Sunday, January 25, 2009

What's wrong with this picture?

The event I played in Saturday night at the WSOP at Harrah's Casino (Tunica) was one hour late getting started so I watched a little of the final table from Friday's event. The events work like this: they play until down to the final table (or occasionally when there is two tables left if it is after a certain time, I think 2 a.m.), then those players come back the next day.

I heard that when there were five players left, they made this chop: There was one short-stack and the other four were about the same. The shortie got $10,000 and the other four got $25,000 each. (I'm not sure the numbers are exactly right, but something like this.)

They give a ring instead of a bracelet at these circuit events, so they played on. The winner would get his name in lights and the ring. A friend of mine won one of these rings two years ago, so I've seen one -- they're nothing special as far as being valuable, basically something to show off.

What's wrong with this chop? I'll give my comments in a day or two after others have had a chance to comment.

EDIT: You can see the payouts if you click here.
1st: $56.8K
2nd: $29.3
3rd: $15.9
4th: $8.5
5th: $5.6

You can see the big difference between 1st and 4th and thus the rationale for wanting to chop.

When I add them up, however, it comes to around $116K and that doesn't work out. 25 times 4 is 100 and 10K for 5th so there would be 6K left over. As I said, the numbers were hearsay and not exact. For the purpose of this discussion, let's say they chop was $26K for the top four and $11K for fifth. Also, let's assume the short-stack was very short.

3 comments:

  1. I wonder why the shorty would accept the chop, unless the difference between 5th place money and $10k was a huge difference. He's got nothing to lose and everything to gain, especially considering all of the other stacks are likely tightening up because they are so similarly sized.

    ReplyDelete
  2. 4th place is making out like a bandit here.

    -PL

    ReplyDelete
  3. Great deal for the short stack. He made out like a bandit, getting better than 4th place $$, when he was practically certain to get 5th place money had they continued. People make dumb chops all the time and this seems like a case of that.

    ReplyDelete