It’s understandable though, or at the least, expected. In most businesses, the operations side generally lags behind everything else, and the WSOP is no exception. How much longer they can ignore their gross incompetence remains to be seen. Based on the conversations we’re hearing, probably not much longer.
To break down the numbers for you, there were 8,773 players who started this year’s WSOP Main Event, each ponying up $10,000 and receiving $10,000 in tournament chips in return. Thus the total dollar value of chips in play would be…hold on, ok, wait, that’s four zeros and 1 x 8,773 is…fuck we hate math. Math is dumb. Let us get one of them calculator thingamajigs.
[several minutes later]
Hey look, we made it say “BOOBLESS” when you hold it upside down.
Ok where were we?….right, so there would have been $87,730,000 tournament chips in play at the start of the tournament, give or take several thousands due to clerical fuck ups and such. Fast forward to when we were down to the final 27 players and the total chip count reported at PokerWire.com was $88,246,000. A fews days later though there were $91,140,000 tournament chips in play according to the official chip count at the start of the final table. Then looking at the last chip count provided by CardPlayer.com when the play was heads-up between Jamie Gold and Paul Wasicka, the total chip count was reported as $90,200,000.
So what gives? Were the chip counts horribly wrong? Did the chip races add that much to the total? Was something sinister taking place?
Attempting to answer these questions for us/you/whoever are Amy Calistri and Tim Lavalli, who spent several weeks looking into the controversy for the fine folks over at PokerNews.com. In short, the duo point the blame on tournament officials who they say somehow introduced 2 million extra chips on the second to the last day of the Main Event.
For details, get your Woodward/Bernstein on at the below links:
Also check out Richard Brodie’s blog. Brodie is a poker pro and the original author of Microsoft Word who first reported on the extra chips during the main event. He ain’t happy about all of this.
Finally give Haley over at KickAssPoker.blogspot.com a read. She gives an analysis of Calistri and Lavalli’s report and doesn’t quite buy that this was an error but instead suggests the possibility of “a fix between a player and a dealer and/or director who saw an opportunity in the chaos.”