After weaving through the crowd of railbirds gathering for Day 3 of the $50,000 HORSE tournament, I ran into JDN, LA Mike, and Lara Miller. As we were discussing the poorly designed betting structure for the event, professional Bryan Devonshire joined the conversation. "It's supposed to be the 'Superbowl of Poker' but they just dropped in a new kind of football and said 'Have fun!'"
The analogy has merit. Remember the debacle in the first few weeks of the NBA season? League officials introduced a newly designed basketball. According to an NBA.com press release, "The new ball, manufactured by Spalding, features a new design and a new material that together offer better grip, feel, and consistency than the current leather ball." After a month of complaints from players, the NBA finally went back to the old ball.
It's Day 3 of what's billed as "the most prestigious" tournament in the history of poker, and the consensus is that's it's already a crapshoot. The betting limits at the start of play were 10k-20k with a 2k ante (with a 3k bring-in for the stud games).
The average stack was 286,900.
That’s 14 big bets per average stack. The biggest stack has only 30 big bets—which should be closer to the average.
I’ve written enough (Part 1 Part 2) about the problematic betting structures during this WSOP, but up to this point nothing has been done. Can we expect tournament officials to make the needed changes? They are offering a “Player’s Forum” tomorrow morning at 10:30 AM in Amazon Room 1.
Hopefully, like the NBA, they can listen to the people playing the game and improve the betting structure.
