Week In Review #39 December 14th-20th GGPoker, the WSOP and Re-entrys
I guarantee you'll have a good time reading this
The story of the week is that the $25,000 WSOP Paradise Super Main Event not only hit their $60,000,000 guarantee, but they shattered it by getting 2,891 entries and generating a prize pool of $72,275,000. One would think that making such an ambitious guarantee and surpassing it would be cause for celebration, but many poker players are not happy about how this tournament was structured. Tournament poker is often disappointing, but this tournament was very bloody for some individuals, as they entered and re-entered the tournament several times. Recreational poker players taking one shot were not thrilled that their table was full of pros entering and re-entering. Some people, like CardPlayer’s Robbie Strazynski, wrote about the casualness of people busting and re-entering a $25k like it was a $3 rebuy when he took to Twitter and wrote:
“Hot” take: I think part of what has “dulled” what’s commonly referred to as “the poker dream” for recreationals [sic] is the candor and flippancy with which the high roller contingent publicly treats these kinds of tournaments.
Somehow, to all these people we see on camera and on X, $10k $25k and multiple bullets thereof seem to mean nothing at all.
I am going to do something I often do in this space and defend the “high roller contingent.” The problem here is not the high roller contingent; I do not know of any high rollers who lobbied for this tournament with this structure to exist. This tournament is a marketing gimmick— let’s make the biggest guarantee possible. Then to ensure the marketing gimmick was not a fiasco, the operators created a tournament structure that would make hitting the guarantee possible, capitalizing on the knowledge that high rollers would perpetually rebuy to earn their 5% edge. My defense of high rollers will not extend to the point that I am asking people to pity these poor edge-chasers for losing money, but blaming someone who lost 300k (312k if you count rake!) for being too flippant while doing so is a little absurd.1 Players can advocate for the types of tournaments they want, but mostly they play what is available. There are not many players advocating for these types of tournaments or structures, but once they’re announced and big guarantees are attached to them, you cannot fault them for playing. The losers here are poker players who aren’t plugged into the industry, but are enticed by a big guarantee that is artificially inflated by re-entry policy, and get a tournament that is tougher than it appears because the best players in the world are constantly re-entering.
In 2024, the Super Main Event had a $50,000,000 guarantee, and the WSOP engaged in some shenanigans to try and hit the guarantee and they just missed. All in all, there were 1,978 entries, which technically did not meet the guarantee. The tournament was a 25k+1k and 3% of the guaranteed prize pool was withheld for tournament staff2 so they only paid out $48,500,000 to players who received reduced rake not actual overlay. The tournament was effectively a $24520+$1480 instead of a $25250+1750 and I feel comfortable saying it effectively hit the guarantee. This year, the WSOP wanted to make sure it was not close at all, so they did what most tournament operators do when they want to hit a big guarantee: They changed the structure of the tournament.
In 2024, there were four day 1s; they got 1,124 entries in total, of which 387 advanced to day 2. The breakdown from 1A-1D looks like this: 461, 254, 181, 228. There were also 2 or 3 (I forget) online flights, which I believe had around 100 entries each.3 In 2025, the progression was 869, 295, 476, 508 entries. As you can tell by the large increase in players from Day 1A between 2024 and 2025, there was a spike in entries in Super Main Event this year. Some of that was because 30-45 people cashed online in 2024, but not 2025; some of that was because more satellites ran in 2025, and most satellites required that the winners play on day 1A; but if I could dig into the numbers and account for that, I suspect we’d still see legitimate growth between 2024 1A and 2025 1A.
There was legitimate growth, but the enormous spike of 1,978 to 2,891 was due to something else— increasing the opportunities for individuals to re-enter. Last year, the tournament allowed one re-entry per flight, which meant the most bullets anyone could fire was 10 (two on each day 1 and two on day 2). This year, there was unlimited re-entry, and several people fired more than ten bullets. Additionally, they played day 2A before day 1C and 1D. Day 2A played down to 7% of the field when 12% of the field cashes, which made it possible for individuals to cash the tournament, bust the tournament, and re-enter on Day 1C (and 1D and 2B). Per this unsourced tweet, we had people firing 12, 13, 14 bullets. A couple individuals firing 14 bullets instead of 10 does not lead to 1000 new entries total, but the structure made it much easier to go off for a lot. Not just going off for 14 instead of 10, but, say, 6 instead of 2. Let’s say you bagged 1A on one bullet in 2024; you could bust day 2 and re-enter twice for a grand total of three bullets. In 2025, if you one-bulleted 1A, you could end up firing 5-6 bullets on Day 2A, or you might fail to cash on 2A and fire lord knows how many bullets on Day 1C or Day 1D and Day 2B combined.
The unlimited re-entry plays a large role in the increased field size, but the innovation of playing Day 2A before 1C and 1D really caused an uptick in entries. When registration closed on Day 2A this year, 440 people remained in the tournament and 108 players made it through to day 3. That means there were 332 players who last year would have been unable to fire any more bullets who now had 1C, 1D and 2B available where they could fire as many bullets as they wanted. I do not know how many unique entries there were in 2024 or 2025, but I’d guess that at least half of the increase in the number of entries was due to the change in the rebuy rules and tournament structure.
I don’t think it’s healthy for the poker ecosystem to make gaudy guarantees that bank on pros firing as many bullets as possible to artificially inflate field size.4 The WSOP did give away free seats and ran satellites that overlay, but many winners of these seats sold their packages at a discount, and there was a large secondary market of people reselling packages, which makes me wonder if maybe the better stimulus to the poker economy would have been giving away money, instead of giving away seats and hotel rooms that were resold at a discount to players who were going to play anyways. However, criticizing how someone is giving away free money, when they’re giving away any free money, is ungrateful of me. It’s especially ungrateful because the WSOP and GG did put their neck on the line and risked missing the guarantee and being stuck with a massive bill… sort of.
One of the final tournaments of the trip was the $10,000,000 guaranteed GGMillion$. It was scheduled to start during Day 2B of the Super Main Event and had trouble getting off the ground, as only 7 people were registered for Day 1A, with Day 1B starting the following day. GG and the WSOP decided to cut the guarantee in half and, as an olive branch, cut the rake in half. I was not on the ground, but what I heard happened was: The policy for the tournament was that Day 1A needed 10 players to start, and when they had 7 people registered, three people went to register; before they could register, someone working for the WSOP decided to cancel Day 1A. Refunding half rake and halving the guarantee is a reasonable compromise, but if a big part of your branding of an event is the large guarantees, and you use every mechanism at your disposal to try to hit the guarantee, and the “guarantee” is contingent on the high roller contingent starting the tournament and not truly a guarantee, but a promotional tool to collect more than $12 million in rake, then it’s fair to be critical when guarantees shrink at the last minute. I can’t speculate much more on the specifics of what happened in the GGMillion$ because I was not there, but we can use this tale as an opportunity to quote the oldest maxim in gambling: The house always wins.
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Additional Sims For Premium Subscribers
Premium subscribers get the raw files of sims I used to write my POTDs, sims that are more accurate and appropriate than equivalent sims in the big public libraries, videos of me walking through the sims, and a text summary of how I ran the sims. This week I uploaded:
A PIO sim using alternative preflop ranges for POTD #191
A PIO sim using PF ranges in for three blind games with an ante for POTD #192
Three strategy locked PIO sims for POTD #193
Three strategy locked PIO sims. One that finds Jesse’s ideal turn size POTD #194
An HRC sim for POTD #195
Additional Analysis for Premium Subscribers
Everyday Premium Subscribers get an extra bit of analysis not included on Substack. Today, I’ll share #onemorething from POTD #191, about how you can identify which rivers you should bluff when you have combos that usually give up on the river.
My instincts on the river were not totally off, the only rivers that I bet where I don’t improve are offsuit queens and offsuit nines. I am more likely to river a flush than I am to river a bluff with my combo. That being said, you need to be prepared to play every river. Even a river that you’ll only see around 13% of the time. When you’re barreling the turn with equity, it’s easy to fall into the psychological trap of thinking about what you’ll do when you make your hand or thinking about the pot you’ll rake in once your opponent folds. If you’re thinking ahead you should be thinking about the hardest rivers to play in the deck. The problem is sometimes the hardest rivers to play are scare cards, sometimes they’re blanks and sometimes like today they’re an in between card. It’s hard to think of all forty something river cards when you’re betting the turn, but when at my sharpest my thought process might look like this
What is my min value bet on the turn? Probably top pair for this size. What are my bluffs? Flush draws and straight draws? Do I have any bluffs with no draws? Maybe exactly KQ with a club since it has two overcards and blocks AcQc and AcKc.
Once I am thinking about my betting range, I am not necessarily thinking about what to do on all forty rivers, but I am more likely to come to a conclusion like “all my straight draws paired”, I don’t have very much no pair. Therefore I need to bluff my flush draws. At my best the way I think about a hand on earlier streets leads me to the right answer on future streets. Which is a reminder that anytime your opponent is in the tank is an opportunity for you think ahead to the next street, so you are not unprepared on unusual runouts.
Media
I really liked the episode of Time to Say Goodbye that I am linking below. There’s been a lot of discussion about AI and art and what makes something “real” or “human”. I think this conversation reframed those sort of hackneyed discussions in a lot of interesting ways I hadn’t considered before.
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Bluesky
Even if they sold action or swapped, they lost somebody’s $312k
I always forget if the WSOP withholds 3% for the dealers or if there is some clause that the 3% is withheld for marketing and other expenses. I have had a lot of trouble finding the structure sheets online. In part because I don’t think the WSOP wants old structure sheets easily accessible online, lest players have evidence of their underhanded practices.
One reason I am struggling to find details about the online flights is that last year the WSOP did not add the hundreds of players who played online to the live tournament clock. Why did they do this? Was it incompetence, or did they want to make it look like the tournament was going to overlay a huge amount to entice more people to buy-in? I bet you know what my guess is.
I couldn’t find a natural place to put this bit in the main article, but I’d like to announce that the Sam Greenwood Poker Tour will be having a tournament with a $10,000 buy-in that has a one billion dollar guaranteed prizepool. We will have 600,000 starting days that play down to a winner. All the winners will then battle it out for one billion dollars in 2092 once all 600,000 starting days have been completed. [Fact check: The day 1s would actually conclude sometime in the 37th century. -ed]