Week In Review #65 July 12th-July 18th
The Punt of the WSOP Main Event
Early in the WSOP I took to Twitter to write
Ironically, the person who posted this Patrick “Pads” Leonard was not posting about when he got fucked by a horrible ruling later in the WSOP, nor the decision I’ll be writing about later in this blog. The WSOP adding action clocks to the Main Event mid tournament, which also affected him as he was still in the Main Event when the ruling was made.
My Tweet was a riff on a famous article in The Onion about gun violence in the USA. At the risk of over-explaining my Tweet, the concept of this joke was simple: why is it that there are insane floor rulings, dealer errors or miscellaneous oddities that never occur on other poker tours, but constantly happen at the WSOP. I’ll start with the simplest explanation, one that extends grace to the WSOP. They have the longest series, the most tables and consequently the most dealers hired and the most hands dealt and the most hands reported on. If there was a €1k PLO at EPT Prague that left Jokers in the deck, it likely would never get reported. That being said, people who play the WSOP, who interact with dealers and floor staff every day, know the dealer standards are lower, and that this is not simply a case of more errors total, but more errors per capita.
On Day 6 of the WSOP Main with 72 people left, Loren Klein raised 97.5% of his stack, got jammed on, and tanked 15 minutes before calling all-in. He did this because the tournament was on a 20k pay jump and he was trying to ladder. PokerNews reported that his opponent Tyler Gaston, who put him all,-in said “I will let you stall for the pay jump.” This hand caused such a stir that the next day the WSOP decided to add time controls to the tournament. This was done, if you believe what Shaun Deeb said on stream, in part because Shaun lobbied for it.
First things first: I think action clocks and time extensions are Good For The Game. They increase the pace of play, which makes playing and watching poker more enjoyable. I think they should be added at some point in most poker tournaments. However, what we have here is not an issue that needs to be solved with an action clock. What we have here is dealer and floor incompetence. There are eight tables left in the biggest poker tournament of the year, and one player verbally declares that they are colluding with another player at the table. Any competent dealer would immediately call the floor. Any competent floor person would notice that there were a lot of chips in the middle of a given table and a new hand hadn’t been dealt in some time. One of— frankly, the only— defense for the WSOP’s consistent incompetence is that they have so many dealers and so many tables and it’s impossible to find enough good staff. Well, anyone dealing at the final eight tables of the Main Event should be a top 1% dealer. A top 1% dealer and active floor staff should be able to stop collusion when it was verbally declared. That their idea to fix collusion caused by their incompetence was to change the entire structure of the tournament is stupid, even if you are someone like me, who thinks the WSOPME should add time controls.
The main reason why these changes should not be made is simple: No one playing the tournament at any point in time believed that they would add an action clock to the tournament. It was not stated on the structure sheet and it is unprecedented for the WSOPME. You do not change the rules of a tournament in the middle without consulting the players in it. I have played tournaments that required unanimity from every player still in the tournament to play an extra level for the day or to move dinner break. The reason for this is simple: It violates game integrity to change rules midstream without any warning or consultation with the remaining players. I was not on the ground, but Pads was, and he Tweeted his thoughts:
The biggest thing for me is to just let us know earlier. There was a lot of edge first level today. I went from 6-15m so no bitterness, but people came in tired, no sleep, immediately with unprepared shot clocks. Asked floor for cocktails 6 times / one hour and nobody would come. Loooot of people busted that level.
Frustrations are normal with little sleep.
It’s equal for everybody though.
So they made a decision without consulting the players and didn’t tell them about the changes with enough warning. This is bad. It’s also bad because, as I’ll continue to repeat in this blog, there were other mechanisms they could use to prevent extremely egregious stalling. The EPT has rules about giving players time controls when a player puts all but one of their chips in the pot and faces an all-in. They could have just gone hand for hand, or round for round, on big pay jumps. They could have just told dealers to call the floor over whenever they suspected there was some sort of collusive stalling going on. Adding an action clock is a real “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas” solution to a pretty simple problem.
What matters here is that instead of implementing a simple solution, they implemented a convoluted one, without warning the players, that probably broke gaming laws. However, since people are asking: “Who does adding time controls benefit? Pros or recs?” It benefits people who have experience playing with time controls. They know how to manage the clock and are less likely to blunder under time pressure. It also benefits people who have high cEV win rates because they get to play more hands. The latter camp are often pros, but this is often true of anyone playing a big stack. So It’s not so simple to say it will benefit pros. Pros are also often more willing to push stalling to an absurd extreme, so a pro with a short stack near a pay jump would probably prefer there not to be time controls. Overall, adding an action clock benefits big stacks and people with experience playing with action clocks. That can be, but is not necessarily correlated with, being a pro, and this whole debate feels dumb to me because the real problem is not who this benefits, but that the biggest tournament of the year made up rules mid tournament.
A way one knows they were really flying by the seat of their pants is they decided to give more time extensions after the first dinner break. Which meant the players played the first two levels, not knowing they had more time extensions coming. Once again The WSOP meddled and made an even bigger mess. Another way this implementation was haphazard, is as best I can tell they just copied the time extension format from the high rollers that ran previously during the WSOP. Once they decided to give out time extensions in The Main Event they could make the time controls whatever they wanted to– again, it’s the biggest tournament of the year– the only idea they thought of was copying and pasting what they already came up with for a different tournament.
Days after the WSOP implemented an action clock with 8 left in the $10,000 6-Handed No-Limit Hold’em Championship, the floor refused to go hand-for-hand on the final table bubble of the Main Event. The players agreed to come to “A Gentleman’s Agreement” where they would create their own ad hoc hand-for-hand to prevent egregious stalling. It’s fitting that even after the WSOP’s high-profile fuckup in the Main Event, they still were not able to come to the solution that could have stopped this problem in the first place. I’d say I was surprised, but of course I am not; this is the only place where this regularly happens.
I made it to the end of Day 8 of my POTWSOPME and I tried sprinkling in some more general analysis of how these big field tournaments play and what the best adjustments to make are. If you want to read about the biggest punts of the Main Event, but also improve how to play in big field tournaments. I’d suggest you read the whole series.
There is no Sunday Special this week, mostly because I spent a lot of time this week going through the WSOPME footage and didn’t have time, but I am always looking for submissions. So if you have a hand from the WSOP that is really eating at your soul, feel free to send it over to me. Additionaly with the WSOP over I am looking to take on some more private coaching students. You can read all about my coaching philosophy here
Additional Sims For Premium Subscribers
Premium Subscribers are given access to a Google Drive folder where they will also be able to download 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. The past week I uploaded
Three PIO sims looking at all the different ways I can punt in POTD #306
An HRC Sim and a PIO sim for the Main Event hand I looked at for POTD #307
An HRC sim and a PIO sim for the Main Event hand I looked at for POTD #308
Additional Analysis for Premium Subscribers
Everyday Premium Subscribers get an extra bit of analysis not included in the main post. Today, I’ll share #onemorething from POTD #307 where I write about what happens if you force Trayner to c-bet.
POTD #307 onemorething
I’d be shocked if there is any poker game played between humans where the 3bettor would check the flop 70% of the time here. So I also ran a sim that does a better job of mimicking what Trayner was actually doing and I forced him to c-bet. In that sim the solver splits between b20 and b60 with options of 20/40/60/80 with range. QQ always c-bets the small size and this makes sense. You still want to have some hands that b60, but you want your needless bets that lose EV to be as small as possible. One thing that surprised me is that IP doesn’t raise all that much more often when I force a small c-bet in both sims it’s around 15%. I guess if the button has JJ or 44, they still want to let BB’s 96o turn some sort of equity.
Once his c-bet is called AA,KK,QQ pure check on the turn and KK/QQ mix vs b50 and pure call vs b30. He calls more often in the force c-bet sim than the normal sim because he still need to defend a lot of my range and when he pure c-bets he arrives at the turn with a lot more total air. Even when he pure c-bets the flop QQ calls the turn 84% of the time, compared to 55% of the time when he played checks on the flop. However with range he still folds the turn 48% of the time after pure c-betting the flop, compared to 44% when he doesn’t. The river remains a pure fold and the BB can call with top pair, Jx and even some bare 8x, but it doesn’t call QQ. I am generally a believer that calling with a credible bluff catcher is always a decent play, but I still don’t think this is the right spot.
Media
In an upcoming POTD, I tell a story about studying to write an exam instead of going to see a Prince concert. On a lark, I googled the concert and what do you know most of the concert has been bootlegged and is on YouTube (Prince played back to back nights and the show I found was the second night. I forget which night I was supposed to go to, but let’s say this is the show I was supposed to go to). So I guess I have a general recommendation, watch bootleg concerts on YouTube and a specific one, watch this bootleg concert on YouTube
As always, I can be reached on