Week In Review #67 July 26th - August 1st 2026
The WSOP Removes the Action Clock before the Main Event Final Table
POTD is a small operation and in going through my old posts, I saw that Week in Review #65 was only sent out to paid subscribers. So for today’s Week in Review essay, I am going to rerun my thoughts on the WSOP adding an action clock during Day 7 of the WSOP Main Event below for those who missed it the first time. However, before I do that, I’d like to update my thoughts prompted by the new announcement that there will not be an action clock at the Main Event Final table. You can read this announcement on WSOP’s official Twitter account here.
The thrust of my complaint the first time around was that the WSOP added an action clock to solve the problem of outrageous stalling for a payjump. When instead of adding time controls they could have just enforced existing rules. Instead of using the rules already in place they decided the best course of action was to overreach and add time controls that none of the players were prepared for or expecting and they should not have done that. The secondary complaint I made, which probably should have been my first complaint was that changing the rules of the tournament in the middle of the tournament was unfair to the players and not something that should occur in a fair competition of any sort, especially the biggest tournament of the year where many of the players are playing the highest stakes poker of their lives.
Once the WSOP added time controls they needed to make several decisions: How long is the clock? How many time extensions will there be? How often will they get refreshed? Will they remain in play for the entire tournament? Those decisions should have been made and clearly communicated before the start of day seven. Clock management is an important skill in tournaments with time extensions and players should know the mechanics of how they work when deliberating about when to use one. You should not gain an edge in a poker tournament because you are good at predicting when the operators will capriciously change the rules. By announcing there will be no action clock at the final table they are hurting players who preserved time extensions on Day 7 and Day 8 because they believed they might be of use at the final table. Once again the WSOP is making up rules on the fly that are inadequate and unfair to the players. I’d say it’s embarassing, but it’s par for the course for them. My initial thoughts about this snafu are copy and pasted below.
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.
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
A PIO sim that looks at inequal stack postflop ranges for POTD #312
A PIO sim forcing us down the exact betting line for POTD #313
Several different HRC sims for POTD #314
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 #312 where I write about when loose flop calls become mandatory call downs on blank runouts
POTD #312 #onemorething
I think an interesting thing that happens in this hand is that Jx regularly folds on the flop to b45, but once it calls the flop it almost never folds the turn or the river. This is a pattern that emerges in a lot of situations where you don’t want to call a flop bet because you are at such a range disadvantage. Your hand is often not good on the flop, you are going to face more turn and river aggression, and there aren’t many ways to improve. However, once you do call a flop bet, you only have pot to play and it’s very hard to fold a pure bluff catcher that also blocks value bets, especially when the board runs out brick/brick.
There are many spots in poker where you dump off certain classes of hands at roughly equal amounts on each street. You sometimes fold the flop, turn and river with second pair. In this hand you almost always fold the flop, but once you don’t you just need to shrug and call down. Which makes Ole’s calldown with T9 likely pretty okay vs me, but not in theory where I am regularly value betting Jx myself.
In game it felt natural for me to value bet a hand like KK or QQ to try and get called by KJ, but value betting KJ seemed to thin, especially because I blocked what I was trying to get called by. Ole adjusting to calling a slightly more polar river strategy is probably fine if he doesn’t think I’ll value bet Jx very often on the board pairing river. His side card with the ten is likely not great and T2/T3 are probably the best combos to calldown with vs me. I also think his turn call has got to be bad because I still think I find the turn barrels with Jx, especially the hands I have offsuit combos of pre like KJ or QJ. that I find it very hard for his flop or turn call to be good, but his river call is probably fine.
Media
Ben Clemens published his annual MLB Trade Value rankings at Fangraphs. The concept of the list is that he ranks which players and their contracts would garner the largest return in a trade. If you aren’t a baseball fan, you probably aren’t too interested in reading who should be ranked higher Konor Griffin or Kevin McGonigle. If you aren’t a baseball fan, it won’t be of interest to you, but I think Clemens approaches the series with an epistemic humility about valuation and projections that through the course of all the individual writeups builds several strong arguments about what computer models get wrong, what types of risk in player types are preferred, maximizing ROI vs maximizing surplus value and other ideas that will be of interest to readers of this newsletter. Granted, I don’t actually expect anyone who is not a baseball fan to wade through his rankings, it will be incomprehensible to non-baseball fans, but it’s interesting to me.
One reason why I find it interesting is most written lists don't spend time writing about the rankings themselves. For instance when Pitchfork ranked the 100 Best Rap Albums of All Time the blurb for their #3 Juvenille’s 400 Degreez did not make the case that it was better than their #5 Nas’s Illmatic. This is often an editorial choice because these lists often have several bylines, and the writer of a given blurb might not even know where the subject of their blurb rank on the final list. Clemens’s list has one author and he is open about why he ranked people where, which means this not just a list, but a long fragmented essay about what skills are valuable in baseball in 2026 according to him and team executives. It’s really good.
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