[teddyFBI]

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this is going to mean that about 500-1000 fish are going to just stay home and keep their cashola

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Seriously - how did this thread make it 20 posts before someone acknowledged the real reason we (anyone who was planning on playing the ME) are getting cornholed on this one?

Now, everyone who won a "seat" is instead just gonna have an extra $10K in their pocket. Any guesses on what percentage of those people are now gonna buy into the ME of their own volition? I'm going to throw out an over/under of 20% and I'll take the 'under' by a country mile.

It will be interesting to see how other sites handle this...PokerStars presumably looked far and wide for workarounds to still get their "qualifiers" into the ME...and they came up empty. And remember, more than any other site out there, Stars has really hitched their wagon to the WSOP ME ...so you got to figure they had the greatest vested interest in finding a solution...and they still whiffed.

At the risk of again re-hashing an old question, why would Harrah's adopt this policy prohibiting 3rd-party registrations when it's going to cost them MINIMUM 1,000 buy-ins (aka $10M)...granted that's a drop in the hat for a corp like Harrah's, but they'll be hit even harder with the lost publicity b/c of a smaller field. Seems like a real bonehead move to me. Especially when it doesn't appear that they shouldn't have any concerns about legal liability from merely allowing a 3rd party to pay an entrant's fee.