The "Ghost" extra chips in the WSOP ME

[swarm]

Wasn't there a big screw up by Harrah's where they switched many Day1 C&D players to Day1 A without properly notifying them. Thus their entries were blinded out into the field on Day 1A.

The players screwed in this process were allowed to play on their orignally scheduled day; be it Day C or D and thus another buy-in of chips were entered into the tourney?

Or was that just a rumor I read earlier. That is defintely the end of select your own start day I believe as it caused a major mess.

[Kevmath]

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It seems something got messed up between Day 6 and Day 7. The discrepancy went from ~500k to over 2m.

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I'm going back thru the tournament reports that were done by Nolan Dalla and published at thehendonmob.com (which I hopefully added everything correctly):

End of Day 7: $90,140,000 End of Day 7 Chip Counts
End of Day 6 $88,246,000 End of Day 6 Chip Counts
End of Day 5 $87,775,000 End of Day 5 Chip Counts

[deankeaton7]

richard brodie addressed this in his blog, if anyone has a link. He contends that it is very unlikely with all the racing off of chips, that an extra 3M was added. i thought it was very interesting that Gordon brushed over the discrepancy saying its only 5% of the chips in play. i couldnt tell if he was being serious, or throwing a dig in.

[talentdeficit]

if richard brodie's information about the timing of the color ups is correct, approximately 450 players would have had to have been blinded off day 1/2 and been allowed to play days 3/4 to make up the deficit.

(note: that's to get it to 88.25, up just over 500k. the final chip counts were even higher than this number.)

[Quiet Lion]

The maximum number of chips that can be added due to a color up is 2x(chip value)x(# of tables). I showed in my blog www.liontales.com that by the time they played down to 27 the very maximum theoretically possible in extra chips due to chip races was 50,900. (The likely total is far less than that.) The reported chip count was more than 500,000 over 87,730,000.

By the time it got down to the final table another 1.7 million chips had been added. The only color up that took place between 27 and 9 was the 5000 chips, which could only have added another 15,000. At the final table they may have raced off the 10,000 chips, which could add at most 20,000.

Gross negligence or cheating are the only explanations.

QL

[Bulldog]

Two things:

One of the chip counts with three left totalled 89.x million, and the chip counts I saw on ESPN PPV after the first hand of heads up play until the end totalled 90.x million. Seems like a simple math error there.

Second, could there have been more than 8,773 entrants? Could Harrah's have either miscounted or misrepresented that number in an effort to hold back more money from the prize pool?

[AngusThermopyle]

[ QUOTE ]
Could Harrah's have either miscounted or misrepresented that number in an effort to hold back more money from the prize pool?

[/ QUOTE ]

Do you know what a gambling license is worth? Not to mention negative publicity.

[burningyen]

My guess is a significant number of these chips came from the starting day fiasco. It doesn't seem too farfetched that there might be 50 extra stacks blinded off due to the mix-up. But if it's true that another 1.7M were added to the final table, that's scary.

[Kevmath]

I'm confused as to how the maximum is 2x chip value. For example, if there's 1 extra $25 chip at a table, that would create $100-25=$75 for 3x chip value. The x would go up when the $100 and $1000 were raced off. Also, if the players themselves were writing down their chip values, and either added incorrectly or their writing was confused for something else is a possibility. On Day 1-B, Hossein Tagh Avi wrote $29,125, and it was noted as $229.125 in Nolan Dalla's report.

[Quiet Lion]

You need at least half the value of the bigger chip to bring in an extra one.

QL