Number of 2005 WSOP Main Event hands

[EWillers]

My buddy and I got into a debate about how many hands it took to finish the main event at the WSOP last year.

We couldn't agree on the best way to approach coming up with an estimation.

Any ideas?

[CASINOCASINO]

Well you need to first calculate how many exact hours of constant play, and how many average hands are dealt per hour..
the rest is history..

I would give you an estimate, but I never been to WSOP.

[Copernicus]

Well you need to first calculate how many exact hours of constant play, and how many average hands are dealt per tableper hour. and then an estimate of the attrition rate (tables lost per hour) over time
the rest is history.

I would give you an estimate, but I never been to WSOP.

For a very rough guess lets say there were 6000 players to start with or 600 tables. That means the average number of tables throughout the tournament is about 3000. If the cards were in the air for 40 hours thats 120,000 table hours. It seems from TV at least that play is slower than a normal tournament....maybe only 20 hands per hour? so total theres about 2.4 million hands dealt. A range of 2.1-2.9 million should cover it. (I biased it to the upside because there may be more than 20 hands/hour in the early rounds when the decisions are generally easier and when there are the most tables.)

[poker_n00b]

How many hands did Joe Hachem play during WSOP 2005?

[Copernicus]

How many hands did Joe Hachem play during WSOP 2005?

How many did he play or how many was he dealt in on? No clue on the former. On the latter, the number of hours of the tourney (my earlier guess was 40) times the average hands per hour (my guess was 20, maybe a little low?) which would be 800. Somewhere in the 700-1000 range anyway.

[Whitewash]

Wow....that long of a tournament, and the number of hands that people see online in half a day's work. Really puts into perspective how much of a crapshoot a single tournament can be.

[weimoxer]

Doing it by the amount of time is irrelevant. The bubble time that is H4H takes foooooorever. If you play on party, I rarely do anymore, the H4H can get gruesome, imagine in live play...

[weimoxer]

If you do it by time deduct the bubble time and you probably will have a better estimate.