The World Series of Poker

Wow. What a fantastic tournament. Something like 20 hours of TV coverage, and I enjoyed every minute of it. If you enjoy poker at all, there’s nothing like the big one. What other tournament requires you to beat over 6,000 other players to win? Where you can win over $8,000,000? Where the qualification for entry isn’t your track record, the draft, or qualifying rounds; all it takes is $10,000. I’m still not sure if pokers a sport, but in it’s own way, the WSOP is greater than NCAA finals, the Superbowl, or the World Cup.

Now we finally know the winner. (Actually, we’ve known the winner for month, I’ve just been in a self-imposed poker media blackout so I could see it happen on TV.) Jerry Yang. Frickin’ amateurs! Now Jerry Yang is obviously a better player than Chris Moneymaker. But he’s also obviously worse than Raymer, Haschem, or Gold. I have to give him a lot of credit for this feat, but at the same time you can’t ignore the role of luck. Once at the final table, he went from one of the pack to building an astronomical chip lead mainly by getting great cards four or five hands in a row. He did not play particularly well at the final table. He read his opponent successfully about 50% of the time, in other words he didn’t read his opponent at all. But with that chip advantage it didn’t matter. Kravchenko beat him four all-ins in a row, but Yang only needed to win one. When he finally did, he got all his money back and then some. That’s how it goes.

I just found the hand-by-hand replay. On TV, it looks like heads-up play is decided after the first hand, but it was actually hand 36.

Best reason to be athiest:
Yang and Rahme are all-in, waiting for the last cards that will decide their fate. Rahme’s wife is shrieking to god praising his name hoping for the right cards, while Yang is babbling about the miracles and proving his faith for you O Lord. It must have been working, because my reaction was “Jesus Christ!”. The sight of the two of them praying as hard as they could was sickening. First of all, it’s idiotic. Clearly the Lord can’t answer both their prayers, do you really think he’s deciding whether the next card will be a queen by who prays the best, by which player is most worthy? Second, it’s gambling. Last I checked, this was a sin. Third, the odds were 19 to 1 at that point. God doesn’t really need to intervene at that point. Fourth, the loser gets over $3,000,000 at that point. C’mon!

Best reason to invite all the amateurs:
The two finalists were both refugees, one from Cambodia, one from Laos. Both of them were going to use a good deal of their winnings to help out their native countries. No getting around it, that’s nice, that’s refreshing. Pros don’t have that mentality, or they don’t talk about it during tourney time.

9 thoughts on “The World Series of Poker”

  1. I think you can definitely make a statement about which players are luckier than others. C’mon Ming, we’re all about quantifying stuff like this. There’s at least two angles on it:
    1) Starting cards. Obviously someone who gets bullets a lot is more likely to win than someone who gets 3-8 every hand.
    2) How many times did they go all-in (or risk a lot of money) with the worst hand, but won anyhow? How many times did they have the best hand going and get a bad beat?

    Sure, none of this matters without a certain amount of skill, and we don’t see most of the hands on TV, but you can still quantify it. Moneymaker went in the worst hand a bunch of times and got lucky. I recollect Raymer almost never going in with the worst hand.

    My impression is that Yang got a lot of good hands and a lot of good draws. Not so much that he should be completely discounted by any means, but more than Gold.

  2. I was thinking about the quote of mine: “The number of pros is growing also (easier to make a living playing poker now), but not as fast, so the pros are losing ground each year.”

    From the standpoint of economics, the ratio of pros to amateurs ought to stay constant. There ought to be just enough amateurs to make becoming a pro profitable.

    If there are too many pros, then they have a harder time making money. There aren’t as many fish, the other players are tougher, and they would tend to drop out of the field.

    If there are too many amateurs, then making money is relatively easy. So more of them would turn pro, and this would continue until we’re back at the steady state.

    Of course, this only holds for the profession as a whole, for any particular tourney the mechanics might be different.

  3. I think Tony Eason and Muttrox are saying basically the same thing. Loved Muttrox’s analysis and agree with it. Because of the sheer number of players (8k+), for anyone, pro or amateur, you need A LOT of luck. However, the pros just lower the luck factor…so using Muttrox’s math, if a pro is 10x better (I’d argue for 20x) than the average WSOP competitor, then it cuts down probability from 8000-1 down to 800-1 for any individual pro; and the amateur odds is slightly more than 8k-1. Frankly, to win it (or even make it to final table) there’s so much luck for any player (not just amateur) that I don’t believe you can make a statement that Yang was luckier than Gold.

  4. I think the amateurs at WSOP are still a lot better than I am, so no I’m not on par. I think any of them heads-up with Hellmuth has a 10-30% chance of winning.

    Widest disparity: Hmm. This might lead to a revision of the sports funnel! I think it would have to be sport that is based on sheer physicality. Power weight lifting, pole vaulting, 100-yard dash, etc. I’ll even rank your examples.

    1) Golf. I’ve only played three times, I suck, and I already know I might get lucky and beat Tiger.
    2) Baseball: Just close my eyes and swing.
    3) Federer: Basically impossible. But maybe he double faults or commits an unforced error.
    4) Kobe: I can’t even begin to picture how I would get close to scoring on Kobe. I don’t think I’d even be able to take the first step, he’d get the ball out of my hands within one second.

  5. So, assuming that you’re putting Muttrox on the par with the average amateur, you’re saying that you’ve only got roughly a 10% chance of beating Hellmuth straight up? Still, those are the odds that make it such a wide open tournament. What other endeavor can you beat the best player in the world 10% of the time? I’m a pretty good tennis player, but I probably couldn’t even get a damn Federer serve back over the net, let alone win a game … or a set … or a match.

    How about the other end of the spectrum? What sport is there the widest disparity between best-in-the-world vs. average? Are my odds better of getting closer to the pin on a Par 3 vs. Tiger, or winning a given point vs. Federer, or hammering a Johan Santana fastball for a base hit, or scoring vs. Kobe?

  6. I’ve thought about this a lot also. How much better is a pro than a talented amateur? Three times as good? Five? Let’s be optimistic and say ten. That is, any pro has ten times the chance to win as any amateur. There were over 6,000 entrants this year. My very very rough guess is that there were 100 name pros there. Let’s again be optimistic and say 200 instead. If my math serves me right, that means that the pros as a group have roughly a 1-in-4 chance of winning (10*200/7800).

    If we use non-optimistic numbers (pros are three times better, only 100 of them), I get a 4.8% (3*100/6200) of a pro making it.

    And each year the entrant pool is growing. The number of pros is growing also (easier to make a living playing poker now), but not as fast, so the pros are losing ground each year.

    So to answer the question, Hellmuth kills Muttrox. But there’s only a few Hellmuth players, and there’s a army of Muttroxes. The odds are with the Muttroxes.

  7. A lot of talk about which champ was luckier than another. It brings up a point that everyone on the final table has to have been damn lucky to get there. Either just getting dealt great cards, or hitting lucky river cards here and there. Seems to me that the final table on a ton of these events is a bunch of first-timers and no-names, who just got lucky along the way.

    So just how much luck is there in hold ’em? Take the best poker player in the world, whoever that is. Put him in the main event with 5K other people. What are the odds that he gets to the final 10? If it was random, 1 in 500. We can assume it’s not that. But what is it? 1 in 100? 1 in 50? Any ideas?

    Or, put the question a different way. Put Hellmuth vs. Muttrox in heads-up hold ’em. How often does Muttrox win?

  8. I loved Gold’s trash talking too. Actually it annoyed the hell out of me, but it was effective. The whole tourney, no one ever had a read on him. He rattled people, he read them, he played right with the big stack, etc. Yang played well, certainly better than Moneymaker, but his win still seemed based more on luck than skill — at least when compared to Gold.

    Asian: I never thought it from that angle. I didn’t feel that way about the runner up (Lam?). I have no problem with a silent player who plays robotically, I like Dan Harrington and Alan Cunninham for example (although Phil Ivey is just grating). I have to admit I do like the lively jovial players the best. Daniel Negratnu is a good ideal to shoot for. Great player and always has fun at the table without being a jerk to anyone.

  9. Why would you rank Gold ahead of Yang? Raymer and Hachem have proven to be world class. Moneymaker not so much. But Gold hasn’t done anything since last year I don’t believe. It seems your ranking is based on Gold trashtalking to win last year (which I loved btw), whereby Yang is more prototypical Asian guy who is more low key, doesn’t self promote as much. I’m not saying Gold isn’t better, but just throwing this out for discussion purposes.

    Good post by the way. My wife hates the fact that I’ll watch the same episodes during the year multiple times.

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