2007 WSOP, Day 23: Check Out These Numbers, Bro

When asked on yesterday’s episode of PokerWire Radio about the caliber of play at this year’s World Series, Eugene Todd answered with what has to be the quote of the day (or week): “Brutal. So bad. If I went to the supermarket and put a table in aisle five and picked out the next 10 people that came and played poker with them, they’d be better than the f*&!ing idiots we’re playing with downstairs.”

More on Eugene Todd below. Meanwhile, some numbers.

5,763

Yes, Regis. That’s my final answer. The question? How many entrants do I think there will be in this year’s WSOP Main Event.

Why have I committed to an exact figure? A poster over on 2+2 started a contest to pick the number of entrants in this year’s WSOP Main Event. The one who comes closest without going over gets 50 clams (to be transferred by said poster into yr Full Tilt, Pokerstars, or Ultimate Bet account). Contest remains open until July 1.

So I went ahead and decided yesterday to throw my fedora into the ring by adding a guess to the thread. (Someone is compiling all of the entries on a spreadsheet here). About three weeks ago, I stated here I thought we’d be looking at somewhere between 5,400 and 5,800 entries this year. So I put in my guess at 5,763. I was the 457th person to enter the contest.

Trolling through the entries . . . . When I made my guess, the highest number guessed was 22,345. (Yeah, right.) The lowest was zero, an apparent “Price Is Right”-style maneuver that was quickly thwarted by the person who guessed there would be only one entrant this year. The average for all the entries (as of the time I put in my guess) was 7,305. The median was 7,231 (half guessing above, half below).

Intriguing to consider how the hundreds of contestants have so far collectively come up with a final total in the 7,200-7,300 range. It should be noted that the contest discourages people from picking a figure someone else has already chosen (else one wants to split the prize), so that might slightly skew people’s choices -- not by much, though.

Should be interesting, I think, to see whether the actual number of Main Event entrants approaches this “collective” guess of those who have entered the contest. There’s a school of thought that believes this approach -- i.e., gathering an average prediction from a large sample size of individual predictions -- is actually a reasonable way to predict future events. (Anybody else remember that story about the ill-fated governmental agency that tried to create a “futures market” in predicting terrorist acts?)

167

That’s the number of hands played heads-up last night between Qushqar Morad and Alan Smurfit at the final table of Event No. 33, the $1,500 pot limit Omaha with rebuys event. Smurfit finally emerged as the victor.

Heads-up lasted over five hours, the longest heads-up battle thus far at this year’s WSOP. By a hell of a lot, actually. The longest previously (in terms of number of hands played) had been Event No. 13, when Allen Cunningham took 80 hands to best Jeff Lisandro in the $5,000 pot limit Hold ’em event. The shortest heads-up battle so far this year was -- interestingly enough -- at another pot limit Omaha event, Event No. 23 (the $1,500 buy-in PLO), when Scott Clements took out a short-stacked Eric “Rizen” Lynch in a single hand.

On the left there is a rundown of the number of hands played heads-up at all of the events thus far at this year’s WSOP. (For those events where PokerNews didn’t have hand-by-hand coverage, I’ve made estimates.)

As has been done for a number of events this year, PokerNews provided hand-by-hand coverage of Event No. 33’s final table, so you can go back and look at every hand of the Morad-Smurfit epic battle. Pretty cool for us PLO players.

66

Number of times Eugene Todd said “bro” during his PokerWire interview yesterday. Again, that’s an estimate, as the man got some serious momentum going a few minutes in. Also heard hosts Gavin Smith, Joe Sebok, and Joe Stapleton use the word at least a dozen times between them during the 23-minute long interview.

You owe it to yourself to give it a listen. Todd is an very likable, extremely funny dude, bro, and the interview ends up coming close to reaching the overall hilarity level of Haralabos Voulgaris’s spot on The Circuit last year. Several “listener-dissolves-into-helpless-laughter” moments here, including the quote listed above. I’m not going to ruin it for you any further with more quotes -- go check it out yourself.

And when you are done there, go over to PokerNews’ live reporting for all the latest.