2007 WSOP, Day 43: Chips Ahoy!

The first three “days” of the 2007 World Series of Poker Main Event are done. There were 6,358 entrants, and each were given 20,000 chips at the start of play. That means the winner will eventually have accumulated an almost-unimaginably massive stack of 127,160,000 chips. Day 4 begins with 337 players still alive, meaning the average chip stack should be right at 377,329 chips.

It’s fair to say that as far as chip stacks go, the leaderboard is a bit “top heavy” (not terribly unusual, actually). In other words, there are quite a few more short stacks than big stacks. There are 134 players with a greater than average chip stack, and 203 players with a less than average stack. Also, the top 25 players (7.4%) together have 26,222,000 chips -- over 20% of the chips in play.

Looking at the chip counts currently being reported over on PokerNews, there are 11 players with a million chips or more, including overall chip leader Dario Minieri with 2,398,000, Kenny Tran (5th) with 1,175,000, and Gus Hansen (11th) with 1,044,000.

There are 12 players in the 750,000-to-999,999 chip range, including Issac Haxton (21st) with 791,000 and Kirk Morrison (23rd) with 772,000.

There are 62 players in the 500,000-to-749,999 chip range, including Bart Hanson (26th) with 738,000, Lee Watkinson (28th) with 737,000, Bill Edler (40th) with 673,000, Tommy Le (57th) with 600,000, Karga Holt (67th) with 580,000, and Huck Seed (77th) with 544,000.

There are 121 players in the 250,000-to-499,999 chip range, including Julian Gardner (94th) with 471,000, Chad Brown (101st) with 454,000, Jason Lester (109th) with 439,000, Robert Varkonyi (114th) with 424,000, Thor Hansen (152nd) with 342,000, Scotty Nguyen (162nd) with 321,000, Matthew Hilger (167th) with 310,000, Daniel Alaei (173rd) with 299,000, Carlos Mortenson (183rd) with 284,000, and Peter Feldman (184th) with 284,000.

Finally, there are 131 players with less than 250,000 chips, including Darrel “Gigabet” Dicken (224th) with 215,000, Humberto Brenes (228th) with 210,000, Berry Johnston (233rd) with 203,000, Mimi Tran (273rd) with 144,000, Sully Erna (280th) with 135,000, Tobey Maguire (286th) with 131,000, Hasan Habib (293rd) with 127,000, Hans “Tuna” Lund (330th) with 68,000, and two players who come into Day 4 with just 10 chips each.

They will start play today in the middle of level 15, where the blinds are 3,000/6,000 and the ante 1,000. Each orbit currently costs 18,000, meaning the average “M” is just under 21.

The blinds will continue to go up at a reasonable pace today and tomorrow, but once they get to Level 27 -- probably at the beginning of Day 6 (Sunday) -- the jumps from that point forward are going to be huge. (See my post from last Friday for details regarding how this year’s blind structure differs from the one used for the 2006 Main Event.)

I see the Poker Shrink, Tim Lavalli, is estimating that they’ll play down to about 100 players today, then down to 27 on Saturday. (If you are into all of this number-crunching, do check out Lavalli’s blog.) That’ll mean the accelerated blinds kick in just about the time they’re down to the last three tables, which should translate into a lot of preflop all-in pushes, I would think. Not so great for the end such a huge tournament. As I said before, it will be interesting to see if anyone complains.

As always, you can follow all the action from Day 4 over at PokerNews’ live reports.