Correcting the Zoom

Noticed a little earlier today that PokerStars has responded to complaints regarding that Zoom Challenge event at the PCA. As some may have heard, an issue came up near the end of the event regarding the tourney’s fairness, and it appears Stars is now giving out a number of additional cash prizes in order to try to make things right.

Others have reported on the snafu at length, most inspired to do so following a thread having been started on 2+2 by a player who was unhappy with how the event played out.

To give a quick thumbnail... there was a $1,025 buy-in “Zoom Challenge” event among the 40 on the PCA schedule this year. Unlike a regular multi-table tourney, this one involved having players sit down with an iPad for 12 minutes and play a quick session of no-limit hold’em Zoom on Stars (for play money). The idea was to try to run up a starting stack of 20,000 as high as possible during the allotted time, and in the end those accumulating the biggest stacks divided the prize pool according to a traditional MTT payout schedule.

Players could take part over the course of five days, and near the end of the fifth day trouble arose when several wanted to play at once just before the event was to conclude. A couple of groups of players were subsequently allowed to play at the same time, and in fact there were instances of Challenge players occasionally being seated at the same tables and playing against one another.

Such wouldn’t necessarily have been as big of an issue if not for the fact that play money players on Stars generally play a tight game (you’d be surprised how protective they are of their play money chips), thus making it difficult for the Zoom Challenge players to run up their stacks. But with multiple Challenge players playing against one another, that ensured a better chance for them to find opponents (i.e., each other) willing to shove their stacks.

As it turned out, four of the players who played at the end under these favorable circumstances ended up cashing, although none managed to outchip David Williams (who had played earlier in the week) who ultimately won the event.

Anyhow, after hearing the complaints PokerStars is now awarding prizes to four players who just missed cashing, plus giving some more cabbage to three who did make the money. For a full rundown of what happened and these additional “goodwill payments” being doled out by PokerStars, see Lee Jones’ post in the 2+2 thread.

I followed the reports about the PCA Zoom Challenge with some interest. Back in November when I was in Macau, I had a chance to participate in a kind of trial run of the Zoom Challenge. They had a similar set up there with a “mobile lounge” situated near the tournament area where the Asia Championship of Poker events were playing out. Among the offerings was a version of the Zoom Challenge in which people could play for free with an iPod going to the player amassing the biggest stack, and I took a shot.

I wrote a post on the PokerStars blog about my Zoom Challenge attempt. (That’s a picture of me to the left playing, courtesy Kenneth Lim Photography.) I didn’t win, but did enjoy trying. If you read my post, you’ll see that when I played I busted one time but was allowed to “rebuy” (so to speak) and continue.

I had actually been under the impression that when it came time to run the actual Zoom Challenge at the PCA, there wouldn’t be any rebuying -- that is to say, if you lost your original stack of 20,000, you ended the tourney registering a score of zero. Thus when those complaints came up at the PCA, I was a little surprised to hear how players there were in fact able to continue even after busting their original stacks.

It sounds like from Lee Jones’s post that if they were to try another Zoom Challenge down the road, they’ll get rid of the unlimited rebuy option (or limit players to one rebuy). Seems like that would be a good idea to me.

There may have still been issues at the PCA with multiple players simultaneously participating in the Zoom Challenge even if no rebuys were allowed (e.g., collusion possibilities), and I think they’ll be working to keep that from happening going forward, too. I still think there’s probably something a little weird about having players play events for real money against random play money players on Stars. But I’m glad to see Stars trying to fix a past slip-up and getting things in place to try to avoid any similar mistakes in the future.

Speaking of playing for play money on PokerStars, the first two tournaments of Season 3 of Hard-Boiled Poker Home Games are happening this Sunday night. See the sidebar for more information on this week’s events and joining the league. Season 3 will run through the end of March, and once again I’ll be awarding prizes to the top three finishers in the season’s standings.

Good luck to all. And just so you know, no matter how much you complain, don’t expect any “goodwill payments” to those finishing outside the top three.

Selbst in the Lead

My first experience watching Vanessa Selbst play in person was at the 2008 World Series of Poker when I happened to help report on her bracelet win in the $1,500 Pot-Limit Omaha event. It remains a memorable tournament for me, punctuated by a crazy finale that saw her heads-up opponent, Jamie Pickering, raising pot blind hand after hand in an effort to gamble his way to victory.

That actually marked Selbst’s fourth WSOP final table in three years, and she’d go on to add a semifinal (or third-place) finish in that year’s $10,000 World Championship Heads-Up No-Limit tournament. In other words, out of seven WSOP cashes she’d had up to that point, five of them were eighth-place finishes or higher.

As Shawnee Barton wrote about late last week in her terrific (and timely) article about Selbst for The Atlantic, Selbst usually employs a “relentlessly attacking, boom-and-bust style” that finds her often either accumulating chips early then making a deep run or falling shy of the cash altogether. Barton evokes Michael “The Grinder” Mizrachi as a suitable comparison.

Such was the case in that PLO tourney back in 2008 where Selbst essentially led wire-to-wire. The first long day saw the field shrink from 759 all of the way down to 46, with posts about “Selbst Soaring” already starting to appear by late afternoon. I remember her having the chip lead for certain with about 100 left, maintaining it overnight and throughout Day 2. In fact she’d start the final table with more than 1 million chips while the nearest challenger (Pickering) had but 329,000. She’d then lead for most of the final table, too, before ultimately winning.

Since then Selbst has enjoyed numerous other victories and final-table finishes, among them a $1.8 million-plus score at the 2010 Partouche Poker Tour Main Event, back-to-back Main Event victories at NAPT Mohegan Sun in 2010 and 2011, and a second WSOP bracelet last summer in the $2,500 10-game event.

And yesterday Selbst added another huge line to her poker resume by winning the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure $25K High Roller event (photo above courtesy Neil Stoddart/PokerStars). Thanks to a larger than expected field plus numerous re-entries, the prize pool ballooned up close to $5 million in that one, thereby meaning Selbst’s victory earned her an eye-popping $1,424,420 first prize.

Selbst outlasted a final table that included Micah Raskin (who also final tabled the Sands Bethlehem last month), Tobias Reinkemeier, Bryn Kenney, Shaun Deeb, online star Ole “wizowizo” Schemion, Mike “SirWatts” Watson, and finally the Russian Vladimir Troyanovskiy who also final tabled the PCA $100K Super High Roller last week where he finished seventh.

Now Selbst’s career earnings have inched over the $7 million mark, more than $6 million of which has been won since the start of 2010. A quick scan of the top earners over the same period shows only a handful of players earning more than that, and most of those finished first or second in either the WSOP Main Event, the “Big One for One Drop,” or that $2 million HKD High Roller event in Macau last August.

Excluding those guys, it looks like only Erik Seidel ($7,338,543), Michael Mizrachi ($7,130,635), and Phil Hellmuth ($6,508,181) have earned more than Selbst in tourney winnings since 2010 (unless I’ve missed someone), and of course Hellmuth got a big boost by earning more than $2.6 million for taking fourth in the “One Drop.” Meanwhile, on the overall “All-Time Money List,” Selbst is now listed in 40th place, just ahead of Scott Seiver who jumped up when he won the $100K Super High Roller at the PCA last week.

And of course, as many have been reporting, with her finish yesterday Selbst catapults past Kathy Liebert and into the top spot on Hendon Mob’s “Women’s All-Time Money List.”

I was saying yesterday how I was finding it hard to get too excited over Viktor Blom’s big online swings, but such is not the case here. While bigger payouts and more high-roller events have obviously skewed these all-time lists considerably, Selbst becoming the all-time leader in tourney winnings among female players nonetheless seems like a moment worth noting.

Liebert first grabbed the lead in that race way back in 2002, lost it to Annie Duke in 2004 after Duke won $2 million in that invite-only, single-table Tournament of Champions freeroll, then reclaimed the lead in early 2006 and had held it for nearly seven years before Selbst pushed in front. (Chart via Hendon Mob.)

Selbst now has a big lead in that race, more than $1 million ahead of Liebert (2nd, $5,855,655), with Duke (3rd, $4,270,549), Annette Obrestad ($3,780,520), and Vanessa Rousso (5th, $3,471,293) following.

In other words -- just like happened in that 2008 WSOP event -- now that she’s pushed into the lead on that list, chances are good Selbst will be remaining in front for a good while.