2015 WSOP Europe So Far

The 2015 World Series of Poker Europe festival has been rolling along at the Spielbank Casino in Berlin for more than a week -- no shinola. They are now eight events into the 10-event schedule, with only the €10,450 Main Event and the €25,600 High Roller left to get going.

Aside from the €550 buy-in “Oktoberfest” tournament (Event No. 2), the turnouts have seemed modest-sized so far. Even so, there have been more entries and more euros at stake in Berlin than was the case at the last WSOPE that took place at the Casino Barrière in Enghien-les-Bains, France in October 2013.

Here’s a look at the turnouts and prize pools from the first six bracelet events at the 2013 WSOPE (all but the Main and High Roller):

No. 1: €1,100 Ladies NLHE -- 65 entries, €62,400 prize pool

No. 2: €1,100 NLHE Re-Entry -- 659 entries, €632,640

No. 3: €5,300 Mixed Max NLHE -- 140 entries, €672,000

No. 4: €1,650 PLO -- 184 entries, €270,480

No. 5: €2,200 NLHE -- 337 entries, €647,040

No. 6: €3,250 Mixed Max PLO -- 127 entries, €373,380

Here’s what’s happened so far through the first seven events at the 2015 WSOP (Event No. 8 has another starting flight on Saturday):

No. 1: €2,200 NLHE -- 197 entries, €382,180 prize pool

No. 2: €550 NLHE “Oktoberfest” -- 2,144 entries, €1,039,840

No. 3: €3,250 PLO 8-Max -- 161 entries, €468,510

No. 4: €1,650 NLHE “Monster Stack” -- 580 entries, €843,900

No. 5: €2,200 8-Game Mixed -- 113 entries, €219,220

No. 6: €3,250 NLHE -- 256 entries, €744,960

No. 7: €550 PLO -- 503 entries; €243,955

The offerings from each festival don’t exactly parallel each other, so it’s hard to compare individual events. Just adding up prize pools, the first six events of the 2013 WSOPE (all but the Main and HR) totaled €2,657,940 in prize pools. Meanwhile the first seven of the 2015 WSOPE have added up to €3,942,565 (boosted significantly by the big “Oktoberfest” crowd).

Meanwhile there were 1,512 total entries for those first six 2013 WSOP prelims. Setting aside the “Oktoberfest,” there have been 1,810 total entries for the other prelims so far in Berlin (3,954 with the “Oktoberfest”).

The Main Event and High Roller will earn most of the attention in Berlin -- indeed, that’ll probably be the first time a lot of folks bother to see what’s going on at the WSOPE. Thus will more comparisons be made between the turnouts at the Spielbank Casino and what was the case two years ago when 375 played the 2013 WSOPE Main Event (for a €3.6 million prize pool) and 80 played the High Roller (for a €1.92 million prize pool).

Honestly, I have barely tuned in at all to any of the streams on Twitch. Perhaps it is my connection or browser, but Twitch very often gives me trouble with freezing, buffering, and cutting out, making it less than ideal for me. And I’m thinking the Main and High Roller may not be featured over there, anyway (I have to check). If not, I’ll try to fight it and watch some, or at least look in on the updates.

If You Never Go All In, You Cannot Lose

“Tournaments are like plus-EV lottery tickets... or in some cases, minus-EV lottery tickets.”

That was an idea tossed out by Phil Laak this week while helping with the commentary on the WSOP Europe live stream. Kind of an interesting observation, I thought, about tournament poker that highlighted how much luck is involved in winning a tourney while also noting that some players can via their skills and tourney know-how lessen that chance element -- or, with a lack of such know-how, increase it.

During some of the breaks this week on the WSOPE stream they’ve been showing clips from last year’s WSOPE Main Event final table won by Phil Hellmuth. Saw the finale again a little earlier today, including Hellmuth’s coming over to the rail after winning and saying something about having been all in and at risk only a single time throughout the entire tourney.

We take him at his word, I suppose, but in truth I think that is one statistic Hellmuth can be counted on to keep track of as he plays -- namely, the number of times he’s been all in and at risk in a tournament. He’s famously pronounced in the past with pride his ability to avoid such spots in tourneys. Of course it is an inarguable truism that if you never go all in versus a player with more chips, you cannot possibly be eliminated. (Easier said than done.)

Was kind of setting those two ideas beside each other today while watching what has turned out to be a long heads-up battle between Fabrice Soulier and Adrian Mateos, thinking about how that strategy of avoiding all-ins -- when employed in conjunction with a lot of other poker skills, of course -- can work to improve ones chances in the tourney “lottery.”

Especially in a relatively small field tourney like the WSOPE Main Event usually is -- Hellmuth topped a field of 420 last year; there were 375 entered this time -- the chances of making one’s way all of the way through it without being at risk more than once is better than is the case, say, in the WSOP Main Event where I have to imagine all nine of those who made this year’s final table were at risk somewhere along the way, perhaps more than once. Would be interesting to sort that out regarding this year’s November Nine (if possible).

In any event, it’s interesting to think how playing a tournament is on one level a willing acceptance of risk (especially from the perspective of a cash game player), a primary strategy of the tournament itself is to avoid risk.

Have a good weekend all. And whatever you do, manage your risk appropriately.

From the Front Row

Kind of a crazy day filled with various tasks and obligations that carried me past the dinner bell without even having stopped to eat anything. Looking up and realizing night had fallen, I remembered having agreed to go see a Charlotte Bobcats’ preseason game with my friend, James, a season-ticket holder who had asked me earlier in the week about going.

I raced down the highway to arrive shortly after tip-off, then was pleasantly surprised to discover James had in fact scored us a ticket upgrade that put us courtside, right on the first row just a few feet from the baseline. Even better, the ticket got us into a buffet -- free through the first quarter! -- and before we got comfortable in our seats I’d had the chance to fill my empty belly with some good eats.

Like I say, the day had been filled taking care of a number of different tasks, all done while I had the WSOP Europe €25,600 High Roller final table streaming, eventually won by Daniel Negreanu who also clinched the WSOP Player of the Year for his finish. That’s two WSOP POYs for Negreanu after having one before in 2004, and caps a fairly remarkable year’s worth of tourney finishes dating back to his WSOP APAC Main Event win.

Was kind of interesting to hear it reported early on during that final table that those remaining had made a “gentleman’s agreement” not to collect any information from live stream which came with a half-hour delay and with hole cards shown after the hands had completed. (For more about the delay and players utilizing such info, see last week’s post “The Blessing and the Curse.”)

I think my favorite comment regarding that agreement came via Twitter from Mike “Tîmex” McDonald who tweeted “Just a headsup if I’m ever part of a gentleman’s agreement to not utilize hole card info from a live stream. My word is worth under €725,000.”

Actually I stayed away from Twitter for much of the day, especially once the final table got going in earnest, as I didn’t care to have results reported ahead of time. That delay starts to work on you after awhile, I think, so much so that once I finally tore myself away from work to go to the game it was a little disorienting suddenly to be back in “real time” so to speak.

Sitting so close to the action was a little jarring, too. I would say I felt like Haralabos Voulgaris, who whenever he sees an NBA game live he invariably sits courtside. But it was preseason, and the Bobcats and the Cavs, and, well, that ain’t exactly “high rolling.” But it was fun to pretend. The Bobcats won tonight, though it will probably be another long season.

Was also in very close proximity to lots of sideline reporting going on, and glancing over shoulders I saw people blogging and tweeting not unlike what I do when live reporting from poker tournaments. Indeed, it took me a few years to figure this out, but that sort of work resembles sports reporting more than anything else, and thus when people ask me what I do these days I find myself often quickly bringing up reporting on sports as the easiest way to explain writing about poker all the time.

Speaking of NBA ball, I’m contributing to a roundtable over on Ocelot Sports that will appear soon in which some of us are picking over/unders on all 30 teams, so check over there for that.

Now I’m back home and settling into some more sports-watching in real time, flipping back-and-forth between Game 2 of the World Series and my Panthers playing Tampa Bay. Will slide back into the delay again tomorrow, though, I imagine, to see that WSOPE final table play out, again taking a front row seat... on my couch.

The Blessing and the Curse

Woke this morning to watch some of the WSOP Europe live stream on PokerListings, catching most of the final heads-up match of Event No. 3, the €5,300 no-limit hold’em Mixed-Max event in which Darko Stojanovic of France came back to beat Dan O’Brien of the U.S. to win the bracelet.

These live streams are so commonplace now, many of which come on a delay of some sort and feature hole cards. The ability to go back through the program and instantly click back to earlier moments also adds a lot to the experience when following along.

I believe the 2011 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure might have been the first, most prominent experiment with the format, which means we’re going on almost three years’ worth of having it around. One of the first questions that came with the delayed-with-hole-cards format was how it would affect the actual play of tournaments -- that is, when players found out later what their opponents had in hands in which they hadn’t shown, how might they use that additional knowledge going forward?

This Event No. 3 finale this morning presented an interesting moment during O’Brien and Stojanovic’s heads-up battle that brought that issue to the foreground again, a match-changing hand that saw a big bluff succeed.

The “mixed max” format has players carrying stacks forward through the tourney, which meant in this case O’Brien had a healthy 3-to-1 advantage to start the heads-up match with 1,594,000 to Stojanovic’s 507,000.

Stojanovic quickly evened the score, however, after the Parisian turned two pair on just the second hand between them. But a few hands after that O’Brien took back a big chunk to push back out in front, setting up Hand #12 which began with O’Brien at 1,337,000 and Stojanovic with 764,000.

The hand began with a 2x button raise to 20,000 by O’Brien who held , then Stojanovic three-bet big to 70,000 with and O’Brien called.

The flop then came , giving O’Brien top pair and Stojanovic a gutshot to Broadway. With 142,000 in the middle, Stojanovic led with a huge overbet of 160,000. O’Brien paused at that for a short while, then called, and the pair watch the turn bring a cliché of a “blank card,” the .

This time Stojanovic shoved all in with his last 533,000, and O’Brien took about four minutes before folding.

The live stream commentary was provided by David Tuchman, Max Steinberg, and Jesse Sylvia, and during that lengthy tank Steinberg spoke about how strange Stojanovic’s line was ("That makes no sense") while also developing a convincing argument for why it was very difficult for O’Brien to call, even predicting (correctly) that he would fold.

O’Brien still had the lead after the hand with about 1.1 million while Stojanovic had climbed back to just under 1 million. A few hands more and they were even, then as Stojanovic nudged out into the lead the trio began speculating about what would happen when O’Brien eventually found out about Stojanovic’s bluff.

Steinberg referred to “the blessing and the curse of the 30-minute delay,” something he himself had some experience with after making a couple of final tables during the WSOP this summer. “It’s almost like you don’t want to find out” explained Steinberg with reference to such a hand and the possibility of learning definitively what your opponent had.

About 15 minutes after the hand took place, they explained on the live stream how O’Brien -- in real time -- had spoken to his rail and likely had learned that Stojanovic held Q-J in the most memorable hand of their duel thus far. “He looks sort of down on himself,” speculated Steinberg, and the discussion moved on to consider how (or whether) O’Brien might be affected going forward with the knowledge that had he called the bluff early in the match he very likely would have won the tournament.

The pair would ultimately play 53 hands before Stojanovic won, and so it was probably only for the last dozen or so that O’Brien would have known about the bluff. In truth, it wasn’t obvious on the live stream that he was especially affected by any extra knowledge of the earlier hand, no more so than he might have been by the doubts about it that probably were lingering in his mind anyway. Meanwhile, they were still breaking down the hand right up until the last few hands, with the consensus favoring O’Brien's fold. “It was a good fold with the information he had,” said Steinberg.

I tend to think O’Brien probably felt the same even after getting the additional information. Now I see O’Brien is tweeting that he’s about to jump on the live stream to do some commentary on the Event No. 4 final table and to talk about his match, so I’ll think I’ll jump off here to tune in.

The Bracelets and the Bucks

The 2013 World Series of Poker Europe is underway, kind of appearing suddenly and without too much fanfare amid all of the other tours already up and running all over the globe, not to mention the coming of the November Nine which is now just three weeks away.

I remember in 2008 when the WSOP first announced the whole delayed final table concept less than a month before the start of the Series that summer. One of the instant subplots created by the announcement was the fact that the WSOPE (which only began in 2007) would be playing out before the Main Event concluded, which meant a lot of curiosity about whether or not the WSOP ME final tablists would be turning up in London (where the WSOPE was then held) prior to their final table playing out in November.

After six years’ worth of delayed ME final tables, there doesn’t seem to be that much fuss about the current November Niners and the WSOPE. Nor is there quite as much of the “Are WSOPE Bracelets ‘Real’?” debate happening like there once was, although the conclusion of the first event over the weekend did stir up a few related discussions.

You’ve no doubt heard by now that Jackie Glazier, fresh off of finishing 31st in the WSOP Main Event in July (where she was the last woman eliminated), won the first of eight gold bracelets to be awarded in Paris this week when she took down the €1,100 Ladies Event. Glazier won €21,850 for topping a field of 65 players.

Obviously some want to debate whether non-open tourneys should be regarded as “real” bracelet events. The undersized field of 65 and/or the relatively small first prize can be cause for some also to build similarly-themed arguments.

That first prize of €21,850 is well under what the winner of every other bracelet event during the 2013 WSOP took away. In fact it’s almost five times less what the smallest first prize was this summer (David Chiu’s $145,520 for winning the $2,500 stud event), and that’s not counting the Casino Employees Event. Even there, Chad Holloway won a prize nearly three times as large ($84,915).

A couple of the bracelets won at the 2013 Asia Pacific back in April also featured five-figure first prizes, with Jim Collopy winning AU$69,992 ($1,650 PLO) and Phil Ivey AU$51,840 ($2,200 Mixed Event).

Such comparisons are diverting, but do they add up to a coherent argument about the worth of a WSOP bracelet? Ever since a bracelet came with a $18,346,673 first prize attached, any ideas of a “range” in which first place prizes ought to fall somehow seem less persuasive.

The same might be said for field sizes (which in the case of the “Big One for One Drop” in 2012 was smaller than Event No. 1 at the 2013 WSOPE), the relatively quality of fields, or other of the several distinctions that tend to make every tournament unique.

I’m of the mind that each WSOP bracelet event is different, anyway, and while it’s hard not to equate them on some level to do so always requires momentarily setting aside each event’s uniqueness in favor of indulging in a different kind of scorekeeping.