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Can there be Too Many Chips?! (Re: WSOP 2006)

Poker players love chips, there can be no discussion about that. That’s why the WSOP main event is so popular. It simply contains more chips than any other poker competition. In the main event this summer there were more chips than ever before. With over 8,700 entrants, each starting out with 10,000 chips, there were more than 87 million chips in play, just imagine that. And they all assembled on the final table. And then they all migrated across the table to the great chip suburb outside of Jamie Gold.

But this description is not completely true. As some obsessive, anal-retentive people noticed, the number of chips didn’t match. From a certain point in time during the second last day of the competition, rather than the expected 87,730,000 chips, there were now 90,140,000! In some mysterious way over two million chips had managed to steal their way into the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino and onto the stacks of the remaining players.

How could this be? As Amy Calistri and Tim Lavalli point out in their (very) extensive articles on the subject, “speculations ran from normal chip accretion through chip races and dead stacks, to player cheating, and finally to staff errors.” Sure, bringing extra chips to a tournament is no new idea. It’s the reason why some players have actually been disqualified from the WSOP main event after having pocketed chips when requested to change tables. But two million new chips?! You would certainly need some pretty big pockets to carry them.

And with that assertion, the mystery is solved. That should be obvious for anybody who knows his or her way around the poker topography. We all know who had the biggest pockets during the final stages of the 2006 WSOP main event, don’t we?

Regrettably I cannot mention any names here. My legally responsible gambler won’t allow it. Even though I promised not to take her chips during the first hour of tonight’s office poker. After having won a couple of Sit-and-Gos on PokerStars, apparently she has come to believe that she doesn’t need any more favors. Isn’t it amazing how fast an undeserved self-confidence can build up?

So, dear reader, you will have to do your own investigation. Cherchez the pockets. And believe me, when this shit hits the fan…

/Spinner

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 29th, 2006 at 7:49 am and is filed under Poker, World Series Of Poker, Gambling, Texas Hold'em. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.