Better Late Than Never? We'll See

I took off this week and decided not to play the WPT event at Bellagio. Of course now that it’s going on I wish I was there playing. I have been talking with a bunch of friends who are playing and periodically reading the updates and have a few observations. I think allowing players to register late for events is the usual and customary at the Bellagio and this time allowing players to register the second day until 5pm is a little out there but I applaud Jack in trying something new.

What I think would be even better and they have done at Aussie Millions and Borgata, where there are two first start days and you can buy in on the second day after being knocked out on day one. A criticism of this is that those who start day one might play more aggressively knowing they can start again the next day. I say so what. If they want to play bad the first day I love it. It will make for a bigger prize pool, which is always nice. If you are afraid of facing the same player twice well then why play at all? Maybe I’m missing something here, but what’s the downside? At this last Borgata deep stack they had almost half the players that busted day one re-buy the following day. The added benefit of this will be an incentive to play day one, which is typically the smallest turn out day in multi-day start tournaments.

Allowing players to buy in the second day of play up until midway through that day has created an interesting situation. Of the 275 total players, 30 registered the second day and at the end of that day 10 of those 30 survived which is slightly below the average but not statistically significant. What is really interesting is that Kenny Tran and Phil Hellmuth lasted only minutes after they’re uber-late buy in. None of the 30 are currently high up on the leader board, but there is still a long way to go. Would top competitors in other sports have this type of attitude, you be the judge. I will re-visit this in a couple of days to see how they latecomers fared.

On a side note, I found it odd that Daniel Negreanu omitted me from his WPT stats, when my per event average earnings was only slightly less than his, and I would have made the top ten list. Maybe it was because I have only 27 WPT events and he felt that was not enough to be counted. With Barry Greenstein playing the most, 93 events, and almost 4,000 playing at least twice, 27 events put me 192nd in starts and 10th in over all cash per start. Maybe I was omitted because I have never played a Catholic Priest heads up on national TV? It just struck me as a little odd.