Reconaissance Day

Today (Saturday) has been reconaissance day. I hope I am spelling that right. I registered for my own tournament tomorrow, then checked out the setup. There are two huge rooms, cavernous like airplane hangars. One's called the Pavillion, the other Amazon.

I got my seat assignment: White section, Table 81, Seat 3. I took a picture, but I can't seem to get it from my PC into this blog. According to pictures on the WSOP picture blog (which I cannot reproduce here), Phil Kessel of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Paul Pierce of the Boston Celtics are in today's event. I didn't see them.

You're probably familiar with poker tournament format, but if not, here's the skinny:

• Each player starts with 3000 chips. They have no dollar value, they are just chips. But you had to pay to get them.
• If there are 3000 players (say) in the tournament, that means there are 9,000,000 chips in the tournament. The tournament ends when one player has all of them.
• How does one player get all the chips? By winning them from other players. It's a no-limit format, which means that at any time, a player can go "all-in," meaning s/he is wagering all of their stack on the outcome of the hand. If they lose the hand, and the other player had more chips to begin with, they are out.
• Every hour, required minimum bets, called "blinds," are increased. That prevents players from just folding all the time. There are two blinds each hand. They start slow (25-25), but by Level 5 they will be 50-100, and by Level 10 they will be 400-800 plus an ante of 100 from everyone (not just the two players posting the blinds). So sooner or later you have to make some kind of plays, or you will get "blinded out" as the blinds orbit around and around the table.

On Day 1 (tomorrow), play starts at 12:00 noon and continues for 10 levels, with a 20-minute break every 2 hours and a 90-minute break for dinner at the completion of Level 6. If you do the math, that means that play will end on Day 1 at about 1:30 AM Monday morning. So it's a contest of endurance as well as skill and luck--can you make intelligent decisions 13 hours after you started?

About 10% of the starters will finish "in the money." The payout schedule is heavily weighted toward the top. If you finish 300th, you get back about what you paid to enter. With 3000 players, the total prize pool would be about $2,700,000. The winner would get about 12% of that (>$300,000), with payouts tapering down to the last player in the money.

My goal is to last through Day 1. By that time, about half the players will have been eliminated.