weird

Last year the World Series of Poker made an annoucement that they were going to double the number of chips that you got to start any of their tournaments.So if you paid $3000 to enter, you were going to get $6000 in starting chips.

This was supposed to provide a bigger incentive to get people to attend.

The thing is, they also doubled the blinds. To the uninitiated what that means is that they doubled the ammt you needed in order to play each hand. This is like telling someone that you're going to charge them half price for a 4 slice pizza. BFD.

Beyond the transparent stupidity of it all, I didn't understand it from a marketing perspective. There are two types of poker players...math nuts and degenerate gamblers. Creating a illogical system like this was only going to annoy the math guys. And the degen guys don't care how many chips they get to start, they're shoving them in the middle anyway. I just didn't get it and in the end it didn't have an effect on how many people participated.

Yesterday the WSOP announced that they're doing it again. The announcement read that they're TRIPPLING! what you get for your buy-in this year. So a $1000 buy-in gets $3000 in chips. BUT...

From Cardplayer.com:

With 150,000 in starting chips in 2009, the blinds will start at 400-800, as opposed to 300-600 from last year.

The other obvious effect of all of this are all the zeros. 400-800 with 150,000 ??!?! Why not 40-80 with 15,000 ? I mean the way they have it, at the end of the tourney guys are saying, " I raise you eleventy-billion.....re-raise".

Its absurd. But somewhere I hear someone saying, " These go to eleven "