If you haven’t already had an opportunity to check out the article I posted last night (“Dropping Like Chandeliers”), it has a little interactive chart showing the percentage of the field making it through to the end of Days 1 to 4.

In addition to more players making it through to Day 5 this year because of the size of the field (354 from 8,569), a higher percentage of entries got through Day 4 than in any year since 2014 (4.13%, slightly more than 2017, but fewer than 4% made it in 2015,2016, and 2018).

Even so, the task of rounding up the PNW players in the field is, sadly, easier by far today. On the bright side, though, hometown fave Jacki Burkhart has officially made a deep run in the Main Event, and ditto for Eugene’s Ian Pelz. Kudos also to Mans Montgomery from Idaho, and Shane Abbott and Jeffrey Dewitt from Washington. And, of course, there’s Preben Stokkan.

Players this deep are approaching payouts of $40K. The $100K mark won’t be reached until there are fewer than 73 players remaining. We probably won’t get there until sometime on Day 6, so today is all about slowly climbing the pay scale from a $30K to $60K.

The big blind inthe first level of Day 5 will be 24,000. By the end of the day in Level 25, the big blind will be 60,000.

Pelz starts at a table with 2013 Main Event runner-up Jay Farber.

EOD RANK | NAME | CITY | CHIPS

28 | Preben Stokkan | Corvallis | 2,900,000 ** DAY 3 OVERALL CHIP LEADER

104 | Ian Pelz | Eugene | 1,866,000 ** DAY 2C PNW CHIP LEADER

144 | Jacki Burkhart | Boring | 1,503,000 ** DAY 2AB PNW CHIP LEADER

===== AVERAGE CHIP STACK START OF DAY 5: 1,452,300

===== MEDIAN CHIP STACK START OF DAY 5: 1,272,000

182 | Shane Abbott | Seattle | 1,249,000

197 | Mans Montgomery | Boise | 1,224,000

244 | Jeffrey Dewitt | Redmond | 891,000

Congratulations! You’re all in the money!

Play ended as the clock counted down the last minutes of Level 15 and the money bubble popped with 1,286 players remaining from the field of 8,569. The remaining PNW group includes 11 from Oregon, 4 from Idaho, and 20 from Washington.

More or less.

The wild story of the day belongs to a nominally PNW player, Preban Stokkan, who has a US flag and listed hometown of Corvallis on reports and the WSOP player database, but whose Hendon Mob profile lists as a Norwegian living in London with over $1.7M in live tournament earnings. He was down to a single 5K chip at the first break of the day but he’s in the chip lead now.

It’s not unusual for the WSOP player database to have incorrect or just old info, or for non-US players to claim a US hometown because they were in the US when they first played the WSOP or tax reasons (or even for players from different states to have not updated their info: looking at you, Nick Getzen). That’s why Annie Duke and Esther Taylor-Brady are still at the top of the Oregon leaderboard on Hendon Mob.

EOD RANK | NAME | CITY | CHIPS

1 | Preben Stokkan | Corvallis | 2,184,000 ** DAY 3 OVERALL CHIP LEADER

108 | Allen Nielson | Mercer Island | 909,000

138 | Jacki Burkhart | Boring | 819,000 ** DAY 2AB PNW CHIP LEADER

159 | Ian Pelz | Eugene | 773,000 ** DAY 2C PNW CHIP LEADER

300 | Shane Abbott | Seattle | 596,000

312 | Glenn Ward | Salem | 579,000

318 | Christopher Wolfe | Lake Tapps | 570,000

333 | Dien Le | Bellevue | 556,000

490 | Trong Danh | Bellevue | 402,000

===== AVERAGE CHIP STACK START OF DAY 4: 400,000

501 | Tyler Patterson | Everett | 393,000

521 | Brandon Cantu | Ridgefield | 382,000

539 | Scott Eskenazi | Mercer Island | 374,000

560 | Kevin Law | Mill Creek | 361,000 ** DAY 1A PNW CHIP LEADER

574 | Mans Montgomery | Boise | 351,000

619 | John Stauffer | Shoreline | 329,000

===== MEDIAN CHIP STACK START OF DAY 4: 316,000

717 | Michael Faulkner | Viola | 273,000

721 | Jeffrey Farnes | Dallas | 271,000

751 | Bradley Zusman | Gresham | 255,000

773 | Donald Schiavone | Brookings | 243,000

791 | Thomas Kornechuk | Auburn | 229,000

825 | Eric Kepper | Seattle | 211,000

830 | Jason Antonelli | Sammamish | 208,000

889 | Rittie Chuaprasert | Portland | 180,000

890 | Aaron Ogus | Redmond | 179,000

952 | James Frank | Stayton | 151,000

992 | Theodore McNeely | Myrtle Point | 130,000

1004 | Jacob Davis | Tigard | 125,000

1005 | Steven Josephson | Bothell | 125,000

1079 | Jeffrey Dewitt | Redmond | 105,100

1117 | Ryan Stoker | Spokane | 89,000

1129 | Adam Barker | Bonney Lake | 85,000

1163 | Terik Brown | Mercer Island | 74,000

1252 | Glenn Larson | Olympia | 34,000

There were 3,248 players coming into Day 2AB from Days 1A and 1B, with another 100 or so electing to late-register before the start of play. Out of that, 1,087 players remain. If you were watching ESPN/PokerGO coverage for the day, it was pretty much the Jacki Burkhart show, as her table featuring Chris Moneymaker was the main feature table for the day, Moneymaker didn’t bust (despite being at risk a number of times), so it stayed that way, and her commanding lead at the table and personality got her a lot of love from the hosts.

She led a discussion about “keeping the band [at the feature table] together”, which it did for a surprisingly long time, though people started to drop as the night went on. There was ample Oregon rep at the table, with Jacki, Andrew Seidman (still listed from Portland on the reports though Jacki told me he now lives in the Bay Area), And there’s Josh, dealing!

It should be a very happy birthday for her.

Day 2AB survivors include 8 Oregon players, 14 Washington players, and 2 from Idaho.

https://twitter.com/BJNemeth/status/1147647133027356680

Today’s 2C starts with an 800 big blind/big blind ante (Level 6); The day will end with the big blind at 2,000 (Level 10). Approximate cost per level in blinds:

• Level 6 (400/800/800 bba): 13,300 chips
• Level 7 (500/1,000/1,000 bba): 16,700
• Level 8 (600/1,200/1,200 bba): 20,000
• Level 9 (800/1,600/1,600 bba): 26,700
• Level 10 (1,000/2,000/2,000 bba): 33,300
• TOTAL FOR DAY 2: 110,000

WE NEED RETWEETS AND FAVS. The peoPLE MUST BE SHOWERED

— Violetfemme (@violetfemme) July 7, 2019

EOD RANK | NAME | CITY | CHIPS

67 | Jacki Burkhart | Boring | 391,900

116 | Tyler Patterson | Everett | 331,200

122 | Kevin Law | Mill Creek | 328,900

210 | Donald Schiavone | Brookings | 264,400

220 | Alan Pagel | Renton | 261,400

257 | James Frank | Stayton | 248,900

314 | Dien Le | Bellevue | 229,600

365 | Maria McAlpin | Boise | 212,000

367 | Kenneth Churchill | Auburn | 211,400

401 | Paul Varano | Olympia | 201,000

445 | Tim Adkison | Corvallis | 188,000

453 | Jacob Davis | Tigard | 186,100

454 | Christopher Brewer | Eugene | 185,500

===== ESTIMATED AVERAGE CHIP STACK DAY 2AB: 179,300

482 | Shane Abbott | Seattle | 177,900

513 | Alan Snow | Lynnwood | 172,000

===== MEDIAN CHIP STACK DAY 2AB: 167,000

585 | Landon Brown | Auburn | 150,000

590 | Eric Kepper | Seattle | 149,900

679 | Mark Groner | Lake Oswego | 130,800

751 | Scott Mayfield | Grants Pass | 111,700

762 | Lance Martinez | Mukilteo | 110,000

849 | Kevin MacPhee | Coeur d’Alene | 91,500

916 | Gennadiy Dvosis | Bellevue | 73,300

===== MEDIAN CHIP STACK DAY 1A: 73,300

===== MEDIAN CHIP STACK DAY 1B: 73,100

1024 | Christopher Rourke | 44,300

1086 | Allen Nielson | Mercer Island | 1

After 1,336 players turned up for Day 1A, there are strong indications that the 2019 #WSOP Main Event could be largest ever. Check our WSOP coverage hub for latest news, chip counts, images and features. https://t.co/bnB810RHuR pic.twitter.com/AwdY3jKLZx

— PokerStars Blog (@PokerStarsBlog) July 4, 2019

Day 1A is in the books with “Over 1,300 entrants”, according to the End of Day report. Not as specific as usual, probably because registration is open until the beginning of Day 2 for each flight. UPDATE:  Per the tweet from @PokerStarsBlog, the number was 1,336.

960 players are making it to Day 2A (on Saturday) including 12 Oregon players, 15 Washington players, and 3 from Idaho.

EOD RANK | NAME | CITY | CHIPS

96 | Kevin Law | Mill Creek, WA | 149,900

140 | Maria McAlpin | Boise, ID | 131,200

148 | Allen Nelson | Mercer Island, WA | 129,000

151 | Dien Le | Bellevue, WA | 127,900

183 | Tyler Patterson | Everett, WA | 121,200

211 | Kindah Sakkal | Lynnwood, WA | 115,000

248 | Adam Sherman | Seattle, WA | 108,200

262 | Jacki Burkhart | Boring, OR | 105,100

266 | Donald Schiavone | Brookings, OR | 104,000

289 | Jeffrey Dewitt | Redmond, WA | 101,100

===== AVERAGE CHIP STACK: 83,500

409 | Kevin MacPhee | Coeur d’Alene, ID | 82,500

456 | Kao Saechao | Portland, OR | 76,500

===== MEDIAN CHIP STACK: 73,300

507 | Shane Douglas | Priest River, ID | 71,100

510 | Angela Jordison | Terrebonne, OR | 70,600

511 | Jacob McDonald | Dallas, OR | 70,500

529 | Chris Brewer | Eugene, OR | 68,400

===== STARTING CHIP STACK: 60,000

608 | Noah Bronstein | Bellevue, WA | 59,000

629 | Mark Groner, Lake Oswego, OR | 57,700

636 | Paul Varano | Olympia, WA | 56,000

637 | Michael Coombs | Bremerton, WA | 56,000

658 | Gennady Dvosis | Bellevue, WA | 53,300

663 | Jacob Davis | Tigard, OR | 53,300

688 | Joel Micka | Everett, WA | 50,000

737 | Scott Mayfield | Grants Pass, OR | 44,500

763 | Grant Denison | Portland, OR | 41,800

764 | Ming Zhu | Portland, OR | 41,600

829 | Melissa French | Lynnwood, WA | 33,000

857 | Dustin An | Redmond, WA | 29,300

898 | Christopher Leslie | Portland, OR | 22,700

926 | Greg Rankich | Kirkland, WA | 17,600

By the time the Portland Meadows $40K GTD NLHE tournament rolled around in mid-January, I hadn’t played a single hand of poker for three weeks as a part of my retirement deal. A few people joked about me falling off the wagon, but my arrangement with my newly-retired wife was to not play on a regular basis. As I told people who asked: “I’m retired. I’m not dead.”

I got to Meadows fifteen minutes before the game began, only to find out immediate seating had already sold out half an hour earlier. I was alternate 43 in a rom with 200 seats for the tournament (we were playing 10-handed). Fortunately, the tournament was a freezeout.

PDX poker royalty waiting for start of the $40K @PDXmeadowspoker: podcaster Jonathan Levy (@2PokerGuys) and @PokerStars #PlatinumPass winner/PSPC 38th place finisher Jacki Burkhart (@jackiburkhart81) pic.twitter.com/hyptU0vdsj

— Poker Mutant (@pokermutant) January 19, 2019

Meadows had a very successful $30K GTD in December that went to $84K in the prize pool, so there wasn’t any concern about not making the guarantee, despite the lsat entry day of the Main Event of the Tulalip Pow Wow being held north of Seattle on the same day. Perhaps expecting a big turnout, the starting stack had been reduced from 25K to 20K.

I finally got a seat just over two-and-a-half hours into the tournament. Blinds were 250/500 with a big blind ante, and it was near the end of the level; not exactly where I want to be putting $300 ($285 plus $15 for the door fee) down for a game. True to form, I lost 3K on the first hand (I opened with Ax Qx), and within the first half hour nearing a break, I was down to 7600, with the big blind about to go up to 800.

Over the next hour, I managed to claw my way over the starting stack. They were still seating alternates ninety minutes after I got in—more than four hours into the tournament.

At the five hour mark (I’d only been playing for about half of that), I had 27500, but that was only about 18bb. I languished between 10—15bb for another 90 minutes before I got a crucial double, shoving J♠ 9♠ from UTG1, getting called by Kx Jx and catching a 9. By 6:30, the board said there were 90 players remaining (from 314 entries, game started at noon).

My notes say the board was updated from 90 to 80 players remaining (we were still 10-handed) between 6:34 and 6:38. 45 players were getting paid.

Another 15 players were taken off the board by the time we got back from break at 6:59. I paid blinds early in the level, and was down to 11bb. Action was moving fast, and we didn’t have a full table, I paid another set of blinds by 7:16 and was down to 37K with the big blind at 4000. 56 players on the board. Got aces on the button, action folded to me, I shoved and nobody called. Down to 55.

Blinds went to 3000/6000 at 7:25. The board said there were 50 players left. We went hand-for-hand 10 minutes later. I had 32K.

A couple minutes later, the in the money announcement was made. On the next hand, the player in the big blind was all in for half of the big blind, lost the hand, and the dealer handed him a seat card to get his payout, as he’d been instructed.

That’s when things got weird.

The floor made an announcement that shocked me to the core. They’d somehow missed a table and were going to reset the count to 54.

Now, I once saw a tournament at Planet Hollwood blow through the bubble with people who left the room before the floor staff realized they were close to payouts, but that was a tournament with hundreds of players. We were down to literally six tables. Sure, you can’t count them on one hand, but how do you lose track of whether you’re at five or six or seven tables? Portland Meadows isn’t the Commerce Casino. It has a couple dozen tables in a room you can walk from end-to-end in less than fifteen seconds. And they had to have lost track of the count somewhere in the hour leading up to the bubble without anyone ever noticing. Cash game tables had started up, and an evening tournament had started at 7pm, but you’d think the tournament with the $90K prize pool might take a little precedence.

As a short stack, I’d laid down a couple of hands I’d have shoved in that last hour (which is why I’d been watching the count) and I assume there were a number of other players in my short stack situation that were doing the same thing. Now I was in a situation where I literally couldn’t do that because nobody had just walked the room double-checking the tables.

Anyway, I called a shove around 8pm from the BB with 7x 8x against Jx 9x and hit a 7 on the turn. We were down to 51 players again. I had 58K with big blind at 8000. Ten minutes later we went hand-for-hand a second time. And after about 20 minutes I was in the big blind with half my stack in the middle and K♦ 5♦ when Jason Adams limped inn from SB with a big stack and called my shove with Qx 6x. Out on the bubble when he turns a queen and I split 45th place with a bustee from another table.

Anyway, the title of this post (if you’ve stayed this long) is a variation of something you (well, I) hear all the time, including at Meadows the other day. A player glances up at the payouts and mutters to the tale: “They pay too many places.” The implication, of course, is that the top prize is too small and that all those little payouts at the bottom are eating into their profit. Like they’re a lock on the win.

I’ve actually studied payout structures a bit over the years, though, and I can tell you that the payouts for a bunch of players on the bottom end doesn’t really have that much of an effect.

A few years back when the World Series of Poker extended the number of payouts in the Main Event from just over 10% of the field to 15%, there was great gnashing of teeth. What most people didn’t stop to calculate, though, was that even though 50% more people were getting payouts, the $15,000 each of those players got was one-and-a-half times the players’ contribution to the prize pool (1.5 x 5% = 7.5%) so with a little extra out for fees, around 8%. If you were going to get $8 million for first place, in other words, you were only going to get about $7.35 million. Poor baby.

Another piece I did for the 2015 WSOP was on the effect of the $10 million first-place guarantee. A chart I did for “Satisfaction Guarantee” showed how the jumps in payouts for the WSOP have been all over the place over the years (see the chart from that article above), until adjustments were made to the formula used to determine payouts. For the past couple of years there’s been an online payout calculator that you could use to determine what the prizes would be, based on the number of players in each event.

With all that in mind, people aren’t completely incorrect. The top prize in the Meadows $40K GTD was significantly smaller than it would have been in many other venues for a field of a similar size and prize pool. But it’s not because of the number of payouts.

Time for a big chart. Join me at the bottom.

This chart shows payouts from five different payout structures—two with 45 payouts and two with 54 (plus a 48-payout structure!)—in order from top (smallest) to bottom (1st). If you look at the bottom line, keep in mind that the brown lines represent payouts in the mid-January Meadows tournament (which paid 45 places). You might notice that the $17,100 payout is significantly smaller than the other four numbers, al of which are on the bigger side of the $20,000 mark, ranging from $20,005 to $21,691. How is there a discrepency of $3,000 or more in payouts? It’s less than 3% of the prize pool but it’s a 15% or greater reduction in the size of first place.

Now, in the old days, a tournament of 314 entries would probably have paid only 36 spots, rounding up to 4 full tables from 10% of the field. By my old friend the 2013 Venetian Deepstack 9/10 Handed Payout Structure, top prize would have paid 24%, or $21,480, more than $4,400 above the actual $17,100 scheduled first prize. The none $490 payouts to places 37 to 45 amounted to almost exactly that amount, but that value wasn’t all taken from the top spot.

How do I know? Because the Venetian payouts for 45 players (orange lines on the chart) has a top prize of 23.5%, which is $21,035, still almost $4,000 more than the Meadows prize. And the payouts for 37th through 45th are 0.54%: $485, just a fin under the same payouts at Meadows. With almost identical amounts paid to the fifth table, first place at the Venetian was still a lot more.

Personally, I think the counting mishap the other day could have been handled better by admitting a mistake and adjusting the payout table to pay 54 places. “But Mutant,” you cry, “that’s taking so much money from me, the winner of this here tournament!” Not so fast bucko.

The next column on the Venetian payout chart is for 54 places (red lines). Top prize is 23% ($20,595). with minimum payouts at $385 for the sixth table (46th to 54th) and $420 for the fifth table (37th to 45th).

For additional comparison, I’ve included two forms of payouts using the WSOP calculator. A tournament with 314 entries would pay 48 places (rounded up from 15% of the field, shown in green). I also show the payouts for 54 places (blue lines).

Pretty much every payout schedule except for Meadows has one thing in common: players at the final table are each paid a different amount, then there are three clusters of three payouts for 10th through 12th, 13th through 15th, and 16th through 18th. Then each full table is paid the same amount. For some reason, the payouts at Meadows increase in increments of three from position 30 on up to the final table. But that’s not really the problem, either.

The true culprit is at the final table. Between 9th and 8th, the payouts go from 2.2% to 3%, an increase of 36% where the other structures go up about 25%, The next jump at Meadows is to 4%, a relative increase of 33%. Again, it’s more than any of the other structures. And like compound interest, these bigger relative pay jumps have their effects that can be seen on the chart between payouts for 5th and 9th. The brown line represents a significantly larger payout than the others. More than a thousand dollars more than any other payout for 6th place ($4,475). By the final payouts, the more elegant exponential curves of the standard payouts have left the Meadows payout in the dust.

So the next time that guy sits down next to you at the table to grouse about all his money going to the min-cashers, you’ll be prepared to bore him to tilt with facts, figures, charts, and graphs.

This is not to pick on Portland Meadows or any other venue about their payout tables; it’s an article that’s been on my back burner for a long, long time. But if anyone wants advice on how to set up a payout table like the WSOP’s…