The World Series of Poker can claim a player registration record for a single live tournament event following the final entry figures for the $565 buy-in Colossus NLHE event over the weekend, which reached 22,374, but the way in which the massive $11,187,000 prize pool will be distributed has caused dissent.
A growing number of players, mainly in the professional category, claim that the flat pay structure will pay the winner $638,880 – only 5.7 percent of the prize pool, and that it should be higher.
WSOP organisers have countered that by pointing out that the flatter structure gives more players – 2,241 of them – an opportunity to cash a minimum of $1,096.
WSOP spokesman Seth Palansky said a lot of thought and experience went into the structure of Colossus, relying on a time-tested and player-approved 100-year-old formula called the Golden Ratio. It had been signed off by “hundreds of poker players” and included input from the Players Advisory Council, he said.
“This is the exact structure, we didn’t gimmick it up or do anything for marketing or to make numbers look like they were up. We spit it in the computer and this is what the numbers should be according to this long-standing mathematical formula,” he told Poker News.
Palansky drew attention to the fact that Colossus will pay triple the amount of people that have ever been paid in a WSOP event, and the winner still stands to earn 1,130 times the buy-in for the event, compared with last year’s main event, when winner Martin Jacobson received 1,000 times his buy-in.
Whingeing aside, Colossus has delivered over two-and-a-half times the previous largest WSOP tournament participation, which was the 2006 Main Event…that pulled in 8,773 players.
When we went to press Monday morning just 506 players were still in action after Day 2.