Twitter employee live-tweets his WSOP ascent
allthingsd.com
allthingsd.com
"The buy in is a steep $1,000" - Yes, in absolute terms $1,000 buy-in is high, however by WSOP standards this is the lowest buy-in for an open event (IE anybody can enter).
"if he took home fourth (the place at which he’s currently ranked), Chan would take home more than $150,000" - At this stage in the tournament even looking at the payout for your position is just crazy. Even the first place player right now would likely be better off taking $150k if somebody offered it to him right now rather than play on. Right now the 1st place stack has about 12% of the chips in play (our hero has ~4% of the chips in play). In order to win you need to get 100% of the chips in play... IE there is a long way to go for everybody.
"though he’s probably done the best: Former Facebook exec Chamath Palihapitiya took 101st place last year." - This is the most egregious error. Chamath placed 101st in the WSOP Main Event, the $10,000 buy-in and most prestigious event in the WSOP series (it is called main event after all). This is just comparing apples to oranges, the events have completely different buy-ins, different structures, and of course one is the main event and one isn't. I think many people would prefer a 101st place finish in the main event rather than anything short of winning this $1k no limit event from purely a prestige perspective.
1. The WSOP is a series of events. He is playing in one event, not the actual World Series of Poker.
2. $1000, while a lot to most people, is the cheapest event you can buy into at the WSOP. There is a $1 million buy-in (for charity) and a $50K Player's Championship and the Main Event which is a $10K buy-in.
3. It's not a 3 million dollar pot, it's a 3 million dollar prize pool.
4. Being in place X is completely irrelevant when talking about "how much he would win in his current spot"
Also where's Ian Chan's results page? Or is this going to be his first live tournament cash?
Correction on the $1m buy-in tournament. It isn't FOR charity but does give the rake to charity (~$5m out of $48m).
:-D
As someone who wants to play in live tournaments, drop us your preparation infoz.
His Tweets are filled with the two basic building blocks of great storytelling, even if only by coincidence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loxJ3FtCJJA
edit: i guess he wasn't too worried about it when there were so many players, but has since stopped sharing his hands now that he has acknowledged others reading his tweets. that's interesting.
Because assuming someone at his table is reading his tweets, once you start feeding misinformation into a poker player's Internal Bayesian Inference Engine, then he is going to have the wrong probabilities of what you play in his head.
But the best option is to stay silent, because if you go with the above strategy, you now have to deal with figuring out whether or not your opponent has read your tweets, and whether or not he knows that you have fake hands in some of those tweets, because then that changes his playing style or the way you are perceived by him so you now have to start guessing whether or not he read your tweets.
So yeah, stay silent.
Good luck to him though, ship it :)
Here's a link to this year's official WSOP rules: http://www.wsop.com/2012/2012-WSOP-Rules.pdf (see section 61 on Communication)
Here's the relevant part: "Participants not involved in a hand (cards in muck) shall be permitted to text/email at the table, but shall not be permitted to text/email any other Participant at the table."
Arguably, a public tweet could be interpreted as a text or email to another participant at the table, but the rules are not enforced that way and tweeting is a generally accepted practice by pros and amateurs alike.
Then figure a out a passive way (three consecutive texts - Good; two texts - bad, etc) to get this info to one of the players at his table.
And you don't need sentiment analysis to tell if someone is tilted, you can literally look at the player across the way and figure it out.