POTD #70 Final Table Friday: ClubWPT Adds A Million For First

What do you do?

This summer, ClubWPT launched a very generous promotion. If one signed up for ClubWPT Gold, won a freeroll ticket, and then won a bracelet in one of 11 WSOP events, they would be “awarded an extra MILLION DOLLARS.” You could win the tickets in a variety of ways, but if you won a ticket and had a deep run in any of those tournaments, you were playing a different tournament than the rest of the field. As of today, 7 of the tournaments have been completed and two players won a seven-figure bonus. In the hand history analysis portion of today’s newsletter, I will be writing about the first million dollar winner, Michael Lavin, who won WSOP Event #20 in uncontroversial fashion and pocketed $1,267,373 for his efforts. Congratulations to Michael. However, the much more controversial winner was Jesse Yaginuma, who got heads-up vs. James Carroll as a 30M to 270M chip underdog and battled back to upset James and win a cool $2,255,180.

Many people have noted some odd behaviour in the heads up play that sure looks a lot like chip dumping. Many others have called people who have noticed this behaviour “narcs.” Well, after analyzing the evidence, I think I have come to a conclusion that will make everyone angry. Everyone is at fault and deserves scorn; in the parlance of this blog, they all “punted.”

Let’s start with ClubWPT: This is a dumb promotion. Perhaps if they did not lay off "around 60 people" early this year, they could have kept one person on staff to explain to them why. Poker players are edge seekers; when you design a game, they will find loopholes and exploit them. Anyone creating a game should proactively close as many loopholes as they can. Players stalling to avoid paying a BB before tables broke became a big enough issue in High Rollers that they changed table breaking procedures. A promotion that pays one player as much as 4 times first place money opens up a loophole slightly larger than “I will wait so I don’t have to pay a BB.” Giving away up to $11,000,000 is generous and I will not shame any operator for giving away free money, but if you are giving away up to $11,000,000, you should do it smartly, and this is not a smart way to do it.¹ If you design a promotion with such broken incentives that it actively encourages chip dumping, you will see chips get dumped.

Let’s move on to the WSOP. If the WSOP allowed deals, you’d still probably see chip dumping heads up in an attempt to extract $1,000,000 from ClubWPT, but I am going to use this opportunity to go on a rant about why it’s a bad policy. Every serious tournament poker operator in the world allows deals. Why doesn’t the WSOP? As far as I can tell, the reason is because a bracelet is so prestigious that it would be cheapened by allowing people to win them via deal. There are ways around this; you can allow deals and still force the players to play for some money. Also, if a bracelet is so prestigious, wouldn’t players play hard to win it even if there was no extra money attached to winning the tournament? The WSOP is happy to cheapen the value of bracelets if it means running more tournaments that they can collect rake in, but they are unwilling to “cheapen” a bracelet by doing something that many of their customers would like— honouring deals as a tournament operator. Prioritizing collecting rake over providing a good product is as key to the WSOP brand as the prestige of a bracelet.

I could see some complaining that allowing deals could ruin the integrity of bracelet bets or fantasy poker drafts or the POY race. Prioritizing big-name players who have side bets over the vast majority of WSOP players who do not have significant side action on tournaments does not make any sense for anyone trying to run a fair competition. Additionally, sussing out every angle is part of the edge in side-betting. I’ve never heard of a sportsbook voiding a bet in the NBA because one team is tanking or because of an undisclosed injury. While it wouldn’t have mattered in this case, the WSOP should allow deals, and it’s embarrassing that they don’t.

Finally, we get to the two players James and Jesse. Jesse is HU and his stack is worth ~1.04M to James’s ~1.23M, except there is an added million up top, which means Jesse’s stack is worth ~1.13M to James’s 1.23M. Unless, of course, they play as a team, make sure Jesse wins the 2.25M, and he pays James under the table for his efforts. Then everyone wins. Is this unethical? It’s a matter of degree and personal ethics, I don’t think it’s the biggest sin, but it certainly isn’t affirmatively ethical. I don’t care too much about exploiting ClubWPT, a company with a ton of money that designed a poorly-thought-out promotion. However, I think if they colluded earlier at the final table to make it more likely they would get heads up, where they could chip dump— something I must stress there is no evidence of—² That would clearly be unethical. I also think that their actions might discourage lucrative giveaways in the future, but it might also encourage better designed promotions. I am agnostic about whether their behaviour positively or negatively affected the value of future giveaways and don’t think that element of this story has any notable ethical ramifications.

So in my view, chip dumping heads up is mildly unethical, assuming the way you got heads up was fair and square. However, if we view this heads-up match through the lens of “play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” Jesse and James need to become elite stupid-games players so they can guarantee they win stupid prizes. I am not a lawyer, but I read the T&Cs of this promotion, and it seems to me that it is possible ClubWPT could withhold the money and take them to arbitration. Once you agree to chip dump, you need to balance maximizing the probability Jesse wins while minimizing the probability they get caught. They didn’t have James raise to 6bbs preflop and fold to a 7bb jam, or anything so egregious that it was undeniable they were dumping, but in a 50-something-hand heads up match, dozens of hands were odd. If they chip dumped in a way that was so obvious that they got caught, it is not the fault of “Twitter narcs”³ for noticing; it’s their fault they didn’t hide it well. Especially because any scheme they hatched needs to account for disaster scenarios, like ClubWPT or the WSOP withholding payment to James and Jesse. Building in plausible deniability, but taking the risk you might not win the million dollars, seems like the ideal way to play your stupid game and win your stupid prize.

After all that, “What Did We Learn, Palmer?” ClubWPT ran an ill-conceived promotion that warped incentives in a way that something like this was always going to happen. They are at fault. The WSOP should facilitate deal-making, and that they don’t is one of many reasons they are a poorly-run tournament series, but they are not at fault for the shenanigans that happened. For the players involved, if you are going to try to take advantage of a promotion, you need to account for the possibility you get caught and hatch a better plan.⁴

I’ve written over a thousand words, but we are not done; we still have a poker hand to talk about today. Let’s look at a hand that occurred 7-handed in Event #20, the $1500 Shootout. Michael Lavin is playing a tournament with an extra million up top; everyone else is playing a vanilla tournament. What should happen?

$1500 WSOP Event 20, NLHE Shootout final table
Blinds 60k/120k/120k (BBA)

1st is $267,373, 7th is $42,080 The progression from 1st to 7th is pretty normal.

Preflop: Westmorland (4.615M) raises t240k UTG7 with A♥️A♦️, it folds to Lavin (7.97M) who calls 9♣️9♠️ on the button, everyone else folds.

Flop (780k) K♦️9♦️3♥️: Westmorland checks, Lavin bets 250k, Westmorland raises to 800k, Lavin calls.

Turn (2.38M) 8♠️: Westmorland bets 1.4m, Lavin calls.

River (5.18M) J♠️: Westmorland bets 2.2m all-in, Lavin calls.

Westmorland is eliminated in 7th place. Let’s dig into what he was thinking.