Bestbet St. Augustine had a unique situation arise this past weekend when the final 15 players decided to stop play and chop up the remaining prizepool.
The chop happened in one of the busiest poker rooms in Florida, with many daily tournaments and regular tournament series. Nearby bestbet Jacksonville is a WPT staple location many players know on their poker travels around the USA.
The final 15 players battled down to that point from the 340-entry field in the $300 NLH St. Augustine Championship on March 22nd. The field destroyed the $30,000 guarantee with a $83,300 prizepool.
All 15 of the final players received $4,460 for their efforts, ensuring them all a cash prize of nearly fifteen times the buy-in. Thoughts spared for the 16th place finisher, who got just $933 and is still likely wondering how he became the first cut out of the family pot chop.
Chops like this are incredibly rare and fly in the face of the idea of how poker tournaments work.
Chops are generally not even seriously considered until at least the final table. Sometimes you will hear players jokingly ask about a chop with more than one table left, often met with several chuckles around the room.
How this situation became more than a joke and somehow ended up happening is probably a story for the ages. This almost certainly involved some alcohol and some good banter amongst friends.
The reaction around poker social media over this chop was incredulous as many players said they could never envision themselves ever agreeing to such a large chop as it goes against traditional poker tournament strategy.
However this chop is not completely unprecedented. 15 must be the magic number because the exact same number agreed to a chop in the Wynn Ladies Event last summer. That situation became controversial and led to discussions on if chopping at that amount of players devalued the prestige of the ladies’ event to any extent.
In that event, which was held in June of 2024, was a $600 buy-in with 209 entries. The key difference between that chop and this one in Bestbet St. Augustine, was that it was an ICM chop where players received more or less money based on their chip counts as opposed to the even chop in this Florida daily tournament.