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Short deck poker is reasserting its status this week in South Korea. Nick Schulman, fresh off his stint behind the WSOP announcers’ table, scored a win in an HK$100,000 short deck ante-only tournament that featured several well-known professionals. It was the first short-deck tournament Schulman had ever played.

Here’s the winning hand:

Rewatch @NickSchulman‘s 100K Short Deck Winning Hand QQpic.twitter.com/1uc5zDXruj

— Triton Poker (@tritonpoker) July 25, 2018

American Ben Lamb placed fourth in the tournament. Phil Ivey and Tom Dwan also competed in the event, although they both failed to reach the money.

The tournament was part of Triton Poker’s Super High Roller Series. The tour stopped at Jeju Shinhwa World’s Landing Casino on Jeju Island, South Korea.

Schulman picked up HK$2,135,000 for his first place finish. In US dollars, the prize is equivalent to $272,084.

Short deck sweeping across Asia

The fact that such big names were involved in this tournament highlights how popular short deck is. The game originated in 2014 and started appearing on tournament schedules last year due to demand from action-seeking Asian businessmen.

Of the five tournaments in this current Triton series, three of them are short-deck events. This is the second Triton Poker series to feature the variant so prominently.

The first was in Montenegro in May 2018. In that series, Phil Ivey emerged as a winner, which explains his eagerness to jump into this series’s events in South Korea.

Short deck brings out the gamblers

The idea behind short-deck poker is relatively simple. Deuces through fives are removed from the deck and play proceeds as a normal hold’em game.

However, the removal of those cards profoundly changes the mathematics of gameplay. Hand strengths are far more compacted and lead to more playable situations.

As Ivey told paulphaupoker.com last year,

“There’s a lot of gambling involved. The equities run pretty close, so it’s pretty easy to get your money in the middle and be 50/50 or somewhere near that. It suits a more gambling style of player.”

The mathematics behind the game were such that the continuum of winning hands had to change. In short deck, straights are worth more than flushes.

Dwan, one of the variant’s more prominent proponents, now refers to standard hold’em as “long deck.” Several other notable players have begun doing so as well.

The poker game of choice always changes

Short-deck poker may be simply the next in a natural evolution in poker. No game remains the standard game forever.

For much of poker’s early history, the game of choice was five-card draw. The game lasted as the go-to until the 20th century.

Then came seven-card stud. Seven-card stud dominated cardrooms across the land, and until recently, still had a solid foothold on the East Coast.

Hold’em was the next to emerge. The game typically played as a limit contest until Chris Moneymaker helped push people into the no-limit boom.

More recently, and especially in Europe, the game of choice has been Pot-Limit Omaha. PLO continues to enjoy a bit of a renaissance in the United States.

So, perhaps short deck is the next iteration of our great game.

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At the start of the 2018 World Series of Poker (WSOP), it looked like Joe Cada was the early favorite to win Player of the Year honors. After all, he started with a ninth-place showing in the $10,000 Super Turbo event before June was even underway. Then, the very next day, he won the $3,000 NLHE Shootout. He captured his third career WSOP bracelet and also pocketed a $226,000 payday.

Then, as is often the case as the WSOP runs on into the summer, other contenders emerged. Players like John Hennigan and Eric Baldwin combined a bracelet win with a host of other cashes to climb to the top of the leaderboard. Unlike every WSOP dating back to 2000 though, there was no clear-cut two-time bracelet winner.

After starting strong, Cada finished even stronger

In the final week of play though, we didn’t just get one two-time winner, we got three. Shaun Deeb and Justin Bonomo both earned two, though Bonomo’s One Drop victory did not factor into POY standings.

And then there was Cada. Not only did he win two bracelets, he also finished fifth in the second-largest Main Event in history. Cada started with a bracelet, then ended with another in the massive-field Marathon event. Just two days removed from his $2.15 million Main event score, he picked up his fourth bracelet and over $660,000.

Certainly, the game of poker is about winning and money. It is about beating tough competition too. Nonetheless, with cashes in both the Colossus and the Millionaire Maker, it is difficult not to be impressed by how many entries he outlasted. Across seven cashes, he bested 31,818 entries. That’s an average field size of 4,545.

We’ve laid out the case for Cada, but even without the numbers, it seems pretty clear: he was absolutely the WSOP Player of the Year. So, why then, is he third in the POY standings?

New POY formula trying to address issues of the past

One has to commend the WSOP for never resting on its laurels when it comes to Player of the Year. The organization has frequently changed formulas. Both BLUFF Media and GPI operated the formula in the past. For the past two years, the WSOP has powered the formula in-house. BLUFF’s major critique was it overvalued high buy-in events over large fields with smaller stakes. GPI was similarly criticized for undervaluing the marquee events like Colossus but massively overvaluing the Main Event.

In 2017, the formula seemed to be deeply rooted in return on investment. As such, players like the eventual winner Chris Ferguson earned plenty of points for frequent cashing. Meanwhile, players with only a handful of cashes were too far back in the standings to contend. Case in point: David Bach. The only two-time bracelet winner of the summer finished the race 86th in the standings.

To their credit, the WSOP continued to tinker and introduced an entirely new formula this year. It isn’t something we have never seen before though. It is actually modeled after the points system the WSOP Circuit uses to determine which players qualify for the Global Poker Championship freeroll.

Essentially there are four tiers of points:

• Final table
• 20 percent of the remaining players who cash
• The next 30 percent of the remaining players who cash
• All remaining in-the-money players

The best part of all? First place is heavily weighted. With first getting almost double the points of second, the likelihood a double bracelet winner tops the ranks is higher. And, indeed, that is the case this year, as Deeb is currently in first place in the standings.

This is all well and good, but the problem remains–why is Joe Cada third with more money earned than the players in front of him?

Why the WSOP favors Deeb and Yu over Cada

Looking through Cada’s score, one thing immediately jumps out, and that is his Main Event finish isn’t worth all that many points. It is comparable to the points Ben Yu got for finishing as runner-up in the $25,000 PLO event.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Previous systems, BLUFF in particular, put so much weight on the Main Event that the winner would automatically be in the top ten even if they did not cash in anything else.

Moreover, it isn’t like Cada gets points for difficulty for making the final table for a second time. It is a great story, but it doesn’t, nor should it, count for added points.

By and large, Cada’s points seem to jive though, so the next place to look is the results of Deeb and Yu, the players ahead of him in the standings.

Yu has 14 eligible cashes with four final table appearances and one bracelet. Most of his deep runs are in higher buy-ins. He won his bracelet in the $50,000 event and finished runner-up to Deeb in the $25,000 PLO.

Deeb’s numbers are similar. Fifteen cashes, three final tables and two wins, one in a $10,000 event and the other in a $25,000 event.

You know what else these two have in common? They play all of the mixed games. Tournaments with short fields, but large points for in-the-money finishers.

So what needs to change about the WSOP POY formula?

Full disclosure, I am a former employee of the WSOP. I worked with the POY formula in my time as well as the Circuit formula. Looking at these numbers, my mind drifted to the year we instituted the new Circuit points formula.

As we were developing it, we noticed there was one major problem, which is that the giant field hold’em events earned the same points as the smaller events with only 120 players. On the Circuit, most events pay 27-45 players, but certain stops, like Horseshoe Hammond will pay 100s.

Here is another option for how the 20/30/50 portion of the POY and Circuit formulas could work:

Rather than dole out points at the final table and then divide the remaining field into 20-, 30-, and 50-percent chunks, apply the percentages to the entire field. Why does that make a difference? Let’s illustrate with an example:

Let’s look at the $50,000 Poker Players Championship. This year’s field was 87 players, with the top 14 finishing in the money. The top 20 percent of 14 is first through third. The next 30 percent is fourth through seventh. Finally, the remaining 50 percent is seventh through 14th.

Using this alternative system, the six-handed final table gets the same final table points as the other system. However, the rest of the cashers will get decidedly fewer points. Seventh will be the only spot that gets points for being in the 30-percent category. The rest get points for a min-cash, as making the money but not making the final table in the PPC is a min cash.

Let’s look at a side-by-side comparison of the points:

You’ll notice that the system from this year awards points to the top nine even in events where nine is not the final table. It is a bit of a programming headache, but adjusting the points to only jump at the actual final table of an event is something to add to the to-do list.

You’ll also notice there are 460 fewer points up for grabs. It may feel punitive but think about inflection points in tournaments. In this particular event, if you don’t make or bubble the final table, you just min-cashed it. There is nothing all that more impressive about 12th than 14th or 10th over 12th.

Deeb got 10th in this event, so under our formula his tally is already down 197 points. Extrapolating his other cashes out will inevitably result in a much tighter race with Yu and Cada than what we are dealing with now.

How does this change affect Cada’s score, you ask? It doesn’t basically. That is the appeal. In large field events, cashing at the end of Day 1 is different than making dinner break for Day 2 or one of 27 returning for Day 3 or making the final table. The point system jumps at around each of those points and shifting the number you’re calculating percentages off of by nine really makes minimal difference.

Conclusion

The thing about formulas for the WSOP POY race is that people don’t often think about how tricky it is. There is no other tournament series in the world dealing with a series featuring all kinds of outliers, be it Colossus, the Main Event, or the One Drop High Roller. Any formula designed to be a catch-all will feature concessions.The alternative is to have set points for events like the Monster Stack to account for weird tournaments in the mix.

It’s messy, it isn’t easy, but so long as the WSOP continues to try to improve, we are in good shape. No one can expect a Cada-level performance in advance. All you can do is learn from hindsight, or hope The Kid crushes at WSOP Europe and solves the problem for them.

Lead image courtesy of WPT/Flickr

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The 2018 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, Nevada is officially closed for the year.

Even with the World Series of Poker Europe in Rozvadov coming up in October, there are all sorts of feels when its time to pack up and leave the Nevada desert.

The WSOP awarded 78 bracelets and a record $266.8 million during the summer series. It also processed a record 123,865 entries and paid the most players (18,105) in history.

There were a lot of headlines over the seven weeks of tournament play that included “record.”

How accurate would it be to say the WSOP had a record-breaking summer? Let’s take a look back at the series through the numbers and the headlines.

It’s all about the money

This year marked only the sixth time the total WSOP prize pool was north of $200 million. During its 49 years, the WSOP has awarded just shy of $3 billion in prize money.

The 2018 WSOP hosted a record 10 events that produced a $1 million-plus first-place prize. It surpassed the previous record of seven events from the 2016 and 2017 WSOP. What’s more impressive is four of the ten events paid multiple $1 million prizes.

In case you haven’t heard, Justin Bonomo has been on a heater of late. His incredible run continued at the WSOP. He started the series by winning his second career bracelet in Event #16: $10,000 Heads-Up No-Limit Hold’em Championship. He ended the series by winning his third. As the winner of $1 million Big One for One Drop, he collected the biggest paycheck of the series: $10 million.

U.S. players took home $187,417,000 this year, easily claiming the top spot. Germany ($12,454,810) and Canada ($7,995,246) rounded out the top three.

The Main Event is still the main attraction

The Main Event is still the tournament everyone shows up for. This year 7,874 players put down $10,000 for their shot at poker glory creating the largest prize pool of this year’s series.

It was the second largest Main Event field in history, coming in behind the 2006 Main Event that registered 8,773 players. Even so, with the WSOP paying 15% of the field, this year’s Main Event paid out a record 1,182 places.

It’s not often that someone gets a second chance at the most coveted prize in poker. After finishing 11th in the 2016 Main Event, John Cynn closed the deal after a record-breaking 10-hour-plus heads-up battle with Tony Miles. Cynn took home $8.8 million, the second-largest first-place prize of the series.

Nicholas Dashineau played Day 1C at the ripe age of 21 years and two days. He had a shot to unseat Joe Cada as the youngest Main Event champion until he hit the rail on Day 3, just outside of the money.

On the other end of the spectrum, 88-year-old John Olsen was the oldest player in the field. He survived the mine-field of Day 1 but was unable to make through Day 2.

Players everyone is talking about

Bonomo and Cynn weren’t the only players to capture the attention of poker players and fans.

Joe Cada may just be credited with the best 2018 WSOP performance even though he currently sits third on the Player of the Year race. The 2009 Main Event Champion began the Series by winning his third bracelet in Event #3: $3,000 No-Limit Hold’em Shootout. He ended it by winning his fourth in Event #75: The Closer – $1,500 No-Limit Hold’em. And somewhere in between, he made another run at the title, coming in fifth place in the Main Event.

Kelly Minkin followed up her 29th-place finish in the 2015 WSOP Main Event with a 50th-place finish in this year’s Main Event and was once again, the last woman standing. It seemed as if the whole community was rooting for Minkin, not only because she is a woman but because she is “gangsta.”

Chris “Jesus” Ferguson followed up last year’s Player of the Year performance that included 23 cashes with another 17 this year. While he is not in contention for PoY honors this year, his 17 cashes are still good for the most of the summer.

As usual, the WSOP attracts a wide range of non-professional players from sports, music, and Hollywood. This year that group produced a gold-bracelet winner. Famed musician, audio engineer and music journalist, Steve Albini went from producing gold records to wearing his first gold bracelet after winning the $1,500 Seven Card Stud.

Online players collected more gold in 2018

WSOP.com held the most online bracelet events in its history with four. It also included a PLO online bracelet event for the first time.

What made this summer exciting for online players is the inclusion of New Jersey players to the player pool. Thanks to the Garden State joining the Multi-State Internet Gaming Agreement, a combined player pool launched just ahead of the opening of this year’s Series.

The WSOP hosted the largest online bracelet event with a record 2,972 entries in the $365 WSOP.com Online No-Limit Hold’em Bracelet Event.

It also awarded the first summer bracelet to a player located outside of Nevada when Matthew ‘mendey’ Mendez clicked his way to victory in an online event from his home in New Jersey.

It was a record-setting summer, after all

Looking at the numbers, it appears record-setting is an appropriate description of the 2018 World Series of Poker. Granted, it is busy breaking its own records and as a business, that should be a goal.

Even so, it is still impressive that without a strong US poker presence online, the WSOP is still growing.

In a press release, Executive Director for the World Series of Poker, Ty Stewart said:

“The 2018 World Series of Poker was another big success, and it’s thanks to the loyal players that make it out to Las Vegas every summer. We love seeing the Main Event grow to numbers no one ever thought was possible in 2018 as well as positive reaction to our new events. The team will be hard at work to make sure this remains the premier poker festival in the world.”

There is nothing in poker that compares to the yearly summer camp in Las Vegas. For many, the WSOP shapes their entire year. Families temporarily move to Nevada, jobs are put on hold, and vacations are scheduled around the most anticipated poker tournament series of the year.

All that is left now for players is to return to normal life and begin the wait for next year’s schedule.

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