They have FT replays up now. You can watch Ott fold to your heart's content.

One obvious exception is last year's crew of dbags populating the final 27 (Ruane and Qui and a few others being "exceptions to the exceptions"). This year's Day 7 was much more enjoyable to watch than last year's filth.

Those went up as soon as the day ended. The issue is that you can't watch them from UK, Canada or USA, presumably because ESPN hold the rights. And my attempts with a proxy server haven't worked either. Guess I'll just wait but quite excited to see the footage after sweating all the twitter comments on hands.

With so many first time players like Hesp and Ott making the main event final table this year, wouldn't be surprised if people have been inspired to get started trying to gather change from mom and friends, in hopes of cobbling together the $10k buy-in for next year ...

groton, maybe your mom might be open to lending you the +10% back again, for next year as well?

maybe not like I needed it then or now. Just felt it be more fun to them if they had some sweat equality with me.

I don't see this happening at all - pure wishful thinking. First, they'd have to have been watching the coverage in the first place, and then they'd need to have put 2 and 2 together that these guys were first timers. Sure - maybe that could be surmised about Hesp because the coverage played it up again and again and it also was very evident in his approach, but I think that most of the "I can light $10K on fire" older crowd is already lighting their $10K on fire.

1) There will never be another Moneymaker boom until/unless there's some new way of delivering poker to people.

2) The ME field is pretty damn healthy considering there's no PS, FT or PP to buy people in. So I say just enjoy it.

The only "boom" I could see is the first few years of legal online poker in the US.

Tournament idiot - I'm going to play the $10k Main for the experience and maybe I'll get lucky.

Tournament grinder - I'm going to play 20, $500 Deepstack tournaments and hope to final table or bink one and play cash with the winnings so I don't have to work anymore.

^ this. if online poker suddenly became legal in every state it would be such a media grab and all of the people who currently think it's illegal/banned/think they can't play or can't deposit would hop back on.

Thats the only shot IF its legal across all state lines with shared liquidity but whatever "boom" there is won't last long because unlike the first one where most people didn't know what they were doing, there will be vast numbers of pros gobbling up all the novice/mediocre/ok players like a Hoover Vacuum. They probably need limit multi-tabling to slow down the inevitable but that would likely go over like a ton of bricks.

I do think online poker could do a lot for live tournaments by creating feeder tournaments and satellites online where you can only win one package to a live event which increases the size of the live events and keeps the pros from parking on the satellites and Hoovering them too.

There will never be another "poker boom"" nor does there need to be. The # of main event entrants from 2003-2006 increased by over 1,000%. If that happened again, the main event would reach 70,000 entrants.

I couldn't watch them in mexico either, but using a VPN like Hola and selecting Germany as my country I was able to watch them.

The WSOP Main Event was well on its way to a field size of 10,000 or greater during the height of the online poker boom before two things changed:

1) The Nevada Gaming Commission (or other regulator) prohibited "Third Party Buyins". This was huge. When you won a satellite on Stars for example, you never had to handle or see the actual $10K, Stars would buy you into the Main Event as a third party, and you just showed up and collected your seat number. The rule change made it so that Stars (and others) had to deposit the $10K into your online account and it was the players responsibility to withdraw it if need be, and buy himself into the Main Event. There was quite a bit of "slippage" of players who just took the $10K and didn't register for the Main Event.

2) Black Friday - don't really need to say anything here as its obvious.

Before both #1 and #2 happened, I believe there was a year when PokerStars alone accounted for approximately 20%-25% of the total Main Event field size.

If we could ever get back to allowing Third Party buyins, and roll back Black Friday, the Main Event (and other field sizes) could see massive growth again.

sorted me out, thank you i know what i'm doing for the next 12 hours

Some thoughts that I've been having:

As a high level player - tournaments are mostly boring to watch on TV. Live full ring shallow poker with an incentive to nit it up isn't all that appealing. The big money in the end game is kind of sexy but it's also been done so many times that it has lost some appeal.

Televised cash games are however, pretty fun. The environment is more relaxed, stacks are deep, and you get to see the big boys swang and bang.

Would it be possible to have some sort of hybrid cash game tournament. A made for TV type event. Play a 200bb capped buy-in cash game with an additional side buy-in that gets distributed among the players that finish up the most money.

Maybe get 10 tables of 6 handed play - redraw tables at some intervals. Could be structured like a golf tournament where play takes place over 4 days - maybe 6-8 hours of play per day.

Pretty much just spitballing ideas here.

+1

I never heard about the stupid NGC rule, wonder why they felt this needed to be done

Did you like the party poker premier league? I know its not what you're proposing but it was an interesting mix of heads up, etc with points, etc. I really liked it (but Im a TV poker junky).

PokerGo has the Masters of Poker coming in Sept but as far as I can tell its just 4 big buy-in tourneys, would be more interesting if they mixed it up like you said and assigned points to each event like the PPPL

So much this.

I've always been big fan of The Cage tournament ACR runs. WSOP should do a cash game style event like that.

whats this?

The Cage is a multi-table time-based cash game with a $1,000+50 buy-in (satellites are available). The tournament ends as soon as the clock hits 5 hours of play, regardless of how many players are left standing.

Your buy-in gets you 1,000 in chips and here’s the deal. Those chips have a real dollar value. At the end of the 5-hour tournament, we’ll convert your chip stack to real cash. So if you’ve got 5,000 in chips left, we’ll load your account with $5,000 in cash.

Here's a link to an ACR webpage with more info:

https://www.americascardroom.eu/onli...ions/the-cage/

thx

That sounds amazing - would be much more interesting than 4 days of pretty much the same

I'm not sure why the NGC (or relevant authority) decided to ban "Third-Party Buyins", but I heard after the ban about 50% of people who won satellites didn't show up to play Main Event and just kept the $10K.

Third-Party Buyin was awesome! When Stars bought you in after you won a package satellite, you never saw, touched or felt the $10K, so honestly the Main Event felt like a total freeroll! It's a whole different feeling when you have to withdraw $10K, carry $10K on your person and give it to cashier to buy in, it no longer feels like a "freeroll", it feels like you are spending $10K that is yours. That is why the Main Event was SO JUICY in those days, hundreds if not thousands of players who played the Main Event like a freeroll, because that's what it felt like since they never actually possessed or handled the $10K buyin.

Those were the Salad Days!!

Yes they were, I got in via Bodog in 2006 and if they had given me the option to keep the 10K, I would have. IMO, 3rd party buy-ins are essential to bringing back more salad to the ME