Why did the world series ME go from 10K starting stacks to 50K starting stacks? The buyin did not change. All it does is make the tournament last forever.

Pretty standard for many years that most (all) WSOP starting stacks are 5x buyin in USD. (ME cost $10,000 so you get $50,000 chips to start, Big One for 1Drop cost $1 million so each player starts with $5 million.

They also 5x the blind levels, so it shouldn't take any more or less time. To finish it out.

Does anyone know the first year that starting stacks exceeded 10K for the ME? Seems to me there was at least one year where the starting stacks was 30K.

Starting stacks were definitely 30k in 2015. Not sure about other years.

Right. How does that fit with the 5x buyin claim? Have they changed the level of the blinds also?

Was 30k in 2012, does not really make a difference they used to play 25/25 then 25/50 blinds so you were actually deeper

Starting stacks of the Main Event were definitely 20k in 2007. (the only time I've played).

My understanding is that the original idea is part of an anti-cheating strategy. By increasing the stack size from 10k to 20k, it provided less incentive for a player remove chips from an earlier WSOP tournament and slip them into their stack during the Main Event.

Pocketing a couple 10k (or bigger chips) from an earlier tournament and adding them to your Day 1 Main Event stack could be worthwhile in some scenarios.

They switched to 20K in 2007, went to 30K in 2009, and 50K in 2016

I know it was 10k in 05. Two hour levels starting at 25-50. Used to be dollar to chip stack. The 1.5k started with 1.5k in chips and so on. I think they changed in 07 to keep up with other series that started to promote “deep stacks” to get the fish to play their $150-500 tournaments.

This. Played my first ME in 2007 and it was 20k. The structure was very different too (25/50 was the first level and antes came in at 100/200).

Was/is this a major problem at the WSOP? Did they do anything else to stop it? Seems like you could still do this and gain somewhat of an advantage on the first day (though maybe not as big of an advantage as before)

In the 2006 Main Event, there were roughly 2 million more chips at the final table than what was supposed to be. I remember it being announced, and here is a blurb from a pokernews article from Feb. 2007.


Why has Harrah's not commented on the Two Million Chip incident? Well first of all they did. If you have watched the ESPN broadcast of the final table of the main event, about 7 minutes in you heard Lon McEachern say:

"If you're really quick with math, you might notice that there are more than two million extra chips in play. That may be due to a miscount during the color-up of chips so now... a little over 90 million chips at the final table."


Here is the link to the article:

https://www.pokernews.com/news/2007/...nths-after.htm

It says a formal investigation by the NGC found that 2.41 million more chips were in play than what was supposed to be. No prosecutions because of lack of evidence.

I think you get slightly more chips at each colorup and those add up.

Complete BS, as all the other events also made the same changes in terms of multiple of buyins. It was done simply to make players "feel" like they got more chips even though the structure changed along with the starting stacks to be approximately the same.

-BD

There's no such thing as a 10k WSOP chip.