There were two "experimental" events this year at the WSOP. One was the $1500 Ante-Only NL event, which was a regular bracelet event, and was met with very positive response from the community. I agree that it was a great event, and I look forward to playing it again next year.
The other was the Bracelet Bounty event, which was a non-bracelet, 1-day event (confused yet?) taking place right before the Main Event. It featured $500 bounties paid for knocking out any WSOP bracelet winner.
I played it because I figured I would be able to use the fact that people would be calling off light in the hopes of winning the bounty, and I could chip up early.
Turned out that I didn't think this one through enough.
Before I get to the play of the event itself, I want to address the inexcusable logistical failures that occurred with this event. Brandon predicted before the event (he ended up oversleeping and not playing) that it would be a complete mess. He was right, but there was really no excuse for the various failures that occurred.
Failure #1: They didn't predict they would get a large field for this event. WHAT?! It's only $560, it's right before the Main Event, it's during the post-4th-of-July weekend, and it appeals to people who failed to satellite into the Main. Plus the $500 bounties likely attracted people, too. According to a dealer, they expected 500 people. Instead, they got well over 1000, and were ill-prepared.
Failure #2: They used the same chips as they do for their 2pm deepstack event. When the field was larger than expected, guess what? They didn't have enough chips for the 2pm deepstack and had to pause the event to do premature color-ups! Embarrassing!
Failure #3: They cheaped out on dealers. Assuming that there would only be 500 players, they told most dealers to show up at 1pm. They actually had to delay people from registering while they were out of dealers.
Failure #4: Not enough tables. They did not allocate enough tables for the event, so even when the dealers showed up at 1pm, they were still not letting certain people register until more players busted.
Failure #5: Starting table changes with poor communication. I showed up to the Amazon room where I was assigned, and it was locked. Finally I tracked down a security guard at a side door, who told me to go to the Pavilion. There was no direction on what to do from there, and I had to track down a floorman to find out where to go.
Failure #6: Late registrants were being assigned to existing tables, so they kept showing up to our full table and argued with the dealer that they should be able to sit!
Failure #7: Bracelet winners had to self-identify. There was no automatic mechanism in the system to identify bracelet winners, even though Harrah's has that on file. They were just too lazy to program it in.
I'll get into the actual play of the event in the next post.