If you look at the payout structure of the WSOP for last year 889th place paid out $82,512,162 which more than 1st place. Why is this? Why wasn’t there more coverage of the player that got the $82.5 million payout?
http://www.worldseriesofpoker.com/pdfs/080106_Payout_Structure.pdf
Skipping your PDF entirely, the $82M figure was the entire prize pool for the entire event.
Jamie Gold took first place and $12MM.
889th took something like 12-14k.
edit: OK I downloaded the damn thing… it’s a misprint. 889 took zero, 873 took $14,937
Looks like there weren’t 889 places at all, but rather 873. There are a bunch of empty spaces (well, 15 to be exact) between the last place payout, which was $14,597 and the $82M figure. Eleusis is correct of course. It’s just the way they did the spreadsheet.
Edit for clarification: 873rd was the last paying position, that is. I’m not sure if there were more players than that, it says at the top “Players: 8,773”. That may be a misprint as well. I’m not familiar with how big the WSOP is.
That was correct for 2006.
Usually the top 10% get paid.
Actually, when they got close to the bubble, they switched to round for round play, instead of hand for hand. Every table played one orbit, and then the dealer stood up. Anyone knocked out in that orbit was counted, and they figured how many players were left. Let’s say there were 900 people left. We played an orbit, 20 got knocked out, so now there are 880. We play another orbit, and 15 go out. There are now 865 left. Those 15 players then add up the payouts for #865-#873 and split it equally. I believe that is actually pretty close to the true numbers, but I don’t recall exactly. You can probably find the list at cardplayer.com of the players and their positions and see exactly how many ended up splitting the bubble money.