http://www.finaltablepoker.com/view_...?article_id=65
Since I think you have to register to see the site (even though it's no longer in operation), I'll quote the important part here:
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Leaving the official, the non-official, and the financial reality aside for a moment, if you’ve been following along, you already understand the Day Four/Day Five dichotomy, because you already know about the two Day Ones. Unless you’ve located the following information elsewhere, you don’t know about the 2,576 vs. 2,536 dichotomy. The number of chips in play was so much LOWER than the number of players in play should have owned, just about $400,000, that I worried about some kind of chip miscount problem.
Nothing could be further from the truth. It turns out that the 30-40 players (nobody is ever going to know exactly how many; I’m going to explain the gulf in a moment) who were paid entries and whose stacks sat out there getting blinded off until they were gone (gosh, wouldn’t it have been nice to draw one of those tables) contributed to the lofty total.
I asked Tournament Director Matt Savage about this.
INTERNET LIKELY SOURCE OF NO-SHOWS
“It’s never happened before,” Savage said, “but looking back at it, in retrospect it shouldn’t be so surprising. A lot of the Internet companies had rules about playing only wearing their colors that you could have had some conflicts. You also could have had underage players win seats on the Internet and then realize they couldn’t come play. With the Internet contributing such a large percentage of the field, it really shouldn’t be that surprising.”
The reason no one is really sure about the number of non-starters is that after Day Four, the gap was $405,000, while after Day Five, the gap was $305,000, which makes it seem more likely that only 31 players failed to arrive, and that someone miscounted his chips AGAINST his own best interests on Day Four. Right now, the totals show $25,365,000 chips in play, while theoretically there should be $25,760,000.
Make sure you understand this. Chips have NOT been “imported” into the tournament. In a novel situation, there are fewer chips in play than there theoretically should be.
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Kevin...