World Series of Poker/WSOP Odds of Winning Main Event (May 21)

[Jordan Olsommer]

[ QUOTE ]
I don't see how anyone could have better than 200/1 odds of winning this year.

[/ QUOTE ]

I am curious about this too, so I looked up the number of entrants per year at the WSOP (courtesy of the book, "The Championship Table" [excellent book, btw]) and I figure that if Doyle is correct and the competition is generally weaker now than it was then (he said this in an interview during ESPN's coverage of the WSOP), then it would stand to reason that 6,000 competitors today would be worth less than 6,000 1980-quality competitors. That being said, if we count them as one-to-one, and the odds are still in Doyle's favor (as per the "line" that was posted on him), then if both those things are true it would be a +EV bet. (just for the record, I'm doing this math right now, as soon as I'm done typing this sentence, so I have no idea what the results will be until I post them below).

Total # of entrants from 1976 (the year Doyle first won)-2004: 22+34+42+54+73+75+104+108+132+140+141+152+167+178+ 194+
215+201+220+268+273+295+312+350+393+512+613+631+83 9+2576= 9314*
Number of times Doyle won the WSOP: 2

so 2 /9,314 should be the best poor man's approximation we can get on Doyle's odds of winning, and it equals 1/4,567, or 4566-to-1.

So for Doyle to have 1/33 (32-to-1) odds of winning, he would pretty much have to be the only one playing. And even then, I'm not sure if it's +EV [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img].

*: The 2004 figure isn't included in "The Championship Table"; I got it here.
As an aside, it's only fitting that Chris Ferguson the computer nerd from UCLA wins it in the year that the number of entries equals 2^8 (the number of possible nine-bit binary strings).
As a double-aside, I typed in that long string of numbers first and then it took me a moment to figure out how to calculate them without having to retype into a calculator or some such, so I just wanted to boast that this post here was the impetus behind my most trivial use of Mathematica to date. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

*edit: messed it up, shouldn't have included the est. 2005 entrants in the denominator. Fraction fixed.

*double-edit: In fact, for this to be a +EV bet, you'd have to work under the assumption that every single competitor from 1978 on was so weak as to not even merit inclusion in the calculations. Then his odds would be 1/28, and you would be wise to put some money on him. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]