Online WSOP Seat Count update: 1625 guaranteed or won (5/2/2005)

[Arsene Lupin III]

<font color="red">1256</font> seats guaranteed or assumed to be rewarded by online sites thus far, excluding partypoker. I'm estimating Party to be roughly 350 and the remainder of the sites to be another 20. +251 seats from last time, many (~150) of them from the discovery of the WillHill/Ladbroke promotions

Stars, 564: 100 fpp seats, 464 cash qualifiers
Partypoker, ??: No info, but seems to be awarding 1 seat per day with MTT satellites alone. WSOP steps are producing another 1 or 2 seats per day.
interpoker, 145: 145 guaranteed [Main page popup, yes, i am aware that all of crypto is guaranteeing these 145 so do not include another of these sites]
Paradise, ~140: 104 seats (wow!) awarded plus ~2/3 of 50 freeroll seats yet to be awarded.
william hill, 106: "There are 106 seats available, guaranteed."
FTP, 57: 7 seats awarded, 30 guaranteed from $500+35, 12 freeroll guaranteed, 8 from weeklies until wsop (1 weekly guaranteed for 8 weeks) (website)
Ultimatebet, 56: 56 seats awarded [UB's software, 4/28]
Empire, 50+: 50 freeroll seats, ?# satellite winners. [main page]
Ladbrokes, 50: Sent 50 last year, will send max of 50 this year.
Bodog, 32+: 31 seats guaranteed in may [Website], one freeroll seat
Prima network, ~30: 6 seats awarded to specific users/reps, plus 12 (4 weeklies in april, 4 weeklies in may, plus one monthly for feb-may). This number is confused by promos such at that offered by tgc [4 guaranteed seats for specific user classes] and golden tiger [random claim to guarantee 10 seats]. It's not worth the time to investigate this further.
Pokerroom, 16: mentions that they will have 16 reps, about 10 of which have been chosen through satellites
Truepoker, 7: 2 listed qualifiers, 5 freeroll seats
Absolutepoker, 3: 3 freerolls
b2b net (martinspoker, etc), 5: 5 guaranteed (hazy guarantee on their wsop page)
Intertops: 2 guaranteed ($12k sats)
IPN network: 1 hazy guarantee (betandwin)
Pacific: No info

a few brief notes..
Stars has their fpp sats scheduled pretty well. They've awarded 41/100 seats. I wonder if we can extrapolate this to stars sending 1132 cash qualifiers, as well. Since early 4/28, stars has awarded 1 fpp seat and 41 cash qualifiers. They're doing 4 1-seat sngs a day and awarding 15+ seats in the weekend qualifier (43+/week).. Unreal. Paradise awarded 12 seats in the same time span.
If stars will award 400 more, and party matches them 70%, that means 605 seats from party, excluding freerolls. This makes a total of 2231 projected seats ignoring the contributions of paradise and UB.

Regarding party's entrants, they're doing a freeroll daily for may. That's 31. The WSOP MTTs are getting about an average of 1.5-2 seats per day, and people are going to start desperately trying to use up their wsop step freerolls in the coming months. At peak time, about $2500/hr is being fed into these, so I'd estimate we'll eventually see something along the lines of 4 seats a day being awarded from them towards the end of the run. They've also added the daily $125 sats, which are moderately popular. I'm guessing Party is awarding about the equivalent of approaching 6 seats a day right now.

This all leads to the question.. do the sites have quotas for entrants? Some of these promotional guarantees seem a little odd to me. We know that guarantees will always draw players when advertised, but some of the smaller sites are offering some interesting deals that may prove to be +EV in the 5 weeks. I would find it quite humorous if Harrah's started advertising the wsop more aggressively and, as they approached the cap, stars and party had to make like everyone else and close down their satellites. But I still don't see that as a particularly likely outcome... Discuss.

[Howard Treesong]

I think a linear extrapolation overstates the case somewhat, as you may well start to get more and more repeat winners at the sites sending big numbers. Hard to be sure: there are a number of factors working here.

Still: nice work, Lupin. I'd be interested to see where we stand in another month.

[Teldar]

Very nice work. I look forward to reading your future updates. I still think 2,500-3,000 is feasable from on-line qualifiers. I think the # of qualifiers will accelerate over the next months as more people start to focus on it. We'll see. Keep the updates coming.

[LotsOfOuts69]

It's going to be very funny because when I sit down on day 1 instead of asking "who qualified online?" it will be easier to ask "Who didn't qualify online?"