Rio WSOP Freeroll - I'm In!

Well, it's semi-official. I convinced one of the floormen at the Rio to tell me whether I had over 80 hours in February, and he looked at the computer and said I was well over 80, probably over 95 (by my count I only played there 84:15, but who's counting? Oh, right...)

As I understand it, the freeroll tournament is March 11 at 7 pm. Supposedly there will be about 40 players. First place gets a seat into the main event of the 2006 WSOP. Second through tenth places receive percentage payouts from a pool of about $7500. If this is accurate, the average player will win $17500/40 = $437.50.

The money for the freeroll tournament all comes directly from the players: $1 is taken from every pot. This money also funds the high-hand jackpots, which pay out from $40 to $599 if you get four-of-a-kind or a straight flush. ($599 because, at $600, more paperwork is required.) I don't particularly like the jackpots because it compromises the purity of the game, but it does encourage worse play from my opponents at times. For example, one woman twice stood up and looked at the front board in the middle of a hand, clearly checking the jackpot sizes... and both times she indeed had a high hand. She just couldn't wait for the hand to be over to see how much she had won! That's a pretty ridiculous tell. On the second of these two hands, this tell allowed me to just call on the river - instead of raising - with a full house (it was a limit game and I couldn't bring myself to fold it).

Over the course of the month, I think I saw at least 30 of these jackpot hands get paid out to people at my tables. Assuming an average of 8 players at my table at any given time, and assuming that I play the same number of potential jackpot hands as the average players, we can calculate the probability that none of these 30 jackpot hands were won by yours truly. It's simply (7/8)^30, which comes to .0182, according to Google's calculator. I bring this up, of course, because this is exactly what happened.