So far the Little One for One Drop $1,111 buy-in No Limit Holdem tournament has been bigger than I expected. Judging by the Tweets and live reporting from Day 1a of the tournament there was plenty of buzz about the event, evidenced by the 2,233 official entries from Day 1a (each rebuy was treated as a separate entry), a number that may possibly be matched on Day 1b today.

I say possibly because typically Day 1b flights draw more participants, but considering the schedule I think most of the people that wanted to play the Little One for One Drop would have chosen to play on Day 1a (If they survive they get the 4th of July off and if they bust they can try again on Day 1b), so my expectation is that some new players will register on Day 1b but many of the entries today will be people who busted on Day 1a.

The current record for a non-Main Event tournament at the WSOP is currently held by the Millionaire Maker tournament which was held earlier this year and pulled in 6,343 entries. While it appears that the One Drop tourney will come in well under this number, anything over 4,000 players has to be seen as a huge success, for three reasons:

#1 – the Little One for One Drop has an extremely high drop. Not only does $111 of every entry go directly to One Drop, but the WSOP is still taking their standard $100 cut from each entry: $70 for Caesars administrative fees and $30 for the tournament staff.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have no issue with Caesars taking this money, but astute, bottom-line, players will probably be turned-off by the excessive drop from the tournament, which amounts to almost 20%. Contrast this with the One Drop High-Roller tournament where Caesars took care of the charity aspect of the event with their portion of the fee, leaving $107,777 of every $111,111 entry for the prize-pool – a 3% drop.

#2 – the tournament is taking place during one of the most hectic stretches of the World Series of Poker. Not only do players have numerous choices in terms of events but at this point of the WSOP, with just a single $1,500 tournament remaining to be played, most of the weekend warrior types who came to the WSOP to play in one or two of the smaller buy-in tournaments have packed their bags and headed home.

#3 – the tournament is taking place during the July 4th Holiday. Those same people mentioned in point #2 above are also likely to have headed home for the long weekend. With the Little One for One Drop Day 1 flights taking place on July 3rd and July 4th it’s unlikely they will reach the same tallies had the event been played the week before, on a non-holiday.

*Resources: www.wsop.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 4th, 2013 at 8:55 am and is filed under Poker News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.