Crazy prop bets taking place at the World Series of Poker
When six-figure paydays are the third reason the biggest name poker players want to win a World Series of Poker event you know there is something wild going on. Obviously for players making 7-8-figures every year, winning a few hundred thousand in a poker tournament is probably a little low on the priority list -some first-place prize-money is less than a single buy-in for the games that take place daily in Bobby’s Room-and most fans figure that it’s winning a WSOP bracelet that drives them.
However, after Tom Dwan’s second-place finish showed, for many Poker Pros there is a lot more on the line than the bracelet. By all accounts Dwan lost millions in side-bet action when he was unable to win his first WSOP bracelet. So how much was Dwan going to rake in for a WSOP win? Numbers anywhere from $9 million to $15 million have been circulating around the Rio and on the Internet, with Mike Matusow -who had a bit of his own money in on the bet– putting the figure at $12.5 million according to Poker News’s Nicole Gordon.
Erik Seidel took to his Twitter account saying, “durrrr was a player away from winning the Main Event of the WSOP 5 months early.”
On his Full Contact Poker blog Daniel Negreanu posted, “Durrr has made tons of side bets for this years WSOP and if he is to win a bracelet he’ll pocket enough money to bank and live off for life. Well, normal people could live off that kind of money for life, but I guess with a sicko like Durrr you never know!”
Dwan himself summed up his action to Card Player Magazine: “I have a bunch of money bet to win a bracelet… I have a bunch of money bet to win two bracelets in three years. Those are both really huge bets. Then I have a ton of other bets relating to the series. A bunch of those are ‘most amount cashed,’ which I’m looking in good shape for after yesterday because I won $380,000 or something. So I made $380,000 or whatever that the Rio’s giving me, I think I had 20 percent in cross books, I think I made another $100,000 in side bets on that tourney and I probably made another $400,000 to 500,000 in equity, so … it wasn’t a bad day and today I can say I wasn’t complaining about it. However, yesterday after I busted out, I was very close to my having a much, much better day. I was kind of tilted.”
So, how pervasive are these 7-figure prop bets becoming? In the same piece on Poker News, Gordon points to a$5 million wager between Howard Lederer and Phil Ivey; and with players taking part in every bracelet event it would definitely seem that there is more money at stake at the 2010 WSOP than the official prize-pools!
