31
Why Are So Many Pros Busting?
Yesterday, a friend of mine sent an email that included the following snippet:
“I’m amazed at how many top pros have busted out seeming early in their first day. Do you have a theory here? It can’t be that they are ALL getting crushed on set-under-set… I’m wondering if the pros are playing a little looser, taking a few more chances simply due to the need to accumulate chips to deal with the MASSIVE field.”
I posed the question to Howard Lederer, who busted on his opening day. He gave following reply:
“So, what, there are 150-200 top pros. The fact is that 80 or 100 of them ought to be out by now. So, yeah, a lot of the top players are out.”
Lederer then suggested a better way of measuring the success the pros are having. He suggested looking at list of the 100 players who are leading in the CardPlayer rankings. The 100 players represent 1 Million in chips. He said that he’d be willing to bet that those 100 players have accumulated more than the million they started with.
“That’s the only way to measure,” said Lederer. “You can’t say,’Oh, my God there were 43 Full Tilt pros and 20 of them got knocked out.’ Sixty percent of the field got knocked out yesterday and you’d expect the pros to do just a little better than that. But the 50 percent that survive are going to more than double their chips.”
“I think it’s bogus to look at how many have been knocked out. Let’s look at how people are doing as a group.”
