Bracelet race

Shamus just put up an interesting blog post about the bracelet race between Phil Hellmuth and Phil Ivey. For me this neatly coincided with having yesterday read an article by Storms Reback in the July issue of All In magazine that gave his rating of the ten greatest WSOP players of all time. In order, he listed Hellmuth, Johnny Chan, Doyle Brunson, Johnny Moss, Stu Ungar, Ivey, Barry Johnston, Erik Seidel, Scotty Nguyen, and T.J. Cloutier.

As Reback recognizes, overall WSOP performance is about more than bracelets; it also involves cashing and making final tables, and doing so consistently over many years. Although I rather despise Men Nguyen, while preparing the stats below I was impressed to see that he has finished 2nd, 3rd, or 4th in WSOP events an amazing 20 times, in addition to his seven wins. I think he might have a stronger argument for a spot on Reback's list than a couple of the other nominees.

Anyway, I was curious how the bracelet race would look when graphed over the years, since those with the most have been at it for very different periods of time. So I whipped up the following graph of bracelets by years to see how their trajectories looked. I included seven of the eight top bracelet winners (Hellmuth, Brunson, Chan, Ivey, Seidel, Men Nguyen, and Billy Baxter), excluding only Moss. His trajectory is, well, dead; he is unlikely to earn any more bracelets unless the WSOP adopts Chicago-style voting to determine winners.





Brunson's line doesn't really disappear; it's just hiding behind that of Chan, as they coincide for the past several years.

What do we learn from this? Not a lot that wasn't already obvious, I suppose. Baxter has been the longest without notching up; he started off earlier than any of the others and kept a pretty steady pace for a long time, but has perhaps come as far as he is going to go by this metric. (I hope not. I'd love to see him show up the young whippersnappers another time or two before he's done, and yell at them to get off of his lawn during his acceptance speech.)

Brunson started off like gangbusters, racking up six in four years, then has a long stretch of none (I think he played very few events during those years), and just a slow trickle since then.

With one exception, the other lines are rather similar, though with varying degrees of lurching in their progressions. Hellmuth's appears to me to be the most saltatory, Seidel's the most consistently stepwise, with the others somewhere in between.

The striking exception, obviously, is Ivey. He shows up for the first time in 2000, a full eight years behind the most Johnny-Chan-come-lately of the others (Seidel and Nguyen), and rockets up, with the slope of his line, from start to finish, being far steeper than any of the others.

Just for fun, and fully recognizing that it's an utterly meaningless exercise, I wondered how the lines would project into the future, if we assumed that the players would continue racking up bracelets at the same pace as they have since earning their first. Here are their respective numbers for bracelets per year:

Hellmuth: 0.52
Brunson: 0.32
Chan: 0.40
Ivey: 0.80
Seidel: 0.44
Nguyen: 0.39
Baxter: 0.20

You'll notice that one of those figures is far higher than the others, confirming what you would expect from the graph and from just the general knowledge of the relatively short time span in which Ivey has left his mark.

If we project those rates ten years into the future (a completely preposterous assumption for any number of reasons, but bear with me), we would find these rounded totals at the end of WSOP 2020:

Hellmuth: 16
Brunson: 13
Chan: 14
Ivey: 16
Seidel: 12
Nguyen: 11
Baxter: 9

And these for the year 2030:

Hellmuth: 21
Brunson: 16
Chan: 18
Ivey: 24
Seidel: 16
Nguyen: 15
Baxter: 11

So that's my back-of-the-envelope prediction: Ivey catches Hellmuth in 2020, then leaves him in the dust. (Some of the others are, actuarily speaking, also likely to be in the dust by then, in a different sense, but let's not dwell on that.)

You heard it here first.

I think you might have forgotten someone

The May, 2010, issue of Poker Pro magazine has an article by Chad Holloway (about whom I know nothing), listing who he thinks would make the best picks for a fantasy poker team in deuce-to-seven events at the World Series of Poker.

I wasn't really interested in reading the article. I basically knew who had to be in the number one slot: Billy Baxter. So I flipped the page to get to the end of the list (being presented in Lettermanesque reverse order), and was mighty surprised to find that he had David Grey as his top pick. So I scanned back through the other names to see where he might have ranked Baxter. I was dumbfounded: he hadn't made the cut at all.

A digression for a moment, if I may. An event in one of the first couple of seasons of the World Poker Tour had Chau Giang at the final table. I had never heard of him before. Mike Sexton had nothing but praise for him during the player introductions. He said something like this: "People might disagree on who the best five poker players in the world are, but if you make any list of the top five and don't include Chau Giang on it, you have made a mistake."

Well, let me steal that sentiment for current purposes: If you make a list of the top ten deuce-to-seven players, and it doesn't include Billy Baxter, you have made a mistake. Period. It's like listing the best chess players without mentioning Gary Kasparov, or best superheros and omitting Superman.

Baxter has won seven--SEVEN!--World Series of Poker bracelets, every single one of them in lowball events, including five--FIVE!--in deuce-to-seven. (The others were in razz and ace-to-five lowball.) What record does Mr. Holloway think even comes close to that?

In addition to the wins, Baxter has made eight other WSOP final-table appearances, all of them in lowball events, including five in deuce-to-seven.

I mean, just look at the list of his major tournament cashes, here. Go ahead--scan down the list (it will take some scrolling) and see how many single-digit finishes you find in deuce-to-seven and other lowball events. Without even trying to do a comprehensive check, I'd bet $100 that nobody else in history has a record of cashes or final tables in these forms of poker that can top Baxter's.

Do we really need to remind anyone that he is in the Poker Hall of Fame in large measure because of his phenomenal, unparalleled, decades-long dominance of lowball poker?

When I read the Poker Pro article in a little more detail (once I had decided to rant here about it, I thought I should probably read it first--good idea, dontcha think?), I learned why Baxter got omitted. The author's methodology was just to use WSOP record books from 2005-2009. Though Baxter had a deuce-to-seven final table as recently as 2008, his last bracelet was in 2002. Hence, he is off of Mr. Holloway's radar screen.

But if you think that on that basis he should be left out of a betting pool for the events that he has dominated like no other player, well, I think you're a fool. If the event is lowball, and Baxter is in the field, only bet against him if you don't like money. It's really that simple.

Poker gems, #132

Max Shapiro, as quoted a short time ago by one of the PokerNews live bloggers:


Two things you don't do, pull on Superman's cape or play Billy Baxter in a lowball game.


[Until yesterday, I hadn't really paid attention to Baxter's track record, though of course I knew the name. The guy has won an amazing seven World Series of Poker bracelets, all in lowball games--specifically, five in deuce-to-seven events, one in ace-to-five, and one in razz, scattered between 1975 and 2002. See the full evidence here. Nobody else even comes close to his record in these rather unpopular and unconventional forms of poker, and probably nobody ever will. This is an amazing accomplishment, old-school poker at its finest. He was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame in 2006. As I write this, he has made the money in yet another 2-7 event, and is the chip leader with only 17 players remaining. I'm pulling for him to rack up piece of gold #8 at the final table tomorrow, to stretch out his bracelet-winning span to an astonishing 33 years.]