June 3, 2008
No Chinese at the WSOP?
You may think the price of gas is high (I filled my first $50 tank in my personal history of owning an automobile the other day) but that’s nothing compared to the price of Chinese Poker at the WSOP.
Weren’t we just saying last year how this was one of the hottest games going? Well apparently that was a problem … as WSOP cash games management has made the cost of playing highly prohibitive — a $50 per hour time charge. You’d think we’d be all up in the Chinese these days … not just because of the game’s growing popularity, but also because of the Olympics and everyone’s going ga-ga over Macau. The game is still technically being spread, but again, at that level of time charge, these games will be limited to players willing to gamble-gamble at $100/pt. or more.
Supposedly it has much to do with space — but there was an empty high-stakes cash table available at the time of our learning about this. (The 7-stud players joked about how at $25 a point, everyone would be broke within a few hours.) Gotta wonder if there might not be more to it — after all, there’s no shortage of whities (and even a few viets that I know) who accuse various Asian contingents of high-stakes Chinese Poker players (as opposed to Chinese poker players) of regularly violating the English Only rules and engaging in other forms of nefarious card play.
