If you were around the Rio last week, you could see with your own eyes how massive the first-ever Monster Stack was. With 7,862 players, a seven-figure first place payday in a $1,500 buy-in event, and a long day where every table in the Rio was filled to bursting until after midnight, it did become difficult to wrap your brain about just how big this tournament got.
Here are just a few numbers to help you understand just how monstrous the monster stack was:
- With 7,862 unique individuals, this is the largest single starting day, single entry field in WSOP history. It is also the third largest field ever at the WSOP, trailing just the 2006 Main Event (8,773 players) and this year’s Millionaire Maker event (7,977 entries). However, when you look at unique players, this tournament is two on the list, as the Millionaire Maker has a single re-entry component.
- On Day 1 of play, the cage issued 220,336 individual chips to compose the nearly 8,000 starting stacks of 15,000 chips. The total amount of chips in play? That would be 117,898,400.
- The final table play will resume in Level 36 with the blinds at 200,000/400,000. The ante is 50,000 chips, or, to put it another way, over three starting stacks. While the average stack at this final table is a lower number of big blinds than the Millionaire Maker, that is also because that event ended in Level 37, while this tournament is starting just one level earlier than that. In fact, save for the Millionaire Maker, no other tournament has even made it into the 36th level of the structure this summer.
- With the highest chip denomination on the table being 100,000, it took literally dozens of racks yesterday to break a table late in play, as the sheer volume of chips meant each player needed at least three or four racks.
- Now that we are at the final table, every single player is guaranteed a six-figure payday. The winner will take home $1,327,083—885 times the buy-in for this event.
As for the magnitude of these kinds of paydays for our final table players? Consider this: Three of them have never cashed in a WSOP event in their lives. One, Lynne Beuamont, has just a single cash for $9,805. Only three, Thayer Rasmussen, Zachary Gruneberg, and Sean Drake, have final tabled a WSOP event before. In fact, Drake won a bracelet in 2011 in the Casino Employees event. His payday totaled $82,292.
Even Rasmussen, the most accomplished player in the bunch, would increase his career WSOP earnings four-fold with a win today. There is no one at this table that would say a $1.3 million payday wouldn’t be a life-changing sum of money.
It’s not bad for five days of work, but it was certainly hard work, as these players navigated through a record field to earn their seat in the final nine of what is the first, but will certainly not be the last WSOP Monster Stack event.