Oh really?

Thank you for the enjoyable spam PokerStars. The bolding and italicizing is mine.

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World Record Week on PokerStarsPokerStars bid farewell to 2008 in record breaking style thanks to all our players! With your help, we were able to successfully create a new Guinness World Record for the ‘Largest Online Poker Tournament’ EVER! For the 35,000 players who came together to be a part of something special, we hope that you had a great time playing poker and breaking a record! Eventually it was ‘stan34powa’ who overcame this huge field to win the top prize of $30,000. Along with this record breaking tournament, we also had 10,000 player Sit & Go’s and Sunday Majors with raised guarantees. The Sunday Warm-Up was given a $1 million guarantee while the Sunday Million had its guarantee raised to $2.5 million.Congratulations again to everyone who took part of the world's single biggest-ever tournament - you are all record breakers!

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I have several problems with this claim. 5 years and more than 100,000 hands online ago I had hit a major roadblock on PokerStars. Anytime I was starting to build up anything resembling a decent stack of play money chips I would hit a wall and lose them all back. But, I was honing my investigative technique and for a period of weeks I played in the big multi-table game every night that I could. These tables had a maximum number of entrants of 5,000 peeps. They usually were completely filled.

This often required starting with a newbie $1,000 chips, gaining enough for the $2,000 buy in, and watching the same inevitable pattern unfold. The first and foremost observation is that they made the mistake of showing the chip leaders in a corner of the screen. Invariably there would be leaders who had won all-ins versus multiple opponents show up on the leaderboard before my first hand even finished. This pattern was later duplicated on every other site's big multi-table games. I'm sure the sites' explanations for this would be that aggressive players were hoping to get off to a good start and went all-in.

The second biggest problem - the sitters. They were there in droves. Including bunches that registered and never played a single hand. This is not indicative of real human nature. If you've taken the time to wait until registration opens and then register (you couldn't do it until like an hour before the game ran) a real human, after showing signs of interest in playing would most likely do something silly like actually play in the tournament. There was lots of chat regarding the strategy on eliminating the sitters.

The time factor is an intersting problem. On my best games, I would play for four hours. And if I remember correctly, there was a 5 or 10 minute break every hour. So, the assumption can be made that a 5,000 player game can be processed within 5 hours. That's just a little too long for a night before I have to go to work the next day, but even those nights the games were filled. So, the Guinness record was on a Sunday. This would be a day where lots of peeps would be concerned about getting a bit of sleep before going to work the next day. Especially since you're playing in a free money tournament for hours and you aren't winning money playing poker. The last time I sent my mortgage company Monopoly money for my payment their collection agency called me.

The math is impossible to figure out exactly how long it would take to process a 35,000 player tournament if you didn't actually experience it. Some assumptions can be made.

Even if it's not 5,000 players = 5 hours x 7 = 35 hours, the game will run longer. Considering that the entry fee must have been low for a top prize of $30k, to attract enough players interested in spending even a nominal real money fee, the time of the tourney has to match your schedule. PokerStars, being the most international site, is offering a tourney that's going to be played over a conservatively guessed 10 hour period - 5 hours x 2 to process all those players. So as you are thinking about registering at 2am Eurpoean time and you get the coffee brewing and have called off work so you can play, you aren't going to be satisfied with a 5 minute break. You'll need a breakfast in there. More evidence that a ten hour tourney among real humans is unrealistic. (This assumes that the Sunday tourney was 2pm EST, as most of the weekly play money tourneys catered to EST.)

Let's extend the logic on the length of the game a bit more, if you're real humans. Instead of the instantaneous AI call, you actually pay attention to the blinds, character profiles, chipstacks and general game information you have received after surviving for several hours. You've built yourself up, it's only natural to think more. It may actually take 35,000 real human players cranked up on cocaine for a day to get this thing concluded.

Finally, a reminder. Reiko Hill from 5 years ago. My first big tourney 5+ years ago, this guy Phil Hellmuth Jr. I searched for him and found him on a seven card stud multi-thousand player tourney and he didn't say a peep, and called a hand he couldn't win based on the up cards. This seminal moment for me solidified the fact that this is NOT real human players, other than those slowing down my table and making my life miserable.

35,000 players. And monkeys fly out my butt. Guinness Records should be ashamed.