Home / Poker News July 2008 / How will the Day 1 overall chip-leader fair in the Main Event? Is there a Day 1 chip leader curse?
How will the Day 1 overall chip-leader fair in the Main Event? Is there a Day 1 chip leader curse?
Posted by: James Carter. - Tue, 2008-07-08 18:43
Day 1C of the WSOP Main Event saw a field of 1,928 players take to the tables, from among whom Henning Granstad rose to overall chip lead, by accumulating a stack of 242,950 chips. Mike Matusow, Chris Moneymaker, Brad Booth, Joe Hachem and Rhett Butler also survived the heat.
Not only did Granstad secure overall chip lead, he became the only player in this year’s 4 Day 1 installments to break the barrier of 200k chips. Day 1C was all good news to Granstad, although he might not like to find out about the curse of the Day 1 chip leader. Word has it, the player who gathers the most chips on Day 1 stands a pretty good chance to bust out early in the proceedings. Whether this myth is at all anchored in reality is highly debatable though. Statistics seem to contradict it: last year, no fewer than 9 players managed to get past 200k in the chip count and all of these players did in fact end up in the money. The truth of the matter is though, that out of the 10 players who finished atop the chip leaderboard after Day 1, Jeff Norman, the absolute chip leader finished the worst. He ended up in 500th place. The 10th player, Kevin Kim, who didn’t even break the 200k barrier, ended up in 32nd which was the best of the bunch. With this in mind, it’d be safer to say that the overall Day 1 chip leader tends to finish the worst out of those who make the top 10, although all of these guys will in fact make it to the money. When you’re holding a commanding lead like Granstad though, walking away with a little over twice your buy-in can be a huge disappointment.
The reasoning behind the whole ‘curse’ theory is that those who accumulate such hefty stacks usually play in an extremely aggressive manner. To keep it up for as many days as the Big Dance runs and not bust out, borders on the supernatural. Practice showed however, that these ultra-aggressive players were in fact well capable of keeping up the pace (see Jamie Gold’s run in 2006).
