Wealth disparity explained by a poker tournament


I calculated this originally as a comment to a friend's Facebook post, but I have come to think it is a good enough explanation of the economic problems in our country that it deserves a wider audience.
  • 80% of the population has roughly 7% of all the wealth
  • 1% of the population has roughly 40% of all the wealth
  • 0.1% of the population has roughly 22% of all the wealth

Let's look at that wealth distribution in terms of poker. In the 2015 World Series of Poker Main Event, there were a total of 192,600,000 chips in play to start and 6,420 entrants. If we started the Main Event not with all players having the same 30,000 in chips but rather with a chip distribution matching that of the wealth disparity in the US today, here's what the tournament would look like:
  • 64 of the 6,420 participants - 1% of the field - would have roughly 77,040,000 chips among them, an average of 1,200,000 chips per player
  • 5,136 of the 6,420 participants - 80% of the field - would have roughly 13,482,000 chips among them, an average of 2,625 chips per player
  • The average starting stack of the top 1% would be more than 450x the size of average stacks of 80% of the other players
If you have ever played poker, even once, in your life, you know full well you have very little chance of winning that tournament. 80% of the field is starting off with only 26BB, while 1% is starting off with over 12,000BB. With that size of a stack, they have pot odds to move all-in on every single hand and cover every other player at the table, even with 72o vs AA.

But it gets worse.
  • 6 of the 6,420 participants - the top 0.1% of the field - would share roughly 22% of the total chips in play: about 6,600,000 chips per player
  • 5,778 of the 6,420 participants - the bottom 90% of the field - would share roughly 22.8% of the total chips in play: about 7,600 chips per player
If you have any understanding of math and economics, the words "fair tournament" cannot possibly escape your mouth. 90% of the field is starting off with on average roughly 75BB - only 1/4 of size of the average starting stack of 300BB. And keep in mind that the average is only that high because of the inclusion of the 81st-90th percentile: the vast majority - 80% of the players - is starting off with only 26BB. Meanwhile, 0.1% of the field is starting off with roughly 66,000BB. Has any player ever had 66,000BB in a professional poker tournament ever?

But it gets worse yet.

After Day 1 of the tournament - representing just the last two years of wealth exchange in this country - there is a chip adjustment.
  • The bottom 90% of the field gets roughly 3.5% of their chips removed from their stacks
  • The top 0.1% of the field gets roughly 7.5% of their chips added to their stacks
I'm not a communist or a socialist, but I can do math, and I know a rigged game when I see one. No reasonable person would be in favor of supporting an organization who managed a poker tournament like that, and only fools would play in it. But this is representative of the field in the economic state of the US in 2015.


It should also be noted that those 6,600,000 chips per player that the top 0.1% starts with is greater than the number of chips that 2 of the final 9 players will have when the final table starts in November. Two players who have outperformed 99.86% of the other players would still behind the top 6 stacks from the start of the tournament.

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