Online Games

Jonathan Duhamel is the World Champion of poker.

The winner of the 2010 WSOP Main Event won a massive first prize of $8.44 million for prevailing over a large field of 7,319 players this Monday.

A real life changing amount of money for such a young man barely twenty-two years of age. And this is the appeal of the game of poker, in particular as played in tournaments. The winner gets a disproportionately large amount of money compared to the buy-in fee, so there are similarities with what attracts people to playing lotto. But thank God skill and fun are involved in poker, whereas lotto is a totally brain dead type of activity.

So as the buy in fee for the 2010 WSOP Main Event is $10,000, Jonathan made a 844:1 profit. It is hard to find a better return on investment obviously. As the second player only received $5 million plus, he got roughly 500:1 profit, still very impressive. And this is what is driving thousands of players to these poker events, the allure of winning a very large amount of money.

Going down the ladder a bit, the first player to be eliminated from the final table, in other words the ninth player Soi Ngyuen, got $812k, or only ten percent of what the first place got. This shows how skewed the payout scale is. As a matter of fact the difference between third and second place is $1.4 million, so making a mistake leading to missing second place like Cheong did costs more than the entire prize that the 8th or 9th player got.

As always the buzz was huge and this is the most expected poker event of the year, which did not disappointed poker fans all over the world with great action at the final table, unexpected situations and runner-runner or 2 outers saving the day for some players.