All For Naught

So, last weekend I entered a charity poker tournament at the zoo. I knew very little about this tournament going into the thing, and when I got there, I realized that everyone was in pretty much the same boat as me--no one knew what the prize pool was going to be in relation to how much of the money was going to charity, and in fact, no one seemed to know what exactly the "charity" was that we were playing for. But no one seemed too concerned--we were going to get to play a tournament, after all, which is not that common an opportunity here in Cowtown. I assumed we were playing for some zoo-related charity (which we were) and that the charity/prize pool split would be about 60/40.

On that second assumption, I was wrong.

I won't bore everyone with the details of the play, but I wound up having a very good night. I think all the practice I've been putting in is paying off, because--not to brag--I just dominated my first table. By the first break, I had almost all of the chips. The tournament director then moved me to a different table, one where everyone had about as many chips as I did. I assumed that these would be the better players and I might not last, but no--I cleaned up that table too. So eventually, I found myself at the final table. Pretty exciting, right? Well, kind of. Rumors had been going around that the prize pool was going to be considerably smaller than we all expected. The original buy-in for the tournament was $30, and we each had two opportunities to rebuy for $20 a pop. (A rebuy is when you put in more money and get more chips to play with.) I rebought once, just for the hell of it, so I wound up putting in $50 total. There were about 150 people in the tournament, and almost everyone rebought at least once, so a conservative estimate of the prize pool would be around $7500. Being at the final table should have guaranteed that I'd get at least double my $50 back in winnings, even if I didn't last very long . . . but no. When it was all over, this is what I received:

After all my hard work and over 4 hours of play, I came in 9th and received $45 for my effort. (I heard later that the 1st-place person got around $450.) But wait, it gets better. The next morning, Jackspatula looked at the contents of my envelope and started laughing. There was only $36 in the envelope! So, instead of being $5 down after making it to the final table, I came out $14 down!

But it was all for a good cause, right? I can only hope that the charity's envelope of winnings didn't come out short as well.