The Basics of Chopping a Tournament

Anyone who's been around tournament poker long enough knows that deals are often made at the end of major tournaments. What that means is that the players who haven't yet been eliminated (I've seen deals discussed with as few as two players remaining to as many as 18) will agree amongst themselves how to divide the remaining prize pool, rather than play out the rest of the tournament according to the published prize schedule. The typical player incentive for agreeing to enter into this type of deal is that the blinds have become so large -- as a function of the total chips in play -- as to make luck a much larger determinant of the winner of the tournament than poker skill. Agreeing to a deal takes the luck component completely out of the equation, and instead lets the tournament play to that point serve as the determining factor regarding which players take home more money, and which take home less.

Although these tournament deals come in all different flavors, it is not uncommon for players to "chip chop". In such a scenario, each remaining player is guaranteed the amount of money that he would receive if he was the next player eliminated. After deducting that amount for each player from the prize pool, the remainder of the prize pool is allocated according to each player's percentage of the total chips in play. He is awarded his "chip equity" of the remaining prize pool.

To give an example, a recent APPT tournament awarded a prize of approximately $310,000 for second place, and $650,000 for first place. That is a significant difference. Although no deal was struck in that tournament, if for some reason that last two players remaining had agreed to chip-chop, each player would have received $310,000 as a base amount. Next, assume the chips were split 60%/40%. The player with 60% of the chips would additionatly receive 60% of the remaining $340,000 ($204,000) for a total of $514,000, and his opponent would receive 40% of the remaining $340,000 ($136,000) for a total of $446,000. This balances the prize pool in favor of the player with the chip lead and takes out the luck component in either player winning, or missing out on, an additional $340,000 in prize money.

Sometimes players do a modified chip-chop, with one player taking an additional base amount before paying out all players based on their chip equity. That's where negotiation and persuasion skills come into play. In a multi-way deal, a hold-out player can often leverage the desire of his opponents to make a deal into a bigger payday for himself than his chip equity would otherwise dictate. That's because all remaining players must agree to all facets of a deal in order to implement it. Otherwise there's no deal, and the tournament plays on.

If this all seems overly basic to you, that's ok. I just want to set out the general mechanics of a tournament chop, so that everyone understands what I'm talking about, before tackling some issues regarding chops (although probably not the issues you expect me to tackle). Tomorrow.