Breaking News: WSOP 2011 Winner Revealed

July 14, 2011, Posted by Pokerfarm

Here at the Pokerfarm, we’re committed to bringing you the freshest, most incisive poker analysis possible. While other sites merely spread tired rumours and regurgitate old news, we go the extra mile, spending hours slaving away in darkened rooms with calculators, statistical analysis software and clustered supercomputers, all so we can bring you the greatest poker secrets you won’t find anywhere else.

With that in mind, we’ve been getting down and dirty with the numbers, looking at the last 20 years of World Series of Poker Main Event tournament results, and we’ve come up with a unique-to-the-Pokerfarm regression analysis model to predict tournament results based on the attributes of past winners. We can now tell you, exclusively, who is going to win the main event with a high degree of confidence.

For starters, current chip leader Ben Lamb is, despite his ~551k stack, in very poor shape. Lamb is from Oklahoma, and an Okie has never won the prestigious main event. (American winners are overwhelmingly Californian, with a smaller contingent from New York.) Then we come to Ben’s name - did you know that in the last 20 years, there have been six winners whose first name started with “J”, and none whose name began with “B”? There is a robust and statistically-significant trend for Jonathans, Joes and even Jims, but, sadly for Lamb, not Bens.

Patrik Antonius, currently 12th in chips, is a crowd favourite to make a deep run. Patrik has some great strengths: he’s a tournament veteran, a formidable player, and he’s almost exactly 30.5 years old (the average age for main event victors is about 30.675 years - close enough.) However, Patrik, whose birthday is December 13, is a Sagittarius, along with only 2 main event winners from the last 20 years. A firm favourite would have to be a Virgo or Scorpio, either of which, according to our numbers, would make him at least 50% more likely to win.

Sadly, this excludes both Eli Elezra (445th in chips, also a Sagittarius) and Daniel Negreanu (723rd, a Canadian, and a Leo - fat chance!) Doug Lee (274th in chips) was born on the wrong day of the week in the wrong country.

Huck Seed (1213th) has the advantage of having won the main event before, but as a Capricorn we can more or less chalk that up to a fluke. The same goes for Phil Hellmuth (1249th), a Cancer who is at least two standard deviations above the optimal height for a main event winner (we have no idea how he managed to win in 1989 - perhaps it was a full moon?)

After extensive review and cross-checking, we can tell you that the 2011 main event winner will be... Jeff “Mrrain” Banghart. True, he’s currently 1849th out of 1850 players. True, he only has 3,500 chips, where the chip leader has over 551,000. True, most analysts would more or less count him out at this stage. But, based on his name, age, nationality, birthday, star sign, height, blood type and over a hundred other factors, we can exclusively reveal he’s the most likely player to take down the 2011 main event.

And Jeff, if you’re reading this, if you could just drop us an e-mail to let us know what brand of toothpaste you use (8 out of 10 past main even winners prefer the whitening power of Crest,) that would be perfect. Thanks.