No sooner did Landon Tice get yanked out of one bet with Bill Perkins by his backers than he finds himself in another.
It is hard to know whether to praise his folly or condemn his resilience.
The new bet is pretty simple. Tice has bet $10,000 against Bill Perkin's $80,000 that Tice will win a live no limit Texas hold'em bracelet at the WSOP this summer.
Those are pretty tight odds for a bet like this. Tice will have to show a lot more grit this time around if he's going to justify them. In his previous bet with Perkins, he got just one-quarter of the way in before he quit. This fall, we will see if that was a red flag or if Tice learned his lesson.
Tice announced the bet with a poll on Twitter. "I have a bet with @bp22 to win a Live WSOP Bracelet at 8:1 at my first series. NLHE Events Only. Thoughts?" he asked.
So far, 73.6% of respondents chose "Bad Price."
Vital statistics
The math on this doesn't look great for Tice.
There are about relevant 40 no limit hold'em events. That is once you filter out the events which Tice will be unable to play because of age, gender, employment, and bankroll restrictions.
Tice has mentioned he is unlikely to get staked for any supra-$25k events. That is unfortunate. With their smaller fields, the odds of binking a bracelet go way up in the super high roller events. So, the majority of the events he will enter are relatively low buy-in events. That means high variance, large fields, and the occasional Phil Hellmuth encounter. All of which lengthen Tice's odds of landing a bracelet. Overlapping events and the need to take breaks will hurt his odds further.
Tice only needs to win this bet once every eight years to break even. However, the gap between Phil Hellmuth's last two hold'em bracelets in Vegas was 11 years. And he's rolled for all the events.
Against that, one has to weigh the expectation of smaller field sizes as travel restrictions, vaccine passports, and/or fear of the Delta variant might keep attendance low. Low attendance does wonders for Tice's chances.
The professional consensus
Plenty of pros have aired their thoughts on Tice's new bet. For example, Vanessa Kade estimated that the correct edge should be 20:1 and she thinks Tice is "really good."
Chris Moneymaker chimed in to say that Tice should "work on this whole odds thing."
Tice came back to Moneymaker with: "I’ll be alright Mr. Moneymaker it’s my money this time. If I lose. I lose."
This doesn't reassure anyone that Tice knows what he's doing.
Other players were in the mix just to troll Tice while he's still down.
Like Oliver Busquet, who wrote "With or without charts?" To which Doug Polk came back with "Too soon."
These players were all commenting on the no-limit hold'em bet Tice has with Perkins.
Since posting about the NLH bet, Tice has offered odds on at least two other bracelet bets. The first is any live bracelet including non-NLH games. The second is a bet on any bracelet at all, live or online.
Tice came close to winning an online bracelet last week, which may explain his sudden rush of confidence.
Wherever you land on the subject of Landon, it will be interesting to follow Tice through the WSOP. This might serve as a kind of catharsis for him after shanking his heads-up challenge.
That's assuming the series runs at all. A canceled series is a prospect that looks ever more possible as the global petri-dish keeps dumping out new and improved versions of SARS-CoV-2.
If it does run, we'll be covering Landon's run here.
Featured image source: Flickr by WPT
