"Which seems to be long before the players or media knew. IMO that is whats strange."

It was on the live WSOP blog within an hour.

Gene, this is the bit I cant figure.

Its not that many chips in question.
4 racks of $5k which should have been colored up to 80 x $25k (which apparently became 160).
There were only 3 tables in play so it was hardly a major exercise. Surely whoever was responsible for bringing out the chips would have known how many would be wanted?

In your big tourny's, does anyone check that the value in color coming back to the 'cage' is the same (near enough) as that which was taken out?

When I racked the chips for the club tourny this year, as you know, I also set aside the correct chips for each color up. (As we were racing off it was easy to be exact)

I know I did it partly to make sure we had enough chips but I also did it because last year, when I was helping Robert color up after I went out, he told me to have the right number to take out. I presumed that was so he could quickly see if there was either a mistake, or someone had 'introduced' chips. Not that it was likely or possible in our tourny but just because thats the way he has trained himself to work?