Near the end of the Main Event in this year's World Series, a shocking story came out of the tournament room: over two million extra chips had been put into play, and nobody could account for them.

The most obvious answer at the time seemed to be cheating by players; this would have been much easier than you'd think, because Harrah's used the same tournament chips for all the WSOP events, regardless of buy-in, making it easier and less expensive for potential cheats to enter a low buy-in event, palm off some larger denomination chips, and work them into play in the Main Event.

The second most obvious answer was simple incompetence on the part of the staff, probably during races when smaller denomination chips are removed from play, and replaced with larger denomination chips (during races, it's common for extra chips to be rounded up, so occasionally a 25 will end up equaling a 100, resulting in +75 total chips in play.) But was it actually possible to screw up so profoundly that an additional two million -- two hundred players' worth of buy-ins -- chips could be added?

Amy Callistri and Tim Lavalli did an outstanding investigation, and their results have been posted in three parts at PokerNews.com. It's an extremely long story, but it's exhaustively researched and worth your time.

Part One gives the background and explains why this matters, anyway.
Part Two addresses whether dead stacks and chip races could reasonably account for the additional chips.
Part Three tackles the more "nefarious" possibilities: straight up cheating by unscrupulous players and staff, or a simple but serious mistake?

Amy and Tim conclude -- and Harrah's acknowledges -- that this was a case of a very simple but extremely serious mathematical mistake: "[t]he $5000 chips were removed from play and a simple case of bad math, working without the safety net of basic accounting procedures, was to blame for the introduction of approximately two million chips into the main event. Day Seven would play on until approximately 2:00 AM. By this time, it was arguably an irreversible error; aided and abetted by hours of play, busted players and aggregated chip stacks."

Their story is much more than that, of course, and anyone who wants to know and understand how this could happen -- and what needs to take place so it doesn't happen again -- should head over to PokerNews and check out their story.