Jamie Gold Got His Buy-In Hours Back. WSOP Paradise Staffs A Line.

WSOP Paradise opens in the Bahamas next month, and its buy-in desk has a problem. Players can pay with Solana Pay, which skips the fees and the registration line. Jamie Gold, who helped lead the partnership, has been given back the four to six hours he used to spend waiting to enter a tournament. A WSOP Paradise spokesperson confirmed that he has so far spent none of them.

The first sign was a request that reached the festival's operations team in writing. It asked for a line. It specified a rope, a stanchion and one clerk, and it asked that the clerk be unable to help him for at least four hours. Operations replied that the desk had been designed so that no such line could form. Gold replied that he understood the design and wished to stand in a line anyway.

The Particulars

The festival's staff spent a week on the question and concluded that they could not refuse him. Gold won the 2006 Main Event for $12 million, twenty years ago, and nobody on staff wanted to be the one to say no. A single-person line now exists at a folding table near the registration area. It has a velvet rope, a laminated sign and a clerk named by the spokesperson only as a trained professional. The clerk's instructions are to look at a screen and say the system is slow.

The line has rules. Gold may not be served before the fourth hour, and the clerk may not say the word "Solana." If a player reaches the table to buy in, the clerk must wave them through to the app and apologize to Gold for the interruption. Gold asked that the apology be sincere. The spokesperson said staff practiced it and it is sincere.

Gold's reasoning is on the record, in a video interview he gave to Solana. "Life is about time and how you spend it," he said. The festival has read that sentence several times and takes it to be a policy statement. Its only follow-up question was whether he wanted a chair. He did not. Standing, he said, is what made the old lines feel like lines.

Still To Come

By the second day of the dry run, the line had drawn eleven people who did not need to be in it. Most had simply seen a rope. One asked the clerk whether this was the line for the buffet. The clerk said it was a line for the system being slow, and the man thanked him and stayed. Operations is treating this as a failure of signage, and as the first sign the line works.

Gold will have the line when the festival opens, and the festival will have the clerk. A second clerk is being trained for the afternoon shift. Players are advised that buying in takes seconds, and that anyone who would like to wait with him can find the rope at the folding table, under the laminated sign.