WYWAE

Overview

WYWAE stands for “Wish You Were At EMBARGO”.

WYWAE is a series of ten mb2 tournaments leading up to, and running concurrently with, EMBARGO.

In 2025, there are six prizes, all physical awards; no cash. The awards are being painted by the same artist and in the same style as the WSOP-Style 2025 awards were.

I (Cliff Matthews, aka deadhead) will play in the series but will be ineligible for awards.

The awards are for the top three players on the leaderboard by profit and also by win rate at the end of the series.

To qualify for an overall win by rate prize, the player has to complete at least five tournaments. NOTE: that is five different tournaments, so if you play in a tournament and re-enter, only the initial entry counts as one of your at-least-five tournaments. The player does not have to complete five different structures. The SECOR tournament on January 27th is a different tournament from the SECOR tournament on January 31st, even though they’re the same structure.

From the craftpoker.com lobby, the # column in the WYWAE 2026 Leaderboard report is the total number of entries per player, not the number of distinct tournaments. So, simply having a value of five or more in that column does not mean you’ve played five or more distinct tournaments.

It’s a freeroll

There has never been (and never will be) an entry fee.

The Tournaments

The first nine tournaments are held in the last nine days of January, one per day. The tenth (i.e., the final) tournament is held on the first of February.

All tournaments will be held at “the standard craftpoker.com daily tournament time”, which is 5:05 Pacific (which is also 6:05 Mountain, 7:05 Central and 8:05 Eastern).

In the mb2 lobby, the times will be in the time zone your browser is configured for (which—for most people—is your local time zone).

Tournaments are currently available for registration at craftpoker.com, and mimic the official EMBARGO structures.

This series is not sanctioned, endorsed or in any other way sponsored or related to the BARGE organization. It is being put on by Craft Poker Co., a completely unrelated corporation.

A few Differences from EMBARGO

Since this is an online event, we’ve made a few changes.

Starts before EMBARGO

EMBARGO starts on January 29th, but WYWAE starts on the 23rd, so people attending EMBARGO have a chance to participate in WYWAE and can play EMBARGO’s esoteric games online before playing in real life.

One Tournament a Day

Some of the people who would attend EMBARGO but don’t, because they work or otherwise have daytime commitments, aren’t going to play online poker in the middle of the day. Additionally, regular craftpoker.com denizens are used to the 5:05 Pacific start time, so we’re keeping the start time for WYWAE.

Four of the structures are repeated

All six WYWAE variants of the EMBARGO tournaments are being dealt before EMBARGO starts. EMBARGO itself is four days long, so we’re repeating the four least common structures so that people who can’t make EMBARGO can play vicariously.

Dealer’s Die instead of Mix Max Binglaha

Mb2 doesn’t yet know how to change the number of seats per table in a tournament, so instead of Mix Max Binglaha, we’ll have “Dealer’s Die”, which will have 6-seated tables, and will be a Dealer’s Choice game, but the only choices will be poker games that involve a die roll, which include the various games we’ve played in the past, as well as Crayfish Omaha and Crayfish Hold’em.

FM 100 Buy-in

Each event has an FM 100 buy-in. Mb2 accounts are allowed to go negative, so you do not need Fun Money to enter or re-enter.

Round Duration

All rounds are five minutes long. Mb2 has the ability to have different length rounds, so it could emulate the different round durations of EMBARGO’s HAM & Pineapple structure, but online, that would just add confusion.

Breaks at 55 past the hour

The WYWAE breaks will begin after each table has finished a hand at or after 55 minutes after the hour. The break will then be five minutes long.

Late Registration

In the WYWAE tournaments, late registration will be allowed through level 9.

Re-entries

During WYWAE tournaments, you may re-enter up to two times, through level 9.

Table sizes

The number of seats at a table will not change during any WYWAE tournaments, e.g., HAM & Pineapple will be six seated the entire time; it will not have a seven seated final table. This limitation is because Mb2 does not currently support changing the number of seats during an event.

No Player Scrambling

Player scrambling in real life is, if I understand correctly, designed to encourage people to talk to each other more; people tend to talk to the players adjacent to them. Player chat works differently online, so Mb2 doesn’t support player scrambling.

Antes Post before Blinds

Currently, mb2 posts antes before blinds, which means that if a player is all-in for the ante, that player can only with the ante back. That was the common way to do big blind antes initially, which is why mb2 implemented it that way. Most tournaments now post the blind before the ante, so an all-in player can win more. Mb2 will probably change this before the start of the World Series of Poker.