Universal statistical properties of poker tournaments

We present a simple model of Texas hold'em poker tournaments which contains the two main aspects of the game: i. the minimal bet is the blind, which grows exponentially with time; ii. players have a finite probability to go ``all-in'', hence betting all their chips. The distribution of the number of chips of players not yet eliminated (measured in units of its average) is found to be independent of time during most of the tournament, and reproduces accurately Internet poker tournaments data. This model makes the connection between poker tournaments and the persistence problem widely studied in physics, as well as some recent physical models of biological evolution or competing agents, and extreme value statistics which arises in many physical contexts