The Way We Were: Computers and Final Tables
Every time I say it’s a game, you tell me it’s a business.
Every time I say it’s a business, you tell me it’s a game
- Nick Nolte’s character in North Dallas Forty
If you can’t see the pictures on my blog, there’s something terribly wrong with your computer. Well not really. It seems that my old version of wordpress had become a hacker’s dream and most hosts have terminated its upload feature - including mine. It will take a few for me to migrate to a newer version - but apparently pictures will magically appear again once that happens. Although my faith in ”the new” is never as solid as my comfort with “the old.” Along those same lines, this is my first post from my new desktop. After a week of trying to get the computer to communicate with the monitor (it’s hard to debug shit when you can’t see it), it looks like the basic necessities of life are functional. I have yet to get the monitor to pivot to portrait for editing or color calibrate accurately enough for photo editing - but it’s getting there.
The news that the WSOP is parting with its traditional final table ways has been out for a couple of weeks now. I had just seen the title of the announcement in my email when the phone rang. I knew it was BJ Nemeth before the second ring. BJ and I had a number of conversations about it since the rumor broke more than six months ago. Players seem to either hate it or are backing it in reaction to the harsher economic realities that have been undermining the business of poker. And while I get both sides of the reactive coin, I also recognize that my currency differs from most when it comes to poker. For me, playing a final table months after the event doesn’t represent a change - just another step in the evolution away from the game of poker I came to know and love.
I liked poker before it was popular; before it was a business. And maybe, just maybe, I liked it because it wasn’t mainstream. It was my secret world. I remember going to the World Poker Open in 2002 and wandering between the tables - brushing past the players that, up until that point, I had only read about. I chatted with them in the hallways; usually over a fast cigarette at the breaks. It was there that I would play my first “major” event - busing out half-way through when my flopped top pair/top kicker got outrun by a turned set. It was also there that I performed my first official sweating duties. I had met Judy Ingram at breakfast before the Ladies event. As she progressed throughout the day, she invited me to sweat her and provide chip count and player updates until she eventually made the final table; she finished in third place. Other than players’ spouses, there were no spectators. And other than Nolan Dalla - there was no media.
In 2003, before Chris Moneymaker would alter poker’s mainstream potential, I chatted with Perry Friedman on the sparsely populated WSOP bleachers as we sweat Chris Ferguson to his Omaha hi/lo bracelet. A week later, he would win another in the mixed limit holdem/seven card stud event. It would be almost another month before ESPN would bring in their film crew to televise the main event.
I love the old ESPN WSOP footage; documentaries of a game, not the entertainment business that it has become. And other than High Stakes Poker, I haven’t enjoyed televised poker more than I enjoyed the subdued intensity of pre-boom ESPN.
I understand the economic benefit to players, Harrah’s, and ESPN to try to keep the post-boom era from slipping away. And I absolutely understand the economic realities of the agents, writers, magazines, news websites, and of course online poker sites, that grew in the wake of poker’s popularity. Trust me: I do realize that my ability to make a living writing about poker was a direct result of the mainstreaming and monetization of poker. Even so, my attachment to poker has always been emotional not economic. In a contest between “the game” and “the business” - game was the no-brainer.
Many of poker’s economic beneficiaries are desperately fighting to hold on to the vestiges of the ebbing poker boom. They are hoping that four months of hype will be just the miracle cure needed to save an ailing patient. But whether the business of poker thrives or fades, the poker that I first loved won’t be resurrected either way. So at this point, I view the WSOP final table change with almost distant ambivalence. I understand the reasons for optimizing the promotion of poker and all the economic threads woven into that cloth. I know that finding an alternate media model may be paramount to ”saving” the business of poker. And I guess at this point, I will wish them the best of luck.
You hold on and I don’t know how. I wish I did. I can’t get negative enough. I can’t get angry enough. And I can’t get positive enough. - Robert Redford’s character in The Way We Were
Amen.
Poker Shrink said this on May 11th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
That’s why I actually enjoyed a lot of “Lucky You”. It was nice seeing the Main Event held again at Binions, to have the camera linger on some of the best players in the world before they became celebrities. No doubt nostalgia adds a rose-colored tinge on such retrospection, but it was a more romantic time, and romance rarely survives when the corporations step in.
Mean Gene said this on May 11th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
I liked poker the way it was too … small, intimate–everyone knew everyone–and poker was a semi-secret world in which one could withdraw in simultaneous anonymity and close companionship.
I clearly recall the 1997 main event, where Stu Ungar won his third championship, and I sat not five feet from him in the sun and the wind when they held the final table outside under the Fremont Street canopy. Tourists meandered back and forth as they always do, not paying any attention at all to what was going on, oblivious to everything–even the money brought down in cardboard boxes and unceremoniously dumped on the final table.
But the 2003 tidal wave changed that vibe forever and things will not be that way again. So from where we are now–today–I favor the long hiatus before the final table is played to conclusion in November. In a sense it’s not all that different than an athlete qualifying for his or her national team in a track and field event now, and their performance in the Olympics some months hence.
As Joni Mitchell sung, “… something’s lost and something’s won, in living every day.”
Lou Krieger said this on May 12th, 2008 at 11:25 am
Unfortunately, I think that the move will be lost on the general public, as well as those who have a general+ interest in poker, the audience they are trying to “capture.” Some of the people I work with who enjoy poker, many of who play in weekly games, aren’t aware of the WSOP date(s), are simply aware that ESPN shows WSOP events. People who were aware of the event’s occurrence and air time would watch either way - so no real beneficial change for ESPN there.
Question: Is the coverage going to be live? Will there be hole-cameras?
matt
mkgcars said this on May 12th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
I’m not sure if I like poker the way it was or is, but I haven’t particularly liked the WSOP and Harrah’s. Although my only personal experience has been since the two joined, I feel strongly that poker still lacks that steward of the game who is out to build and protect poker rather than to exploit it.
cc said this on May 13th, 2008 at 9:48 am
I agree with you Amy and wrote this about 2 years ago….
The end of the WSOP is near!!!!
Poker is in the mainstream and here to stay…. The end of the WSOP is near!!!
You know poker has made it to the middle of the mainstream when these are two of the jokes in this month’s Reader’s Digest
What’s the difference between a large chesse pizza and a poker player?
(A large cheese pizza can feed a family of four.)
How can you tell a poker player is lying?
(His chips are moving.)
The following is no joke, though many people won’t believe it until it happens suddenly!
I believe in just a few years the WSOP will be gone. We have only to look at a parallel from the computer world.
Before most people could spell “computer” there were a few computer conventions put on by people who loved computers. One of the most popular became COMDEX. It was an annual event in Las Vegas until two years ago and it’s history predicts the future of the WSOP.
The first Comdex was held in 1979 at the MGM Grand by Venetian casino and former Sands owner Sheldon Adelson.
Comdex was to computer lovers what the WSOP is to poker players. An annual event to look forward to for the following reasons.
1. Rub shoulders with the professionals. (Bill Gates would be in a booth and you could talk to him about his software. Peter Norton had his mother selling his homegrown software in his booth)
2. See the outlandish (Every booth tried to top the others, bikini clad girls, celebrity look-alikes, important industry announcements etc.)
3. “How many people this year”? (Each year we couldn’t wait to get their to see how big it had grown this year. And how big it could be next year.
4. The good natured bantering & arguments between the old school, IBM, Data General, Hewlett Packard & the new “young guns” Compaq, Microsoft, Lotus 123 etc….which way was better, old school or new?
Any of this sounding familiar to the WSOP?
Then came corporate greed.
Attendance at the 1997 Comdex hit 220,000 people and more then 2,500 companies exhibited at the show.
In short Comdex was a “cash cow”. For the past few years Comdex officials pressured vendors to buy bigger booths at higher prices and gave them less for their money.
Take it or leave it…(IBM, famously, left it in 1997)
As Brian Caulfield of CNN Money said in 2003, “Comdex was a magnet for dumb money”. Every year a new “star of the show” would emerge, splash around, and the next year no one would hear anything else about it.
In 2000, major companies such as IBM, Apple Computer, and Compaq (now merged with Hewlett-Packard) decided to discontinue their involvement with COMDEX because of its runaway costs and decline in quality.
In June 2004, COMDEX officially postponed the 2004 exhibition in Las Vegas due to lack of heavy-weight participants. COMDEX was cancelled for 2005, and its future status is uncertain.
Don’t think the WSOP can die a quick death???
There was a lot more money and players involved in COMDEX then the WSOP.
Dave Dillman said this on June 7th, 2008 at 10:14 pm