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.

Question: Is the coverage going to be live? Will there be hole-cameras?

matt

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.”