The State of Modern Pop Poker

HISTORY WILL REVEAL that the height of the poker boom coincided with the last days of Shana Hiatt as the perky sideline commentator for the World Poker Tour. The decline of the modern poker era begins exactly with the announcement that Shana was leaving the WPT.

This is not to suggest that there is necessarily a causal relationship between these two events, although her departure may have played some role, however slight. Shana’s departure started the revolving door of beautiful but ignorant WPT sideline commentators, punctuated by the world’s worst interview question posed by replacement Courtney Friel as players were eliminated from a WPT final table: “So how did you feel when you busted out?”

Although hardcore poker players may have been reluctant to admit it, Season 4 of the WPT was a watershed event for poker in one primary respect – its when we all fully realized that the WPT format was really boring. The accelerated blind schedule in the final stages of a WPT tournament reduced the options of the world’s most highly skilled poker experts to a single action – push all-in or fold.

It was at this point that poker aficionados started skipping the weekly WPT broadcast in favor of logging on to their favorite internet poker site and playing a few more sit-n-goes before bedtime. We had all become educated regarding how to play final tables, and we could experience more real action in an on-line sit-n-go instead of watching six pudgy unknown dudes in shades and ball caps or beanies sit and try to act stoic while masking sheer televised terror, a la David Williams heads-up final table play at the WSOP 2004 Main Event. The WPT may have been on the tube in the background as viewers/players battled for their own personal final table victory on PokerStars, but they were no longer really paying attention to the WPT. Today, the WPT has moved to a second network, and has already started shopping for a third. The WPT’s days are numbered.

Along comes High Stakes Poker, televised cash game poker at its finest. Compared to the WPT, this show was exciting – real players it a cozy back-room lounge setting, exchanging barbs and playing for “cold hard cash,” as we were constantly reminded by AJ Benza. We watched Daniel Negreanu repeatedly call off fifteen WPT tournament buy-ins on the river as he explained with perfect accuracy how his flopped straight had been crushed by lucky a suckout. We could see he was beat, he know he was beat, he explained to the table and the audience how he was beat, and he still called. A player with crystal clear poker vision going completely blind in the heat of battle. This was poker excitement.

But then even High Stakes Poker outgrew its own skin. The stakes were raised as players bought in for a brain-melting $500,000 to $1 million, fueled by higher blinds and double-blind straddles. The stakes were clearly too high for certain participants, as they routinely started to “run it three times” in order to reduce variance and generate split pots.

High Stakes Poker bottomed out when Guy Laliberte graciously wrote off significant equity as he agreed to split a very large pot with David Benyamine to prevent a significant financial impact to Benyamine. Doyle Brunson summed up the hand by noting that it represented just another pot to Laliberte but a “lifetime” to Benyamine. Even if an exaggeration, we knew that this was painful for Benyamine.

These split pot bail-outs were contrary to the very spirit of poker. Poker is a zero-sum game of clear winners and losers. You make a bet, put your chips in the middle, and deal with the outcome. Someone wins the pot, and the rest lose. In America, we want touchdowns, home runs, grand slams and bust outs! We will not tolerate exciting foreplay followed by a limp-dicked fade-out.

So that brings us to the WSOP in 2008. We are nearly one year from the most boring final table in the history of the WSOP, where Jerry Yang hijacked the table by invoking the Almighty Himself to make the correct cards appear on the board. His empassioned appeals to God were almost drowned out by the wife of Lee Watkinson, who was likewise pleading to a higher power in favor of her husband over the small, undeserving, anonymous amateur.

The highlight of the 2008 WSOP appears to be poker players as gamblers, who are so bored with the game of poker that they require side action in the form of prop bets that exceed the value of the prize pools for which they compete. The world’s best players have sucked so much money out of the poker economy that the tournament stakes no longer bring the buzz that made the first season of the WPT so terribly exciting.

Harrahs and the other gaming corporations have co-opted the world of tournament poker because they remain true to the secret ingredient of gaming: lots of money in a casino means higher profits. By all means necessary, the casino corporations’ collective goal is to bring more money from the poker economy onto the casino property. There, creative gamblers will find ways to empty their pockets. Even the cream of the poker crop – none other than Phil Ivey – boasts about his million-dollar losses at the craps table in the form of shaky hand-held videos shot by Barry Greenstein. The new cool is not just to win at poker, but take your poker winnings and piss them away to the casino.

Harrahs has done a masterful job of ensuring maximum revenue from the WSOP. They run six tournaments simultaneously in multiple conference rooms to ensure that all tables are filled to capacity at all times. To ensure maximum excitement for the Series, Harrahs has managed, either by design or happenstance, to have created a fever among the top tier of the poker community for one magic talisman – bracelets!

The players have a seemingly unquenchable thirst for more bracelets. Who has the most bracelets? Who won the most bracelets last year? Who’s going to win the most bracelets this year? Who has the most prop bets for bracelets? Money is no longer the most important method of keeping score in poker. The poker world needs more bracelets!

To satisfy this new demand, Harrahs offers more tournaments, giving players even more opportunities to collect more bracelets – and allowing Harrahs to collect more juice. Players are bewildered by the flurry of overlapping tournaments, while Harrahs ensures that juice is being collected from every chair at every table in every room, every day and all day from the start of the tournament until the final bracelet is handed out. And, they even run added tournaments after the Main Event has started, to keep the busted players in a chair with the juice running. A player watching the final table of the WSOP represents lost potential revenue – put them in a seat and charge the juice one more time.

So we have been conditioned to love poker through television broadcasts, and to pay homage to the victors. Harrahs has finally figured out how to wring the most money from the poker community, and the players are willing, if unwitting, accomplices in their zeal to rack up tournament wins and then donate significant portions to the casino. The victors boast of their wins to the omnipresent poker media, who are eager to report chip counts, tournament results, and outrageous prop bets that keep the poker community entertained.

And we will still continue to play, regardless. Because underneath it all, we still love the game of poker, even if it has become too mainstream.