The Shifting Place of the WPT World Championship

There’s so much happening at the moment as far as the professional tourney scene is concerned -- the recent winding down of the European Poker Tour’s season in Monte Carlo, the WSOP Circuit coming to a close in New Orleans, the Spring Championship of Online Poker on PokerStars, and the soon-to-begin World Series of Poker in Las Vegas -- I’d nearly overlooked the fact that the World Poker Tour was having its big finale this week, too.

Wrapping up Season XI, the WPT is currently staging its annual $25,000 WPT World Championship at the Bellagio. The tourney has always featured a $25K buy-in throughout the 11 years of the WPT, although in recent years they’ve added the option to re-enter once.

It looks like this year they drew 146 entries total, making the total prize pool just over $3.5 million. Checking in with B.J. Nemeth and Eric Ramsey of the WPT who are there at the Bellagio this week, it sounds like there were 120 unique players and 26 re-entries, all told.

That total of 146 represent a few entries less than they had last year (152), and the lowest since the WPT’s first season. They are about to start Day 3 today, with 67 players still in the hunt.

Kind of interesting to think about how the place of this WPT World Championship within the larger context of tournament poker has shifted over the years. During its first few years the tournament was kind of a focal point, a “major” (of sorts) that was often regarded as one of the most coveted titles on the schedule each year. That doesn’t seem so much the case these days, although for the winner it still represents a significant achievement (not to mention a big lot of cabbage).

Looking back over the last 10 years, here’s a look at the turnouts and winners of the previous WPT World Championships (with their first prizes additionally noted):

Season I (2003): 111 entries (Alan Goehring, $1,011,886)

Season II (2004): 343 (Martin De Knijff, $2,728,356)

Season III (2005): 453 (Tuan Le, $2,856,150)

Season IV (2006): 605 (Joe Bartholdi, $3,760,165)

Season V (2007): 639 (Carlos Mortensen, $3,970,415)

Season VI (2008): 545 (David Chiu, $3,389,140)

Season VII (2009): 338 (Yevgeniy Timoshenko, $2,143,655)

Season VIII (2010): 195 (David Williams, $1,530,537)

Season IX (2011): 220 (Scott Seiver, $1,618,344)

Season X (2012): 152 (Marvin Rettenmeier, $1,196,858)

The rise in the number of entries up to a peak in 2007 obviously corresponds to the larger growth of tournament poker during those “boom” years, although the drop off since then has been much more precipitous than has been the case, say, with the WSOP Main Event or with the big season-ending events on other tours.

For example, the EPT Grand Final, a €10,000 buy-in tournament played in Monte Carlo every year except in 2011 when it was in Madrid, has seen the following less dramatic bell curve in the number of entrants over its nine seasons: 211 (2005), 298 (2006), 706 (2007), 842 (2008), 935 (2009), 848 (2010), 686 (2011), 665 (2012), 531 (2013).

Meanwhile the WPT has expanded considerably from just 11 stops during that first season to 24 in Season XI, with the World Championship remaining the highest buy-in event on the tour (by far).

People still care about the WPT World Championship, I think, although nowadays it feels like both players and fans alike have their attentions divided at this time of year, with a $25K buy-in event not necessarily earning the focus it once did among all of the other smaller and larger buy-in tourneys crowding the calendar.

There’s more to say about the various causes that have potentially affected turnouts for the WPT World Championship over the years, of course. In any case, it does appear to have shifted somewhat of late from a central position in the poker tourney landscape over to a spot somewhere on the side.

Ambient Noise

“Well, I’ve been to one world fair, a picnic, and a rodeo, and that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard come over a set of earphones.” --Major T.J. “King” Kong, Dr. Strangelove

I’ll admit that while I’ve been busy with other things this week, I’ve continued to linger some over that Travis Makar info dump from last Friday regarding the UltimateBet insider cheating scandal, in particular those two lengthy audio files chronicling two meetings involving Russ Hamilton, Dan Friedberg, Sandy Millar, and (on one of them) Greg Pierson.

Been snooping through the files some more, reading various articles and postings, as well as listening to still more audio regarding it all in the form of podcasts.

The most recent episode of the Two Plus Two Pokercast with Haralabos Voulgaris provided some interesting discussion, with Voulgaris providing some interesting tidbits from his experience with UB and some of its principals. However, the lengthy guest spot of Scott “ElevenGrover” Bell mostly had the effect of confusing rather than clarifying (for me, anyway).

I better liked Todd Witteles’s partial breakdown of the recordings on his Poker Fraud Alert show this week. “DanDruff” played clips (mostly from the first part of the first recording) while commenting along the way, which seemed a more constructive exercise.

Finally I heard Witteles’s ex-cohort Bryan Micon’s latest Donk Down show on which appeared both Pokerati’s Dan Michalski and the man in the middle himself, Travis Makar. A mostly maddening hour-and-a-half, I’m afraid, with neither of the hosts having listened to the audio and even Makar saying he wasn’t completely up on what the recordings contained.

Makar expressed a willingness to answer any questions from Micon and Michalski, but neither seemed able to come up with any and thus the show failed to add much of value at all other than to remind us that Makar has still more information (and audio) which may or may not be revealed at a later date.

All of which is to say, the actual significance of the recorded discussions as well as all of the other newly-publicized data obviously remain in need of cogent explanation. And probably will for a good while, I imagine.

I mentioned on Monday how the recordings uncannily recall the Watergate tapes, what with the secretive nature of the recordings being made and the discussants’ talk of covering up previous scandalous behavior while making decisions that will subsequently affect the lives of many others. The ambient noise and interruptions occasionally obfuscating certain exchanges adds further to the similarity.

Every now and then I’ll dig around and listen to those tapes Richard Nixon had made, part of my hobby-like fascination with reading and learning more about the complicated figure. Of course, I almost never do so without also looking a transcript and usually having some sort of additional annotation to help guide me regarding who is saying what and what it all ultimately means.

Given the historical importance of those recordings and the fact that they were made so long ago, it’s easy to locate various aids to understanding that can help make the experience of listening all the more worthwhile. Not to mention even more compelling. (By the way, if you’re curious about the Nixon recordings, the “Nixon Tapes” website is a good place to start.)

* * * * *

Speaking of private meetings conducted during times of crisis, I wrote a new “Pop Poker” column for PokerListings regarding Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the 1964 darkly-comic satire directed by Stanley Kubrick that is mostly taken up with a U.S. president and his advisors meeting in a “War Room” to discuss and try to deal with the surprise launch of a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union by a deranged general.

The film actually has a couple of significant connections to poker, including the character of Dr. Strangelove (one of three played by Peter Sellars) being partly based on John von Neumann, the Austrian-born mathematician often credited with having written and co-written the works that helped inaugurate the study of modern game theory. Von Neumann wrote about poker in those seminal works, and during the Cold War especially game theory played a particular role when it came to decision-making regarding nuclear weapons.

In fact, as I note at the end of the piece, in Dr. Strangelove the War Room itself features a large circular table around which the president and his advisor sit that was deliberately meant to look like a poker table.

Check out the article, if you’re curious to read more.

WSOP Conference Call Means We’re Getting Close

Listened in on that WSOP Conference Call from yesterday. I guess we really are less than two weeks away now to the start of the 2013 WSOP.

From the hour-long call there were really only a few items that stuck out for me, the most notable being the mention of the new WSOP-branded real money online poker site soon to launch in Nevada. There were no details offered regarding when exactly the site will be going online, although it certainly sounds as though the plan will be to get it up at some point during the Series.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ll be heading out to Vegas again this summer around mid-June to be there for the last month or so. I’ll be spending most of my waking hours working (as usual), but I am curious about perhaps playing on a Nevada site or two while I’m out there, and I imagine the WSOP one might be one I’ll try, if indeed they get it up and running.

This 21-event “Carnivale of Poker” series that was mentioned might be interesting. There was talk of this being a revival of an earlier run series (from 1998-2000), described in the call as having once been the “second-largest poker event in the world.” I’m one of many unfamiliar with that earlier incarnation of the “Carnivale,” although this one sounds more like just an expansion of the Daily Deepstack tourneys -- i.e., more non-bracelet events to occupy folks with a greater variety of low buy-ins (from $365 to $1,675), plus that $5K Open-Face Chinese event.

If I followed the discussion correctly, it sounds like several of these “Carnivale” tourneys (for which winners will be awarded medallions) will play out as the Main Event winds down, which would mean unlike in past summers there will still be considerable WSOP-related action going on all of the way through mid-July.

The other item that interested me was the reference to using RFID technology in the playing cards at a number of final tables this summer in order to be able to show hole cards (on a delay) during the online streaming. Am curious to see that used, and will certainly be tuning in from home to get an idea of it before I get out there.

There were a number of jokes along the way, some of which landed and some falling a little short. A couple of shots were taken at Ultimate Poker (in the context of discussing the WSOP’s planned-for site). Reminded me a little of last year’s call in which there were various digs made regarding the recently-sunk Epic Poker League.

There was a timely remark right off the top about Russ Hamilton and recording the call, and another confusing one later about the erstwhile svengali Sam Chauhan and cooking food. Something about him creating a frequency through vibration of the powerful mantras to cook up some veggie burgers, I think.

For a more detailed rundown of the call, you can visit Flushdraw where I touched on most of what was discussed. Or if you want to listen yourself, Pokerati Dan has posted the call here.

All in all, it sounds like the plan going forward for the WSOP in most respects is to keep things as they have been for the last several years, only with more offerings (a record-number of bracelet events, the “Carnivale” tourneys). That said, it seems every year something comes up -- usually early on -- to add new wrinkles and/or make the new year different from what has gone before.

One of the reasons why the sucker remains interesting, year after year.

Aces All Around in Dr. Jack

Over the last couple of years I’ve begun to amass a small collection of poker-related film clips to use in my “Poker in American Film and Culture” course. Having just ended the spring semester and now readying to teach the class once more during the summer, I’ve been revisiting some of these excerpts as I make choices about which ones to include this time around.

I’ve had one clip for some time that I’ve yet to introduce into the course, mainly because I haven’t really thought too much about it and where it might fit into the overall narrative we build in the class. I usually try to tie these clips to certain discussions or issues that come up. For example, when we talk about the Old West and the image of the cowboy and how poker played into that image, I’ve been showing scenes from old Westerns such as Tall in the Saddle (the John Wayne film I’ve written about here before).

But this one I have yet to find a place for, a scene from the 1922 silent comedy Dr. Jack starring Harold Lloyd. I like it, though, and so will probably try to include it somewhere this time around.

Here’s the scene (with some extra music and French subtitles to go along with those title cards):

Dr. Jack is one of Lloyd’s lesser-known films. Most who know of him have seen Safety Last! (1923), the one with the iconic image of Lloyd hanging from a large clock, or perhaps The Freshman (1925) which finds him attempting to earn some popularity at college by joining the football team. Those are the only other Lloyd films I’ve seen, I think, and both are highly entertaining.

He’s good in Dr. Jack as well where he plays the title character attempting to help a sick girl whose family is being taken advantage of by a rival, unscrupulous doctor. The movie is really mostly just a series of loosely-connected gags allowing Lloyd to do his usual stunts and often impressive physical comedy, which actually makes the poker scene easy to snip out of the film and present separately.

I could probably fit the clip in among others that demonstrate cheating being prevalent in early-era poker, although the cheating that happens here is a little different from the other examples I have. Looking at it again, I’m realizing how a poker game can be presented coherently and even with lots of nuance in a silent film. There’s something about the drama inherent in a poker hand that captures the attention, with the suspense built looking forward to the hand’s outcome having its effect whether or not we hear what players are saying.

It’s a carefully constructed scene, if you think about it. In fact, this is probably the most elaborate poker hand I can think of from a silent film. Of course, Lloyd’s animated expressions help him carry it. Unlike his contemporary Buster Keaton -- who often gets described as “poker-faced,” actually -- Lloyd usually possesses a more dynamic countenance that perhaps for some makes him a little more “human”-seeming.

The exaggerated reactions of the old fogies at the showdown are pretty funny, too. Everyone was so focused on their aces... they forgot to pay attention to the Jack!

Looking at Ivey Through Kaleidoscope

Among the poker headlines coming through the reader yesterday was a Punto Banco story. That’s right, another interesting chapter in that situation involving Phil Ivey and the Crockfords Casino in London.

Recall how we heard Ivey had visited the Mayfair casino last August, transferring a cool £1 million into the casino’s bank account while accompanied by a mysterious Chinese woman (styled “a beautiful Oriental female” in most of the U.K. reports where the adjective isn’t considered non-PC the way it is in the States). Then over a couple of evenings Ivey proceeded to play high-stakes Punto Banco, a variant of baccarat, for about seven hours altogether.

On the first night Ivey started out betting £50,000 per hand, then was allowed to increase the stakes to £150,000. After initially finding himself down nearly £500,000, the momentum swung back Ivey’s way and he ended the evening £2.3 million up. He then came back the next night and his streak continued, enabling him to leave £7.8 million ahead -- i.e., a win of almost $12 million or the equivalent of Jamie Gold’s 2006 WSOP Main Event first prize (the largest ever for the ME).

Ivey’s session immediately made headlines in the Daily Mail, with the initial reports also noting how Crockfords had not paid Ivey his winnings right away. Then came word of the casino’s plan to investigate casino footage, interview staff, and inspect the cards and dealing shoe used during the two sessions before paying Ivey. Another item of potential interest was the fact that the woman accompanying Ivey had been banned from another London casino previously.

Soon it became apparent that Crockfords might not be willing to pay Ivey his winnings at all.

Crockfords did allow Ivey to withdraw the £1 million with which he’d started, but otherwise they were resisting paying Ivey the rest. By the time the situation had dragged on into the fall, it was apparent the case may end up in the High Court, and indeed last week news came that Ivey was suing Crockfords in an effort to claim his winnings in what will surely be a huge, sensational legal story.

Then yesterday the Daily Mail reported that in response to Ivey’s lawsuit, Crockfords is now alleging that rather than having enjoyed a streak of good fortune in the chance-based game, Ivey “exploited tiny flaws in the card design” as he played, and thus was able to bet accordingly. According to the article, “the cards were flawed because of a mistake during the cutting process at an overseas manufacturing plant.”

Thus the allegation is that Ivey somehow knew about or discovered the flaw, with his request to the dealer that the cards (while face down) be turned in such a way that would enable him to spot the distinctive characteristics more easily and thus know what cards had (or hadn’t) been dealt.

From the outside, the casino’s case sounds sketchy, given that Ivey obviously had nothing to do with the cards being used in the game. Anyhow, it’s all very eyebrow-raising in an “international-man-of-mystery” kind of way, and the Mail and other outlets have routinely brought up by way of comparison James Bond and his game of baccarat in the original Casino Royale to help their stories more readily catch the reader’s eye.

Another film frequently mentioned in these articles is the 1966 Bond-like comic caper Kaleidoscope starring Warren Beatty and Susannah York. Coincidentally it was last August -- around the time Ivey visited Crockfords -- when I wrote up a “Pop Poker” column for PokerListings about the film, which often gets mentioned in those “best poker movies” lists one sees popping up from time to time around the web.

Those comparisons are being made because the plot of Kaleidoscope involves Beatty’s character, Barney Lincoln, pursuing an elaborate scheme whereby he doctors the plates from which the Kaleidoscope brand playing cards are printed. The cards are used in casinos all over Europe, and thus we see Lincoln spend the first half of the film enjoying win after win as he plays Chemin de Fer (another baccarat variant), wearing a conspicuous pair of thick-framed eyeglasses as he does to help him see the markings.

Lincoln is eventually found out in the film, and the plot takes a turn as he gets recruited by Scotland Yard to help them capture a villainous crime lord, Harry Dominion, played in over-the-top fashion by Eric Porter. The latter half of the film features a high-stakes game of five-card stud involving Lincoln and Dominion, and does include a few interesting moments -- particularly after a deck change introduces non-Kaleidoscope cards into the game.

If you’re curious about the film, check out my discussion over on PokerListings. There you’ll see I was kind of lukewarm on it, not really being that entertained although I can see some fans of Bond and/or Bond parodies perhaps getting into it. It’s also cool for those who enjoy swinging ’60s fashion, U.K. style.

It’s sort of funny to compare Kaleidoscope to the Ivey-versus-Crockfords situation, since doing so invites us to imagine Ivey as some kind of supervillain-cat-burglar type breaking into card manufacturing plants and manipulating the printing process in order to set up his big score later on. Obviously that’s not what is being alleged, but still, it’s a funny image, perhaps even easier to entertain for those of us who have gotten to know Ivey as a larger-than-life figure.

More pertinently, those of us who know Ivey and his high-roller ways also find his enjoying a winning streak of 40-50 bets’ worth at a chance-based game to be much less remarkable than is the case for Crockfords’ owners. Then again, as we’ve been thinking about a lot over the last few days with regard to the revival of the UB cheating scandal, being able to know all of the cards that have been dealt is a sure way to increase one’s chance of winning.

Here is the groovy title sequence for Kaleidoscope:

More UB Sh!t

I have been away for the last few days, attending a dressage competition with Vera. I’ve mentioned before how Vera competes, and I enjoy getting the chance sometimes to accompany her on these trips to provide support for her.

One of the ways I usually end up helping out at these shows involves handling various jobs associated with the maintenance of Vera’s horse. In other words, having long ago agreed to be her groom, I continue today as a different kind of groom for her.

I’m not a rider myself, but I am qualified for several of these highly necessary tasks, including the important one of periodically keeping the stall clean. That’s right. I’m talking about being able to use a long-handled tool especially designed for digging and shoveling.

And no, I’m not talking about shinola.

Anyhow, being away from home as I was, I was only intermittently “on the grid” for the last several days. However, I was sufficiently connected to become aware on Friday night that Russ Hamilton’s former assistant and would-be fall guy Travis Makar had suddenly made available a host of new information regarding the extensive and widespread insider cheating scandal and subsequent cover-up at Ultimate Bet.

I’m sure you know all about this release of information, too, including its highlight -- two audio recordings of meetings secretly made by Hamilton himself revealing details of both the cheating and the early stages of the cover-up. The recordings have been known by many to exist for quite a while, actually, but their having been made public now finally gives everyone a chance to listen and learn a lot more about how deep the scandal went and how devious Hamilton and others were.

As I say, I was occupied for much of the weekend, unable to sit in my usual workspace in order to listen, read what others were saying, formulate thoughts and take notes, and write. But I was able to hear the entire five hours’ worth of meetings on my iPhone as I went about my work around the barn.

Having only listened through once, I’m not ready today to offer any sort of comprehensive response to what appears on the recordings. I imagine I will eventually find the time and energy, however, to add another post (or posts) to the pile being created by others as well as the one I have built here at Hard-Boiled Poker over the years.

We all knew Hamilton was an immoral ogre, but on the recordings he seems positively inhuman. Others on the recordings (UB founder Greg Pierson, attorney Daniel Friedberg, attorney Sandy Millar), while being badgered about by Hamilton, seem nearly as repulsive.

I will say I thought more than once while listening about the Watergate tapes, which as someone with a special interest in Nixon I’ve listened to quite a bit over the years. The ambience and whole “we gotta contain this” purpose of the discussions almost uncannily recalls the experience of listening to those tapes, too.

Such a mood is firmly established at the beginning of the first-released recording:

Hamilton: “So, Dan… where are we at here?”
Friedberg: “Well, Greg said this thing is spiraling.”
Hamilton: “Say that again?”
Friedberg: “This thing is spiraling.”

I also had another thought as I listened, connecting the entire, complicated saga with what I was doing at the time. And yes, that thought was partly inspired by the sound of Hamilton visiting the restroom after the meeting concluded on the first-released recording, sounding as though he was (with great difficulty) emptying his bowels -- a hilarious coda seemed to literalize the overriding metaphor of the meeting that preceded it.

I don’t know if you’ve ever cleaned out a horse’s stall before or not, but if you have, you know that while the first part of the job is easy enough, near the end you often find that no matter how many times you think you are completely finished, if you move some shavings or hay around a little you’ll discover -- always, it seems -- still one more little imperfect, stubborn globule in need of being removed.

You push stuff around and dig and dig, and dammit there’s more there. Finally you just give up and stop digging, because otherwise it never ends.

Just like with UltimateBet.

Here’s Mike and Adam

Had a chance recently to interview a couple of dudes with whom I’d guess just about anyone reading this blog is familiar -- Mike Johnson and Adam Schwartz of the Two Plus Two Pokercast. The interview is now up over at Betfair Poker, and features the pair talking about what has now become an eight-plus year run at poker podcasting.

I’ve written here many times over the years both about Mike and Adam’s original podcast, “Rounders, the Poker Show” (that ran from April 2005 to December 2007) and the 2+2-based show they’ve been doing since January 2008. A remarkable run not just for podcasting, but for poker, too, where there are very few on the reporting side of things who’ve lasted that long.

In the interview the pair start out talking about how the original “Rounders” show got started, discuss the move to 2+2, and then share some thoughts about memorable moments and guests. The conversation next moved over to consider their contribution to the chronicling the story of poker -- especially online poker -- over the last eight years. I got them to opine a little toward the end about the state of “poker media” (so to speak), too.

Regarding that latter subject, Mike brought up a point about the passion many who get into reporting on poker demonstrate, which he attributed to the fact that the great majority of those who write and report on poker play the game as well. (Such is true of the two of them.)

I think Mike’s right on that count, that is to say, just about everyone who takes a shot at podcasting about poker or writing/reporting on poker in some fashion is at the very least a casual poker player, with many being a lot more serious about the game than that. I also think that among those who end up sticking with poker reporting for a lengthy period the amount of time spent playing the game often begins to wane (something I’ve experienced), but there nonetheless still exists that ability to think about the game from a player’s perspective.

Kind of makes poker different from other sports and/or other subjects of news reporting, if you think about it, in which that overlap between participant and observer isn’t so great.

With most sports, for instance, ex-players frequently become broadcasters or get involved with the media, but they necessarily do so after their playing days are behind them. Poker, meanwhile, doesn’t really feature players “retiring” and then moving over to the media side (except perhaps when it comes to that sort of gradual sliding away from playing to which I was just referring). That is, the line between the two -- player and reporter -- is not just blurry, it’s essentially non-existent.

To build a little further on Mike’s point, when it comes to those few who have reported on poker as long as Mike and Adam have, it’s probably safe to say just about all of them have a special passion for the game that has sustained them. I know that is the case for Mike and Adam, and I think the poker community has a lot to be grateful for when it comes to what those two have contributed to the game over the years.

It was definitely fun to talk to a couple of guys with such enthusiasm for poker, not to mention take a shot at interviewing a couple of the best interviewers in poker (in my opinion). Check out the interview.

Lock’s Stock in Peril

I continue to follow the worsening situation at Lock Poker which I wrote about last week. More details regarding the non-payouts, ever-shifting policies, Two Plus Two refusing their adverts, and various other dramas concerning sponsored players (and their perceived responsibility/culpability) continue to emerge every day.

For a good catch-up on the situation since last week, check out Haley Hintze’s most recent articles on Flushdraw regarding Lock: “Lock Poker Malaise Deepens as Trade Values Crash, More P2P Restrictions Allegedly Introduced” and “Monitoring the Lock Poker Spiral: The Shane Bridges Blowout.” (There’ll probably be more on Flushdraw to come.)

Also, Todd “DanDruff” Witteles’s thread-starting post (as “Kilowatt”) on Two Plus Two from Monday titled “Lock Shady Practices 101” provides another thorough summary of the situation up until a couple of days ago.

There are numerous, rapidly-growing threads on Two Plus Two regarding Lock. In some ways I’m surprised to see so much response, not because complaints aren’t warranted but because I hadn’t necessarily realized the site had earned so much traffic. It certainly seems that within the crippled U.S. online poker scene of the last two years, Lock had carved out a significant place.

And now with Lock’s final crash starting to appear imminent, there’s a certain canary-in-the-coalmine feeling that the whole “rogue” approach of small sites trying still to serve U.S. players is about to blow up once and for all.

I was intrigued a little this morning by a post from 2+2 moderator “SGT RJ” in the humorously-named “Lock Poker Crisis Containment Thread.” I say the name is funny because the thread -- begun less than a week ago -- is now approaching 1,400 posts.

In her post, SGT RJ offers some advice to posters as well as to those burdened with the unenviable task of trying to get funds off of Lock. She also makes a distinction between 2+2 posters and others who might have played on Lock. Or who, I suppose, might even be thinking of signing on and depositing on Lock.

“If you are knowledgable about poker in general, and frankly if you’re on 2p2 and following these mess of threads,” writes SGT RJ, “you’re probably more tuned into the poker world than 95% of the regular joes who play.”

She goes on to say “I think it’s part of our responsibility as poker players to not give business to owners and sites who have demonstrated, time and again, that they do not have the players’ best interests at heart.”

We circle back, once more, to that unavoidable conflict in poker, namely, the fact that it is a game based on self-interest that also requires cooperation among competitors in order to exist at all.

The idea of more informed players being “responsible” for the community as a whole in a situation like Lock is certainly more obvious to us post-Black Friday than it was before. I’m thinking back to Bill Rini’s provocative post from a while back titled “Who to Blame for Black Friday?” which I opined on here a bit in “Talking Black Friday and Blame.”

This notion that for online poker to work at all there has to be a sincere working together among all parties -- including a shared responsibility and trust -- is a new thing, I think, at least for those of us in the U.S. The tone of responses from players to Ultimate Poker’s first week of operation perhaps reflects this changed mindset, with many seeming to demonstrate patience and a willingness to remain hopeful and supportive of the site as it experiences various early growing pains.

In any case, I tend to agree with SGT RJ about players needing to avoid Lock if possible. And perhaps there’s a further need, too, for those who know about Lock’s problems to make an effort to publicize those issues to those who don’t (an idea reflected in the new “#LockPokerSucks” hashtag on Twitter).

The Need to Be Naïve

Another busy day here at chez Shamus. Part of it was spent having a conversation with a friend discussing a poker-related writing project on which he’s presently working. The discussion was fun, interesting, and inspiring.

I thought I’d briefly share one idea that came up in that conversation, ripping it free from the context entirely to apply it in ways other than its original intention. It’s not too complicated of an idea, but one that I found myself thinking a lot about afterwards.

Was something someone had told him. Then he told me. And now I’m telling you.

Referring to this writing project of his -- on which he’s been working for quite some time -- he noted how another friend had humorously pointed out to him that he probably wouldn’t have even embarked on it in the first place if he hadn’t been somewhat naïve to have begun it.

Hearing him share that self-deprecating observation, I couldn’t help but think about how I, too, will sometimes think similarly about myself and various projects I’ve begun in the past -- some of which I have finished, some of which I have not.

Just yesterday I wrote a blog post in which I made a reference back to an earlier post written a couple of years ago. Rereading that old post led me to click around for a little while and read a few others. At one point I found myself lingering over one of them thinking to myself a couple of thoughts.

One was to marvel at the energy and enthusiasm I’d pumped into the post, so full of opinions being confidently delivered one after another.

The other was to think how naïve I was when I wrote it, and how knowing what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have bothered.

I shared that story with my friend, adding that it seemed like there was probably some sort of “life truth” embedded in that observation about needing to be naïve in order to do most things that are worthwhile.

Think about the first time you sat down to play poker and how naïve you were. Think about how much more you know now about the game and how to play it. Then answer the following question...

If you knew then how much you didn’t know about poker, would you ever have played at all?

Public Concerns

Marco Valerio, frontman for QuadJacks who after leaving for a stint with the Global Poker Index has recently returned to revive QJ in time for the upcoming World Series of Poker, has penned an interesting article for the May issue of Two Plus Two Magazine. The article is titled “The Poker Community versus the Poker Public,” and among the topics addressed is the distinction between the two groups identified in the title.

In the article, Valerio comments on frequent, often loosely-defined references to a “poker community” which often seems to include players, Two Plus Two posters, and others fairly in tune with the game as it is played in cardrooms, online, and on the many tourney tours. I like his suggestion that those belonging to the group have an “affinity for poker goes beyond merely playing it.”

He then discusses the “poker public” as a larger group of which the “poker community” might be understood as a subset, encompassing people who aren’t necessarily living and breathing poker the way the “poker community” often does. Some play, but not all do, as there are some in this larger group who are content merely to watch others play on television or in person. All, however, are interested in poker in some fashion.

Valerio ultimately offers advice to all regarding the significance of this distinction, in particular directing his comments to those working in various poker-related industries (esp. online poker) who have a vested interest in trying to attract members of the “poker public” into the “poker community” as players.

In other words, while the title of the article might suggest an adversarial relationship, Valerio’s clearly petitioning for better communication and respect between the groups. It seems a worthwhile point to make, perhaps of special significance to certain parties within the “poker community.”

The article reminded me of various debates that have popped up before over recent years, including some of those “Is it good for poker?” discussions focused on moments when poker occasionally earns brief attention from so-called “mainstream” popular culture. A reference by Valerio to Two Plus Two’s central place in the “poker community” also made me think of a post I wrote here a couple of years ago “On Poker Communities” that overlaps a little with some of what he discusses.

However, a lot of my thoughts after reading the article centered around the experience of teaching my “Poker in American Film and Culture” class for the past couple of years, one consequence of which has been being frequently forced to think about the larger “poker public” Valerio describes.

Most (not all) who sign up for the course have at least some interest in poker, with a few being players themselves. Readers of this blog -- most of whom are probably best considered part of the “poker community” Valerio is describing -- might be surprised to learn that very few among those who take my class play poker regularly, let alone are as serious about the game as most of us are. And I even have a few take the class who have never even thought much about poker before at all, let alone played.

It might have been different if were teaching the class a few years ago. Black Friday happened during the first semester I taught the course (spring 2011). I know I had quite a few online poker players enrolled in that first installment of the class, but obviously the situation has changed since then. These days there are usually only a few who take the class each time around whom I’d unequivocally peg as coming from the “poker community” group.

In any case, talking with groups of people who mostly belong to that “poker public” about poker and its place in American culture has forced me to think a lot about how people outside of our “poker community” view the game and its significance. Often there are some great differences between how the two groups think of poker, the most conspicuous usually being the way the “poker public” views poker as essentially just another gambling game while those in the “poker community” often consider poker as something much different.

Being the teacher in this dynamic, I guess I’m also quite conscious of how those in the “poker community” sometimes recognize a need to educate the “poker public” about certain important elements of the game (including its skill component). But I’m also aware that I often learn a lot from my students, too, regarding the topics we discuss, and thus can say from experience that the “poker public” can teach the “poker community” a lot, too.