What the Polls Are Saying

Was thinking a little today about the preponderance of polls that tend to dominate the reporting about the ongoing presidential race. It’s almost claustrophobic, with the only thing seeming to cut through the constant stream numbers being the next outrageous thing a candidate (usually the current GOP frontrunner) says or does.

In fact, after that outrageous thing gets spun through the usual news cycle a few dozen times, the focus immediately returns to those numbers again and how they may or may not have changed as a result. Then come the primaries and caucuses, with even the reporting of actual voting results being prefaced by unending references to exit polls and still more polls appended afterwards.

Of course, there’s the unthinking reporting of poll numbers (which we most often see), then there are more careful examinations of what those numbers actually mean. Like has happened with the rise of “analytics” in sports -- and poker -- some of the analyses of polls have become increasingly sophisticated, occasionally resulting in uncannily accurate predictions of how the voting will go (although surprises still do happen).

I’ll admit I find myself checking in over at FiveThirtyEight frequently, especially on those evenings when there are primaries or caucuses, just to see how Nate Silver et al. are further crunching the numbers as they arrive. FiveThirtyEight helps us judge particular polls’ credence as well as how to sort through all of the data in a way that helps show its actual relevance.

That said, the constant focus on polls tends to eclipse actual discussion of candidates and their various positions and substantive issues, operating like a kind of virtual (and ongoing) scoreboard alongside the delegate tallies. To borrow Global Poker Index CEO Alex Dreyfus’s favorite word, it works to “sportify” the presidential race, or at least making it even more like a sporting event than has been the case in past decades.

Polls become a shorthand for both reporters and voters, fitting easily within 140 characters or as a colorful, eye-catching graph and standing for more involved consideration, and becoming something to cheer or fret over. You know, now that football season is over.

Photo: Voter polling questionnaire on display at the Smithsonian Institution, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Global Poker League… You’re on the Clock

Had that Global Poker League Twitch channel on the teevee during the afternoon and early evening, watching some of those American Poker Conference panels and then the draft for the Global Poker League.

Watching Twitch through the Roku is much, much better than on the laptop, I’ve discovered. For me Twitch never works properly via Safari, and while it plays okay on Chrome my laptop tends to run hot whenever I leave it on for a while. Meanwhile watching on television is a breeze, and so I was able to let the sucker play on over in the corner of the room while I worked on other things.

While my attention was coming and going, the panels were interesting and kind of reminded me a little of academic conferences from long ago where I gave my own presentations, listened to others’, and did the same sort of discussing and networking afterwards. Meanwhile the GPL draft similarly did a decent job of imitating the familiar, lengthy draft shows ESPN puts together for the NBA and NFL drafts. Kara Scott was even there to tell teams “you’re on the clock” when it was their turn to pick.

I’ve never much liked those other draft shows, mainly because I’ll know of only a few of the players being drafted (usually at the very start), making the rest of it kind of tedious. Meanwhile with this GPL draft I knew practically every player, team manager, and even the folks running back and forth in the background and turning up in random crowd shots, in many cases personally.

That alone made watching a little more fun. The team identities and logos are kind of interesting as well, and there is something kind of cool about a “global” league with various big cities represented around the world (four in the U.S., and one each in Brazil, Canada, England, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, and Russia).

Like many I’m still more than a little unclear about how the teams work, how the games will go, and the whole playing-while-standing-in-a-cube thing. There’s also the larger question of how exactly the GPL might invigorate poker, generally speaking, although with that I’m willing to exercise some patience. Gets a little fatiguing to keep hearing “stay tuned and find out,” but my curiosity about it all is certainly piqued enough to keep paying attention.

I will say this -- the apparent contrast between the GPL and the last attempt to create some kind of professional poker “league,” the ill-fated Epic Poker League, couldn’t be more stark.

Besides being incredibly short-sighted and impractical in the way it was run, the EPL from the start was purportedly about creating a context in which only the best could compete against the best. In other words, it was mostly about finding a way to keep others out the game.

The league’s commissioner Annie Duke introduced the EPL as “incredibly pro-centric” back in early 2011, arguing (unconvincingly) that the league would somehow represent “the one piece that’s kind of missing from the poker landscape right now... something for the best players in the world to compete against the best players in the world.”

Such an approach -- along with steep $20,000 buy-ins for events and fairly severe restrictions on who could enter them -- was enough to keep a lot of players away, then eventually the whole thing collapsed in on itself with the company that created the league declaring bankruptcy before a single season could be completed.

Meanwhile it’s clear that the Global Poker League seems to have a much different ethos, trying instead to be more inclusive and bring poker to a wider audience, if possible. The whole idea of having a league spanning the Americas, Europe, and Asia is one indicator of such a mindset, and watching the draft yesterday there’s obviously a lot of focus on marketing and spreading positive messages about poker that go beyond just what the league itself and its teams will ultimately be doing.

Interestingly, the GPL used Global Poker Index rankings -- the lone piece of salvage remaining from the EPL wreckage -- to establish criteria for draft eligibility, having invited the top 1,000 ranked players to “opt in,” with a little over 200 doing so. The 48 players drafted yesterday came from that smaller group, and teams can now add two more players each as “wild cards” with no restrictions other than not being able to select any of the almost 800 who didn’t opt in for the draft. (That rule was implemented for the sake of fairness, not exclusion, as the GPL didn’t want top-ranked players to opt-out and then join teams later.)

We’ll see how it all goes and whether or not the GPL gathers any momentum in its own right, as well as whether it does produce these intended effects as described by entrepreneur and league founder Alex Dreyfus to help promote the game in positive ways. I’m intrigued about it, and as long as I can watch via my Roku I’ll probably do so once the season gets going.

Image: Global Poker League.

Here Comes HoldemX

I played a few games of this new HoldemX today. There’s a site up and running now where you can create an account and play. I think the site actually just launched, with this being called the “alpha version” of the game meant to introduce it and get feedback from players.

This article on PokerNews gives a bit of background about the game and a little on how it fits into this larger vision of Alex Dreyfus and the Global Poker League. The article points out how the game combines hold’em and other card-based games like Magic: The Gathering, Hearthstone (about which I was writing a little here a while back), and Uno.

It also explains how the game involves both the regular 52-card deck used in hold’em and (in this version) a 15-card “Discovery Deck.” If you go over to the site and mess around as I did, you’ll see these are listed as “Xcards.” They’re essentially game-changing cards, letting players do things like change or add to their hole cards, change community cards in various ways (including adding sixth street), and so on.

Here’s a picture of the 15 “Xcards” to give you an idea (click to enlarge):

Hands are played like hold’em, with extra rounds inserted along the way where players are able to employ those “Xcards” to change how the hand is going. It’s a bit like playing hold’em with wild cards, but with a lot more variables greatly affecting strategy. The games are timed as well meaning you can get through one in just a few minutes.

Dreyfus is quoted in the article explaining how this is in fact a rudimentary version of the game using “only” 15 of these “Xcards” or “Discovery Deck” cards. The idea, he says, is to provide “an educational experience to give players a chance to play around with the fundamental mechanisms of the game before flooding the platform with multiple deck options, special cards, and other features.”

The article also emphasizes that the game is not intended to be played for money -- only chips. “Hearthstone is not about money: it is about fun, special effects, and skills,” explains Dreyfus, who envisions HoldemX to function similarly (and not to compete with poker).

The tagline is “Poker Enhanced,” but I’m not sure what poker players are going to think of the game. It seems like you’d have to have an interest in poker to want to try it out, but the differences from regular hold’em -- or even from most forms of poker -- are so great even in this “simple” early version, you’d have to have a more substantial interest in games and problem-solving to want to play.

A decent percentage of poker players do like these sort of challenges, but they also like playing cards for money, so that, too, seems like another hurdle HoldemX will have to clear.

I may get back on there at some point just to mess around some more. If you do, let me know what you think.

Images: HoldemX.com.

Travel Report: 2016 PCA, Day 7: High Rolling

Actually started yesterday working in the room and listening to David Bowie all morning -- the “Berlin trilogy” albums (Low, ”Heroes”, and Lodger). Then once the afternoon came I was back in the poker room here at the Atlantis helping cover the $25K High Roller yesterday at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, where the field was super-stacked as was expected.

There were 214 entries yesterday, and there will likely be a handful more to start today before late reg and the reentry period ends with the first hands of Day 2. The total will be shy of last year’s 269, but will still create a big prize pool and a huge score for the winner. From that group 106 made it through to today.

Chatted briefly yesterday with Alex Dreyfus of the Global Poker Index who showed me the 12 team logos for the Global Poker League. I believe the official announcement of that comes today. The logos did look cool, and while I’ll still mostly in the dark about what the GPL will be like, I am a little intrigued, I’ll admit.

Gotta run this morning as thanks to the encouragement of Vera Valmore I have decided to take the “Stingray Experience” here at the Atlantis, which involves wading around with, feeding, and snorkeling/swimming with around 130 cownose stingrays (no shinola!). You can read more about what it involves here.

Half-terrified, half-excited about getting so close to the stingrays. Assuming all goes well, I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.

Meanwhile, check out the PokerStars blog today for updates and more on Day 2 of the $25K and Day 5 of the PCA Main Event, the penultimate days for each.

Photo: courtesy Carlos Monti/PokerStars blog.

Cubing the Cards

A week ago came a press release from something called Mediarex Sports & Entertainment, parent company of the Global Poker Index, announcing this new Global Poker League that is set to launch early next year.

The presser describes the desire of the GPI and its CEO Alex Dreyfus to “sportify” poker “in a bid for the Global Poker Index to become the equivalent of the NASCAR, NFL, NBA, ATP, or PGA for poker.” In an interview with PokerNews, Dreyfus underscored the importance of making poker spectator friendly, with the GPL and its planned-for schedule intended as a step in that direction.

The GPL will consist of 12 teams, it sounds like, who will compete with each other over the course of a 14-week schedule. Sounds like an extension of the earlier Global Poker Masters experiment from back in March of this year -- you can read details over on the Mediarex website.

“We wanted to think out of the box,” explains Dreyfus in the PN interview. Not sure if the pun was intended or not, but the GPL will have players playing inside a box -- “The Cube,” that is, described as the GPL’s “signature arena” à la UFC’s Octagon.

I’ve been skimming for several minutes now this elaborate page describing “The Cube” on the Mediarex site, though to be honest the idea still kind of escapes me. It is like a big clear box that kind of reminds me of the squash class I once took. (The photo credits to “SquashPics.com” might have further planted that seed for me.)

The “arena” lets both TV viewers (or Twitch or whatever) as well as a live audience see and hear the players as well as access all the stats, cards, bets, and so on -- again, I suppose kind of replicating watching or attending a sporting event with a scoreboard nearby tallying relevant data and results.

I’m not real sure what all of this is or is supposed to be. It doesn’t look much like poker, and of course no previous attempts at team-based poker have ever really worked to produce more than a curiosity.

It excites some curiosity, sure, and I’ll be staying tuned to see what happens. “The Cube” feels like a big weird roll of the dice, although without knowing exactly what is being gambled it’s hard to have a rooting interest just yet.

Contemplating Commissioners

Was listening today to an interview with the new Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred who was elected to take over the position last August after Bud Selig stepped down.

Can’t say he was especially riveting to listen to as he addressed various “state of the game” questions, but afterwards my mind wandered a little into a couple of interesting memories from years past.

One was very long ago -- had to be 1981, I guess -- when Major League Baseball went on strike for nearly two months right in the middle of the season. I lived and breathed baseball then, playing all summer, collecting cards, watching and listening to games, and poring over box scores in the paper every day, so the strike was hugely disappointing to a young Shamus. (Making it worse, the strike started the day after my birthday.)

I was concerned enough about the situation to write a letter to then MLB commissioner Bowie Kuhn, something I probably wouldn’t remember having done if not for the fact that Kuhn wrote me back. I have long lost both letters, but you can imagine what they both said -- mine expressing a desire they’d resolve the sucker and his registering my concern and stating his similar hope.

I thought of that when hearing Manfred talk about how baseball fans contact him constantly -- some every single day -- with thoughts about the game and how it can be improved. I imagine he probably experiences that sort of thing much more often than Kuhn did back in those letter-writing days.

A bit of trivia: Had history evolved differently, Richard Nixon could have been in the MLB Commissioner’s seat then as he was actually offered the job in 1965, which he turned down. Later on, after both he and Kuhn took their respective offices in 1969, Kuhn presented Nixon a trophy honoring him as “Baseball’s Number 1 Fan” during a reception at the White House (pictured at left).

I also found myself after listening to Manfred being interviewed thinking a bit about the World Series of Poker’s experiment with having a commissioner and Jeffrey Pollack’s tenure in that position which lasted from early 2006 through November 2009. Pollack first came from NASCAR to the WSOP in mid-2005, and somewhere in there -- perhaps just after he changed from being VP of Marketing to Commish -- there were rumors that Pollack was in fact angling one day perhaps to succeed Selig as the next MLB Commissioner.

Some of Manfred’s PR-like talk about baseball made me think of Pollack and the rhetoric he employed -- often effectively -- when talking about poker in general and the WSOP in particular during those years. While many spoke favorably of him early on, later things soured a bit and his departure and subsequent involvement in the failed Epic Poker League helped influence many to conclude his influence on the game’s livelihood was mixed at best.

I was thinking, though, about how we got used to having someone in what seemed an authoritative position -- even if it weren’t, really -- who was constantly addressing questions about the “state of the game” and thus by default carrying a kind of influence, if not on the game at least on how people thought about the game.

There are certain poker players who today perhaps occasionally seem to fill that role. I suppose Alex Dreyfus with his GPI-related ventures perhaps also does, too, as do those leading the EPT, WPT, WSOP, and other major tours and venues.

But there’s no “commissioner” currently acting as the game’s “table captain” -- not that there actually can be, I don’t think.

Which is okay. Until there’s a strike, then to whom will the kids send their letters?

GPM Afterthoughts

On Friday I was noting how that Global Poker Masters event was coming up over the weekend, and indeed I ended up having the show -- streamed via Twitch -- up and running for most of Saturday and Sunday while my attention was divided somewhat by the NCAA basketball tournament.

Both events took up the majority of waking hours on both days, although the basketball featured multiple contests starting and ending (with clear winners and losers) while the team-style poker tournament was a lengthy, multi-stage competition that eventually whittled down to just two teams with Italy defeating Russia in the end.

I gave kind of a hasty summary of the GPM format here on Friday, although by the time things got going Saturday they might have tinkered further with it a bit, or at least that’s what commentators Joe Stapleton and Jesse May indicated at one point when talking about the players having made suggestions at the drawing party in Malta Friday night.

In any case, while Saturday’s sit-n-gos were easy enough to follow, I’ll admit I got a little lost on Sunday with what was happening, no doubt due in part to that aforemention division of my attention between the cards and hoops. Checking in over at PokerNews’ live reporting helped a lot, actually, when it came to sorting out how the teams were doing relative to one another as well as how the entire event was progressing toward its conclusion.

I did notice a couple of very interesting hands along the way. For example early on Saturday there was a hand that saw Dario Sammartino open with a raise with two red aces and Igor Yaroshevsky call from position with A-K. The flop then brought the case ace and what appeared the set-up for an inescapable knockout of Yaroshevsky, but the Ukrainian managed only to call a flop bet, check behind on the turn, then fold quickly to a decent-sized river bet by Sammartino.

In any tournament or session, a single hand is only a small part of the larger narrative of conflict involving many combatants. However, in this case the significance of this one hand was obscured even further by the complicated format. In other words, while in a regular tournament it would be easy enough to see how the hand might have affected the subsequent fortunes of the two players involved, here it didn’t seem all that meaningful occurring amid the early levels of one of 25 eight-player sit-n-gos played as the initial stage of a two-day, multi-stage event.

I guess what I’m saying by this observation is that while there were obviously some highly-skilled players participating and there were occasions as well for that skill to be displayed, I’m not so sure the format necessarily provided a consistent test of skill, nor too much chance to demonstrate that skill in ways that viewers could readily appreciate. (The fact that on Saturday the “hard stop” rule for the SNGs ended up encouraging a lot of gambly all-ins to conclude each of them didn’t help, either.) Contrast, if you like, those NCAA tournament games where individuals’ contributions to team goals were unambiguous, as were the results of those efforts during and at the conclusion of each contest.

There’s a lot else to say about both the event and its presentation to an audience, to which this is really just a very specific response alluding to just one small part of it. I thought it was interesting to hear GPI’s Alex Dreyfus on the stream discussing how one purpose for the Global Poker Masters event was to create a poker event that could attract non-poker coverage, thereby bringing poker to a wider audience. I’ll let others decide how well that goal was realized over the weekend.

Meanwhile, the first GPM did give us a number of things to think about, among them the idea of “team poker,” the efficacy of Twitch and other media for covering poker events, to what extent poker can hope to attract audiences (and new players) not already involved in the game, and what exactly is meant by attempts to “sportify” the game and/or its presentation.

Community Building at the APA

Definitely followed with interest all of the reports from that American Poker Conference and American Poker Awards from last Friday in Los Angeles. Hard to find anyone who participated in either having anything but positive things to say.

The conference appeared especially intriguing, with a day-long schedule of sessions that reminded me a little of my days as a graduate student traveling to conferences where I’d deliver papers and listen to others’.

The sessions covered an interesting variety of topics, including poker media and marketing, technology, social media, strategies to grow live poker, the current and future state of online poker (with a special session about the situation in the U.S.), and a players’ panel.

The tweets were interesting to follow, and I read a few articles summarizing some of what was said, but afterwards I thought how the whole conference would have been interesting to see online either streaming live or archived to watch later. (Donnie Peters wrote a good recap of the day over at PokerNews today that included some suggestions, and that might be another I’d add.)

The awards dinner sounded like a fun time as well. I had a chance to attend the European version of that ceremony in Deauville once, and so know a little how such things go as well as how the process of highlighting certain individuals in that way can strengthen the community as a whole. And of course I was glad for friends and colleagues whose work was being recognized.

Unlike with the conference, there was no shortage of video from the awards ceremony, and I enjoyed watching some of the presentations and acceptance speeches. Here’s a full highlight reel, if you’re curious.

Following it all in pieces as I did from the other side of the continent, the collective message emanating from the SLS Hotel seemed to be not just a well intentioned plea to grow the game, but an effective, constructive means to accomplish that goal with tangible plans and the creation of genuine incentives for doing so.

Those academic conferences I’d go to were mostly pretty positive experiences. It was always satisfying to present work and get feedback (especially when it was positive), and usually hearing what others were up to was inspiring, too. The best part, though, was meeting new people with common interests and goals, and feeling like there really was a community out there of which I was a part.

Poker does this in little ways all the time, but we don’t always notice. Heck, any time a group convenes to play the game it resembles in miniature a kind of conference the subtext of which is the livelihood of poker itself. Nice job by Alex Dreyfus and the GPI to make something like that happen in a grander, more conscious way.

Talking Team Poker and the Global Poker Masters

Was reading here at week’s end about this new Global Poker Masters event scheduled for March 21-22 in Malta in a couple of articles appearing over on the All In site -- one by Storms Reback criticizing called “Empty Cup?” and a response Alex Dreyfus, CEO of Global Poker Index (who is sponsoring and organizing the event), titled “Masters Plan.”

Like you (probably), I’d become aware of the Global Poker Masters via a few tweets and other random references here and there, but hadn’t really paid too much attention to it. As a quick look at the very detailed and sharp-looking Global Poker Masters website confirms, the event will involve eight national teams each made up of five players competing against each other for the title of “World Champion Nation.” Here’s the trailer they’ve created for it:

The nations involved are Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and the United States (making it more a North America-Europe competition than a “world” one). I think that ideally each team’s players would have been the highest-ranked ones according to the GPI, but in reality they’ll mostly consist of the highest-ranked players who would commit to playing. I’m not sure, actually, how the teams are being formed, but there will be four players (with high GPI rankings) plus a “wild card” player on each.

I believe the format resembles that of the Americas Cup of Poker that recently played out at the PCA with sit-n-gos the first day then heads-up matches the second (I wrote a couple of posts about the Americas Cup here and here). There are still a couple of months to go to learn how it all works, and the GPI has already done pretty well to start getting word out about the event. It will be live streamed as well on the Global Poker Masters website and other places, too, so there will be more attention drawn to it in March for sure.

The event is being referred to as “Poker’s World Cup,” and Reback’s editorial begins with him asking the question “Does poker really need its own version of soccer’s World Cup?” He goes on to wonder why attempts keep being made to take poker, a “quintessentially individual pursuit,” and shoehorn it into a team game. Reback takes issue with the anointing of the event’s winners as “the world champion.” He also mentions the efforts of the GPI and Dreyfus to “sportify” poker -- that is, to promote the game’s affinity to other sports (including its skill component) in order to widen its mainstream appeal. “But I don’t see how this two-day team poker event is going to achieve that end,” opines Reback.

In his response, Dreyfus correctly notes that just because previous attempts at team poker haven’t been successful, that shouldn’t necessarily make it wrong to keep trying. (In fact, Dreyfus brings up a longer list of failed attempts than did Reback.) He notes events like golf’s Ryder Cup and the Davis Cup in tennis as analogous examples to this effort to make a team game out of an individual one. Dreyfus also clarifies that the “world champion” tag for the winning team is hardly meant to usurp the one given to the WSOP Main Event winner.

To me Dreyfus’s most interesting point about the Global Poker Masters comes in a digression where he explains that “To promote poker in the mainstream, we need to create content and excuses that appeal to the journalists,” going on to identify sports as the “vertical that best fits poker.” In other words (if I’m following), present poker in ways that more closely resemble sports -- including creating new versions of the game (like the team format) -- and you’re more likely to generate more interesting coverage and perhaps capture the interest of a new audience.

While I’m not sure I entirely agree with the idea that sports provides the best available avenue via which to increase poker’s appeal, when Dreyfus goes on to complain about the numbing repetition of much current poker reporting, I can’t really dispute his point. “But honestly, aren’t sports journalists tired of always seeing the same headlines?” asks Dreyfus. “‘This new random name won $1.2 million in another poker tournament.’ These are the same headlines we’ve been reading for 10 years. There is (almost) no innovation in the way we serve poker to the media.”

He’s not blaming the reporters for reporting on poker tournaments the same way over and over and over again (although he could have), but rather is finding fault in the game itself for failing to generate anything innovative -- at least since those earliest stories of players becoming millionaires in tourneys lost their novelty.

Reback ends his article expressing considerable apathy about the Global Poker Masters, idly speculating about which team might be a favorite, then adding “That is, if I even bother to watch, which, given my current lack of enthusiasm, seems highly unlikely.” Meanwhile Dreyfus concludes with references to the enthusiasm of the players who have committed and that of the GPI and its partners in the project.

The event is obviously more of an exhibition than anything, and while it will likely showcase some skillful poker being played it won’t be nearly the demonstration of talent we saw at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure earlier in the month. (See my interview with Jesse May at the PCA for more on that topic.) But I’m definitely more intrigued to see how it plays out than is Reback, as well as to see what kinds of stories the event produces and whether or not they are more interesting than the usual poker narratives.

Epic Anniversary

It was one year ago that Federated Sports + Gaming, parent company of the Epic Poker League, suddenly announced its intention to file for bankruptcy. The announcement came on Leap Day -- February 29 -- which should have inspired more puns about Epic and “leaps of faith” than it did. So technically the anniversary will only be coming around every four years.

Kind of wonder, actually, if all matters involving the FS+G and its debts will be resolved by the next Leap Day.

As I’ve mentioned here a few times, I became tangentially involved in the sad story of the Epic Poker League as I was one of a few writers recruited to contribute columns to the EPL blog. It was a good experience, particularly working with the blog’s editor-in-chief, Michael Craig, as I produced weekly columns for about six months. I wrote about a variety of topics, all under the heading of “poker and pop culture,” and my column was titled “Community Cards.”

The timing of the bankruptcy filing meant I ended up on the long, long list of FS+G’s creditors (I was owed one last invoice), and a year later I continue to be among the large crowd of folks still owed money. And who still receive the mailings regarding the latest happenings in the Maryland court where it all continues to play out.

A couple of weeks after the filing in mid-March, FS+G issued an angry statement responding to a Card Player article that outlined how “Epic Poker Bankruptcy Leaves Mountain of Debt.” That article referenced the more than $5 million owed to creditors and the $15,000 the company then had on hand. (I believe the amount of debt was ultimately found to be considerably greater than that.)

FS+G’s response to Card Player strongly suggested that the EPL wasn’t “shutting its doors” but that the bankruptcy was part of the effort to reorganize and somehow keep the sucker going. That the EPL “website and social media game are up and running” was cited in that statement as evidence that the league wasn’t planning to fold.

But even then few were being fooled by such optimism, and indeed by mid-June the company’s meager assets were being sold off to Pinnacle Entertainment, thus enabling FS+G to pay back a small fraction of the $2.1 million they owed Pinnacle. Those assets were highlighted by the Heartland Poker Tour, but also covered what was left of Epic, including the website with all of its live reports from the three tournament series, the blog, and other content produced over the league’s brief run.

It wasn’t long after that I noticed the EPL site had been taken down altogether, an occurrence I noted here with dismay in a post last August. Eventually I put it together that when Pinnacle sold the Global Poker Index to Zokay Entertainment, the contents of the website had gone over as well and soon all but the GPI stuff was scrubbed away.

I talked to Zokay CEO Alex Dreyfus since then, and he confirmed for me that this was how things went as far as the EPL site is concerned. Dreyfus, of course, is helping to promote the Global Poker Index ranking system into something the poker world has become increasingly intrigued by over the last few months. I believe the GPI will become a bigger part of the scene this coming year thanks to a new partnership with the World Poker Tour and plans for the upcoming WSOP in Las Vegas.

In any case, to mark this one-year anniversary I thought I’d today start reposting some of those “Community Cards” columns here on Hard-Boiled Poker. I won’t be publishing them all here, but there were a handful in I have wished were still around on the web.

I’ll tentatively plan to use the next few Fridays to share these columns, starting with one titled “Men, Women, and Poker in A Streetcar Named Desire,” which I’m posting separately today.

The GPI’s Tinkering

There are a few different topics floating about the poker world at the moment that seem worth discussing, one of which is that announcement this week by the Global Poker Index that they were “suspending” two players from their rankings thanks to allegations regarding their having cheated at the 2009 Partouche Poker Tour Main Event final table.

You’ve heard about this already, I imagine, both about the cheating and the GPI’s action, and so I won’t needlessly delve too deeply into the particulars. The players concerned are Jean-Paul Pasqualini and Cedric Rossi who finished first and second, respectively, at that year’s PPT ME final table.

A video compiled by the player and writer Nordine Bouya was posted a couple of weeks ago and presents what appears to be some fairly damning evidence of collusion occurring between the pair. For a rundown of the story of the video and what it shows, see Haley Hintze’s report over on PokerFuse “2009 Partouche Poker Tour Cheating Allegations Further Tarnish Tour’s Legacy.”

Yesterday the GPI decided to make a formal announcement regarding their decision to remove Pasqualini and Rossi from their rankings. Actually the 2009 tourney happened outside of the 36-month period on which the current rankings are tabulated, but as Zokay Entertainment CEO Alex Dreyfus spells out in his article on the matter, the primary motivation here is to use the GPI as a mechanism to help discourage cheating and better conditions for players, generally speaking.

Dreyfus acknowledges that by making such a decision regarding what is otherwise a stats-based ranking system the GPI perhaps puts itself in danger of sliding down a “slippery slope” when it comes to delivering judgments regarding particular players and their eligibility to be considered in the rankings. He also notes that the GPI isn’t even ready to commit to having been convinced that Pasqualini and Rossi did, in fact, cheat, saying that “we are not claiming that we know they cheated” and adding that such a finding is “up to the casinos and the overseeing regulatory bodies to decide.”

In other words, it’s a somewhat awkward stance being taken here by the GPI to remove a couple of players from their rankings when neither were ever disqualified for cheating from the tourney in question, nor is it even clear there will be any sort of retrospective handling of the matter (e.g., a post-tourney DQ-ing of the players and/or attempt to recover winnings).

Rich Ryan posted an op-ed over on PokerNews today in which he disagrees with the GPI’s decision to “suspend” Pasqualini and Rossi from the rankings. Rich draws analogies from other sports (baseball, cycling) to talk about how various forms of cheating have affected the record books in those contexts, concluding that he dislikes how making subjective decisions about players’ results being compromised ultimately lessens the overall strength of the GPI’s ability to assess and compare players’ tourney performances.

I’m mostly with Rich, I think, regarding his stance on the issue. That is to say, I’m not really sure the GPI needs to worry too much about this sort of policing of its rankings, although I also understand where Dreyfus is coming from with his broader goal to use the GPI to help improve the game and the experiences of the players.

That said, I’m less apt to agree with the assumption that the GPI rankings are in fact wholly objective. Even if the rankings are entirely based on players’ performances, a host of decisions have been made regarding the various criteria for weighing those performances that are, in fact, subjective. It’s a nifty measuring system, no doubt, that certainly works to provide a different and more thorough way of measuring players’ performances than comes from, say, a panel’s votes or by polling players. But as we all know, an entirely objective measure of performance in poker tournaments doesn’t really exist.

Anyhow, check out Haley’s report and Ryan’s op-ed, and decide for yourself whether the GPI should or should not be “suspending” players from its rankings, or the degree to which the issue even should matter to the poker community.