Riding the Colossus

Over the weekend I gave some time along with many other poker people tracking how that “Colossus” (Event No. 5) was playing out at the World Series of Poker, marveling as others did at the numbers it was producing.

The name sounds like what you might call a roller coaster, and in fact there was a well known ride at Six Flags Magic Mountain in California called the Colossus. That was the one you see in National Lampoon’s Vacation (the “Screemy Meemy”), and I’m reading it also turns up in the classic KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park, although the ride is now closed due to a fire last year.

Was a fast, wild, bumpy ride for the poker Colossus, too, the last couple of days.

I appreciated some of the things regarding the $565 buy-in event Jason Somerville, Remko Rinkema, and Donnie Peters discussed on the Friday episode of the PokerNews Podcast, in particular what they had to say regarding the Colossus functioning as many players’ “Main Event” (more or less) as far as the WSOP was concerned. It was also interesting to see the reports of poker rooms all around Las Vegas booming with business, too, as a side effect of the event bringing so many poker players to Sin City.

The final total came to 22,734 entries (about 5K over my guess), a number that includes the many, many re-entries as players could fire up to four times. I’d expected to hear something around that number (or a little less) as the total prior to players getting their refunds for unused entries, but it sounds like that total comes after subtracting those, as there were 25,571 “raw, paid entries” altogether.

As the guys on the “PN Pod” discussed -- and as many others who played the event were tweeting about, too -- there were a lot of first-time WSOP players in the Colossus. Would be interesting to know exactly how many were playing their first ever WSOP event, or even just a rough percentage. Perhaps half? More?

[EDIT (added 6/3/15): The WSOP did release further Colossus stats, noting there were 14,284 unique players and that 5,664 of them -- just a tad under 40% -- were playing in their first ever WSOP event.]

The crew’s sentiments about it shaping up to be an especially positive experience not just for the newcomers, but for the experienced players, too, were all convincing.

As you’ve surely heard by now, 22,734 entries translated to a prize pool of $11,187,000 to be divided by the top 2,241 finishers (a little over 10% of the field). They already made it to the money last night, in fact, with no less than nine all-ins during the final hand of hand-for-hand play.

Of course, if you were following things last night you know that the excitement of the bubble bursting was basically set to the side thanks to the animated response to the announcement of the prize pool, in particular to the $636,880 up top for the winner. That figure surprised many who thought first place in a tournament with that many entries and a $11,187,000 prize pool would at least pay a milly to the one managing to survive the record-crushing field.

Not having any particular skin in the game made it easier for me to be entertained watching the Twitter feed last night as people took up either side of arguments regarding “flat” payouts, the “Golden Ratio,” the relationship of rake to payouts (or lack thereof), and so on. Defensive (and in some cases even seemingly dismissive) responses from the WSOP’s Twitter feed served to add further drama.

Marty Derbyshire does a great job summarizing last night’s immediate reaction over on PokerNews, if you missed that. Jeremiah Smith also has a good morning-after piece today over at All In where he focuses on the WSOP’s not having made clear beforehand the possibility of this particular payout schedule should the event draw the 20K-plus entries they were saying they expected it would.

Sort of felt a little like watching a movie in which the “Colossus” was this awesomely big, frightening-looking creature who turned out to be cuddly and lovable, someone everyone in the story liked. Then suddenly he starts breaking things and wreaking havoc, which might well have been expected given his size, but since everyone had been lulled into thinking they’d always like everything about him they all reacted with surprise.

I’m still on the side of those thinking the event ultimately seems as though it is (or will be) mostly positive, all things considered. And perhaps after this first wild ride it will serve to teach some lessons to players and tournament organizers alike -- also a positive.

Players Sponsoring Themselves on Twitch

Was reading about Twitch this week. Hadn’t realized it had begun as a spinoff from the old Justin.tv, which I recall having tuned into occasionally in the past, including during those early marathon-streaming days of the old Quadjacks who I believe moved there at some point not long after Black Friday.

Justin.tv began back in 2007, then in 2011 created Twitch as a kind of separate network just for video gaming and “e-sports” competitions. The latter grew in popularity, then last summer Justin.tv was shut down so the parent company (Twitch Interactive) could focus just on Twitch.

Back in February PokerNews did an article suggesting 10 poker-related Twitch accounts to follow. Last month Eric Raskin wrote an interesting piece for All In looking at Twitch from a more theoretical point of view and relating it to other forms of “life streaming” whereby people turn their lives into shows for others to watch. (Twitter functions like that for some, I think, as I was writing about yesterday.)

BLUFF just ran a long profile of Scott Ball, a.k.a. “The Man Behind Twitch’s Poker Explosion,” which includes an overview of the site’s brief history and increasing involvement with poker.

Even The Wall Street Journal has written about Twitch becoming a destination for online poker players and those who enjoy watching others play (and/or learning about poker, too). The WSJ article cited a statistic that “In January, Twitch streamed 56 million minutes of poker, less than 1% of the total 16 billion minutes of streamed video on the site.” There were only 44,640 minutes in January, so I suppose that means an average of about 1,250 poker-related streams were live every minute of every day that month -- more than I’d have guessed.

Those who are able to get 500 or more viewers to watch their streams consistently are eligible to have a subscriber button put on their channels, which in turn becomes a way for viewers to subscribe for $4.99 a month (half of which goes to Twitch). Subscribers can then be offered extras such as special programming, access to archives, and so on.

Those who have Twitch channels can also derive income by selling advertising (with the revenue also shared 50/50 with Twitch). Twitchers can additionally get sponsorships or collect donations as a way to “monetize” what they’re doing, and in the case of poker players who are also coaches, they can use their Twitch channels to direct folks to purchase other content, hire them as coaches, and so on.

It struck me that with the paucity of online poker sponsorships post-Black Friday, Twitch has become a form of “self-sponsorship” for a not insignificant number of players, kind of analogous to self-publishing or other kinds of independently-produced content (e.g., music, video/film).

For me it remains a kind of idle, only occasionally-sought-after entertainment, although I continue to be impressed with how some -- with Jason Somerville the pioneer and current Twitch “chip leader” (by far) -- have found ways to make it work both for them and their viewers/followers/subscribers. And I continue to be curious about what will come of it, too.

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.

Not Watching Poker

Have to admit I’ve more or less drifted away from following the 2014 World Series of Poker coverage on ESPN this month. Going up against Sunday Night Football has lost them one viewer in this household, and while I DVR’d the sucker the first couple of weeks I haven’t been moved even to do that lately.

Not picking up things until Day 4 made for some added awkwardness narrative-wise when it came to telling the story of what happened this summer. There were some okay moments and an interesting hand or two involving Phil Ivey during those first two hours, but as I’ve said here before about these edited shows, knowing outcomes (e.g., Ivey’s pre-deep run bustout) considerably lessens what is already small amount of suspense in evidence.

I thought about this method of showing a poker tournament months after it actually occurs when reading this funny article from The Onion earlier today -- “LeBron James Relieved to Finish Filming NBA Season.”

The inordinate focus on amateur player Curtis Rystadt and his relentless antics on Day 5 were a big turnoff for me as well (literally). Exhibiting all sorts of poor etiquette and cringe-worthy behavior -- none of it terribly representative of how the great majority of players act at the WSOP -- Rystadt was made the center of attention during that week’s shows.

However, it almost felt exploitative for ESPN to devote so much attention to a relative unknown who like an unwitting reality show participant probably wasn’t fully aware how he’d be received. (Here’s a quick example of Rystadt’s performance, if you happened not to have been watching.)

So I’m not really watching, and in fact this year I may well miss out on the final table, too, as it looks like I’m scheduled for a tourney trip during those days. Speaking of the November Nine, Chris Tessaro has a new column for All In punningly titled “Waited Down” in which he’s revisiting the delayed final table idea -- now in its seventh year, if you can believe it -- and wondering if the WSOP and ESPN might consider altering its approach going forward.

There’s much I still like about the shows -- including Norman Chad, Lon McEachern, and Kara Scott -- but like Chris I’m finding the current approach to the coverage to be far removed from the immediacy and excitement of what tournament poker actually can be. And with NBA starting up and that other World Series going the distance, it’s making it even harder for this sports fan to tune in to watch the card playing.

Travel Report: LAPT7 Peru, Day 1a -- Mata Aces, BodogAri, and More

We were nearing the end of the night yesterday when I told Sergio, my blogging colleague here on the LAPT, how it always seems to happen that Day 1a takes the most out of me. I think it has to be mostly related to the travel which usually immediately proceeds those first Day 1s, with the fact that those days are almost always noon-to-midnight (at least) and thus usually the longest ones to cover.

The field of 274 entries was decent-sized, and with a bigger Day 1b (as anticipated) the overall turnout will exceed that of last year’s LAPT Peru.

Had some fun during the day playing a poker variant called “Mata Aces” with Christian de Leon, a wacky game that sorta kinda combines elements of hold’em, stud, and even draw. It’s getting big in Mexico, and perhaps might begin to spread elsewhere as it provides a lot of action -- read about it here.

Also enjoyed chatting with Ari “BodogAri” Engel near the end of the night, a very friendly guy who’s played (and won) on just about every tour there is in addition to his considerable online success. Here’s a post sharing what we discussed.

If you’re looking for something else interesting to read today, check out Jonathan Grotenstein’s recent article for All In about Daniel Colman, titled “Silent Assassin.” Grotenstein speculates in interesting ways about the wunderkind’s motives, giving a shoutout to Hard-Boiled Poker along the way by referencing a post of mine where I was attempting something similar with Colman.

Gonna cut it short as Day 1b is drawing close. Check the PokerStars blog for reports throughout the day.