Jesse May Interview, April 2011 (Part 1 of 2)

The passing of Dave “Devilfish” Ulliott earlier this week brought to mind his significant role on the first series of Late Night Poker. That in turn reminded me of a lengthy interview I was able to do a while back with Jesse May, another person who was there at the start of the groundbreaking poker TV show in the late 1990s.

This was another of those Betfair Poker interviews that are no longer available online, and I realized now might be as good a time as any for me to repost the interview over here. Took me a while to find the sucker, actually, but thankfully I did.

I’ll repost it here in two parts, just as it originally appeared on Betfair Poker in early April 2011 -- right before Black Friday, actually, which is kind of interesting to consider when reading some of the discussion of the state of poker at that time. The first part primarily focuses on May’s 1998 novel, Shut Up and Deal, while the second (which I’ll post tomorrow) delves into the Late Night Poker story.

Thanks again, Jesse, for the interview!

* * * * * “The Betfair Poker Interview: Jesse May, Part 1”
[Originally published at Betfair Poker, 1 April 2011]

When it comes to poker-themed novels, Jesse May’s Shut Up and Deal (1998) stands out as an especially accomplished entry, a book that brings alive the unique and fascinating world of the cash-game grinder of the mid-1990s.

May’s narrator, a young poker pro named Mickey, relates in episodic fashion the story of his ongoing struggles both at the tables and elsewhere, exploring in detail the many challenges faced by himself and others as they all separately strive to “stay in action.” Full of memorable characters and set pieces, I highly recommend May’s novel as both an entertaining read and an insightful exploration of poker’s many highs and lows.

In addition to his poker writing, May is well known for his contributions as a commentator on numerous poker shows, a role that has earned him the nickname “the Voice of Poker.” For May that career began shortly after the publication of his novel with the first season of Late Night Poker (in 1999), a show that would come to have great influence on televised poker a few years later with the launching of the World Poker Tour and expansion of coverage of the World Series of Poker on ESPN.

I recently had the opportunity to talk with May about both Shut Up and Deal and the early years of Late Night Poker. This week I’ll share the first part of our conversation in which we focused on May’s novel, and next week will present the story of May’s involvement with Late Night Poker.

Short-Stacked Shamus: I know Shut Up and Deal is based somewhat on your own experiences playing poker in the late ’80s-early ’90s. To what extent is Mickey’s story comparable to your own?

Jesse May: First of all, the story is true in the sense that I think truth is stranger than fiction. When I was writing it, I wasn’t worried about it being true, but I think that when it comes to a lot of gambling stories, you find that you could never make this stuff up. That’s been the case, I think, for every moment I’ve been in the gambling world.

Like Mickey, I did start playing when I was in high school. With a couple of other guys we all got obsessed with poker at the same time, then went out to Las Vegas -- four of us, all underage, like 17 or 18 -- and there discovered Texas hold’em (limit). Soon after that it became kind of a more serious thing for me. I used to go to Las Vegas quite a bit back before I turned 21, spending summers there trying to play poker. I dropped out of college twice, and after I turned 21 I ended up in Vegas and really tried to make a go of it.

Obviously it was during that poker explosion, and so as far as the places in the book go, they did kind of coincide with where I was. I spent a lot of time in Las Vegas. I was in Foxwoods within a month after they opened up [in 1992] and stayed there the better part of a year. I was in Atlantic City the very day they opened poker [in 1993], and stayed there about a year-and-a-half. Those were really interesting times as far as poker goes, because it was so new. There was no internet, obviously, back then, and all the action was there. I think the world had never seen anything like those two major openings -- Atlantic City and Foxwoods.

SSS: In a way the novel kind of chronicles this interesting and important moment for poker. For a lot of people who only came into poker post-Moneymaker, they might not realize how significant that earlier “explosion” really was for poker.

JM: That’s true. Also, it was interesting... at the time there were some poker texts, but most people really didn’t have access to them. So it was a combination of there being so few people who played poker -- not even well but just marginally -- and there being so much money around.

It was incredible, because it required such a different skill set to become a poker player then -- a professional -- than it does today. The skill sets then were really about money management and surviving in that hustling type of world rather than sitting around talking about hands. People didn’t sit around and talk strategy then. You talked about who was cheating and who owed you money and that kind of stuff (laughs). And I loved that world, and so for me it was a great time.

SSS: It’s funny, the world your describing was really much more similar to what came before -- even stretching back to the 19th century -- than what the poker world has become over the decade.

JM: It’s true. I look at a guy like Amarillo Slim [Preston]. You know -- throw out all the personal controversies that he’s had -- people have been very critical of his game, saying that he’s essentially not a poker player. And to some extent that’s true, but the fact is that in his time, and even when I would play with him a little bit back in Foxwoods, he was representative of a guy who was a great professional as far as poker went. Because he knew everything else. He knew how to get a game together, how to get an edge... he knew all that stuff. And I always had a lot of respect for him.

It was people like that -- like the Bart Stone character [in Shut Up and Deal] -- who really were able to thrive back then, and who wouldn’t be thriving now. And it really was, as you’re saying, the tail end of that era where that sort of “road gambler” was able to succeed.

SSS: So what led to your decision to write the novel?

JM: The book itself was written as a catharsis, really. Back when I was playing, you got such a strong response from people when they found out you were playing poker. You kind of continually felt yourself defending your lifestyle to others and to yourself and trying to make order of it.

I used to take a lot of breaks when I played poker, and this particular time when I had the first crack at writing the novel, I had been playing in Atlantic City and took off nine months to travel in Asia. It was during that period I wrote the bones of the novel, writing every day.

SSS: So the places and chronology of the novel roughly correspond to your own experiences. The characters -- Bart Stone, John Smiley, Uptown Raoul -- I assume they, too, are somewhat based on people you knew and with whom you played?

JM: Yes. Actually there were some liability issues with the publisher that made it very important for me to go through and change certain things -- ethnicities, physical qualities, names, things like that. But a lot of times [with a given character] there was some person I had in mind, and sometimes characters were compilations of different people.

The Bart Stone character, for example, was probably as close to real as you could get [i.e., the person on whom he was based]. He was such a strong personality, you couldn’t exaggerate him. His life was so amazing... he really was one of the true road gamblers. He was a guy who had a church-going wife and completely lived this sort of “picket fence” existence for three weeks out of every month, then for one week he’d get into his car to some town -- just start driving -- and find a town, find a game, and find a way to get the money.

He had this saying. He said he’d go into a town and first he’d try and beat people on the square. If that didn’t work, he’d try and cheat them. And if that didn’t work, he’d just pull out a gun and rob the motherf*ckers. That was his philosophy of life!

SSS: You actually start the novel with Bart Stone -- with a sketch of his character and telling the story of him cheating others. It’s interesting, because I think by starting the book that way you kind of indirectly introduce Mickey as a contrasting figure -- a “good” guy, that is, who looks at Bart and expresses a kind of awe because he could never live that way. But then he weirdly admires Bart, too. And Mickey, as we come to find out, isn’t without flaws himself.

JM: I guess it’s kind of flattering to hear you say that. You know, I recently just read Vicky Coren’s book. I don’t know if you’ve read that.

SSS: Oh, yes -- For Richer, For Poorer. It’s terrific.

JM: Yes, I quite like it, too. And I think the reason I like it so much is that unlike a lot of these “tell-all” poker books or whatever they are, Vicky never tries to make herself into sort of an elite. She throws herself in with the poker players -- they are her peers, and she’s not trying to pretend that she’s not as bad or as good or as sick or as addicted or anything as any of them. And I always thought that was kind of important in the poker world as far as keeping your own order together was concerned -- that if you do think you’re different or better than everyone else, at least recognize that you’re a hypocrite (laughs)!

One of the things about poker, especially back then, is that you are faced with so many moral choices. I think that’s what excited me about the story more than anything else. Just because of poker’s nature, the decisions that you have to make every day... you are constantly testing out your own morality. And other people’s, too. You find out a lot about what lengths they’ll go to, what depths they’ll sink to, really who they are as a person. Poker reveals so much about people’s personalities because the ethical dilemmas -- the gray areas -- they come so fast and furious.

SSS: There are several themes present in the novel. One seems to be the way people tend to view poker either realistically or they romanticize it -- that there’s a “reality” of poker that some get, and there’s a “romance” about the game that others prefer to see.

JM: I’ll buy that.

SSS: A related theme in the book -- and this is interesting because you’ve already used this phrase a couple of times with regard to the writing of the novel -- is this idea of “making order” of your life. Mickey is constantly trying to do that himself in the book, and struggling, at times, between being “realistic” and being “romantic” about his life as a full-time poker player.

JM: I think that for people who play poker professionally today, that “order” is so much more readily available. And it’s an order that is very similar for all of them. They’ve identified profitable ways to play, mistakes their opponents make, and all of the numbers involved that they can see with the tracking software and things like that -- the order is there. I think it was much harder before, but believe me, they still have a lot of chaos in their lives, because the nature of poker and gambling is obviously based on the streaks of winning and losing. That stuff throws off your sense of balance.

Then there’s the “moral” order of setting up rules for yourself, which obviously is a whole other thing. The order of believing that what you’re doing is the right thing to be doing. To me that’s always been the major theme of gambling -- not just poker -- that you’re always making up new rules for yourself. Maybe it’s like that in life, too, you know, something works for a while and then something throws it off and you have to go back to the drawing board. But it’s very important for people to have a sense of order, and I agree that’s something that Mickey struggles with in the book. As everybody in the poker world does.

I think everyone takes this little, sort of vicarious pleasure in seeing someone who’s completely on top of the poker world run bad. You know, when somebody like Brian Townsend is writing that he’s questioning everything and going back to the drawing board. You recognize that the poker world can be as chaotic for them as it is for the rest of us.

SSS: I think you’re right about it being a different situation today than for players in the ’90s, not just in terms of being able to track results and see “order” that way, but when it comes to the moral questions, too. Poker still isn’t completely accepted today, but -- to go back to what you were saying earlier -- poker pros aren’t necessarily having to defend what they do as much today as before.

Okay, one last question about the novel. What writers -- poker and otherwise -- would you list as ones you admire and might consider as having influenced you when writing Shut Up and Deal?

JM: As far as poker writers are concerned, I love Al Alvarez (The Biggest Game in Town), of course. And Jon Bradshaw, I love the way he profiles people in Fast Company. Also, Damon Runyon, to me, is one of the great writers of all time when it comes to creating the characters of gambling. I feel like he is so underappreciated, although now that I think about it I probably never read any Runyon before I wrote the book. And Mario Puzo’s Fools Die...

SSS: You allude to that one in Shut Up and Deal.

JM: Oh, that’s right. You know Puzo was a big gambler. To me, Fools Die was the greatest book on Vegas that had ever been written. There are a couple of scenes in there in which he describes Vegas that I think heavily influenced me.

For other [non-gambling] stories, I used to read Somerset Maugham quite a bit. I love storytellers who are happy to tell the details they want to tell, you know? Writers like Hemingway or Djuna Barnes... who show that it doesn’t have to be a [linear] sort of narrative where you say “he said” and then “she said” but that you can just relate what strikes you about people. I always felt like that at the poker table, but essentially there you are just watching people, which I love to do.

Come back tomorrow for Part 2, covering the early years of Late Night Poker.

A Slim Story from Joseph Walsh

Yesterday I brought up California Split again as well as screenwriter Joseph Walsh’s 2008 book Gambler on the Loose. Not long after that book appeared and I wrote a review of it (for PokerNews), I got in contact with Walsh. We’ve been in touch ever since, and usually it’s around the time I teach the film in my class I find myself sending him another note to see how he’s doing and to share something with him about the discussion of Split.

The two of us had our exchange of messages again this week. I told him I hoped the replacement refs didn’t screw him over too much earlier this NFL season (and that the regular ones weren’t doing so, either). He replied by referring to that fourth-and-29 play in the Baltimore-San Diego game -- the one I was crying about on Monday -- and how it had him “reaching for the phone to call the paramedics.” But otherwise he’s doing great. Still “in action,” as they say.

I was reminded this time how back in the spring when we’d exchanged messages it wasn’t that long after the passing of “Amarillo” Slim Preston. It occurred to me then to ask Walsh if he had any Slim stories from the making of California Split. Preston has a cameo near the end of the film, and so I guessed Walsh probably had met and interacted with him at some point.

When the movie premiered in the summer of 1974, Preston was probably at the height of his popularity and renown as a poker player. He’d won the 1972 World Series of Poker Main Event, then had embarked on a kind of publicity tour afterwards to promote himself, his book (Play Poker to Win), as well as poker and the WSOP. He appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson multiple times during that period. Then in 1973 CBS filmed a documentary at the WSOP Main Event to show as part of its CBS Sports Spectacular, a kind of anthology show that often featured off-the-beaten-path sports programming.

That entire 47-minute show dealing with the 1973 WSOP is available on YouTube, if you’re curious to see it. As you might imagine, Preston is featured heavily as both the defending champ and, really, as the country’s most famous poker player at the time.

So, did Walsh have a Slim story? Yes, he did. I asked him this week if he’d mind if I shared it here, and he said it would be fine.

“Slim Story:

Since I barely knew Slim, I made an arrangement to have breakfast with him the day before we were going to start filming on ‘Split’. Soon as he sits down I say to him, ‘Slim, I’m going to offer you a bet you can’t refuse. In the next Keno game I’m going to pick one number and take 2 to 1 I hit it! Well, Slim, knowing he’s beating the price, says to me ‘you're on, son, and for how much.’ I reach into my pocket and put up two hundred bucks. Slim reaches into his pocket and takes out a roll of hundreds that must have been 6 inches thick.

I say to him, ‘You really come prepared.’ He says, ‘always’ and flicks off 4 hundred to cover the bet. One minute later the Keno game begins and the first number that lights up on the board is 9, the number I picked. If Slim had false teeth they would have fallen out of his mouth. It takes him about 4 seconds to recover and then he says to me ‘My god, son, you are spooky.’ Later in the next game, he tried to engage me in the same bet. I just smiled warmly and said ‘Sorry, Slim, you had your shot.’ We became instant friends.”

Thanks, Joey, for sharing that one -- a “Slim story” that rivals some of Preston’s own.

By the way, for fans of California Split here is an excellent compilation of reviews and interviews regarding the film on a cool website called Shooting Down Pictures. Lots of goodies there, including the whole background regarding the struggles to get the film made (and the alternate-universe-possibility that Steven Spielberg might’ve directed it), tons about the production, and an excerpt from an interview with Walsh in which he talks about what it was like working with Robert Altman.

(That picture of Walsh above is from another, more recent interview he did for Stop Smiling which focuses on the ending of the movie and how it diverged from what had been scripted.)

“Amarillo Slim” Preston (1928-2012)

We had heard a couple of weeks ago that Thomas Austin Preston, Jr. -- a.k.a. “Amarillo Slim” -- was nearing the end, his friend and fellow poker icon Doyle Brunson having tweeted that he was “in critical shape,” then last week again reporting he was “at death’s door.” Preston passed at age 83 during early Sunday morning.

Preston’s significance to the modern history of poker is impossible to ignore.

In my “Poker in American Film and Culture” class we cover the entire history of poker, going back to the early 19th century. By the time we get to the latter part of the story Preston comes up again and again.

We read and talk about the World Series of Poker and Preston’s win at the third ever WSOP Main Event in 1972. We even discuss the possible deal-making that occurred at that final table that resulted in Preston’s victory, since that story helps show poker’s still uncertain place in American culture. And we talk about Preston’s subsequent publicity tour, including his many appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson where he was, for all intents and purposes, the face of poker in America and the game’s chief spokesperson.

I wrote a “Poker & Pop Culture” piece for PokerNews a few years back detailing that part of Preston’s story -- check it out for a fuller treatment of how Preston uniquely combined the Old West cowboy image with modern ideas about poker and gambling while advancing the message of poker to mainstream America.

I save the films in my class until the last few weeks. I feel like the students get a lot more out of them after having studied poker’s fascinating history, as well as after having thought a lot about poker’s place in American culture. They are, I believe, uniquely positioned to interpret and critique the movies after having gone through such study previously.

As I mentioned in a post last week, we just watched the 1974 film California Split, in which Preston has a memorable cameo near the end, essentially playing himself. His appearance immediately communicates a huge change from the games back at the California Club we see at the beginning of the film, announcing at once that this is high-stakes, serious poker.

This morning I’m rewatching Rounders (1998) for today’s class, and of course there are numerous references to Preston in that film, too, the script for which is packed with lots of knowledgeable allusions to poker’s past. In fact, the movie’s famous opener -- “If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half-hour at the table, then you are the sucker” -- is often attributed to Preston.

“I had this picture in my head,” explains Mike (Matt Damon) early on, after having been gutted by Teddy KGB in the film’s opening sequence. “Me sitting at the big table, Doyle to my left, Amarillo Slim to my right, playing in the World Series of Poker.”

For at least three decades, Preston was most certainly a symbol of poker greatness, the mention of his name in a film like Rounders instantly conveying a young player’s aspirations.

I never met Preston, although I did cover him in a few events at the WSOP, and searching back through I am seeing some posts of a few hands here and there. He didn’t play in that many during the years I’ve covered events (since 2008), usually showing up for the Seniors event, the Main, and perhaps a few others.

Of course, Preston’s place in the poker world changed dramatically just as the poker world itself began to change following Chris Moneymaker’s dramatic win at the 2003 WSOP Main Event and the subsequent “boom” in poker’s popularity.

In the summer of 2003 Preston was indicted on charges of indecency with a 12-year-old child (his granddaughter), charges later reduced to a misdemeanor to which Preston pleaded no contest. There’s a lot of uncertainty surrounding the case, addressed by Preston in a two-part interview with Nolan Dalla in 2009 for PokerListings titled “A Legend Lost” (part 1 & part 2).

Last week in my class we talked about Preston’s place in poker history when discussing his scene in California Split. We necessarily talked about the indecency charge, too, which I summarized as a factor that had already affected his place in the poker world presently, and would certainly complicate how people would remember him once he had died.

In any event, for anyone with an interest in poker’s history, Preston’s passing is certainly worth noting. As I’m sure we’ll be doing in class this afternoon.

Minding the Gaps in World Series of Poker History

Excitement continues over in London at the WSOPE. After Phil Laak’s victory in Event No. 1 (£2,500+£150 six-handed no-limit hold’em), Jeff Lisandro picked up his fifth WSOP bracelet in Event No. 2, the £5,000+£250 buy-in pot-limit Omaha event, coming from behind against Joe Serock heads up to win.

Today the final table for Event No. 3, the £1,000+£75 buy-in no-limit hold’em event, will play out. Indeed, it began just a few moments ago. You can follow the action online at PokerNews.

The big story today concerns English player J.P. Kelly, who won a WSOP bracelet in a $1,000 NLHE event last summer, then at the 2009 WSOPE won this same £1,000 event. J.P. Kelly is a PokerStars pro, incidentally, whom I was following over the weekend in that WCOOP heads-up event (No. 38) to which I referred yesterday. Kelly was the only PokerStars pro to make it to Day 2 of that one.

Kelly begins the final table third in chips, and thus has a chance to be the first player since Johnny Chan in 1987 and 1988 to “defend” a no-limit hold’em title in a WSOP bracelet event -- that is to say, to win the same NLHE event at the same buy-in in consecutive years.

At age 24, Kelly could also apparently become the youngest person ever to get to three bracelets. Nolan Dalla explains in his report from last night that if he wins Kelly would break Phil Ivey’s record for that (Ivey was 27 when he won his third bracelet in 2003).

Some of us were chatting on Twitter yesterday, trying to determine if yes, indeed, no one since Chan had defended a WSOP event in no-limit hold’em. Thang Luu went back-to-back in ’08 and ’09 in the $1,500 Omaha/8 event, and Phil Hellmuth won the $5,000 limit hold’em events in both ’92 and ’93. I scanned all of the multiple bracelet winners, checking who had won in consecutive years since 1988 to see if any had won their bracelets in the same NLHE events, and didn’t see any other examples of anyone winning the same no-limit hold’em event in back-to-back years during that stretch.

The Twitter conversation continued regarding the “youngest to three bracelets” question, and it occurred to me that while one can certainly find a lot of information rather quickly online to help one answer such questions, there isn’t a definitive “WSOP Records” site listing records like “youngest to three bracelets,” “title defenses,” and the like.

Later in the day the question arose whether or not a player from the continent of Africa had ever won a bracelet. Mehdi Senhaji of Morocco enters today’s Event No. 3 final table second in chips, and so the media was trying to figure out if that might be another bit of history, should Senhaji win. It doesn’t appear there has been, but there didn’t seem to be a simple way to look something like that up.

The official WSOP site has a ton of information, including info on just about every player who has ever played and cashed in a WSOP event, results for past WSOPs (all of the way back to 1970), and more. But there are gaps in the info there -- understandably, since it wasn’t until relatively recently people cared that much about any of this stuff and so record-keeping wasn’t always a priority.

The Hendon Mob site is another good one to consult for WSOP records, and in some cases has more complete info than the WSOP site does. But there is still a lot that is missing there, too.

In fact, even just trying to find information about the final tables for the WSOP Main Event during the 1970s is a hit-or-miss affair. For example, who exactly was sitting at that first final table in 1971, the first year they held a tournament to decide a champion?


The WSOP site only gives us the winner, Johnny Moss.

Over at the UNLV Center for Gaming Research site, they don’t say who the six at the final table are, but list “Amarillo Slim” Preston, Brian “Sailor” Roberts, Doyle “Texas Dolly” Brunson, Walter “Puggy” Pearson, Crandall Addington, and Carl Cannon as “notable players,” and Moss as the winner.

In their book All In: The (Almost) Entirely True Story of the World Series of Poker, Jonathan Grotenstein and Storms Reback say seven men played in the event -- Brunson, Moss, Pearson, Preston, Robert, Straus, and Jimmy Cassella -- but don’t identify the final six. “No one bothered to take notes or keep records,” they explain, conceding that “the details of what happened” during the two days of the event “have for the most part been lost to history.”

Over on Wikipedia, we find Moss, Pearson, and Bob Hooks at that final table, and the other three seats empty (“unknown”). At Hendon Mob, only Moss and Pearson (as runner-up) are listed.

Doyle Brunson writes about that event in his 2009 autobiography The Godfather of Poker. “There were only six players for this first tournament,” writes Brunson, “me, Johnny Moss, Puggy Pearson, Sailor Roberts, Jack Straus, and Jimmy Casella.”

I would be inclined to believe the first-hand witness, particularly his omission of Preston from the list of participants. Texas Dolly should remember if Amarillo Slim had played, I’d think. I mean, after all, Preston plays a pretty large role in Brunson’s story, having “faded the white line” with him and Roberts all those years.

Yet in Preston’s memoir, Amarillo Slim in a World Full of Fat People (2005), he also refers to “six players each putting up the $5,000 to enter,” and includes himself as one of the six. In fact, Preston essentially takes credit for having come up with the idea of having a freeze-out tourney to determine a champ.

“I wouldn’t say I was a long shot,” writes Preston, “but very few people gave me much of a chance.” According to Preston, he finished third, with Straus runner-up to Moss.

Look elsewhere and you find still more variations, not just for the 1971 WSOP, but for others as well (especially for the 1970s). There’s probably a worthwhile historical project in there for someone. Even just an extended investigation of that 1971 final table could prove an interesting inquiry.

Those looking back at the 2010 WSOP and WSOPE won’t have these problems, of course, as every move is being watched and most every pertinent detail recorded many times over. And, like I say, I’ll be checking in over at PokerNews today to see how the history gets written.

The WSOP Main Event: Birth, Build Up, Boom . . . Bastardized?

Still brooding a bit about the decision to delay the 2008 World Series of Poker Main Event final table to November. Have been reading through several thoughtful responses to the decision on various blogs, including those of Michael Craig (Part I & Part II), Luckbox and Otis (taking the pro & con), Haley, Andrew “Foucault” Brokos (here, here, and here), Mean Gene, Craig Cunningham, among others. Have also continued to follow the debates on the forums, where it appears as though posters are mostly (say, 3-to-1?) against.

Not that it matters, of course. As a colleague of mine likes to say, the toothpaste is already out of the tube.

My sense is there’s an unreconcilable tension here between a lot of folks’ ideas of what tournament poker should be and what the WSOP Main Event has become. Sometimes it is hard to remember what the Series was like before the Moneymaker “boom” changed everything, but when one looks back, one sees pretty clearly that what we’ve been watching for the last few years only barely resembles what went before it.

The WSOP Main Event: Birth

Back in 1970, Benny Binion invited a group of high-stakes, poker-playing buddies to the Horseshoe to play five different cash games. Thirty-eight players competed, then seven of them (Crandell Addington, Doyle Brunson, Carl Cannon, Johnny Moss, Puggy Pearson, “Amarillo Slim” Preston, and Brian “Sailor” Roberts) voted Moss that year’s winner. They gave him a silver cup.

The next year was the first in which a freeze-out tournament was used to determine the champion. In 1969, something called the “Texas Gamblers Convention” had been held at a Holiday Inn in Reno. (In fact, this gathering directly inspired Binion to create the WSOP the following year.) A tourney was held at the Reno convention, and some believe this to have been the first high-stakes poker tournament of any magnitude.

Back at Binion’s, in 1971 there were four preliminary events (Seven Card Stud, Five Card Stud, Razz, and Ace-to-Five Draw), followed by the Main Event, a $5,000 buy-in, winner-take-all No Limit Hold ’em tournament. Only six entered, and the story goes that Moss had to stage a huge comeback to take the $30,000 prize.

As Benny Binion’s son Jack told Gary Wise on the 4/16 episode of Wise Hand Poker, soon afterwards two reporters came out to Vegas from the Cleveland Plain Dealer to do a story on the WSOP. Seeing the chance to create some publicity -- both for the WSOP and his casino -- Binion got Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder to help further increase buzz for the event.

Indeed, just about every major change that has been made to the WSOP has been motivated by a desire to make the event more popular (both for players and fans). In other words, the media has been heavily involved pretty much from the beginning of the WSOP’s history, helping to shape (either indirectly or directly) what the series of tournaments would become.

The WSOP Main Event: Build Up

In 1972, Benny Binion added $5,000 of his own money for each entrant into the Main Event, thus doubling the prize pool. Eight entered that year, and “Amarillo Slim” Preston took the trophy. That’s right. There would be no bracelets per se until 1976 -- another change introduced to increase the WSOP’s prestige.

Preston, of course, helped make the WSOP a nationally-known entity following his victory, appearing on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show 11 times, being featured in a 60 Minutes segment, Tom Snyder’s The Tomorrow Show, Good Morning America, and doing a cameo in Robert Altman’s 1974 film California Split (reviewed here). He even addressed the U.S. Senate on one occasion. (I have no idea why, or what he might have told them.)

Besides increasing Preston’s own profile, the publicity tour got people interested in Binion’s Horseshoe and the WSOP. Of his appearance on The Tomorrow Show -- in which Preston appeared along with Benny Binion and Joe Bernstein (a Vegas gambler) -- Preston said it was like “an hour’s commercial for the Horseshoe.”

According to Jonathan Grotenstein and Storms Reback in All In: the (Almost) Entirely True Story of the World Series of Poker, “The Press flocked to the 1973 World Series -- beginning what would become for many of them an annual pilgrimage. They note that a couple of books -- including David Spanier’s Total Poker (1977) (discussed here) -- devoted entire chapters the event, “as did seven thousand newspaper and magazine articles.” One other major change in the way the event was covered happened in 1973 as well: “Television cameras also appeared for the first time as a crew from CBS News filmed a documentary narrated by Jimmy the Greek.”

That year there were six preliminary events and 13 entrants in the Main Event, each of whom paid the full $10,000 to enter. In 1974, there were 16 entrants. And so forth. In 1980, the year Stu Ungar won his first Main Event, there were 11 preliminary events and 73 who ponied up the $10K for the Main Event. In 1990, the year Mansour Matloubi become the first European to win the big one, there were 14 preliminary events and 194 Main Event entrants. In 2000, the year Chris “Jesus” Ferguson caught that nine on the river to beat T.J. Cloutier, there were 23 preliminary events and 512 players in the Main Event.

CBS produced a few more one-hour documentaries about the WSOP during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Then ESPN took it over in the late 1980s, producing a show most years through 2002. (There were no shows in 1996, 1999, 2000, or 2001.) Steve Lipscomb helped make a documentary of the 1999 WSOP for the Discovery Channel, a program that would provide the spark for the World Poker Tour. Then came the hole card cameras, a variation on the under-the-table cameras first introduced on the U.K.’s Late Night Poker in 1999. Lipscomb’s WPT made its first season debut on March 30, 2003. Then, later that summer, ESPN showed those seven episodes chronicling Chris Moneymaker outlasting 838 competitors to win the 2003 WSOP Main Event.

And the World Series of Poker was never the same.

The WSOP Main Event: Boom

The number of players entering the Main Event suddenly vaulted into the thousands: 2,576 in 2004; 5,619 in 2005; 8,773 in 2006; 6,358 in 2007. The number of preliminary events has also increased over that period from thirty-some to the current 54. Several of those early events have also begun attracting thousands of entrants; for example, last year’s initial $1,500 No Limit Hold ’em event (Event No. 3) had 2,998 runners.

A lot of us -- myself included -- have an idea about what tournament poker should be. While any given tournament will necessarily involve a higher degree of variance than will a long sequence of cash games, a lot of us like to believe that these tourneys -- including the Main Event -- do somehow reward players with above-average skill thanks to time-tested structures and well-planned payouts.

When the WSOP Main Event began attracting more than two thousand entrants in 2004, we “purists” could no longer pretend to think the tournament resembled what Addington, Brunson, Cannon, Pearson, Preston, and Roberts got together to do back on May 10, 1971. Or even what Moneymaker, et al. did in May 2003.

In 2004, because of space limitations, “Day One” had to be split into two days to fit everyone into Binion’s Horseshoe. (Aside from the 2005 ME final table, this would be the last year for the WSOP at Binion’s.) That year the tournament was played in a week, with no days off (other than if you happened to have played in the first Day One).

In 2005, the tourney was completed in eight days, again with no scheduled days off. In 2006, with four “Day Ones,” two “Day Twos,” and an off-day before the final table, the tournament took 14 days to complete. Last year, following a similar schedule (with a couple thousand fewer entrants), the tourney took 12 days.

Like I say, the tourney barely resembles what it looked like even five years ago, but I think there has always been an effort to make it at least appear to be a unified event genuinely testing each individual poker player’s skill at the tables. That’s out the window, now. This year the Main Event will begin on July 3rd and conclude on November 11th -- a 132-day span.

The WSOP Main Event: Bastardized?

Now I don’t oppose change per se, but this one is different, representing an utter break from what went before. Some, like Shane “Shaniac” Schleger, believe the change has “bastardized and twisted around” the format of traditional tournament poker as it has developed and become established over the last forty years. Others, like Michael Craig, think the change will give poker (generally speaking) a much need “shot in the arm” and help with the business of “building the brand” of the WSOP.

At the end of his thoughtful post on the matter, Up for Poker’s Otis (who opposes the change) eloquently states “As we move forward, we should always be asking ourselves what is more important . . . the integrity or growth of the game? Moreover, is there ever a time we should put the latter before the former?” Otis doesn’t think there is.

Of course, looking back at the history of the WSOP Main Event -- in particular the last five years -- I think it is clear that for all its symbolic value, the Main Event has evolved into something very different than an indicator of poker’s integrity.

Indeed, the decision to move its conclusion months and months away from the rest of the Series is itself appropriately symbolic, signifying the utter separation of the Main Event from what a lot of us believe “real” poker to be.