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.

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.

The GPI Turns Three

Saw this morning Alexandre Dreyfus tweeting that the Global Poker Index was marking its third anniversary today.

I couldn’t resist cheekily responding by pointing out that according to the GPI’s own “Aging Factor” for which results more than three years old no longer count in the rankings, they’ll “need to pick up more points now to replace those from the start.”

Kind of interesting to think how much the GPI has managed over these three years to locate itself near the center of everything as far as tournament poker goes. The rankings get referenced a lot in poker media, most full-time tourney players are at least aware of them (if not genuinely motivated by them), and of course the various events and partnerships (such as with the WSOP) have increased the GPI’s profile even further.

The use of the GPI’s formula to determine the WSOP Player of the Year this time around earned a lot of cynical response (including from your humble scribbler), but setting that aside, the general ranking system has at least worked to some extent as a kind of shorthand reference indicating players’ relative consistency when it comes to tournaments.

Think about tournament poker as it was played 10 years ago, during the height of the “boom.” How were players’ performances judged against one another then? And, concomitantly, how were online sponsorships -- in abundance then -- awarded?

It was a fairly scattershot process, almost entirely manipulated by television exposure. That’s not to say the GPI is the best way to measure what tournament players have done and thereby suggest what they might do in the future, but at least there’s a kind of method being followed that is more obviously meaningful and less random.

Zinno’s Paradox

Last night Anthony Zinno won his first ever World Series of Poker bracelet, topping a field of 175 in the $10,000 Pot-Limit Omaha Championship (Event No. 60) to earn a better than $1.12 million first prize.

That’s Zinno’s fifth cash this summer at the WSOP, and incredibly he’s made the final table all five times. He’s also won two WPT Main Events this year as well as a WPT Bay 101 High Roller, so it has been some year for the Boston resident.

In terms of the occasionally discussed (and occasionally derided) WSOP Player of the Year race, Zinno’s win was worth 619.11 points according to the formula followed by the Global Poker Index, which added to the 1,323.61 he had previously gave him 1,942.72 points total.

That moved him into second place behind current leader Mike Gorodinsky who has six WSOP cashes this summer including a third, a second, and a first, with the latter coming in the $50K Poker Players Championship (Event No. 44). (Gorodinsky, you’ll remember, was wondering a short while back what exactly the incentive was for chasing the POY.)

Gorodinsky also cashed in the $25K PLO event, finishing 17th, a result worth 279.49 POY points. Added to the 1,771.21 he had before, that gives Gorodinsky 2,050.70 points total.

So Zinno was behind Gorodinsky prior to the conclusion of Event No. 60, then earned enough to pass Gorodinsky but didn’t because the latter also earned points in the same tournament.

Will it keep happening for Zinno, that every time he cashes and earns points Gorodinsky will also cash to remain ahead of him?

Could it happen that in order to win WSOP POY, Zinno would have to traverse an infinite number of divisions in order to reach Gorodinsky, but since it is impossible to traverse an infinite number of divisions, Zinno will never be able to pass Gorodinsky?

Really, we all should have seen this coming.

What Are We Playing for Again?

It’s been a while -- five years now -- but once upon a time I had a full-time job that had nothing to do with poker whatsoever. For a long time, too (a decade, in fact).

Won’t go too much into specifics, but I will say that part of that job involved serving on lots of committees. And therefore attending lots of meetings. With agendas.

Yeah, it was as fun as it sounds.

In those meetings we’d discuss all manner of things that needed to be done to improve our place of employment for everyone involved, including us. However, we were only employees, and in truth in most cases we didn’t have the political power or tangible resources to make those changes we were discussing happen.

As a result, many of the meetings followed a similar trajectory, starting out sticking closely to those agenda items which would inspire all sorts of suggested courses of action, with discussions often building into grand, detailed plans resulting from the push-and-pull of our debates.

Then would come the inevitable “existential” moment. Usually that moment would come just before the meeting’s scheduled time of concluding, and right after someone brought up the troubling truth that when it came to the thing we were discussing, we technically had no real means to make it happen. Then someone would ask the question.

“What exactly are we doing here?”

Usually just asking the question was enough to send us all back into our individual caves of despair. What we had been discussing, we all were forced to realize, was entirely abstract -- a theory that could never be put into practice.

I thought about that just a short while ago when noticing an exchange of tweets between Paul Volpe and Mike Gorodinsky, the two players currently sitting atop the 2015 World Series of Poker Player of the Year race “powered” this year by the Global Poker Index.

“Hey @WSOP @WSOPTD what exactly are the added incentives for POY these days?” tweeted Gorodinsky, currently second in the POY race. “I’d also like to know if there is any incentive,” replied the current POY leader Paul Volpe.The person manning the @WSOP account quickly answered the question.

“It is a permanent banner hung from the WSOP annually,” was the reply.

Had to chuckle at that, and as I say, it made me think back to those committee meetings where so often we fooled ourselves into thinking we were discussing something concrete before finally realizing there wasn’t much at stake at all. It also made me think a little of the anticlimax associated with the announcement of the Colossus first prize a couple of weeks ago.

Volpe expressed some disappointment, saying the WSOP was “giving no incentive to go to Europe and try and win it,” and Gordinsky said “agree 100%.”

Soon, though, WSOP Executive Director Ty Stewart (@wsopSUITd) jumped in to clarify that in fact there is a trophy to be won as well, plus a $10,000 buy-in to next year’s Main Event. “But honestly,” Stewart added, “w/winner traditionally having earned high 6 to 7 figures, is prize the motivation?”

Never mind problems with the POY formula, it is hard to say exactly how much those in contention for the POY prize are valuing it. However -- unlike was the case in so many of those committee meetings -- at least they are playing for something.

GPI, WSOP, POY, et al.

A little behind with other stuff this week. Saw one item over the past few days I might’ve written more extensively about in the past, but am only going to allude to briefly here today -- both because I don’t have time to sort through it fully, and I’m not sure how deeply I’d want to get into it even if I did.

It was announced last week that the Global Poker Index will be “powering” the World Series of Poker Player of the Year rankings this time around. (That’s a great, positive-sounding verb, by the way, to describe such a relationship, isn’t it?) In fact, the new name for the race/award will be the “GPI WSOP Player of the Year.”

BLUFF had previously been the one powering the WSOP POY, and their method seemed reasonably powerful enough although like any ranking system it was the subject of plenty of debate. I think over recent years more have objected to the WSOP Europe and/or the WSOP APAC events being included in the tabulations than have had any problems with the way the rankings were done.

Now the WSOP Player of the Year will be determined according to points players earned as determined by the current GPI model, which differs in a number of ways from what BLUFF had done. Like I say, I might’ve written at length about this before, but instead today I’ll point first to Jess Welman’s recent post over on her blog that highlights some of these differences, titled “POY Problems.”

Amid the Twitter discussion of the topic I was led to read another interesting post written a few months ago that like Jess’s takes issue with the GPI rankings while also comparing them to BLUFF’s method. That one is by poker player Michael Wang and is titled “A Critique of the GPI Ranking System.”

The WSOP POY race -- or should I say, the GPI WSOP POY race (which is hard to rattle off if you need to ASAP or PDQ) -- serves a few different purposes, including heightening interest in the events for fans of poker and in some cases providing encouragement to players to play more events. The winner gets a trophy, is pictured on a banner to be hung in the Rio hallways each summer (like Allen Cunningham’s above), and is honored in a special ceremony, but there aren’t any other tangible benefits (as far as I know).

Stepping back from the whole issue, it feels a lot like a different, more detailed version of the debate over WSOP bracelets and their relative worth. It also resembles other debates from major sports, too, having to do with the numbers games can create and how we interpret them.

I’ll just leave it all right there for now, though, and let you, reader, do your own interpreting.

Playing Games, Watching Sports

Saw someone refer in passing to this whole “sportifying” poker idea that has come up now and again over the last several months, usually in the context of the Global Poker Index and some of the ideas and stories related to their method of ranking tournament players and associated ventures.

It was an unsympathetic reference, insisting -- as I tend to do -- that poker is really a “game” not a “sport,” although not elaborating on the point much further.

This debate or conversation starter or whatever you want to call it comes up occasionally in my “Poker in American Film and Culture” course, thanks largely to a reading I assign early on, the first chapter of Al Alvarez’s book Poker: Bets, Bluffs and Bad Beats titled “The American Game.”

In that chapter Alvarez makes a good case for why poker is, in his opinion, the “American national game.” In fact the first move he makes as he launches into the argument is explicitly to distinguish poker from baseball and football -- i.e., a couple of other games which might spring to mind as candidates for the title he’s bestowing on poker.

The difference, says Alvarez, is that “baseball and football are spectator sports, and, airtime and column inches notwithstanding, not many people go on playing them once they have left school and lost their physical edge. Poker, in comparison, is a game for life and a great equalizer -- what the young gain from stamina the old make up for with experience -- and it is played by at least sixty million Americans.”

The book was published in 2001, when about 285 million lived in the U.S. Today the population is edging toward 320 million. You continue to see estimates of the number of poker players ranging from 40-60 million, although that’s obviously a hard number to pinpoint.

In any case it’s probably safe to say there are more people playing poker in America than are playing baseball or football. According to one report, there were a little over one million football players in high school last year and a little under half a million playing baseball. You could extrapolate from that how many total players (older and younger) there might be in each sport, but I think the total would be well below the 40-60 million poker players.

A lifelong sport like golf might be a better comparison, actually. It sounds like there are about 25 million golfers in the country at present, a number that has held steady for the last three years or so according to another report.

Stepping back from all of this (and perhaps getting a little abstract as I do), it occurred to me that calling poker a “sport” rather than a “game” could make it seem more like something you watch than something you play.

Many of us love to play one sport or another, but don’t necessarily look upon all sports as providing opportunities for participation. Or any, even. Each sport requires some specific set of physical skills that can potentially limit involvement for those who lack them. Meanwhile playing a game of cards also requires some skills (more so mental than physical), and to play cards well requires even more, but the game of poker is nowhere near as exclusive as are sports like baseball and basketball.

I know the idea behind “sportifying” poker is to make the game more accessible (and acceptable), but could calling poker a sport and championing its most successful players as superior mental “athletes” actually make the game less inviting to new players? That is, could it make the game seem more exclusive as far as participating is concerned, though (perhaps) more inviting to spectators?

Another way of posing the same question: Today the International Federation of Poker (@IFPoker) tweeted “#Poker is a game where the best players think about the way hands are played at a level most people couldn't even imagine! #mindsport #skill.” That’s a view I imagine most of us who have studied poker and who take the game seriously can readily appreciate to be true.

But does that make poker a more inviting game to play? Or less?

Four for Urbanovich

Have mentioned here before how once a week I compile a report on the latest Global Poker Index rankings -- both overall and Player of the Year -- for PokerNews.

Since the overall rankings reflects results going back as much as two years, there usually isn’t too much dramatic movement at the top. A player winning a tournament earns a decent number of points and can move up even hundreds of spots down below, but among the top 10, anyway, the players are pretty dug in. Indeed, this week the top 10 players are the same as from a week ago, with Ole Schemion in the top spot for a 14th straight week.

Meanwhile the POY race is a bit more volatile, especially as we’re still early in the year and players are just starting to gather points. Those doing well at the first big festivals of 2015 -- the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, EPT Deauville and EPT Malta, the WPT stops and WSOP-C stops, and others -- are the ones populating that list right now.

Thus it wasn’t too much of a surprise this week to be reporting a new POY leader, Poland’s Dzmitry Urbanovich, although it was notable to see he’d jumped all the way from No. 17 to No. 1 this week. And that he’d leapfrogged way ahead of the chase pack, suddenly turning up with a little over 2,380 points, more than 600 ahead of nearest challenger Joe Kuether.

Knew Urbanovich had been winning side events in Malta, and at the time of that report and the latest rankings he’d in fact won three different ones.

The €25,500 High Roller had gotten some news earlier in the week, with Urbanovich topping a tough field of 68 entries to win a €572,300 first prize. A few days later he bested a 156-entry field in the €1,100 NLHE Turbo to win another trophy and €35,200. Then the day after that he won a third event, the €5,200 NLHE Turbo that drew 55 entries to claim a €110,000 first prize.

At the time Urbanovich had additionally cashed in two other events -- final tabling both including finishing runner-up in a stud event. Then today came the news that he’d won a fourth side event in Malta, the €220 Crazy Pineapple Turbo tournament that drew a field of 56 to earn Urbanovich a modest €3,260 first prize.

Even with the small fields in a couple of the events, winning four tournaments in a single series is remarkable. Indeed, Chris Hall reports it represents a record for the EPT.

Some feat, and again suggests something about how winning begets winning in poker.

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.

Global Poker Masters Plays Out This Weekend

The two-day Global Poker Masters kicks off tomorrow in Malta. The European Poker Tour is there now, too, the first visit for the EPT to the island just south of Italy. They’ve got a huge series going there, with 69 events total (I believe) and the Main Event getting started tomorrow.

As far as the GPM is concerned -- a.k.a., poker’s “World Cup” (as the GPI is dubbing it) -- on Saturday there will be five rounds of play scheduled starting at 12 noon Malta time (GMT+1, or five hours ahead of me in the ET zone). Then on Sunday comes the quarterfinals, semis, and finals, again starting at 12 noon.

Each of the five rounds on Saturday is comprised of eight-handed sit-n-gos with one representative from each of the eight national teams -- Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and United States -- at each table. The structures will be fast, with every SNG due to finish within two-and-a-half hours. There will be a 30-second “shot clock,” too, to speed things up.

The players’ finishes for the day (with points given for each place) will all be tabulated with the eight teams being ranked accordingly, then the eighth-place team will be eliminated from the competition -- kind of an interesting idea which at a glance appears to make the Saturday SNGs more meaningful since not everyone automatically gets through to the “tournament” on Sunday.

But even though they start out Sunday playing something called the “quarterfinals,” it isn’t really that.

Teams are seeded according to their finishes on Saturday, then on Sunday will start with the five-person teams playing heads-up matches against each other. The top-ranked team gets a bye in the quarterfinals, with the other six remaining teams playing No. 2 vs. No. 7, No. 3 vs. No. 6, and No. 4 vs. No. 5.

Rather than just have the team winning the most heads-up matches advance from each of those three contests, they’ll again tally points, rank the six teams, then eliminate the one with the lowest points. That means six teams survive the “quarterfinals” to go on to the “semifinals.”

The six teams then pick one player from each to play a relatively deeper-stacked SNG (as the “semis”). Sounds like they can “tag” players in and out, too, if desired. I believe the starting stacks will be different, too, for this SNG, corresponding to how the six teams fared in the “quarterfinals.” (Not sure how the stack of the team with a bye will be determined.)

Once this SNG gets to heads-up, the five players from the two players’ teams then all sit down to play heads-up matches, with each match starting with stacks that equal the stacks of the two players in the SNG. Think of the heads-up match suddenly being cloned four times over. The five matches are then played out, with the team winning three or more winning the title.

It resembles in part the “Americas Cup of Poker” I had a chance to cover at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure this year (for the PokerStars blog here and here), although throws in some extra twists on the second day to divert from that formula. The whole sucker will be streamed over on Twitch, and it’ll be hard to resist dipping in over there this weekend from time to time just to see what it’s all about (while I have the NCAA on the teevee, of course).

I’m wondering what kind of stories might be produced by the GPM, aside from who wins (which I think isn’t necessarily the most compelling part of it). The number viewing the Twitch channel will be of interest, probably. So, too, might some especially compelling hands, if they arise. There could be other, unexpected stories, perhaps even including some related to this whole campaign to “sportify” poker the event is intended to highlight.

Anyhow, even if there will be a more compelling team game to keep my attention this weekend (for me, anyway), I am nonetheless curious to see what happens with the GPM the next couple of days.

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.

I Said “Lady, Step Inside My Hyundai”

Didn’t see the Grammys -- can’t say I normally do -- although have absorbed the requisite amount of buzzing about it over the last couple of days, as will happen if you click on your computer machine and look around.

I like Beck’s Morning Phase, the disc that earned the trophy for album of the year, although as most who’ve followed his career have acknowledged, there are other, better titles in the catalogue. For me, Midnite Vultures and Sea Change are the twin peaks. The latter does the melancholy thing more consistently for me than does Phase, while the former is an inspired amalgam of faux funk.

I realized this morning when my alarm went off I’ve had the first few seconds of “Debra” as my ringtone for so many years I’d stopped thinking of the song when it goes off. Meanwhile, just now I clicked on the video below and reached for my phone.

I remember seeing Beck do this one on teevee close to two decades ago on some show wearing a white suit and referring to it not as “Debra” but something like “I Wanna Get With You Only You and Your Sister.” I knew Mellow Gold and Odelay and was a fan already, then later when “Debra” finally found its way onto Vultures I was fully hooked, destined to keep checking in on Beck thereafter.

Beck’s been hit-or-miss for me in some respects, although he’s always intriguing. I even spent a week or two last year exploring that Song Reader release for which Beck issued an “album” of 20 songs without recording them -- i.e., just as sheet music. I learned a couple on the guitar, and watched a number of vids of others’ versions which all somehow sounded more or less like “Beck songs.”

I also saw and heard the odd-seeming rant by Kanye West about Beck’s win. That seemed to have began as a humorous, self-effacing reprise of his “Imma Let You Finish” performance at another awards show a few years back, then became less funny after West’s incoherent manifesto about Beck needing “to respect artistry” and give the trophy to Beyoncé.

I wonder if those Global Poker Index-sponsored American Poker Awards coming up later this month in Los Angeles could drum up some analogous controversy? Maybe I’ll try to stir things up over Twitter among the nominees for Media Person of the Year -- Nolan Dalla, Chris Grove, Kevin Mathers, and Rich Ryan -- to create conditions for something similar.

I mean, Dalla seems like a good candidate to deliver a Kanyesque rant, wouldn’t you say? He definitely provided some good Grammy-related criticism this week, reaching back through the years with his post “The Most Baffling Grammy Award Winners of All Time (i.e. “My Anti-Grammy Awards”).”

Meanwhile, I’m heading out. Gonna step inside my Hyundai and go out for a real good meal.

Poker and Sports (and Fun and Games)

Earlier this week Victoria Coren Mitchell was interviewed over on PokerNews about various topics, one of which was the participation of no less than 22 men in this year’s women’s event at EPT11 Deauville. You might have heard about the men overrunning that event, with one of them eventually winning. In fact there were but 83 total entrants in the €200 buy-in tournament, meaning men made up more than one-fourth of the field.

I’ve written here before on several occasions about the subject of men playing in tournaments designated as women’s events. In fact I’ve even written about Coren Mitchell’s opinions about the subject, a post occasioned by my having covered the Ladies Event at the 2012 WSOP when around 10 men participated, as did Coren. That was before she would add Mitchell, and before the WSOP would add that inflated 10x price tag to the event for men wanting to play.

To summarize that earlier discussion, both she and I find the men playing in ladies events a huge bummer, a point of view she reiterated in the interview this week. There was another point she made at the end of the interview, however, that I found newly thought-provoking, something that came up in the context of discussing the Hendon Mob database.

Coren Mitchell has known the Hendon Mob guys from way back, having participated in the old forum, written columns in the past for the site, and also shared many funny anecdotes about them in her excellent poker memoir, For Richer, For Poorer: A Love Affair With Poker.

In her comments she somewhat laments the Hendon Mob site’s having been taken over by the Global Poker Index group, primarily because it disconnects the site from what it once was (and from her friends the Boatmans, Joe Beevers, and Ram Vaswani). “It was all a bit of fun, and now they are not involved in it anymore,” she says.

Continuing from there, Coren Mitchell speaks directly to the effort by the GPI and Alexandre Dreyfus to “sportify” poker.

“If the website is trying to seriously make poker a sport, I think they may have lost some of the comedy of the enterprise,” suggests Coren Mitchell. “But it doesn’t matter. Is snooker a sport? Is darts a sport? Is chess a sport? I don’t think it’s an important question, really.”

Again I’m finding myself agreeing with Coren Mitchell, sharing the same ambivalence about arguments over poker being or not being a “sport” (something else I’ve written about before.) But the idea that focusing on poker’s sport-like elements could potentially drain some of the “comedy” or fun from the game isn’t necessarily something I’d considered before.

I can see the point -- that is, how heightening the significance of competition perhaps diminishes that of community, thus (potentially) making things more serious and less fun. But it’s an idea I’ll need to think about further before deciding if I agree.

What do you think? Whatever your thoughts might be about efforts to “sportify” poker, do you think those efforts might in some way serve to reduce “the comedy of the enterprise”?

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.

The Trip from PCA to Bee

Made it home in good shape, thankful for once to be flying directly to my destination. There were a lot of familiar folks taking the same flight to Charlotte with me, including poker media and several players, although for them CLT was a just a stop on the way elsewhere.

Had kind of a funny coincidence with the seat draw for my airborne, two-and-a-half-hour sit-n-go. In the morning before leaving I had pulled together a new article for PokerNews updating the Global Poker Index rankings. In the overall GPI Ole Schemion is still on top this week, while Pratyush Buddiga (pictured above, via PokerStars’ Neil Stoddart) had made a move up several spots to No. 2 after finishing seventh in the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure Main Event -- a career-high ranking for the Colorado player.

I had decided to feature Buddiga in the headline and in the photo illustrating the article, and so I had to chuckle when he came on board to take the empty seat next to me on the plane.

I told him about the article which he’d already seen -- “I want to get to No. 1,” he grinned -- and we chatted further about the PCA and our respective trips home. While I knew some about his background -- including, of course, his win as a youngster in the Scripps National Spelling Bee back in 2002 -- I didn’t realize he’d graduated from Duke a few years ago. As a UNC grad, I had to report how I am obligated to pull against the Blue Devils at every opportunity, which he of course understood.

Later while disembarking we talked a bit more about spelling bees. I remembered Rebecca Sealfon’s win back in 1997, which he mentioned having watched, too, and how it had gotten him interested in the competition. Many also remember Pratyush’s brother, Akshay, who finished runner-up a couple of years after Pratyush won, and how during the competition he famously fainted after being given a word to spell, then dramatically rose back up to spell it correctly. It wasn’t until later that I recalled having seen the 2002 documentary Spellbound (about the ’99 Bee), which I’m sure Pratyush watched as well.

Pratyush mentioned how a lot of people are more interested in his spelling bee story than in his poker accomplishments. I recalled how during the PCA coverage Howard Swains had written a post about him that included a video interview with Sarah Herring, and how Howard had worked in a sneaky reference to the word “prospicience” which by spelling correctly Pratyush had clinched the title back in ’02.

We parted, with him going to settle in for a longish layover before flying to Denver while I took off for baggage claim. It was fun meeting the very friendly Pratyush. I’m sure in some ways his experience handling the intense pressure of the spelling bees as a youth is serving him well at the poker tables today. After getting home I told Vera about Pratyush and his spelling bee background (and his getting a degree from Duke), and she responded that it proves again how winning poker players tend to be smart in other ways, too (which is true).

I thought back to the couple of times I participated in a spelling bee, way back in elementary school. I don’t remember much about it (I was seven or eight), but after all of these years I do recall the word that knocked me out of one of them -- thermometer.

I don’t think we were sending winners from our little school to D.C. Nor we we being asked to spell words like “prospicience” or “euonym” or “alopecoid.”

I mean, really, ours was a humble Bee.

Browsing the Global Poker Index

During the World Series of Poker this summer one of my PokerNews assignments was to compile the weekly column reporting on the updated Global Poker Index rankings. I picked that duty back up back in September and have been delivering that news each week for the last several months.

Has been kind of interesting to pay a little closer attention both to the 2014 Player of the Year race and the overall GPI rankings.

The current standings show Daniel Colman leading in the 2014 POY race, a spot he’s held for six weeks running. Ole Schemion -- who won the 2013 GPI POY -- picked up a couple of big finishes at the Master Classics of Poker in Amsterdam recently to surge up to second behind Colman. With EPT Prague and the WPT Five Diamond Poker Classic still left to go, there ought to be more movement in that race before the calendar reaches December 31.

Meanwhile in the overall rankings Dan Smith has led the way for 16 straight weeks. He just lost some points, though, after his victory in last year’s WPT Five Diamond Main Event (which I helped cover) became more than 12 months old and thus now counts less for him points-wise. Schemion is number two in those rankings as well, now just a small cash or so away from surpassing Smith.

The GPI has been around since the start of 2011, and some may not even remember it was created along with the ill-fated Epic Poker League as a means to decide which players would qualify for EPL events. From the ashes of that dumpster fire arose the GPI, surviving as not only an interesting discussion-starter but also as an increasingly relevant part of the poker tournament circuit.

I was thinking today how the GPI should perhaps go back into the past and apply its formula -- or a modified version of it -- to pre-2011 tournament poker. Records are fairly complete for a lot of the tours going back at least into the early 2000s, making it possible perhaps to perform a kind of retroactive ranking of players and naming of POYs.

Obviously there are pros and cons to the ranking system as far as its worth as an indicator of players’ ability. I also understand well the cynicism of those who are not on board for the whole campaign to “sportify" poker (as the GPI rankings could be said to attempt to do). But the lists are still quite diverting and if anything help bring some publicity to a lot of players -- and the game, generally -- that might not otherwise happen.

Rankings and Recency

Been scribbling nonstop all day today and thus have little left in my scrambled brain to give over here, I’m afraid.

I’ve seen the tweets today reacting to the news from the Borgata regarding the resolution of “chipgate” -- i.e., the counterfeit chip scandal from the 2014 Borgata Winter Open that saw the tournament halted with 27 players remaining. I haven’t looked closely as yet at the terms of the resolution, but from the impassioned responses I’ve seen it obviously has produced a lot of reaction. Then again, as I mentioned here earlier, it was hard to imagine any resolution that wasn’t going to be problematic.

I’ll look more closely at it when I’ve got more mental fuel to give it more proper consideration. Speaking of being low on mental fuel, I did run an errand today and heard a little sports radio, including some commentary by John Feinstein on the conclusion of yesterday’s Masters won by Bubba Watson.

I probably have an unreasonable prejudice against Feinstein that stems from his being a Duke grad, so take this observation for what it’s worth. He was all hot and bothered today on his radio show over the PGA’s World Golf Rankings which currently have Tiger Woods in the top spot and Watson fourth.

Feinstein was complaining how recent winners of golf’s majors -- e.g., Jason Dufner, Justin Rose -- weren’t in the current top 10, while Henrik Stenson was ranked third without ever having won a major. And, of course, Tiger hasn’t won one since the U.S. Open in 2008.

He went on to whine about how the PGA’s rankings are calculated, complaining how they draw from golfers’ performances over a two-year period. “They should just start from zero,” he went on, blithely ignoring the whole idea of a ranking system that didn’t overvalue what happened most recently but recognized achievement over a more significant sample size (if you will).

The little rant recalled to me the Global Poker Index system which similarly uses not just the most recent and biggest tournaments but tries to incorporate a more comprehensive view of performance (in the GPI’s case over a three-year span).

Not saying either system is without flaw, but it just seemed to me like Feinstein was willingly ignoring what a ranking system actually was in favor of an instinctively simple bit of airtime filler designed to sound like a thoughtful position on debatable issue.

But what do you expect, really. I mean look at Duke... they just lost to Mercer.

Egalitarian? Egad.

Like many of you who might have clicked through my tweet announcing a new blog post (@hardboiledpoker), you probably also had your timelines populated today with much back-and-forthing regarding the Global Poker Index and the pros and cons of ranking systems designed to indicate who might be the best of the best when it comes to tournament poker.

If you did, you noticed that Phil Hellmuth has kind of weirdly wandered into the conversation, making various claims and pronouncements that remind me of a tenured faculty member who has missed every meeting all semester suddenly showing up to share his thoughts on this particular agenda item.

Starting earlier this week, Hellmuth has tweeted about a half-dozen times on the matter, sort of firing randomly in ways that belie a lack of understanding of how the GPI works, what ranking systems actually represent, and perhaps a desire to be considered by his Twitter followers to be the kind of respected commentator on poker-related issues that other players actually are.

His first salvo was the most hilarious, although he’s come close a couple of times since. “The GPI is very flawed,” he began. “I cannot respect a points award system that counts $100,000 high rollers. Poker awards need to be egalitarian.”

I liked Dreyfus’s early response to the non-specific criticism of the first sentence. “Poker is flawed,” said Dreyfus.

Dreyfus also offered a more detailed response to the rest of Hellmuth’s tweet in a post over on the GPI site, including pointing out that the Poker Brat’s criticism of $100K events being included ignores how the GPI actually weighs high roller and super high roller events differently in order to prevent them from unduly affecting rankings.

The best part of it, though, is the line that “Poker awards need to be egalitarian.” Hellmuth might as well say that the ranking system is unfair because it penalizes poor players while rewarding the good ones.

Sure, he means to say something less obtuse about high-rolling players having an inherent advantage in such rankings, but that ain’t the words he’s chosen. (I see the latest episode of the PokerNews GPI podcast is titled “Hellmuth the Egalitarian,” which makes me want to listen.)

I suppose the only real “egalitarian” tourney rankings system would be one that accounted for buy-ins, too (something that came up during the long Twitter discussion today), but that obviously ain’t happening.

Now Hellmuth is ducking his head inside the door to say stuff about a “players council” being needed to establish criteria for ranking systems. We’ve heard this line before from him -- recently, in fact, such as last fall when he wanted to “draw a line in the sand” over which WSOP bracelets were supposed to “count.”

But like I say, it’s like the whole faculty has been working on this issue for weeks and he’s just bumbled into the room to remind everyone that even if he’s presently well outside the top 100 on the GPI, he can’t be fired!

Anyhow, sorry to those who like my buddy Remko were pointing out how there was an overload of GPI-related talk in his timeline today. “They should change the word ‘Timeline’ on my Twitter app to ‘Endless GPI Discussion with some sports news and pictures of cats,‘” he tweeted.

To which I felt like there was really only one correct response (click pic to enlarge).