It Was $86, Not $39

Here’s a bit of poker trivia I had not realized until today.

Chris Moneymaker turns 40 years old on Saturday. Was reading around a little about Moneymaker this afternoon and after following a few links learned that one detail from the story of his 2003 WSOP Main Event win has long been misreported. It’s a detail I myself have repeated a few times, I know, both here on the blog and elsewhere.

It has long been passed around that Moneymaker won his $10,000 seat into the WSOP Main Event on PokerStars via a satellite, with the cost of that satellite almost always being referred to as $39. I knew that he didn’t actually win his ME seat in that satellite -- rather, he won entry into a larger satellite, and from there won his seat. But I only just found out that the buy-in for the first one wasn’t $39 -- it was $86.

First, here’s a post by Dan Goldman (former VP of Marketing for PokerStars) on his Braindump v1.0 blog from a couple of years ago in which he originally repeated the $39 figure, then was corrected in a comment by Michael Josem (who currently does PR for PokerStars).

Goldman follows up with a confirmation that Josem is right, the satellite buy-in was $86, despite everyone having repeated $39 for years and years -- including Moneymaker himself!

In Eric Raskin’s oral history of the 2003 WSOP Main Event -- exerpted on Grantland in an article titled “When We Held Kings” -- Moneymaker says that he entered a $39 sit-n-go, winning a seat into a bigger satellite from which he then won his ME seat. In fact, Moneymaker’s autobiography published in 2005 is titled Moneymaker: How an Amateur Poker Player Turned $40 into $2.5 Million at the World Series of Poker, again repeating the incorrect detail (here rounded up) regarding the buy-in.

This page over in the “PokerStars Online Museum” further confirms both the $86 buy-in figure, noting that it “is correct and has been checked against PokerStars’ official tournament records,” as well as that “earlier reports that it was a $39 satellite were mistaken.” The $86 tourney got Moneymaker a seat in a $650 one with 67 players in which there were three ME seats awarded, with Moneymaker getting one.

Trivia, for sure, but perhaps the most interesting part of it is the fact that so many got the detail wrong for so long.

Super Bowl Postscript: Replaying the Last Hand

Just a short postscript today on Super Bowl XLIX after reading New England fan Bill Simmons’s lengthy “Retro Running Diary” of the game.

To refer to anything Simmons posts over on Grantland as “lengthy” is redundant, as word count often trumps most other considerations with his stuff (a subject about which I’ve written here before.) But in this case there’s a decent amount of quality along with the quantity as he narrates in minute detail the roller coaster ride taken by the world’s most verbose Pats fan as he watched that incredible game and finish on Sunday.

The most intriguing part of the article (for me) comes near the end when Simmons attempts to come to grips with the seemingly baffling decision made by New England head coach Bill Belichick not to use one of the Pats’ two remaining timeouts when there was almost exactly one minute to go and Seattle was readying for a second-and-goal at New England’s one-yard line.

Rather that call the TO, Belichick let the clock run with more than 30 seconds ticking away before the Seahawks snapped it with 0:26 left for what would become a stunning interception to end (essentially) their title hopes. Like most everyone, Simmons found the lack of a timeout bewildering at the time, and if you scroll down to that part of his article there are some funny animated .gifs helping underscore his confusion.

At that point Simmons steps back and with a full day’s worth of hindsight is able to construct a kind of hypothesis to explain Belichick’s thinking, aided in part (he says) by a Washington Post article by Adam Kilgore explaining why it could be considered a “sneaky-brilliant decision” insofar as in a strange way it might well have helped coerce Seattle into the pass call.

Simmons also spoke with a couple of N.E. guys (“two of my Patriots sources”) in addition to rewatching the end several times. “A long, fascinating email from a poker player helped” as well, explains Simmons, who then goes into a further elaboration of Kilgore’s idea that by not calling the timeout, Belichick invited Seattle to consider other options when it came to that second down play call, options which in the frenzied, pressurized atmosphere of the moment perhaps became trickier to evaluate.

In other words, the idea Simmons pursues is that by not calling the TO, Belichick did something that momentarily perplexed an opponent that had expected him to do just that. “He wanted confusion and chaos,” opines Simmons. “He wanted that in-game pressure to tilt Seattle’s way.... [He] felt that in-stadium energy shifting after Lynch’s first-down run [the previous play],” and so in the moment decided not to stop the clock and thereby mess with Seattle’s collective head.

The decision also had a concrete purpose -- to elicit the possibility of a particular pass play (the slant) against which New England had specifically prepared to defend. In any event, it sounds like the poker player (who? I wonder) helped Simmons put the whole situation into terms that made Belichick’s move not only seem understandable, but truly inspired.

“This was now a poker game,” writes Simmons. “What do you do when you know you have the lousier hand? You bluff.”

I like the analogy, and not just because Belichick often wears a hoodie. The Pats absolutely had “the lousier hand” in that spot, although I’m not sure I’d describe the non-action of not calling a timeout as a “bluff.” Rather it was just an unexpected play that suddenly put the pressure on Seattle when deciding how to answer -- as though one player has made a confident bet that looks like it will be enough to win the pot, then another makes a surprising all-in push that forces the first into a much-harder-than-expected decision.

I mean, folding seemed the right play, if we want to regard calling the TO there thusly. Heck, announcer Chris Collinsworth was even bringing up the “let them score and get the ball back” idea, which of course would have represented another kind of folding in this spot.

But no, Belichick didn’t fold. He shoved. By not stopping the clock, he made it clear the game was going to end on this hand, and there would be no next one.

If you’re still thinking about the game and that crazy ending, I recommend spending a short while reading Simmons’s story of it. His lyrical conclusion regarding Belichick’s persona, reputation, and possible legacy works well, and is somewhat persuasive, too -- so much so that even this non-Pats fan couldn’t help but appreciate it.

Whether or not Belichick knew exactly what he was accomplishing by not calling that timeout, I’m convinced it wasn’t simply a momentary lapse or something done without purpose. He absolutely meant not to call the TO, all right, although I’m not quite ready to allow that he knew what would happen next with as much precision as Simmons appears ready to believe.

It was assuredly a poker game, that ending. And good gosh, what a river.

Dealing with KISS

So I’m clicking around today, as we all tend to do, and see Chuck Klosterman has written something like 10,000 words about KISS today for Grantland. It’s kind of a funny divide we have going here online these days -- everything is either over in an instant or designed to take up your whole afternoon.

Klosterman’s “definitive guide” to KISS has been occasioned by the fact that the four-plus-decade-old group is slated to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this week. After a lengthy preamble, the piece covers every single studio album, live album, compilation, solo work, and other ephemera. I skimmed through the first half, then mostly just scrolled through the remainder once the story hit the mid-1980s -- just a little past the time the makeup came off.

I was just having a conversation with my buddy Sergio Prado a couple of weeks ago down at Viña del Mar about KISS. We’re close to the same age, and were both preteens when we first became aware of the band -- in other words, right smack in the middle of what I’d guess to have been the band’s prime demographic at the time. As I told Sergio, the second album I ever bought was a KISS record, albeit one of their less notable offerings, Dynasty (with their “disco” hit “I Was Made for Loving You”).

Sergio and I both remembered adults warning us against KISS -- obviously an important part of their allure. I recalled an elementary school teacher actually insisting to me that old line about the band being “Knights In Satan’s Service” and thus to be avoided at all costs.

I still will spin Destroyer and Rock and Roll Over now and then, and I have an LP copy of the first Alive record which I haven’t pulled out in ages. I wrote here a few years back about delightfully stumbling upon a KISS cover band once and being more or less spellbound for the next hour-plus. But I never did develop any sort of lifelong fascination with KISS along the lines that Klosterman appears to have done.

At one point near the end of the piece, Klosterman makes kind of a curious assertion. It might be the most interesting point of the whole dissertation, although I can’t really claim that as I didn’t read the entire massive tome.

“I own Kiss,” he claims, then clarifies that he means “I have complete intellectual autonomy over my interaction with Kiss, as does every other person immersed in the Kiss Lifestyle.” The claim is primarily supported by his understanding of the band as an entirely commercial entity, one consequence of which is the necessary introduction of a kind of critical distance between producer and consumer. Fans adore KISS when they perform, says Klosterman, but “the moment they exit the arena, that same fan base views them skeptically and objectively.”

I get the cynicism and even kind of identify with the position he’s describing. That is to say, I “like” KISS all right, but I tend to keep ’em at arm’s length. But I’m not sure I buy the “intellectual autonomy” line or the idea that as a critic Klosterman has some sort of mastery over the complicated “text” of KISS. Something tells me devoting this much time and effort to working out ideas about KISS more likely betrays a lack of control over one’s relationship with the subject of one’s criticism than it does “autonomy.”

There’s one other bit of trivia Klosterman includes (since he’s including everything) -- the old story of Ace Frehley having skipped out during part of the recording of Destroyer to play in a poker game. Thus was Dick Wagner (of Alice Cooper’s band) brought in to play the solo on one track (“Sweet Pain”).

When including that reference, Klosterman links to Frehley’s solo track “Five Card Stud” from his 1989 solo album Trouble Walkin’, easily one of the most banal poker songs ever penned, although I guess it rocks well enough when compared to other less-than-inspired pop-metal of the era.

Anyhow, if you’re a KISS fan -- and whatever you believe to be your level of “intellectual autonomy” in your relationship with the group -- you might give Klosterman’s piece a skim.

Moneymaker

Today’s a special anniversary in the poker world, one that many have been noting had been coming for the last couple of weeks. I’m referring, of course, to it being the 10th anniversary of Chris Moneymaker’s stunning victory in the 2003 World Series of Poker Main Event, an event which many point to as a catalyst of sorts for the subsequent poker “boom” thanks to the way it brought together numerous influential factors -- online poker, newly-revamped televised poker (with hole cards), and the underdog story of an amateur being the pros that further inspired so many to get involved in the game thereafter.

I’ve written many times about Moneymaker and his win here before, including writing posts marking this very date and its significance, and so am not too interested in scribbling yet another, similar one today. Am also kind of running low on mental fuel, to be honest, thanks to having sat up the entire night following and reporting on an online tournament -- one in which Moneymaker himself actually made a fairly deep run, finishing ahead of about 1,500 other players or almost twice as many as he bested in the 2003 ME.

I’ve enjoyed reading some of the other pieces that have been posted this week regarding Moneymaker’s win, most particularly that cool, lengthy oral history of the 2003 WSOP Main Event compiled by Eric Raskin for Grantland, titled “When We Held Kings.”

Nolan Dalla has also been writing a series of entertaining posts over the last several days sharing his memories of that Main Event. As I talked about once with Dalla in an interview for Betfair Poker, it wasn’t that long before Moneymaker’s win that he’d become the WSOP’s Media Director, and he worked for Binion’s then, too, which necessarily put him right in the middle of things when lightning struck 10 years ago today. Check his blog for the series, to which he’s still adding.

Finally, I very much liked Brad Willis’s piece on the PokerStars blog today in which he shares a more personal account of how Moneymaker’s victory affected him both personally and professionally. In “Ten years later: How Chris Moneymaker changed my life,” Brad tells a story that is familiar to a lot of us, and in fact when I look at his next-to-last paragraph, I could almost quote it verbatim as representative of what also happened me (changing out only the original career):

“Ten years ago today, I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life working in local TV news. It wouldn't have been a bad career, and I think I could’ve done it with pride. But because of that day in 2003, I’ve seen a big part of the world, been able to report some amazing stories, and met friends I will cherish forever. And, for what it’s worth, I’ve been able to hang out with a poker hero named Moneymaker from time to time.”

All of those statements apply to me, too. Even the bit about getting to know the champ a little, as I’ve had the opportunity to talk to Moneymaker on several occasions, including about what happened on May 23, 2003. Such a friendly guy and truly a remarkable ambassador for the game -- and, if you think about it, a person who has helped define what we mean by that idea of being an “ambassador” for poker.

Of course, when I think back to 2003 I don’t remember anything at all about what happened on this date as far as poker was concerned. Like many, many others, it wasn’t until ESPN began showing its coverage of the Main Event in late August -- and I got hooked like everyone else on the weekly one-hour segments -- that I ever paid any attention to Moneymaker and his story.

If I’m adding up the dates correctly, it would have been Tuesday, October 7, 2003 when the seventh and final installment of ESPN’s coverage was shown for the first time. That was the night it all went “boom,” I’d say, and everyone finally found out about Moneymaker and the WSOP and online poker and everything else.

Still today’s a day worth noting, and enjoying the memories being shared by others regarding a life-changing event for one 27-year-old accountant and for countless others, too.

Poker! That starts with P, and that rhymes with T, and that stands for Trouble!

Been back for a week from Macau, and I’m repeatedly encountering people responding to stories of my trip with references to the new James Bond film Skyfall. Apparently there’s a sequence set in Macau, including a visit to a place called the Dragon Casino (?). I will have to investigate in short order, which shouldn’t be hard to do as Vera has already been indicating she wants to see the flick.

I’m not a huge Bond buff, although like everyone I’ve seen and enjoyed a lot of the films over the years. We did catch Casino Royale in the theaters several years ago, and in fact I wrote up a “poker review” at the time as that film -- released at the height of the poker boom in 2006 -- featured several scenes of our hero playing high-stakes hold’em.

At the time we all remarked on poker surfacing in the mainstream so prominently, although to be honest that was a period when poker was simply everywhere. Such is not so much the case anymore, which is why an episode of The Simpsons from a week ago featuring a subplot in which little Lisa plays online poker stood out as something a little different.

I wrote a “Pop Poker” piece for PokerListings about The Simpsons episode, if you’re curious for more about it. One point I made there was to say that the show’s presentation of online poker was essentially no different than it might have been back during the “boom” -- that is, before the Unlawful Internet Enforcement Act of 2006 and Black Friday and everything else that has significantly altered online poker in the U.S.

Indeed, the Simpsons episode essentially ignores the current reality of online poker altogether, proceeding as though Black Friday never even happened. (In truth, I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea for the story had been hatched before Black Friday -- perhaps several years ago -- and only now found its way into an episode.)

Anyhow, check out that discussion of the show on PokerListings and let me know what you think.

Speaking of mainstream references to poker, there was another one recently when former NBA star Jalen Rose, now a commentator on ESPN, offered some candid thoughts about pro players’ poker playing in a clip appearing over on the Grantland channel. Here is that clip:

Referring to the plane rides between games, Rose speaks of the popularity of poker as a pastime among many players, with the amounts changing hands sometimes climbing up to the $10K-$20K range. Rose weirdly insists on the games’ legality as he justifies them, while also pointing to the way they satisfy players’ competitive desires.

He also explains the reason why players play with chips rather than money on the planes, settling their debts afterwards. “The reason why you bring poker chips,” he explains, “is that coaches and general managers and sometimes... the owners [are] on the plane.... [Therefore, you] don’t want to see guys passing around hundreds and thousands of dollars. It’s just not good etiquette.”

In other words, as much as Rose defends the players’ gambling, there’s still a kind of “underground” element to the games insofar as the true significance of the money being exchanged is in need of being suppressed. If they aren’t doing anything wrong, why bother with such “etiquette”?

Like with The Simpsons episode, I wouldn’t say poker is necessarily being promoted by Rose’s mention of it. In fact both instances seem to reinforce ideas of the game’s “outlaw” status, which is how the game is usually treated whenever it surfaces in the mainstream.

Of course, there was that time, just a few years ago -- say, when Casino Royale was in the theaters back in ’06 -- when it wasn’t automatically the case that poker was considered to be like pool in that song from The Music Man....

You know, starting with P. Which rhymes with T. And which stands for Trouble!

A Thousand Words (Or So) About Bill Simmons

Over the last couple of months I’ve come to appreciate more and more what Bill Simmons and his collection of writers are doing over at Grantland.

I’ve mentioned Grantland here a few times, such as last June when alluding to Rounders co-scripter Brian Koppelman’s interesting op-ed that appeared on the site called “The Beauty of Black Friday.” I brought up Grantland again in late July when referring to the novelist Colson Whitehead’s novella-length account of his experience World Series of Poker that ran on the site.

And last month James McManus did a turn on Grantland to recap the “Full Tilt Boogie” in which he presented the story of Black Friday and its messy aftermath to a wider audience, so I made mention of that, too.

Poker only turns up now and then on Grantland. The site primarily focuses on in-depth analyses of sports as well as some interesting and similarly detailed essays on popular culture. Bill Simmons is the Editor in Chief and lead writer on the site. In one of those earlier posts I characterized Simmons as “some sort of superblogger, one of these endlessly passionate fans who will go on and on and on with little acknowledgment that it might seem self-indulgent or obsessive to do so.”

I wrote that about Simmons with full self-awareness that I, too, have been guilty of such self-indulgence now and then here on Hard-Boiled Poker. But I do try to be mindful of the fact that quality trumps quantity when it comes to any sort of writing, not to mention the fact that readers are much less likely to stop and read thousands of words about anything unless they are similarly passionate and/or interested in the subject.

Grantland was begun back in the spring as kind of a carve-out from ESPN (where Simmons has written for years, including occasionally about poker) to provide a space for long-form writing about sports and entertainment. And as I say, I’m coming around to enjoy the site more and more, including the podcasts.

I particularly like Simmons’ own “B.S. Report” podcast, having gotten into it a lot over the last couple of months in order to hear him talk with a variety of guests about the NFL season and playoffs.

On Monday’s show (1/23/12), Simmons was talking with the always funny Cousin Sal about how both of the conference championships that took place on Sunday interestingly turned on player mistakes that created a few more “goats” than “heroes” in the games. Indeed, while the New England Patriots and New York Giants both played well and deserved their victories, both benefited considerably by opponents’ errors that helped make their victories possible.

In fact, both contests saw late-game miscues -- a couple of fumbles in the Niners-Giants game, a muffed catch and missed field goal in the Ravens-Pats one -- that were on the flukey side. That is, they were mistakes to be sure, but it is easy to imagine them having been avoided and the outcomes being different.

Simmons used a poker analogy to explain his point further, bringing up an idea that those of us who play poker know quite well.

“I came to the realization yesterday that… there’s gonna be these NFL seasons where you have four or five or six teams that are all basically the same talent level, and then they play and it becomes a poker hand,” said Simmons. “It’s like everybody can do everything relatively the right way, but it’s still going to come down to… the last card… on the river. And I need this and you need this and our percentages are pretty much equal and then that happens and then you win.”

In terms of a given hand, Simmons is describing one of those “coin flip” situations in which all decisions have been made and players’ fates are now to be decided by whatever card peels off the deck. Both players apparently have played the hand well, and now the odds of each winning is roughly the same.

Of course, the analogy also includes a slightly different observation, namely that when two players of essentially equal skill level sit down to play poker, luck will ultimately decide who walks away a winner. (I think the latter is actually the primary point Simmons was making here.)

All of which I found interesting and relevant as part of an analysis of what happened on Sunday. I’m still a little amazed at how Simmons pours out thousands upon thousands of words each week about a given game, then invites multiple guests on his show to break down the games even more.

Last week Simmons’ ESPN colleague Rick Reilly responded to a reader’s email complaining that he’d left out mentioning something in a column by making reference to his desire to keep his columns a reasonable length. “I try to keep all my columns under 900 words so people don’t have to quit their jobs to read me,” wrote Reilly. “It’s just sports, not the American Medical Journal. Not everything fits in 900 words.”

That particular “mail bag” column by Reilly ballooned over 2,800 words, actually, although as he says he usually keeps it around 1,000 words or less, such as he did in the column about 49ers kicker David Akers about which that particular reader was complaining.

One of Simmons’ readers mentioned Reilly’s comment to him, and Simmons shared the message in his own “mail bag” column from last Friday. Referring to Simmons’ prolixity, the reader remarked that Simmons -- who goes by “the Sports Guy” -- might consider changing his nickname to “the American Medical Journal Guy.”

Simmons replied that thanks to that snarky comment he was going to try for 7,500 words in that column. In fact, he almost made it, getting up over 7,200 before signing off.

I’ve already shot past the 1,000 word-mark myself in this post, and since I don’t have the same aspirations -- or inspiration -- to aim much higher, I think I’ll be signing off soon. As I said I do understand and appreciate Simmons’ approach. And while sports or poker probably aren’t as important in a practical sense to the discoveries being shared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, that doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy of close, extended scrutiny.

After all, how we play and experience games tell us a lot about ourselves, and learning about ourselves can be as meaningful to improving our lives as can finding out how to treat a disease. Besides it is hard to be inspired by writers who aren’t inspired themselves. Or, to put it another way, I’m not really that into spending my time reading a sports column only to be told "it’s just sports.”

By the same token, I also think (like I assume Reilly does) that more isn’t necessarily better, and it’s possible to start saying less the more words you pile on. I believe Simmons is plenty aware of that, though. The self-effacing highlighting of his initials -- B.S. -- in his podcast title suggests as much.

Quite succinctly, in fact.

Online Poker’s Hot Stove League

“When might Americans, who invented the freakin’ game in the first place, be able to play it again on the Internet?”

So writes James McManus at the conclusion of his new piece over on Grantland, “Full Tilt Boogie: The UIGEA and You.” In his lengthy feature McManus recounts the last eight months or so of online poker in the United States -- including the whole Full Tilt fiasco -- a prelude, it appears, to a series of articles he’ll be writing for the site.

Some of us Yanks are still playing online poker, actually. Sort of.

I’ve mentioned here how I’ve won some freerolls on Hero Poker and Carbon Poker, thereby earning myself some modest real money rolls on both sites. Had sort of an interesting series of exchanges with support over at Hero Poker over the last week or so which I thought I’d share, if only to pass along an actual anecdote related to playing online poker. (Remember when we used to share those all the time?)

One aspect of Hero I have liked is the fairly frequent awarding of tickets for sit-n-gos and tourneys (all micro stuff) as well as the occasional bonus. The more you play, the higher you rise through the various levels they have on the site (Farmer, Recruit, Barbarian, etc.), and I believe you earn some sort of small something each step of the way. (Here’s a page describing it all, if you’re curious.)

In late November I tripped over one of the levels and was given both a play-through bonus worth $15 (i.e., I had to play a certain amount to earn it) and an instant bonus of $10. As is my custom, I recorded the instant bonus in my daily ledger along with other info about my play for that day, and pretty much forgot about it.

About two weeks later I played a short session and won a few bucks, then when I went to record my balance noticed I was down a little from when I started. The discrepancy was exactly $10. Not much, although unfortunately ten bucks represents a decent percentage of my roll at the site.

So I sent an email to support. Hero is a small site, but they do quite well getting back to you quickly whenever anything arises. Sometimes, though, the promptness of the replies aren’t exactly matched by clarity. I got a quick response which said the money was deducted “because on November 23rd you were credited with an instant cash bonus twice... by mistake.”

Fine, I thought. Kind of uncool just to take money out of my account without any sort of heads-up, but at least I understood why. But when I looked back at my records -- as well as the “Player Admin” they have for you there at Hero (a fairly handy feature) -- I could see on 11/23 that I’d only gotten the bonus once.

To make a long story short, we ended up exchanging several more emails before someone was finally able to explain that I’d gotten an instant bonus for $10 way back in early September and the latter one on 11/23 was awarded erroneously. Also, there apparently had been a bulk email sent out regarding the error and correction, but I had never received it.

Along the way one of the emails had instructed me both to “disregard the email” I had just been sent as well as to “please just use the very last email.” In the same sentence. Like I say, the responses come in a timely fashion, though they aren’t always as lucid as one would like.

All of it reminded me of PokerStars and how they, too, always rapidly responded to any support requests. And clearly, too. I also thought about how they’d handle a situation such as this one -- how Stars would likely allow me to keep an erroneously awarded bonus. But Hero is a small outfit and if they did issue even small bonuses to all of their players by mistake, I can see how they wouldn’t be able to handle the loss as easily as Stars might.

The future of these relatively small U.S.-facing sites has to be tenuous, I’d think, at least as far as their continuing to serve Americans goes. That said, I assume a number of these sites (Hero included) probably couldn’t really continue without the continuing to serve the U.S. -- the only part of the world where they currently can compete and Stars cannot.

We’re definitely the minor leagues here in the U.S. right now as far as online poker is concerned... not even Single-A ball, but Rookie league. Worldwide, PokerStars is the only big league left. In fact, “big” isn’t a big enough word for them, given their overwhelming dominance of the market at the moment. Party, iPoker, Ongame, and 888 we might call Double-A, but then so are Stars’ own French- and Italian-only sites. Then come the Merge guys, Bodog, Cake, and the rest.

I suppose the baseball analogy sprang to mind here because like poker, baseball is an American game. McManus’s piece and particularly his anti-UIGEA arguments are further tempting me to refer to our online poker game as currently mired in the “Bush leagues” and pun on the name of the person who signed the UIGEA into law.

But while that action was certainly central to the story of online poker’s fall in the U.S., it was hardly the only contributor. Really, the better baseball metaphor for online poker would be to say we’re amid a kind of “hot stove league” -- i.e., an off-season during which we are having to be patient while awaiting the return of our favorite game.

Will be interested to see where McManus goes with his Grantland articles. And, of course, what will happen with online poker in the U.S., too.

Long, Long, Long

Many have noted how the structure for the World Series of Poker Main Event is utterly unique. Two-hour levels with gradually increasing blinds and antes, stretched out over ten long days of play, themselves scheduled over two weeks in July then two more days in November.

By most measures, it’s the longest tournament around. By far.

Speaking of, this week I began reading through Colson Whitehead’s account of his having played in this year’s World Series of Poker Main Event over on the new Grantland site that launched in early June.

I say I’ve only begun the account. Still a ways to go, though. Let me explain.

Grantland -- so-called in homage to early 20th-century sportswriter Grantland Rice -- is an ESPN-connected portal that features a lot of examples of that variety of sports writing well exemplified by its Editor-in-Chief, Bill Simmons. (I referred to another interesting piece on Grantland last month by Rounders co-scripter Brian Koppelman titled “The Beauty of Black Friday.”)

I imagine many readers of this blog are familiar with Simmons, although perhaps not all. He’s a sports columnist who has written for the ESPN Magazine and a few other outlets, though is best known for his regular columns at ESPN.com that address sports but also incorporate tons of personal and cultural allusions in a somewhat idiosyncratic way. Simmons also does a podcast for ESPN (“The B.S. Report”), and I believe he was also involved in coming up with the idea for the often-excellent “30 for 30” series of documentaries ESPN has been producing over the last few years and for which he’s the executive producer.

To me, Simmons reads like some sort of superblogger, one of these endlessly passionate fans who will go on and on and on with little acknowledgment that it might seem self-indulgent or obsessive to do so. I don’t mean that as a criticism, actually. And as someone who himself writes a lot (and at length) on his blog, I’m fully aware of having been guilty of the same from time to time.

That said, I sometimes find Simmons a bit overwhelming. I remember once last fall getting bogged down in a 3,000-plus word piece of his in which he was defending his rooting for Michael Vick. I think I stumbled most noticeably when he began to pursue an analogy between O.J. Simpson and Vick, noting how the former had “unwittingly” raised awareness about domestic violence while the latter had done something similar with regard to animal abuse. Frivolous at best, tasteless at worst, and (most problematically) not much relevant to his thesis.

Not fair, really, to single out one misstep like that, though. I do find Simmons to be a bright guy who often has many good, even highly original ideas. But you have to be willing to edit yourself down once in a while -- to realize that not every thought that occurs to you necessarily deserves to make it to the final draft.

So when I say the writers at the new Grantland site are following the Editor-in-Chief’s lead in terms of their chosen style, I’m referring mainly to what seems to be an absence of editorial restraint being exerted upon them. Having made the cut to be chosen as contributors, they are subsequently forced to endure few if any further cuts. That is to say, I’m guessing they are being mostly encouraged to write as much as they like and about whatever they like in the features they are producing.

All of which is to say, I’ve begun Whitehead’s piece about his experience playing in the Main Event this year, but it will be a while before I finish. That’s because the four-part feature is nearly 20,000 words long. In fact, he doesn’t get to the first hand of his adventure until close to the 10,000-word mark.

Whitehead is a novelist, and indeed his story, titled “Occasional Dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia,” seems to be more closely following the formal guidelines of a novel than a magazine-style feature. The idea -- i.e., for a writer with an interest in poker to go play the WSOP Main Event and tell his tale -- isn’t new, of course. James McManus was the most famous (and most successful) to do so back in 2000. Heck, even Simmons did it once for ESPN back in 2006.

Still, as a poker player who also likes to read (and write), I like the idea of the WSOP getting the literary treatment. Thus do I look forward to making my way through Whitehead’s lengthy piece.

Still a ways to go, though.

Low Battery

Those of you with iPhones, ever notice how whenever you are told your battery’s charge has fallen dangerously low, you are given just one option to select before you are free to do something about it?

“Dismiss.”

I mean, really... we can’t just keep being dismissive about such things, can we? Seems unhealthy. I mean, if we have to recharge, we have to recharge. Why always put off such necessary action with denials?

Speaking of, I freely admit that I am running a bit low on both time and energy today.

Regarding the former, not much time remains before I leave for Las Vegas on Tuesday. In Phil Hellmuth-like fashion, I’ll be arriving late to help PokerNews cover the WSOP over these final four weeks of the Series until the November Nine is determined on July 19. I am looking forward to the trip, and especially to reuniting with my many friends and colleagues who are already there. Meanwhile I am trying to take care of a lot of different matters and tie up some loose ends before I go, which is further taking up these few hours I’ve left.

Energy-wise, I’m running a bit low as well, having committed a lot of brain power to writing other pieces in addition to pushing forward on that second novel. Am trying to reach a point with that where I feel comfortable enough to leave it for a while when I’m at the WSOP.

I did want to point you to one of those other pieces, a feature for Betfair that went up today called “On Poker’s Brave New World.”

You might recall how I commented here last week on an exchange between Jesse May and Brandon Adams over the whole online sponsorship issue and how Black Friday had fundamentally changed things with regard to the sponsored pro. This week another interesting op-ed appeared that also touched on the subject, a piece called “The Beauty of Black Friday” by Rounders co-scripter Brian Koppelman.

I thought it would be worthwhile to pull together and compare all three writers’ arguments in a piece of my own, and so that’s what you’ll find if you follow the link above. There are issues I’d probably take up with each of the commentators (May, Adams, and Koppelman), but I do think all make interesting arguments and provide genuine insight into how things have dramatically changed for sponsored pros and poker in general. Their writings evoke a lot of ideas about poker and its place in contemporary culture that are worth considering as well.

I hope everyone has a relaxing, revitalizing weekend. See you on Monday when we’re all back to 100%.