Praise the Lord Admirals

I mentioned a while back how the chefs over at Poker Soup had invited me into their kitchen a few episodes back (episode 15). I had a lot of fun chatting with them about poker, podcasts, and the upcoming WSOP. Am gonna swing me a decent headset here soon and perhaps might join them again at some point this summer when I’m out in Vegas helping cover the WSOP for PokerNews.

During our conversation, the subject of the old Card Club on Lord Admiral Radio show came up. We all agreed it was a terrific show -- really the first poker podcast of any note, having started way back in November 2004 and run up through August 2006. There was some talk when I was on there of trying to get the Lord Admirals on Poker Soup, and sure enough this week they were able to do so, having Cincinnati Sean, Brent Stacks, and Headhunter Mark on for the first hour or so of episode 18.

Some of you may remember Card Club on Lord Admiral Radio, though I’m going to guess many reading this blog do not. When I first started Hard-Boiled Poker (a little over three years ago), I frequently wrote about the podcast in which two amateur players from Toronto got together weekly -- usually with others from their home game -- to talk about poker. If you’re curious to learn more about the show, here’s a post I wrote shortly after they went off the air in 2006 in which I recounted some of what I thought to be the show’s particular highlights.

It was an oftentimes very funny show (the Admirals are witty guys -- something they proved yet again on the Poker Soup show the other night) that included a lot of great poker strategy discussion, though always presented from a suitably humble amateur’s perspective. One of the neatest aspects of the show was its inclusiveness. The Lord Admirals were consciously trying to build a community with that show, a task which they achieved especially well. As I wrote in that post linked to above, “listening to the show was a little bit like being part of a ‘Card Club’ that met on a weekly basis.” Indeed, I think anyone who remembers the show knows what I’m getting at there.

I wrote my first post here not that long after having found the Card Club podcast, and indeed it wouldn’t be that big of a stretch to say that listening to the show might well have been part of what inspired me to start a poker blog in the first place. That’s because Cincy Sean and Stacks frequently talked about poker blogs on their show. I remember they even had a “blog of the week” feature on there for a while, and had folks like Dr. Pauly and Iggy and others on there as guests, with whom they always had interesting, entertaining conversations about poker, media, life, what have you. (For example, click here to read a summary of Sean & Iggy’s interesting discussion from the summer of 2006 about the significance of poker blogs.)

In fact part of what Card Club on Lord Admiral Radio was about was to participate in (and perhaps inspire) a kind of “alternative press” when it came to poker, something other than what you found in the poker mags or on a few online sites. Sean in particular was always arguing for the value of independent voices, talking and listening to one another, and the show both exemplified what he was arguing for as well as encouraged others to participate in the conversation, too.

Some time after Card Club went off the air, I did an interview of sorts with Cincy Sean to find out what the Lord Admirals were up to as well as to get his thoughts on some of these subjects. If you’re curious to read more about both the history of the show and these other matters, you can read that interview here.

When Card Club first went on the air, there really weren’t any other poker podcasts, although Rounders, the Poker Show (which later became the Two Plus Two Pokercast) & Ante Up! came on board shortly afterwards.

Nowadays there are dozens, more than any of us can reasonably listen to on a regular basis. Some are quite good, some less so. All owe a debt -- at least indirectly -- to Card Club on Lord Admiral Radio, the first and certainly one of the best poker podcasts in the genre’s brief history.

On the Economy & the 2009 WSOP

We’re getting close, peoples. Just a week more and satellites get crankin’ at the Rio. On Wednesday, May 27th, Event No. 1, the Casino Employees Event, a $500 buy-in no-limit hold’em tourney, gets started. Then on Thursday at noon the real World Series of Poker begins with the “Special 40th Annual No-Limit Hold’em” event (Event No. 2), that $40,000 buy-in event everyone’s been talking about for weeks now.

Then all hell breaks loose.

One new event starts each day from Wed. through Sat. next week. Then the following week, we’ll slip into the routine of having two separate events start each day, meaning there will usually be around five or six different tournaments going on at once, with a couple of final tables each day.

Am noticing that on Wednesday, June 3rd there will be a whopping seven different events going on, including three final tables, all starting at 2 p.m. Vegas time. (I think that has to be a record.) I don’t see any other days on the 2009 schedule with seven events running. It’s the conclusion of that $1,000 buy-in no-limit hold’em Event No. 4, the “stimulus special,” that’s causing the pile-up there, I believe. That’s a four-day event, though really five days as it will have a couple of day ones.

So whaddya think? Too many events? There are 57 bracelets being awarded at this year’s WSOP (a new record). Is the WSOP spreading itself too thin?

Everyone’s wonderin’ about the numbers, specifically whether recent economic woes might affect turnouts. Casino revenues have certainly experienced a significant downturn. The Las Vegas Sun reported in late January that casino revenues had decreased markedly in 2008, and that the trend was expected to continue in 2009. A more recent article over on PokerNews Daily reports how Nevada has seen fifteen straight months of decline in gaming revenues (when months are compared year over year), with the drop-offs over the last six months ranging from 11.61% (March 2008 to March 2009) to 22.33% (October 2007 to October 2008).

There was another interesting article over on Poker News Daily yesterday in which Dan Stewart, the owner of PokerScout (that site that tracks traffic on all of the sites), is interviewed regarding the current health of online poker.

That article appears to have been specifically occasioned by the recent spate of overlays in Full Tilt Poker’s FTOPS XII, including an eye-popping $200,000-plus overlay in the $2.5 million-guaranteed Main Event. According to Stewart, Full Tilt’s decision to run a “mini-FTOPS” alongside the regular FTOPS -- mirroring the main events with similar events costing one-tenth the buy-ins -- appears to have affected turnouts for the big events. Says Stewart, the decision to run a mini-FTOPS was a “mini-disaster” that “cannibalized the business from the big tournaments.” Of course, Stewart also points out that Full Tilt nevertheless is doing just fine, as is the rest of the online poker world, which is “quite healthy” clicking along at an overall 30% increase in revenue over last year.

So live casino games are hurting. But online poker is as healthy as its ever been. What about the WSOP?

There was some discussion of the economy and its possible effect on the WSOP on last week’s episode of The Poker Beat (the 5/14/09 show). The consensus there seemed to be that the currently ailing economy would not have much effect on turnouts.

John Caldwell is now a regular co-host on TPB. Unfortunately, I won’t be working with Caldwell this summer as he is no longer with PokerNews, although I’m sure I’ll see him out there somewhere along the way. According to Caldwell, the WSOP tends to thrive no matter what the economy is doing, being, as he calls it, “the exception to the rule.” He goes on to point out that “the prestige and the cachet of the event sort of insulate it from... the [failing] economy.... Now, it may be an issue in certain specific events... [but] I don’t think it’s going to be much of a factor [overall].”

Caldwell is probably right, although I do think it will be interesting to watch how the field sizes in the $1,500-$2,500 events compare to those of the $5,000, $10,000, and higher buy-in events. The smaller buy-in events are always much more popular, but I wonder if perhaps we’ll see an even more severe “class difference” happening this year, with just the same 200-300 players turning up for the higher buy-in events, while the hoi polloi stick with the smaller buy-in tourneys. (Sort of a WSOP and a mini-WSOP, in a sense.)

I, for one, am hoping for big fields and a highly successful WSOP, although I know it could turn out otherwise. Selfish, I know, as a thriving poker economy certainly is good news for someone like me.

In any event, it’s gonna be a busy time for your humble gumshoe, no matter how the turnouts turn out.

Grump Runs Good in RGC 3 (WSOP Edition)

Pictured above is an exclusive, live action photo taken during the first of two events scheduled for the PokerListings Run Good Challenge 3: WSOP Edition (click to enlarge). That’s the Poker Grump out in the lead. He’d end up taking it down, thereby winning an entry into a $1,500 preliminary event at this summer’s WSOP. The Spaceman is close behind; he’d finish runner-up. And there are F-Train, Michele Lewis, and the others trailing.

That’s me in the back with the fedora. I’d finish an ignominious 20th (out of 25 runners). Lasted into the third level, and really, all told only had a single hand where afterwards I found myself thinking if I could’ve possibly done something differently to alter my fate.

There were eight players at my starting table. Going counterclockwise, we were seated as follows: myself, Benjo, Bruechips, Dan Skolovy, the Poker Grump, Spaceman, CarmenSinCity, and Pokerati Dan. I’d played with most of these folks before in previous Challenges, having butted heads most significantly with Dan Skolovy, the strategy writer over on PokerListings.

Back last fall in the first Run Good Challenge, PokerListings Dan knocked me out of the first event in fourth when his A-J outran my pocket jacks. Then in the second event, I made it to heads-up only to fall to PL Dan again. I won the third event of that first challenge, though have to say my triumph was helped somewhat by the fact that PL Dan went out early in that one.

Knowing PL Dan is an aggressive player, I didn’t care too much to see him a couple of seats to my left. (In fact, during previous RG Challenges we’d joked about how he always seemed to be seated on my left.) When I was in the cutoff, he’d be in the big blind, meaning it wouldn’t be such a simple matter to steal should the opportunity arise.

Still, I managed to win a few small pots early on without catching any real cards, then found it necessary to fold to preflop reraises a couple of times, causing me to slip down below the 1,500-chip starting stack. Was sitting at 1,485 near the end of level 2 when the following hand arose -- to me, the only real interesting one in which I was involved.

It folded to me sitting in the cutoff with . I decided to raise to 100 (a little over 3x). Then Benjo flat-called my raise from the button, which I didn’t care for too much.

When Bruechips folded his small blind, I knew instantly what PL Dan -- sitting there in the big blind with a below average stack of 955 chips -- was going to do. He shoved, and I had a decision. I might’ve considered gambling with PL Dan, since I know his range is very wide here, but with Benjo lurking behind (not to mention having me outchipped), I decided not to risk it. I got out of the way, and Benjo called.

PL Dan had K-9 offsuit, and Benjo pocket sixes. A jack did flop (que sera, sera). Benjo’s pocket pair held up, and PL Dan hit the rail. “Knew he wuz gonna do that” I typed, referring to PL Dan’s attempted squeeze.

Wasn’t long after that when I’d slipped down to an even 1,000 chips. The Poker Grump, our eventual champion, had been the short stack with around 650 chips, having been gutted early on when Spaceman’s outdrew his pocket kings. But then he managed to double up with pocket rockets. It was actually the second time he’d gotten ’em in one orbit, though he didn’t get any action the first time. He’d chipped up a little more to 1,675 when we reached what would prove my last hand.

With the blinds 25/50, I was sitting UTG where I was dealt . Raised to 200, and my only caller was Grump from the button. The flop came all babies -- . I shoved, and PRESTO Grump called, showing pocket fives for the flopped set. No jack came to save me, and I was toast.

I shot PG an email shortly afterwards telling him he now had to take the sucker down. A little while later he sent me a reply telling me he’d fulfilled my request. Have to say I’m especially excited for him, as I would have been for anyone who had emerged victorious in this here winner-take-all tourney. Gonna definitely be fun to see how he does in the WSOP event, whichever one he chooses to enter.

We all have one more chance this Saturday in the second and final event of Run Good Challenge 3. Big thanks again to Matt S. and the PokerListings guys for hosting!

Run Good Challenge To Run All of the Way to WSOP

Am hoping to be there tomorrow for the latest installment of the Run Good Challenge, hosted by PokerListings. Have some running around to do this weekend myself, and in fact will be not be at home tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific time when the first of the two scheduled tourneys begins. But I’ll have my laptop and am hoping to find some place to log in and play the sucker. (Big thanks to Matt and the PokerListings folks for the invite!)

The PokerListings guys have set up a winner-take-all situation tomorrow, with the top prize being a seat in a WSOP preliminary event. And the second-place finisher winning a hard-luck story. Then next Saturday (May 23), there will be a second tournament in which the top two finishers will win prelim seats. Pretty cool stuff.

Click here to read more about the third Run Good Challenge. Hopefully I am able to get on there and play tomorrow, and will certainly report back here how things go.

What the Rules Say (2009 WSOP)

Was leafing through the “Tournament Rules” for the 2009 World Series of Poker yesterday. When the rules for this year first went online about a month ago, much of the attention was given to the new “Code of Player Conduct” that appears as Rule No. 30 (of the 98 rules). Also getting some reaction at the time was that Rule No. 36 that “prohibits the use of obscene or foul language in any public area of the casino at any time.” If yr interested, click here to read F-Train’s overview of the new rules.

As I was looking back over the rules, there were a few that caught my eye, so I thought I’d share.

In the section covering “Player Likeness and Image” -- the one covering stipulations regarding the wearing of logos -- there is a new rule appearing at the end of the section, one that will most likely be referred to colloquially as the “Phil Laak Rule.”

Rule No. 44 states that “Players may not cover or conceal their facial identity. Tournament officials must be able to distinguish the identity of each player at all times and may instruct players to remove any material that inhibits their identification or is a distraction to other players or tournament officials. Players may wear sunglasses and sweat shirts with hoods, but may be asked to remove them if they cannot be identified by tournament officials.”

For those who don’t remember, Laak played Day 1d of the Main Event last year dressed as an old man, having had a professional makeup artist work five-plus hours help construct for him a full prosthetic mask. Laak went the entire day undetected, and ended up with a fairly intriguing story to tell afterwards about what it was like to be thought of as just another nobody chasing a WSOP Main Event dream. Kind of embarrassed tourney officials, too, I think, not to mention those of us who were reporting on the ME. I did think, however, that gsqwared did a nifty job recapping the stunt at the end of the day on the PokerNews live blog, in a post titled “The Amazing Phil Laak.”

A couple of other rules, neither of them new for 2009, also caught my attention. Both appear in the section regarding “Poker Rules” (i.e., actual play).

Rule No. 72 spells out how “In limit events there will be a maximum of one bet and four raises, even if there are only two players remaining in the hand.” That five-bet cap is similar to what one finds in a lot of live games, but online players may be more familiar with a four-bet cap (a bet and three raises). I didn’t cover too many limit events last summer, and in fact cannot remember ever reporting a hand that actually went five bets. The latter half of that sentence refers to the fact that some poker rooms allow players to continue raising beyond the cap if they are heads up, something that doesn’t happen in WSOP events -- with one possible exception, that is.

The rest of Rule No. 72 reads as follows: “Once the Tournament becomes heads-up, this rule does not apply. There may be unlimited raises at the heads-up level.” Would be interesting to see a hand go down at the end of a limit event this way, although it would take a mighty unique scenario for it actually to occur.

Finally, there’s another rule in here that is not new, but I think might get some extra attention this summer, the “Approved Electronic Device Rule” (Rule No. 88). Reads the same as last year, although officials have put in bold one sentence in particular that wasn’t in bold last year.

Here’s how that rule reads: “Players are allowed to use as approved electronic devices iPods, MP3 and other music players or noise-reduction headsets during Tournament play until they have reached the money in any Tournament, so long as the approved electronic devices can not [sic] access the internet, send or receive SMS texts and are not equipped with any type of communication device. Therefore, iPhones, iTouch, Treos, Blackberrys, and other similar devices will not be allowed at any time. Once players are in the money in any Tournament, all approved electronic devices must be removed. An announcement will be made to players once they have reached the money to remove all such electronic devices. Failure to do so will results in a penalty up to and including disqualification, in accordance with Rule 53.”

Rule No. 53 is the one spelling out the various penalties tourney officials can assess, including verbal warnings, one-hand penalties, one-round penalties (on up to four-round penalties), and disqualification. That’s the rule that also notes how the WSOP will be keeping a log of all penalties throughout the series so as to be able to impose harsher penalties to repeat offenders.

This rule stood out for me because of all the recent buzz about Twitter, with some even suggesting how players sending “Tweets” about their chip counts could somehow challenge (or at least affect) conventional tournament reporting. But reading the rule, it sounds like there really shouldn’t be any logging onto Twitter by the players during play, except perhaps on breaks.

As with the no-profanity rule, I have to wonder how strictly this rule is going to be enforced, especially if a lot of players start Twittering away from the start. If I remember correctly, there were some attempts to stop players from texting at the tables early on, but I think they basically gave up trying to stop ’em after a certain point.

We’ll see if tourney officials take a different approach to the enforcement of the “Approved Electronic Device Rule” this time around. If they do, I think they should probably anticipate a lot of challenges to the no-profanity rule as well.

Looking Ahead

Well, the flight is booked. Still a few details to be ironed out, but I’ll be back in Las Vegas this summer, again helping PokerNews cover the World Series of Poker. Will be arriving in LV in just a week-and-a-half (no... really?), and once more I’ll be there for the duration, all the way ’til mid-July when the new November Nine is set.

Haven’t really had a lot of time to think about the summer. Don’t anticipate having a lot of time for reflectin’ once I get there, either, as it looks to be another very busy one for those of us who’ll be reporting from the Rio. Am especially looking forward to reuniting with the PokerNews crowd as well as all the other media types with whom I got to work (and play, some) last time. Am hopin’ to make a few other new connections this time around, too.

I have been alluding here and there to my other “life” -- the one characterized by the full-time job about which I don’t write here. About a month back I was writing about how I might be going back to LV this summer for the WSOP, and how the writing thing has started to make me think more and more about possibly making some sort of career move.

Not saying I’m ready to make that leap, nor even that I necessarily see “full-time poker writer” as real option, even if I were ready to choose it.

But it has been an interesting week.

Just about the time I knew for sure I was heading to the WSOP, had a bombshell of sorts happen with the first job, with sudden not-entirely-unexpected-but-still-surprising news of pay cuts and other (significant) scaling back of benefits across the board. No one’s losing his or her job just yet, but that is starting to appear pretty damned inevitable. Maybe not right away, but soon.

I know, I know... it’s happening everywhere. But for a dude who’s already been thinking about making a change, this sort of stuff can be, well... a bit suggestive.

So it’s hard to say what lies ahead, beyond the next couple of months anyway. But hey, let’s have a good summer! I’ll definitely be posting here throughout, so stay tuned.

Check-Raising the Devil by Mike Matusow, with Amy Calistri and Tim Lavalli

This week Mike Matusow’s autobiography, titled Check-Raising the Devil, finally hits the shelves -- both virtual and actual. If you didn’t know it already, two of our friends, Amy Calistri and Tim Lavalli, helped Matusow write the book, which tells the story of his rise and fall. And rise and fall and rise and fall. And rise.

Starts in the early 1990s with Matusow in his early twenties playing video poker and living in a trailer, then eventually moves through his becoming a poker pro and winning three WSOP bracelets and over $7 million in tourney earnings. Along the way, Matusow describes in detail his period of drug use and self-destructive behavior during the early part of this decade, his getting clean and properly diagnosed as suffering from both bipolar disorder and ADHD, his arrest for drug trafficking and six-month jail term, and his triumphant return to poker as well as to a more balanced existence.

I’ve had the chance to read Check-Raising the Devil and can say without hesitation that it is a compelling story, very well presented. It most certainly does not lionize Matusow, and in fact most often brings him down to our level (or below) in its bald confessions of the author’s many limitiations -- some involuntarily imposed on Matusow (e.g., his disorders, other psychological issues), others brought on himself (e.g., the drug use, his ruinous sports betting). Actually, it isn’t always simple to sort through where Matusow’s culpability begins and ends, but on the whole the book doesn’t do too much passing of the buck. This is a man owning up to everything -- the good and the bad.

So Check-Raising is a very interesting character study, and since he’s a character most of us already know at least a little bit about (probably more than a little), the book is all the more intriguing.

The book also provides a nifty overview of the last ten years or so of poker from the point of view of a professional player who was there for just about every major happening -- both live and online. There’s much about the WSOP in there, as well as other major tourneys. There’s some chronicling of the online scene, too, including Matusow’s getting cheated by Russ Hamilton over at UltimateBet. (No punches pulled there.)

All of which is to say, there’s a lot to recommend here for both casual fans and hardcore players. Matusow’s life to this point has been full of extremes, although there’s a lot in his story to which most of us can relate, including the highs and lows caused by poker itself. Even if we haven’t experienced the euphoric triumphs and soul-crushing defeats to the degree Matusow has, we all know what he’s talking about.

I also want particularly to recommend what I perceive to be the contribution of our friends, Amy and Tim. This is an especially well written and well presented book (better than yr average poker text, and I’ve read a bunch), and we’ve got to believe Amy and Tim had a lot to do with that being the case.

When you start a blog, then keep at it for a while, it doesn’t take too long to become aware of this here nifty community of blogs, forums, podcasts, and other interwebby connections via which people with similar interests interact. And while there are tons of poker blogs, forums, podcasts, and now Twitter pages and so forth, the community is nevertheless still relatively small, especially compared to some other ones out there. So if you keep writing -- and, importantly, keep reading -- you are gonna find these folks eventually, I’d think.

It was probably just a few months after I began writing Hard-Boiled Poker that I became aware of Amy Calistri’s blog, Aimlessly Chasing Amy. I’m pretty sure it was via Iggy that I did. There was a good long stretch there during which we all routinely found each other through Iggy’s “uberposts.” Soon after that I was listening to Amy when she co-hosted Keep Flopping Aces with Lou Krieger. She gave that gig up about a year ago, I believe, somewhere around the time she also went back into the “real” world of business and scaled back her work with poker media.

Found Tim Lavalli not too longer after that, if I remember correctly. Probably was those series of investigative articles he wrote with Calistri about the extra two million chips that mysteriously showed up during the latter stages of the 2006 World Series of Poker Main Event, titled “Two Million Questions: Will Poker Answer?” That series began in September 2006 (if yr interested, click here for part one). Somewhere around there I started reading Lavalli’s “Poker Shrink” articles (which he began in 2006) as well as his personal blog.

Ended up meeting Tim last summer near the end of the WSOP. Didn’t get the chance to meet Amy, who after several years in a row at the WSOP didn’t make the 2008 one. Am hopeful to see both this time around to congratulate them on having made it through the several-years-long journey that got them to the book’s publication this week.

I’ll also thank them, because while Matusow’s story is itself somewhat inspiring, as a writer I’m also inspired by seeing Tim and Amy -- two of “us” -- realize this terrific achievement and get themselves “into print.” Am looking forward to seeing others in the blogging community make that move as well one day. And those that do, I assume, probably will have been inspired somewhat by Tim and Amy, too.

(By the way, if you are interested in hearing more about the book and how it was written, tune into to Keep Flopping Aces this Thursday [5/14] where Matusow, Lavalli, and possibly Calistri will be Lou Krieger’s guests.)

Whatcha Gonna Do With All Them Chips? (On Changes to the Structures at the 2009 WSOP), continued

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post referring to the new “triple stacks” that will be used for this summer’s World Series of Poker. If you haven’t heard, the WSOP has decided to give players more starting chips -- “deeper stacks,” as they say -- this time around, starting them three times the buy-in in chips. That means players entering a $1,500 buy-in event will start with 4,500 chips instead of 3,000 (as they did for the same buy-in events in 2007 and 2008) or 1,500 (as they did in 2006 and before).

When event organizers made the change to “double stacks” in 2007, it was initially lauded by some as inviting more “play” in the early levels, making it less necessary to gamble it up right away. However, once the tourneys began, it was discovered the increased starting stacks really didn’t help as much as some had thought they would.

What happened was that in preliminary events -- for example, the popular $1,500 no-limit hold’em events -- the first level (a 25/25 level) was eliminated, meaning players were essentially starting the tournament at the second level (25/50). (These are all 60-minute levels, by the way.) Also, several later levels were omitted as well. Check it out:



Those figures in red on the 2006 side represent omissions in 2007, and the green ones in ’07 represent additions/changes. You see how mostly levels were omitted, and in fact the only new one in 2007 (Level 11) replaced one that was taken out.

By removing that first level, one could argue the tournament was essentially starting with double blinds/antes, thus making the “double stacks” relatively less meaningful. The further removal of levels later on had an even greater effect on how the tournament was actually played. All in all, the “deeper stacks” didn’t really translate into more play. (Incidentally, in the 2007 Main Event the blinds/antes schedule was with a couple of exceptions doubled from beginning to end, making the change from 10,000 to 20,000 starting chips mostly meaningless.)

Moving from 2007 to 2008, some adjustments were made. Again, here’s how the structures for the $1,500 no-limit hold’em tournaments compared:



Easy to see how it was decided to put those later levels back in. There was some tweaking done for the 2008 Main Event schedule of blinds/antes as well, with some levels added in both at the beginning and later on. While there were still some complaints here and there, players seemed to come away largely satisfied with the changes. (I could be wrong, but that was my impression.)

In other words, unlike was most certainly the case in previous years, there didn’t seem to be a huge call at the end of 2008 for the WSOP to revise structures for the following year. Nonetheless, following the trend toward “deep-stacked” tournaments happening elsewhere on the strip -- and perhaps also a response of sorts to economic woes happening everywhere -- the WSOP decided to go with “triple stacks” this time around.

In that earlier post, I discussed the changes and suggested that they probably wouldn’t dramatically affect the way the tournaments go all that much other than to make it possible to be a little more patient in the early going. To complete our comparative journey, here’s how a $1,500 no-limit hold’em event in 2009 compares to last year:



As you can see, while the starting stacks will be different, the structure will be unchanged, save the addition of two extra levels -- one near the beginning of Day 1 (level 3), and the other midway through Day 2. So, as I was saying a few weeks ago, I do think there will be a chance for players to take their time a little more early on. (I haven’t really looked at the 2009 WSOP Main Event structure yet, so I can’t say anything about how the 30,000-chip stacks might affect things there.)

But will there be other consequences here? Andy Bloch raised a bit of a ruckus a few weeks back at the WPT Championship event at the Bellagio where it was decided to give everyone a whopping 100,000 chips -- 1,000 big blinds! -- to start. According to Bloch, the deeper stacks basically just translated into a wasted day of play, as it took considerably longer for the field to get trimmed down. Then, some crazy-big jumps in the blinds later on forced players to gamble more, causing even more ire.

While I’m not seeing in the WSOP events the inordinately big increases in later rounds as happened at the WPT last month, I do think the WSOP might run into a bit of trouble introducing these slower starts to the tournaments. As Bloch has observed, more players should be making it to the second days than was the case last year, which may well mean those Day Twos are going to be very long if they hope to play down to the Day Three final table. (Goes without saying that more players making the second day of events will also affect the turnout for events starting the next day, too.)

I’m remembering covering the WSOP last year for PokerNews and how everyone regarded Day Twos with trepidation. Unlike Day Ones, where there were a certain number of levels scheduled to be played (and one knew when one’s day was going to be done), we would begin Day Twos without knowing how long the shifts would be. I had some lucky draws in there, enjoying some relatively short Day Twos that ended around midnight or just after. But I had some insanely long ones, too, returning to my home-away-from-home well after the sun had risen, knowing I’d be back within a few hours to cover Day Three.

Hard to know for sure, but it’s looking like there might be quite a few long Day Twos this summer for players and reporters.

(To give credit where it is due, that photo above is from PokerNews’ coverage of the 2008 WSOP, and I'm pretty sure it is of Amnon Filippi’s stack -- he tended to create such eye-popping edifices whenever he built a stack, which was quite often.)

(EDIT [added 7:45 p.m.]: Still reading?!? Check out F-Train’s rejoinder to read further on the subject of these here triple stacks.)

Was It Good For You? (On the Celebrity Apprentice Finale)

I’m no culture snob. Sure, I might write something here about Dostoevsky from time to time. I’m even contemplating a soon-to-be-written post in which I’m going to reference Virginia Woolf. But I obviously enjoy (and appreciate) a good, pulpy page-turner, and consume other forms of popular culture (music, film, etc.) as readily as anyone.

Have never, ever been a big fan of the “reality” show thing, though. Like everyone else, I first became aware of the shows cropping up in the 1990s. I noticed when programs like The Real World starting to push music off of MTV, then Survivor (which premiered in 2000) kind of representing a tipping point after which similarly-styled programs began their decade-long TV tyranny. I remember watching some of that first Survivor that summer, the one in which the clothes-optional dude won the $1 million. Can’t say I paid much attention to that one after that first season, however, even in 2007 when poker pro Jean-Robert Bellande was on the China one.

Nor have I bothered much with the dozens and dozens of Survivor imitators (except for American Idol, which does entertain from time to time). Since these shows basically come and go without my ever noticing them, it wasn’t until last night that I bothered with Celebrity Apprentice, despite all of the hype in the poker community regarding Annie Duke’s deep run. Finally did break down and watch the finale last night in which Joan Rivers managed to “win” the hopelessly-contrived “competition” manufactured by the show.

Since there is that poker connection, and since a lot of people are buzzing about what happened last night, I thought I’d share here a bit of my own response to the show.

One of the questions most intriguing to poker players and folks in the poker media is the familiar “Is it good for poker?” question. Always comes up, that one. They ask it fairly often -- about various cultural phenomena -- on The Poker Beat, so much so that someone started a thread on their forum a few weeks ago titled “Sick of ‘is it good for poker’ topic?” The discussion on that thread went back and forth for a while, then some joker jumped in with his own non-constructive entry into the debate:

“Good points, all. But the question needs to be asked: is the ‘is it good for poker’ debate good for poker?”

Now that I think about it, that might have been me. Although my question was about 98% class clown in its inspiration, it actually produced some interesting responses. (As it happens, it really is not so useless to assess once in a while the usefulness of self-assessment!)

Anyhow, I suppose we’re all wondering whether or not Annie Duke’s appearance on Celebrity Apprentice is good for poker. In that WSOP conference call a couple of weeks back, WSOP Commish Jeffrey Pollack indicated that he thought it was, pointing out how it represented a “leap forward for the mainstreaming of poker into our pop culture” and that the “net effect was going to be very good for poker.”

I gotta wonder, though. I mean, did you watch?

From what I could tell, Rivers “won” the thing not because she raised more money than Duke (she didn’t), nor even because she demonstrated in any obvious way better leadership skills or creativity or whatever it is the show is attempting to measure in its contestants. Rather, it seemed pretty clear that Trump picked Rivers in the end as the winner of a popularity contest, and her popularity rested largely on her characterization of herself as a person who wanted to “win with honor,” and her characterization of her opponent -- a “pokah playah” -- as someone who was willing to forgo all moral guidelines in her Machiavellian quest to succeed.

In other words, while Annie Duke’s profession as a poker player made her an intriguing figure on the show, it also clearly helped make her the villain. And I guess now we’re left to contemplate whether that’s good or bad for poker.

Even if you haven’t been watching the show, you’d probably heard about Rivers’ shots at poker and Vegas. How she referred to the money contributed by poker players to Duke’s cause as “money with blood on it.” How she referred to her many years performing in LV by saying “I’ve met your people in Vegas for forty years -- none of them have last names,” suggesting the nefarious and/or criminal backgrounds of the inhabitants of Sin City. How she called poker players “beyond white trash.”

And, oh yeah, there was that Hitler thing, too -- a crazily hyperbolic attempt to characterize Duke as a ruthless dictator. That offended some, but not as many as you might think. (Rivers later apologized on her Twitter page -- to Hitler.)

Rivers again sounded the poker-is-gambling-is-criminal theme last night. In the final fund-raising task, Duke raised three times as much as Rivers (about $450,000 to $150,000); however, Rivers was able to diminish Duke’s achievement by referring to the money raised as “mafia money.” Duke again fired back in defense of poker players, but her cause appeared lost.

Even though I haven’t been watching the show, I knew Rivers was going to “win” early on Sunday night and told Vera Valmore as much. The not-so-subtle way the show portrayed Rivers as “all heart” and Duke as “all business” made it obvious. Rivers’ final “America is a charitable nation” speech at the end was just overkill -- she was already destined to be anointed the show’s heroine.

What is a show like Celebrity Apprentice about? It’s about what just about every cultural product produced for mass consumption that achieves significant commercial success is about, namely, reaffirming the status quo. Which at the present time does not include a loving acceptance of poker as a pursuit accepted by the majority of American society. If you didn’t get that before, the show confirmed it fairly unambiguously, in my view.

The show also confirmed a few other elements of the status quo of American culture, none too flattering. I’m not going to explain all of these points here, but if you watched the show, you know what I’m talking about:

Men are in charge.

Women shouldn’t act like men.

Emotion trumps intellect.

Greed is good, but don’t be so obvious about it.

There are other things to say about how the show reflects other aspects of American culture -- including issues associated with class and race -- but we’ll keep it a poker blog today.

And as far as poker is concerned, I’ll conclude (for now) that Annie Duke’s appearance on Celebrity Apprentice is at best a push. Might have helped a little insofar as it invited people who hadn’t previously thought much about poker to consider the question of whether or not it represents a legitimate pursuit. But that would require looking past the way the show indirectly positioned poker as part of what defined the show’s “villain,” thereby underscoring cultural prejudices against poker.

How Many Will Enter the 2009 WSOP Main Event?

Shortly after Jeffrey Pollack was promoted from Vice President of Marketing to Commissioner of the World Series of Poker in January 2006, he began fielding interviews in which almost invariably Pollack would be asked how many players he thought would be entering the upcoming WSOP Main Event.

For three years running, Pollack always had the same reply -- or non-reply -- to the question. For example, when Pollack last year appeared on Phil Gordon’s podcast The Poker Edge (the 5/15/08 episode), Gordon put the question to the Commish once again. “I couldn’t pin you down last year,” Gordon began, “I’m going to try again this year: How many participants in the championship event for the World Series this year?”

“I don’t know, you tell me,” said Pollack. “There are certain things I’m consistent on, and one of them is never publicly predicting the turn-out. I will give you the line I always give, and that is [to say] whoever makes the decision to show, we’re going to welcome them with open arms and they know they’re going to have a better experience than they did the year before.”

Makes sense, really, for the Commish to avoid making such predictions, as there really isn’t much to gain from doing so. Predict a number too low, and it gives the impression the WSOP wasn’t prepared to handle the field that arrives. Predict a number too high, and it gives the impression the WSOP hasn’t met expectations. And, as a marketing-savvy guy, Pollack has always been aware of the importance of impressions.

I’ve heard Pollack interviewed a few times this year, and also heard his answers to questions at the 2009 WSOP Media Conference Call a couple of weeks ago. Haven’t been hearing the question about Main Event numbers so much of late, as I suppose reporters are getting wise to the fact that Pollack ain’t gonna give them anything concrete in response.

All of which makes it interesting to discover that in the 2009 WSOP Staff Resource Guide one finds predictions -- of a sort -- of the numbers of entrants for each of the 57 bracelet events. Including the big one.

Now this guide isn’t necessarily meant to serve as part of the marketing of the WSOP, but rather just a helpful reference for those many individuals employed by Harrah’s to manage the various events. It’s a good idea for those folks to have at least some clue about how many will be showing up for each event so as to prepare more efficiently the needed tables, dealers, and other resources.

Nevertheless, these planned-for numbers do give us a glimpse into what those running the show at the WSOP are anticipating. If you are curious, you can mosey over to Pokerati to see where Kevmath has compiled a list of these predictions, including indications of whether returning events are predicted to have more or fewer entrants.

Lots of interest in there, for sure, such as the prediction of 150 entrants for the much-hyped $40,000 buy-in “40th Annual” No-Limit Hold’em Event (Event No. 2). Barry Greenstein has an over-under bet on that one with Eli Elezra in which Greenstein has taken the over on 222 entrants. They’re also planning for 5,305 players to come out for the so-called “stimulus special” $1,000 buy-in No-Limit Hold’em Event (Event No. 4), which would rival the number of entrants for the Main Event in 2005. Like I say, check out the list on Pokerati for other interesting figures.

So, in this here WSOP Staff Resource Media Guide, we have ourselves a prediction (in a way) for the Main Event -- 7,323. That would represent an increase of nearly 500 from last year’s total (6,844).

My instinctive response to the number is to say it sounds reasonable. There are many factors, of course, which will affect the Main Event turnout, the two biggest probably being the still-struggling economy and the rest of the overstuffed WSOP schedule. But the general vibe I’m catching is that there’s a bit more excitement this year regarding the WSOP than last time around. And as far as the Main Event goes, we might actually see some benefit coming from the institution last year of the “November Nine” delayed final table, insofar as everyone saw how it worked and thus some may well be further encouraged to participate in the Main Event this time around.

Dr. Pauly has already predicted 7,100 for the 2009 WSOP Main Event. Like I say, I think some number over 7,000 sounds reasonable. What do you think?