The Times We Live In

Following Chris Moneymaker’s meteoric rise to stardom after winning the 2003 World Series of Poker that revolutionized Texas Hold’em, I really lost interest in the World Series and other televised poker tournaments. The game just wasn’t the same after that.

Sure, Moneymaker’s story brought in a ton of money from new, inspired players who believed in the “Anyone Can Win” mentality that Moneymaker helped popularize. However, the celebrities of Texas Hold’em just aren’t the same as they used to be.

On Yahoo’s website today I saw a photo of the new WSOP winner standing next to the final table with his “posse.” The photo was indicative of what the game has become. It was a 23-year-old douche-bag-looking dude and about nine others who looked identical to him. It seemed like a “life imitating art” moment straight out of HBO’s “Entourage.”

While there still are those in the world of poker who I can admire like Phil Ivey, the bombardment of posers and phonies looking for 15 minutes of fame and a million-dollar payday is just too much to wade through.

In the late 90s when I would watch the World Series of Poker, the amount of talent at a final table was amazing and it was a joy to watch the titans of poker battle one another. And the players of old had personalities. They were characters. They weren’t all 20-something college dropouts who decided a 9-5 job was too lame and playing cards for a living was the cool thing to do. I’m not saying that some of those dropouts aren’t worthy of being card pros, but because there are so many of them they have become caricatures of themselves.

The World Series of Poker was also more interesting prior to Moneymaker because unless cards were shown at the end of a hand, the viewer didn’t find out what the players were holding. The hole-card camera was non-existent prior to the 21st century, and therefore it was almost as if you were playing at home trying to figure out what the guy had before a showdown commenced.

I know this is mostly just “old man” syndrome spouting off a rant, but the game of poker is a joke to watch nowadays. Especially when the field has thousands of people and it is more luck than good play that earns you a World Series Main Event bracelet. That is not to say that good players aren’t winning each year, but I cannot be convinced that in a field of 5,000+ contestants that the best player is crowned winner each year.

Something that would bring me back as a viewer to the World Series of Poker is if the Main Event’s buy-in was increased to thin the field back down so only the truly great players were playing again. Would average players want to risk $50,000, or even $100,000, of their savings simply to say they took part in the World Series of Poker like some do now with the $10,000 buy-in?

The way things are now, it is as if the NFL were to open up the playoffs to every team in the league, all college teams and any other group who could get enough players to field a team and have the brackets whittle their way down through 12 or 13 levels, where by the end of things you have the only two teams who could survive injuries playing in the Super Bowl, whether that is the Pittsburgh Steelers and Green Bay Packers or the Stephen F. Austin Lumberjacks and Deion Sanders Pop Warner football team.