There’s been a lot of talk recently about comments made by Jamie Gold in his post-WSOP media tour, most of which fall under the category of “what a pompous, arrogant jerk” (at best). With Phil Hellmuth’s successes as WSOP Player of the Year and Mike Matusow’s ever-presence on any ESPN coverage, I figured it’d be a good time to take a look at the “heels” of poker, and try to understand what it all means. <READMORE>

My online name “grapsfan” means that I am a fan of grappling. I grew up watching boxing with my dad, did enough amateur wrestling as a kid to know I wasn’t very good, and studied judo and Brazilian jiu-jitsu for a few years as an adult. I like the UFC, Pride, K-1…any of the fighting arts. But most of all, as long as I can remember, I’ve been a fan of professional wrestling. I love the athleticism, the violence, the characters, and its often-cheesy theatricality. Before getting serious about poker, wrestling was probably my #1 hobby, as I served as advisor, feature writer and forum moderator at WrestlingClassics.com (the owner of which is a long-time friend who now reads and posts at P5s as “FabulousTexan”). So having been a fan for over 30 years, I see aspects of pro wrestling in everything around me, especially in anything televised as “reality”. Poker fits nicely into this categorization.

The last few years, the WSOP champions have all fit into the pro wrestling category of “babyface”, or the good guy, the hero. Whether they be the undeniable talent (Chris Ferguson), the hard-working everyman (Chris Moneymaker, Greg Raymer) or the suave, “I wanna be like him” cool guy (Carlos Mortenson, Joe Hachem), the first winners of the new millennium are likeable on-screen personalities. A number of other players come to mind immediately as strong babyfaces: Kenna James, Gavin Smith, Doyle Brunson, and Barry Greenstein (because of his actions, his interviews are actually pretty heelish). To be honest, most poker players don’t have enough on-camera personality to really come across as babyfaces, regardless of what kind of people and players they are. I mean, I admire their skills as much as anyone, but Phil Ivey, David Singer and Allen Cunningham don’t ooze any sort of on-camera presence one way or the other.

Some of the other celebrities of the game are definitely “heels”, or the villains of the sport, at least in terms of their on-camera exploits. In professional wrestling, the heels generally fall into two categories. One of them is the whiny jerk, the argumentative, exploitative one. He’s the guy whom you, as a fan, want to see get the taste smacked out of his mouth whilst going down to an ignominious defeat. For wrestling fans, these were heels like “The Mouth of the South” Jimmy Hart, Jim Cornette and the late “Hot Stuff” Eddie Gilbert. In poker, the obvious examples are Phil Hellmuth and Mike Matusow, although I’ve always felt that Paul “Eskimo” Clark personified this as much as anyone at the table.

A different kind of heel is the cocky, “I’m better than you, I’ll prove it to everyone, and there’s nothing you can do about it”, arrogant guy whom you, as a fan, really want to see get his comeuppance. Sometimes he’s the foreign menace (the Iron Sheik or Nikita Koloff in wrestling; Men “The Master” Nguyen is probably the best example in poker), but not always. Let’s look at these quotes:

“To be the man, you’ve got to beat the man…and I am the man!”
“Diamonds are forever, and so is Ric Flair.”
“Whether you like it, or you don’t like it, learn to love it, because it’s the best thing going today!” – “Nature Boy” Ric Flair (I could have used about 20 other lines from Flair, the absolute quintessential heel of my lifetime, and probably my favorite guy to ever step in the ring)

“I am the best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be.” – Bret “Hitman” Hart (whom I always thought was a mediocre character as a babyface, but a really brilliant heel)

“I was like Kobe coming out of high school.”
“It was the greatest display of big-stack poker ever.”
“Bodog insisted that they put me on their celebrity team because they knew the celebrities wouldn’t go far and I had a great chance in this tournament.” – Jamie Gold

There have been other poker players who fit the “cocky heel” role fairly well. I always thought of TJ Cloutier that way, even though he has a gracious side to him, and Shawn Sheikhan is trying like hell to make himself the first poker player to ever end up in a Steel Cage match. But Jamie Gold is in perfect position to take poker villainy to the next level if he so chooses and I think it’ll be good for the game. A good heel is always marketable, especially one capable of being this kind of heel. It takes a special personality to make this gimmick work. A wise man once told me “A great wrestling gimmick is one that isn’t a gimmick.” Ric Flair doesn’t just become the “Nature Boy” when he steps out from behind the curtain; he lives it all the time. Jamie Gold’s heel gimmick may the same way. If we’re lucky, he’s as arrogant and pompous as initially portrayed, which means he’ll never slip up and blow his cover, so to speak.

So what does it mean for all of us? First, as fans, we need to keep in mind that the person away from the game, or even in the game when the cameras aren’t rolling, is often different than the one in the spotlight. Almost everyone who knows Phil Hellmuth outside a casino says he is a genuinely good person with a great heart. It’s not fair to judge a person because of how television may edit and portray them.

More importantly, to all of us grinding it out without ever sitting at a table with the real Jamie Golds and Phil Hellmuths of the world, there will be a million imitators. They will suck at it. They can drive you insane with how bad they suck at it. It is crucial for you to not only block it from affecting your game, but for you to work past it to get a read on whether or not their chatter and attitude is affecting their own play. I remember very clearly one night where I blew off three buy-ins at a $1/$2 NL game on Full Tilt to a guy who was doing and saying everything he could think of to work the table into frenzy. About the fourth time he trapped me or goaded me into a big pot, it hit me that he was probably the tightest, most sane guy there. He just wasn’t talking like it. In retrospect, it was fun to watch and a good, albeit expensive, lesson to remember.

In contrast, last night I played in the same game with a guy on my left who called all of us “Internet donks” and ridiculed someone almost every hand while his stack zig-zagged up and (mostly) down. Remembering back to my previous experience, I tried very hard to focus in on how he was playing, rather than what he was saying, and what I noticed was that he was getting reckless pre-flop, then tightening up if he made his hand for fear of getting yet another bad beat. Of course, they weren’t really bad beats at all. He was consistently giving people the right price for their draws and making crying calls with mediocre holdings. If I would have listened to what he was saying about how we all played, I might not have noticed how he played himself, and therefore missed the pleasure of being the recipient of the majority of his losses on the evening.

Be entertained by the heels. They’re often times the best part of the show, in wrestling, poker, and in life. Then, if you get the chance, give them what the fans paid to see.
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