By
shronk
“The art of progress is to preserve order amid change.” - Alfred North Whitehead. That may as well be Jeffrey Pollack’s motto. No single sports television event has shown the amount of growth in as short amount of time as the World Series of Poker over the last few years. This is almost wholly due to the new ideas and changes put forth by Pollack, Harrah’s, and ESPN. If hastily handled, such drastic and sudden growth could have easily sunk such a huge enterprise. However, the WSOP powers-that-be have demonstrated a commitment to progress, a willingness to admit their mistakes, and dead-on accuracy when it comes to making changes that helped grow the game of poker.
The latest change to the WSOP is the pushing back of the final table of the $10,000 Main Event. Obviously it was met with fierce opposition and criticism (but let’s be honest, is there any change to the WSOP that could be announced without hordes of naysayers screaming their opinions?). People ultimately hate change, and they hate it even more when they perceive it to only be benefitting people that aren’t them. To really understand the benefits of this move, we have to look at how it benefits everyone – including the final table players and the poker community as a whole.
The final nine players will obviously experience unprecedented media and sponsorship opportunities. I think logical minds will agree that the final table becomes infinitely more interesting if we know more about the people involved. I covered the entire WSOP last year and was among the last 20 people to leave the Amazon Room after Jerry Yang took down the title, and right now I couldn’t name five of the final table players. 2007 final table participant Jon Kalmar went deep in the recent WPT Championship at Bellagio and more than one tournament reporter had to ask me who he was. Is there any argument that it would be better for all of us if even more of these guys were stars? This break will allow players to hire agents and break into the mainstream media to bring more viewers to the WSOP, which in turn will bring more players, more money, and more fish.
The final nine players will also benefit from money added to the prize pool. Harrah’s plans on paying out ninth place money to all the final table players and placing the balance of the money (presumably around $20 million) into an interest-bearing account for the ten week delay. The interest accrued off that sum will surely be nothing to scoff at and will be given directly back to the players.
The WSOP fields have slightly shrunk since the passing of the IUGEA. If the reward for final tabling (interest money added to prize pool, more sponsorships, more stardom, and ultimately more money) becomes greater, that will just attract more players to the main event. Along with these new players comes the $10,000 in equity they just added to your tournament, plus the likelihood of one of them gifting off chips to you – more dead money and softer fields sounds like a tournament I’d want to be a part of.
On the surface, ESPN getting higher ratings doesn’t sound like something the average player should care about. If you look deeper, however, you’ll realize that every time poker is shown on a mainstream television network, it helps to legitimize the industry. In the era of the IUGEA and some of the online scandals that we’ve suffered through, the poker industry needs legitimacy to survive. By placing the Main Event front-and-center on one of the biggest networks in the world, high ratings can easily translate into more legitimacy in the eyes of the American public.
There is also an intangible benefit to the delay. If you’re reading this, odds are you’re a fan at heart. The people reading this article are the same people who watch hours and hours of Poker After Dark, High Stakes Poker, World Poker Tour, and probably every single hour of the World Series of Poker broadcast. With this saturation of poker programming, a new way to watch poker would just flat out be exciting for us as fans. I know that having knowledge of how the final tables play out is exponentially less exciting than when I don’t. Even if you feel on the surface this idea is gimmicky, you will almost assuredly be excited leading up to the airing of the semi-live main even final table after weeks of anticipation, media attention, and learning about these players. It’s just going to be good TV.
One of the common outcries of the naysayers has been, “What if one of the players dies in the 10 week delay?” Well, as tragic as that would be, it’s simply so unlikely that it makes an absurd argument. Have any of the main event final table players passed away within 10 weeks of the final table in the last 20 years?
Others are screaming that this will “ruin the integrity of the game.” Yes, the tourney will have a different wrinkle to it, but it would be a mistake if the WSOP was simply satisfied with the status quo and didn’t strive to make the WSOP bigger and better each year. I mean, would the WSOP really be better off if it was still at Binion’s? With only the main event televised? Without hole card cameras? At the advent of all of those changes, poker purists threw up in between shouting that the integrity of the game had been ruined, but these changes have only helped to turn poker into what it is today.
A lot of people have quickly assumed that this change was made purely out of greed. However, if you look back at the history of Jeffrey Pollack and the other “suits,” they clearly demonstrate a genuine desire to make the WSOP better for players and fans alike. They have implemented numerous suggestions from the Player’s Committee, including adding more non-hold ‘em events, adding more $10k events, shortening playing days, and changing structures of events. All of those decisions actually work in direct contradiction to what a business that was only looking out for ratings would want (i.e. more hold ‘em, cramming in more events, and faster structures). They have also demonstrated the willingness to admit their mistakes and correct them as soon as they can. Pollack himself said on the most recent media conference call “the tent clearly didn’t do what we intended it to; there will be no more tent.” He had shown this level of contrition with many of their decisions that didn’t work as planned.
This also proves that the WSOP has the ability to try things out, admit they didn’t work, and then correct them. This is another reason not to be threatened by the final table delay. The worst case scenario is that it doesn’t work, people don’t like it, and they change it back next year.
So with that in mind, why not take a shot at something that has the potential to benefit so many people? It’s good for the WSOP, it’s good for the final table players, and it’s good for the poker community – sounds like the art of progress to me.
* For a contrasting opinion on the WSOP final table rescheduling, P5's members and visitors are encouraged to read Paul "grapsfan" Herzog's article titled Greed Gone Wild.
Justin Shronk got into poker media in 2006 as the Multimedia Intern for Cardplayer Media, specifically working on "The Circuit" radio show. After that internship, Justin helped launch the multimedia department of PokerNews.com's tournament coverage as Multimedia Manager for PokerNews during the 2007 WSOP. In December of '07, Justin moved over to PokerRoad.com where he is a producer for PokerRoad Radio and other multimedia projects, as well as writing the weekly "Pokerazzi" and "15 Outs" columns and managing the daily news section.