EPL: Putting The Pro (And Grow) In Professional Poker
By BigLeadSports
Blog By Annie Duke
Anyone can play golf. Anyone can play football. Anyone can skateboard. Anyone can play tennis. My father is still out there competing in the seniors division on the courts several times a week. I am pretty sure you don’t want to watch my 72-year-old dad playing tennis on TV.
The beginning of the television boom for poker was all the way back in 2002-2003. That tells you how new poker is to the mass media. It is a young sport and it is time for it to grow up.
At the beginning of the boom, poker tournaments were small, generally in the 100 to 150 entrant range. This was mainly because only a handful of people really knew there was such a thing as ‘tournament poker’. Who were the people that knew? They were the best poker players in the world. So tournaments, de facto, were competitions where the best players in the world played against each other because those are the only folks who even knew tournaments existed.
The pros thrived on the competition, I know I did, when you won a championship it felt real because you had beaten other champions. The title I relish the most is my Tournament of Champions win because I had to beat Phil Hellmuth, Phil Ivey, Doyle Brunson, Chip Reese and 5 other of the best players in the world to earn that victory. The toughness of the field makes the win so much sweeter.
So when poker was first put on television it was really just like any other sport, fans of the game got to watch the best players play each other and that created a lot of great action to watch. Fans could see poker played at the elite level between its elite players.
Sure, occasionally there was a Chris Moneymaker, the Cinderella story of the amateurs who rises up to defeat the pros. But that was the exception, albeit a glorious exception. In the first couple of seasons of televised poker, the pro was the rule and the Cinderella story was the exception.
That might seem like a great thing on the surface, but what it meant was the best players in the world had little chance of making the televised final tables. The Cinderella story now became the rule and the pro the exception – and that dilutes the value of both. Cinderella stories are only interesting because they are unusual. Make 8 out of 9 of the players at the final table a Cinderella story and it just isn’t so, well, Cinderella-y anymore.
The net result is of this type of environment is that is almost impossible for “new stars” to be created. I personally received a huge benefit from focused television coverage at the beginning of the boom. I had a unique story that enticed the media, being a woman and a mom, coupled with the fact that there just weren’t that many folks to cover.
Today with huge field sizes it becomes almost impossible to create new stars because the new generation of great players just can’t get on television enough for the fans to get to know them. There are too many players to cover for anyone to get the kind of focus the players back at the beginning of the boom benefitted from. Add to that that when fans watch a player win, they have no way to distinguish if this is just another one hit wonder or a player who has unusual poker talent.
Ask any casual poker fan to name the best players in the world and I guarantee they will rattle off a bunch of names of players who became famous in the first couple of years of the poker boom: Phil Hellmuth, Phil Ivey, Daniel Negreanu. From this you would think there were no new great players in the last half decade.
I’m willing to bet that if I listed off the top ten players in poker today, the casual poker fan has probably heard of at best two of them. Do you know who Eugene Katchalov is or Tom Marchese or Scott Seiver? You should because they are currently number 3, 7 and 8 in the world. Phil Ivey who you probably have heard of, is currently unranked. This demonstrates one of the key problems for the sport today. I don’t watch a lot of tennis but I sure know who Federer, Nadal and Djokovic are.
I even know who Shaun White is and I really haven’t watched more than 10 minutes of snowboarding in my life. That’s because even snowboarding has grown up enough to know you have to have some sort of competition where the field is limited to objectively the best in the world.
This caps the possible worldwide entrants in all Epic Main Events to 250, with about half that number playing each main event. Epic events host between the top 100 and 150 of the best players in the world all competing against each other. How good are these guys? In the first event this past August a total of 15 of the top 20 players in the world played the tournament. At the 6-handed final table, the combined lifetime earnings of the players was over $45,000,000 and two of the players, Jason Mercier and Erik Seidel grabbed the number 1 and 2 rankings on the Global Poker Index based on their results in that event. That’s the definition of the best competing against the best.
Kind of retro, right? Feels very 2003 in the best possible way for the game.
Honestly, it is time for poker to grow up, too.
Annie Duke is the Commissioner of EPL and co-founder of Federated Sports + Gaming. She is third on the women’s all-time money list with $4.2 million in earnings. This month, she was nominated for induction into the Poker Hall of Fame. (Big Lead Sports Q&A with Annie Duke.)