Professional Poker: From Dark Rooms To The Bright Lights

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Blog By Annie Duke

My perspective, however, was that poker was simply a form of investing your money at a mathematical advantage over time, akin to options trading. The general public thought poker was more like craps, pure luck, gambling in the truest sense of the word. No one believed that poker could be a vocation or a craft that could earn you a living and a pretty good one over time.

Most of my early career was spent explaining to people what I did for a living. I would tell them I play poker and their first assumption was always that I was a poker dealer. No, I’d insist, I’ve never dealt a hand professionally in my life. Then there would be some series of obligatory follow-up questions about whether: my husband was rich, was I independently wealthy, did I have another ‘real’ job and ultimately it spiraled into the inevitable question, had I considered Gamblers Anonymous.  No, No, No and emphatically No!

Almost a decade later – you can imagine how weird it was for me in 2002 when the cameras came to tournament poker to put us all on television. If you think poker itself was obscure as a job, at least everyone understood the idea of a home game. Now came the real challenge, trying to explain a poker tournament to these same folks, a journey into the land of the often absurd.

So when the cameras came to poker, I have to admit that I did not have the vision of how poker as a televised sport would evolve. I was coming from an experience of strangers looking sideways at me when they found out what I “claimed” to do for a living – so I certainly didn’t think anyone would consider poker interesting enough for millions of households to fire it up on the tube.

Shortly after the 2003 WSOP Main Event started airing, someone came up to me at a poker tournament and asked me for my autograph. I started laughing. Really. I thought it was a cruel joke that Erik Seidel had put them up to.   I couldn’t imagine that a few episodes on television could enhance awareness and  interest in the game I loved.

Things didn’t turn out that way, once poker hit television, people watched with rapt attention.   While they cared about the game’s strategy, because there were so few pros playing at that time, they became increasingly more interested in us, the players.  We were experiencing the birth of a form of ‘reality TV.’

At the time the cameras first came around poker, there were only about 70 or so regular professional level poker tournament players. For perspective, the WSOP Main Event in 2003, the first year it was televised with hole cards, had 839 entrants – in 2006 it had 8,800. The whole first season of the World Poker Tour did not see a tournament exceed 177 players with a few tournaments in the 80 entrant range. The WPT Championship that year had only 111 players in it, which at that time was a huge number of entrants, unheard of really, for that size buy-in.

You can imagine that as a woman, with four children under the age of 7, playing professional poker among only about 70 (or so) regulars, I got a lot of attention. Everyone in that original ‘class’ of players did – and the fans really got to know us. We were on TV a lot mainly because – well, we were there. The public it turns out had a voracious appetite for poker television, and we benefited with a lot of TV time because we were the only people that could fill the roles.  The most famous poker players in the world all came from that original class of 2002-2003; players like Chris Ferguson, Phil Ivey, Erik Seidel, Daniel Negreanu, Phil Hellmuth, Doyle Brunson and Jennifer Harman.

Mine is a story of accidental fame – right place, right time, right skills and right story. Today I feel like the reverse is true – players become “accidentally anonymous.’”  Unlike when I started playing poker, this is no longer a world that players enter thinking that no one will ever know their name. Young players think that if they excel at this game they will become famous.

So now the sport of poker has a problem – and it is a big one. All of the really well-known pros are close to or over 40, but poker is a young game.  As a sport, we cannot let our stars age without creating new ones to replace them. We have a Top Ten in the game where the general public most likely only knows one of them, Erik Seidel. Be honest, have you ever heard of Sam Stein? Eugene Katchalov? Shawn Buchanan? Go look at the Global Poker Index and test yourself. These guys are the best in the world and unfortunately most folks have never heard of them because they just don’t get enough television coverage for anyone to get to know them in the way America got to know the class of 2002 a decade ago. That is a huge problem for poker, for any sport, if the Top Ten is anonymous.

I don’t want to see a tennis or golf tournament with 8,000 entrants. I want my tennis players pre-qualified so I know I am watching just a small handful of the best players in the world playing the game. (and I know and care who they are). Tennis has stars and a platform that allows new stars to emerge and get rewarded for excellence in their game.

To solve this problem, you have to take a modern approach to rolling back the clock and figure out what worked so well about the “good old days.” And that means limiting the fields to the best players in the world and trying to create events in that 100 to 150 player range. Because what the last decade should have taught us is that in poker, just like in any sport, quality really matters much more than quantity.

I might have become “accidentally” famous a decade ago but the number two poker player in the world, Eugene Katchalov, should not remain anonymous now.

Annie Duke is Commissioner of the Epic Poker League, a new, and professionals-only poker league with 253 qualified cardholders.