The Poker Corner

A new champion has been crowned at the 2005 World Series of Poker…and I'm not going to tell you who it is. You can find out easily enough if you want to, but what I've found the last few days is how many people DON'T want to know who walked away with the diamond bracelet and $7.5 million in cash. I'm amazed that in this day of 24-hour news channels and the omniscient Internet so many folks are willing to wait until November 15th for ESPN to reveal who won that final, historic hand. That's a long time to keep your head in the sand.

But I understand the reasons behind the madness. I found that I didn't enjoy this season's World Poker Tour as much as I did the first two in large part because I knew who the winners were. When it's 9:47 and Doyle Brunson goes all-in, it somewhat kills the drama when you know Texas Dolly is going to be smiling at the end surrounded by bundles of greenbacks. I guess it's a little bit like finding out whether your baby is going to be a boy or a girl—its going to be a big surprise no matter when you get the news, but you get more bang for your buck if wait until the big event, if you'll pardon the expression.

The 2005 WSOP Main Event wasn't just huge in a poker sense—it was a huge news story. The winner took home more money than the total purse of the British Open. Thousands of players from all over the world competed, and tens of thousands played in satellites both online and live trying to get in. It was a textbook example of democracy and meritocracy in action…assuming that no one made the field by sucking out on the river. For argument's sake let's make that assumption, because it’s an argument I can't counter.

It wasn't so long ago (1981 in fact) that CBS showed the NBA Finals on tape delay at 11PM. Today it would be insane for a network to pay billions for broadcast rights and then keep viewers from watching the event live (I know, NBC did just that with the Sydney and Athens Olympics, which is why I said it's insane). There's no way to keep fans from finding out who won the game, and once that cat's out of the bag you can kiss your 19.4 ratings share goodbye.

But poker has proven far stickier than basketball or football when it comes to retaining viewers. Ratings for WPT events were higher the second time the shows were broadcast, and the WSOP events have been a consistent draw on ESPN despite repeats that appear so often I wonder if the tapes are growing threadbare. Watching a favorite poker show over and over can be like re-reading a favorite book, you notice things you might've missed before. Or it can provide more soothing background noise than the ubiquitous talk-show screaming and reality-show nonsense.

So people are watching poker. But would they watch LIVE poker? Fox broadcast 2 live tournaments (at Turning Stone and the recent Full Tilt Poker event) and the action was, at times, a bit dull. Unless you enjoy watching an early position raise and five rapid-fire folds. The thing is, you SHOULD enjoy watching that, because that's how good tournament players increase their stacks, by stealing blinds and antes. Watching how top players play each hand, each and every hand, can provide insights into the game you can't get out of a book.

Which is why it's unlikely we'll ever see gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Main Event on ESPN—a lot of professionals woudn't want to give up that much information about how they play. A number of top players have said they carefully study DVDs of the WPT and WSOP tournaments looking for tells and patterns in their rivals' play, but at least in those instances the player under scrutiny has made a final table and has locked up a nice payday. A seat at the TV table on the first day of the Main Event, when they're one bad beat from an early and ignominious exit, might not seem like such a big honor, not when their every bet and raise will be closely analyzed by a school of sharks.

Maybe ESPN is the wrong venue. The perfect network to provide total coverage of the WSOP would be C-SPAN—just set up a camera, turn it on, and turn it off after the bracelet is awarded. You wouldn't get to see the hole cards of the players at the feature table, but you would at least get a glimpse at the spectacle the World Series has become. It's said that watching poker without hole card cameras is like watching grass grow, which is another reason it would find a ready home at C-SPAN, which features scintillating speeches by members of Congress and lots and lots of panel discussions. A perfect fit. It would also remove the need for 14 hours of play-by-play commentary, which would be a tough gig to fill. Put Norm Chad on TV for 14 hours straight and you're getting a call in the morning from the FCC, that I can guarantee.

Is there a market for this extended coverage? Well, I had friends at the Rio covering the World Series and live-blogging the Main Event, and as it wound toward the final table they each were getting over 100,000 page views a day. These were both personal and corporate blogs, but none of them had the marketing and advertising clout of a broadcast network, and they were still pulling in huge audiences. CardPlayer.com had streaming video and interviews throughout the tournament, Phil Gordon was podcasting from the start, and other web sites provided chip counts and hand-to-hand replays. The Rio certainly wasn't surrounded by a Cone of Silence.

And in the end, maybe television doesn't have a role to play in expanded WSOP coverage. By next year it probably will be a technical piece-of-cake for bloggers to provide video as well as text for the web-surfing masses. You might have a dozen sites providing content that was once the monopoly of the biggest media outlets. Just as the Internet helped create the poker boom, it may provide the means for journalists of every stripe to feed the hunger for poker news. Of course, those of you who don't want to know who won the Main Event have to somehow avoid that news. For four months. Good luck with that.