Will the Newly Minted Professional Poker Tour Meet the Needs of the Game?

After five months of negotiations World Poker Tour Enterprises and the Travel Channel have an agreement in place to bring WPTE’s new show, the Professional Poker Tour, to the Travel Channel later on this year.

The top 200 poker players in the world will compete against each other week after week, and each player will have to qualify for a tour card in order to compete. Tour cards will be earned through success on the World Poker Tour, the World Series of Poker’s main event, or by achieving stature in the poker community through such things as membership in the Poker Hall of Fame.

The five tournaments that will make up season one of the PPT have already been filmed. The show is hosted by poker pro Mark Seif and actor-poker enthusiast Matt Corboy.

While this tour seems like a start in the right direction, I believe a better model would be predicated on tour stops that are sanctioned by a poker association, rather than television determining who is eligible to play on tour as well as deciding which events will be used to define the tour.

Workable models abound. The PGA, the Rodeo Cowboys Association, and professional tennis all offer fair and effective ways of putting a tour together.

If a professional poker association were to be formed, there’s no reason why its governing board couldn’t be made up of players, networks, programmers, and hotel properties. This broadly based grouping, though sometimes at odds with one another, ought to be able to come up with a tour of major events, as well as one or more satellite tours to serve as feeders for the main tour — in much the same way that golfers play on lesser tours in hopes of working their way up to the PGA.

This kind of structure puts poker right where it belongs, firmly in the hands of its stakeholders: players, TV programmers, networks, casinos, and anyone else with a vested interest in the game. Though not as convenient an arrangement as a tour that’s network controlled, or in thrall to a TV production group, I’m sure the right balance could be struck to allow everyone to share in the growth and interest that surrounds televised tournament poker.

After all, the competing and diverse interest that are golf, rodeo, and tennis have each made it work in their particular sports, so why not poker? And why not now?

What's your take on this?

Jellyfish exhibit at Long Beach Aquarium - 2005

 

Is Poker About to Come to North Carolina?

An AP story a day or so ago said that the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians met with advisors to North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley to discuss a new gambling agreement with the state. The reason for this get-together, according to tribal officials, is their desire to add live poker at its casino.

The tribe believes poker holds a winning hand for them, as well as for local residents. They envision an additional 430 jobs along with a $15.2 million payroll once their poker room is operational. The tribe sees this expansion as a way to compete with the cheap airfare and accommodations offered by other casinos in the Southeast.The Cherokees' existing casino offers 3,500 video games for slots, poker and blackjack. The casino is run by Harrah's under a contract with the tribe.

According to a spokesperson for the governor, the parties only need to work out the details of the gambling agreement.

This is pretty compelling evidence that interest in poker has not waned, nor is it about to. North Carolina has been a state without legal poker and residents have either had to travel out-of-state to play, or satisfy their poker Jones online.

With a revised agreement in place, a Cherokee poker room will provide easy access to poker players and jobs too. Sounds like a winning hand to me.

How Popular Will the $50,000 HORSE event be at the WSOP?

A few days ago I posted about that the World Series of Poker adding a $50,000 buy-in HORSE event to this year’s schedule.

Now they’ve announced a try-out event aimed at testing its drawing power. At the WSOP Circuit stop at Caesars Palace, slated to run from April 28th to May 11th, a $5,000 HORSE event will be played on May 2nd.

Until this HORSE stampeded into the arena, hold’em was what the event was all about, with only a lone Omaha event as a change of pace. But WSOP Commissioner Jeffrey Pollack listened to players who said that hold’em was dominating the WSOP, to the detriment of other games, and the biggest buy-in event in WSOP history was added to the schedule.

The $50K HORSE event will be played prior to the $10,000 buy-in no-limit hold’em tournament, and the high cost of entry should limit the field to poker’s biggest name players — or its wealthiest. Did Harrah’s make a good decision by adding a $50,000 buy-in HORSE event to the schedule? While we won’t know for sure until the WSOP, we’ll have a good idea after the $5,000 buy-in HORSE event makes it debut at Caesars in early May.

Many top players believe that mixed games are better determinants of who should be considered poker’s “world champion” than just a hold’em event. The size of the buy-in is also designed to limit the field, thereby making it unlikely that an unknown player will jump out of the woodwork and make his mark with an unexpected win.

This could eventually lead the folks at Harrah’s to decide that the $50,000 HORSE event should be the championship bout, not the $10,000 buy-in no-limit hold’em tournament. While that would certainly reduce the number of players willing to pony up $50K for a chance to become poker’s champion, it would also relegate the traditional championship event to the status of “…just another hold’em tournament.” If Harrah’s were to designate the HORSE event as poker’s Big Kahuna, it wouldn’t take long before you’d find far fewer players signing up for the $10,000 no-limit hold’em tournament.

Would that lead to more and more satellites for the $50K event? It might. But there’s only so much money to go around, and since satellites are essentially multi-level marketing modalities, far more folks and far more dollars would have to line the base of the pyramid to provide $50,000 for each player who wins an entry. In fact, if the money stayed the same, it’s hard to envision the $50K HORSE event ever topping 1,000 entrants. But I say that with trepidation. After all, we’ve all been waaaaay over to the short side when it came to predicting the number of WSOP entrants during the past few years.

I don’t see Harrah’s forcing the action by declaring that the HORSE event is now the world championship event, because that ensures that the $10K tournament would decline in status. But if the $50K event grew in stature to the point where it became the primo event all on its own — the “people’s champion,” as it were — then all Harrah’s would have to do is recognize that reality. Anointing a popular choice is not nearly as dicey as forcing the action, which would mean kicking the $10,000 buy-in no-limit hold’em tournament — an event that now attracts 6,000 players — to the curb in the process. I just can’t see Harrah’s making that kind of decision, especially when there’s no guarantee that the $50,000 HORSE event will become a popular event.

It’s hard for me to guess just how popular the $50,000 HORSE event will be with players and with the TV viewing audience. I don’t think Harrah’s can make an accurate assessment at this juncture either, which is why a try-out of sorts at Caesars on May 2 sounds like a good idea. After all, they still try out Broadway shows in the hinterlands, so why not poker?

The Poker Wisdom of Chad Flood

According to Chad Flood, a junior at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, it took patience and a level head to out play more than 25,000 students from 2,400 schools around the world to win the 2005 College Poker Championship and earn the $41,000 grand-prize scholarship. Flood, an economics major, offers the top five lessons he learned while competing in the second annual College Poker Championship.

1. Manage Your Money Wisely — In poker, as in life, it's important not to waste money on marginal investments. Don't throw away money on longshot draws when you're not getting the correct pot odds to make them.

2. Be Patient — It's not necessary to play every hand. Wait for the right situation to make your moves.

3. Assess Your Opponents — It's essential to read people and try to anticipate their next moves; this will keep you one step ahead of your competitors. Study their wagers and antes, just as you would pay attention to mannerisms and facial expressions at the poker table.

4. Stay Calm — Having a short fuse or a bad temper can be a problem in poker just as it is in everyday life. People with bad tempers often find themselves playing on tilt and too recklessly due to the previous hand.

5. Express Yourself — Sometimes it isn't possible to sit back and wait for aces. If you begin to get short stacked, you may have to make a move with a less than premium hand. Otherwise the blinds will eat away at your chips.

Students can put Flood's strategies and their own to the test in College Poker Championship III, which is currently underway. More than $200,000 in scholarships and $10,000 in charity donations are on the line in the third annual tournament. Weekly qualifying tournaments are held on Sundays at 6:00 p.m. EST with practice tournaments on Tuesdays at 6:00 p.m. EST.

The College Poker Championship, located at www.collegepoker.com, is open to registered college and university students worldwide to determine the World's Best College Poker Player. Entry into the tournament is free of charge, and no purchase is ever required. College Poker Championship supports students' educational endeavors with scholarships worth $200,000, and charity donations too. In poker and in life, champions like Chad Flood use poker as a strategic learning tool.

Harrah's Adds $50,000 Buy-In Event to 2006 WSOP

Harrah’s Entertainment recently added a $50,000 buy-in HORSE event to the 2006 WSOP. This marks their first ever event with a buy-in of more than $10,000 at the WSOP.

HORSE tests a variety of poker skills, with players taking turns playing five different kinds of poker during the event: no-limit hold’em, Omaha, razz, stud, and stud 8-or-better.

Harrah’s also announced that six of the most recognizable tournament pros have joined a player advisory panel created by Harrah’s to help guide and improve players’ experiences at WSOP events.

Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, Scotty Nguyen, Jennifer Harman, Howard Lederer, Daniel Negreanu, and Robert Williamson III have committed to a one-year post on a player advisory council that will work with Harrah’s executives to help enhance player experience at WSOP events.

The panel, which will soon add one non-professional player, will meet regularly with Harrah’s executives to provide their opinions and suggestions about WSOP.

A $50,000 buy-in event is something that will attract most of the top name pros, but not scads of other players. I’m sure no one expects 6,000 players to ante up $50,000 apiece for this event, though 6,000 looks solid if you’re forecasting the number of entrants in the $10,000 buy-in no-limit hold’em tournament. In addition to the high buy-in, HORSE is also an event that answers the assertion by many top professional players that hold’em alone is not a true test of poker mastery, since the HORSE tests players’ skills in five distinct poker games.

Whether a $50,000 HORSE event or the traditional $10,000 no-limit hold’em tournament becomes the WSOP event that determines the world champion in the public’s mind is still an open question. You’ll see the resolution begin to evolve later this summer.

Will You Be Playing Online Poker on Your Cell Phone?

Just as I made the turn onto National Trails Highway, there in the middle of the desert a few miles from what is the almost ghost town of Amboy, CA, I had an insight. I was heading home to Palm Springs from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas where I had been hired to do a poker seminar and host some poker games by one of the firms taking place in the show. I was taking the “back way.” It was miles of empty desert instead of a crowded freeway, which gave me plenty of time to think as I drove.

Much of the talk at the show centered around new outlets for distributing content. Now that broadband is able to fill television and computers with content unimagined even a few years ago, the next big thing seemed to be the cell phone.

It seems that the cell phone of the future will provide significantly more content than you might imagine. Even now, broadcasters such as ESPN are preparing to distribute programming to very small cell phone screens. They just can’t rebroadcast television’s Sports Center on a cell phone. Instead, they have to shoot everything with much tighter shots, and create graphics tailor-made for a very small screen.

All of this led me to think about poker’s future on cell phones. After all, games or all sorts have been a staple of cell phones for a few years now. Sure, you’d have to reconfigure the graphics, but that can be done. And while it might be difficult to navigate between two or three game s on a cell phone, and taking notes about your opponents would be difficult at best, even on cell phones with full keyboards, surely you could play poker online at one table, and that might be quite sufficient for the really mobile player.

But then I began thinking about the frequency of dropped calls. It’s one thing to lose a phone call when your car drives under some power lines, through an area where reception is poor to non-existent, or you’re inside a building where reception is blocked or shielded. All you have to do is place the call again and take up right where you left off.
But that’s not so easily done when you’re playing poker. Whether you have ten dollars or a thousand dollars riding on a hand and are disconnected because you entered a cellular dead zone, your battery just died, sun spots in the atmosphere are wreaking havoc on reception, or your phone is just balky and made up its mind to quit on you, it’s no fun to see that money go bye-bye because of poor reception.

Regardless of how cool the next generation of content rich cell phones may be, they are still subject to the whims of unreliable connections that bedevil us all. And while dropped calls are an annoyance, they are not nearly as annoying as dropped money due to unreliable connections would be.

Until the reliability factor increases, I think I’m gonna forego cell phone poker games unless I play for really small stakes, where the money is nearly meaningless and I’m playing just for the fun of it. While I might download tunes, send email, watch Sports Center or do scads of other things that cell phone technology will support, I’ll probably forego poker until the connections are a lot more reliable. Until that day comes, I’ll just have to wait until I’m no longer in motion, can take out my laptop, find a good wireless connection, and play poker that way. That’s probably as mobile as I intend to be until cellular connectivity improves dramatically.

Poker Predictions for 2006

I predict 2006 will bring a number of changes to the world of poker. At the risk of going out on a limb, here is what I predict will transpire over the next 12 months.

Expect More Consolidation:
All new industries go through periods of consolidation as they mature, and poker is no different. Let’s face it; if you don’t have customers, you won’t have any games to offer, and anyone venturing to your site won’t stick around very long.

In 2006 the strong will continue to eat the weak, and marginal rooms will continue to seek networks as a key to survival. It’s already happening. In the last quarter of 2005 Prima Poker added scads of rooms and now tops out at nearly 40. Networks bring together thousands of people playing simultaneously at dozens of card rooms, to create one unified body of players. Seamless networks will continue to revolutionize online poker by giving the smaller rooms a shot at competing with industry giants such as Party.

Expect Online Card Rooms, Casinos, and Sports Books Will Provide Integrated Gaming Opportunities:
In the brick and mortar world, you can easily see the model for gaming success. Walk into any large casino and you’ll find poker, sports books, and table games under one roof, all just footsteps away. This will happen online too. Why not allow online poker players to place sports bets or wager on blackjack, baccarat, craps, roulette, slots, or a variety of other table games while playing poker, and do so from the same bankroll? It sounds like a good idea to me.

This is nothing new, either. It’s merely a form of “cross-selling” that works well in the financial services industry, so why not in gaming? By making it easier for players to wager on all sorts of games, online operators will broaden their customer base by offering more wagering opportunities.

While I’m not a blackjack player, I know lots of poker players who are. So while I’m playing poker at two or three poker tables simultaneously, others will be playing poker at one table while playing blackjack and making occasional sports bets at the same time. Something for everyone? Sure. Why not?

Expect TV Poker to Simmer Down:
If anything grew more rapidly than the general public’s interest in poker over the past few years, it’s all the televised poker shows that seem to air 24/7 for your viewing pleasure.

The bar set by the World Poker Tour for production values is quite high, and it’s becoming harder and harder to watch televised poker where there’s no stage set or theatrical lighting, and the show chooses to rely on ambient overhead casino lighting — which at best is flat and lacking all drama. It’s like watching a play in a theater with the houselights on instead of with theatrical lighting. It just doesn’t work.

I expect all of the shows with poor production values to die out from lack of ratings, and the next group to bite the dust will be the gimmicky shows with little real poker interest and little to attract viewers who have now become spoiled by watching televised poker with high production values and dramatic poker.

Poker on TV has grown so fast it outstripped its audience. Considering how fast the audience for poker has grown, that seems almost an impossibility. But it happened. Go figure.

The Barrier to New Poker Rooms Continues to Grow:
If you want to open a new, stand-alone poker room in 2006, it's a much more difficult hill to ascend than it was even a few short years ago. The big continue to grow bigger, and you’d have to come up with some very fresh offerings to attract a critical mass of players. Without that critical mass, a new room will never have a sufficient number of games to continue attracting new players while retaining the ones they already have.

One of the big differences between an online casino and online poker is that where poker is concerned, the customer and the product are indistinguishable.

If you’re playing blackjack online, you don’t care (and it doesn’t matter) how many others are playing table games in the same online casino. But unless you’ve got the players, you won’t have any poker games.

That’s the challenge to new poker rooms: How to get players when they have the option of playing at established online poker sites where a variety of games is available to them day or night. I’m not saying a new room can’t succeed, just that doing so in 2006 will be incredibly difficult outside of joining an established network or forming a new network with other poker rooms that have decided that joining forces is a better way to go than struggling to survive with only a relatively few customers.

2006 promises to be a very interesting year. Let's see how well these predictions pan out.