If you want to be surprised in a few months when ESPN shows the final table of the Main Event, please ignore this post.
With that said, it should be no surprise to anyone that poker fans will not recognize the names on the list of the final 9 players who will walk to the final table later this year. With over 6800 people in the Main Event, it was only a matter of about 7 days (more than that actually, but we are going by "tournament days") to weed the pros out and solidify what I would say is a completely unrecognizable table. The yearly donkey fest will give us another unknown to watch try and exist in the new prime time poker that we all love and enjoy since King of the Donks Chris Moneymaker turned $3 Canadian (or some amazing small amount of money as the story goes) into millions because he out-donked 1000 people. If anyone has ever seen the "amazing bluff" he pulled on Sammy Farha to solidify his win, you know that he was walking the very fine line between "Holy crap I can't believe that worked?!?!?" and "Holy crap what a horrible player!!!!" His results since winning show that he was a fluke.
My opinion of the last 5 ME winners isn't very high with a couple exceptions. Joe Hachem has went on to win a WPT event and Greg Raymer has had some good finishes elsewhere, but isn't exactly a solid winner. So with the exception of one and a half winners in the last 5 years, we have seen donkeys take home the once coveted bracelet. Noone can actually defend Jerry Yang or Jamie Gold as real, solid, challenging poker players. I look forward to reading their books so I can learn how to play online freeroll style poker and win millions of dollars. But I digress...I haven't seen the players who are left play, so perhaps the video when ESPN shows it will give me a better picture. The final 9 are:
Dennis Phillips
Ivan Demidov
Scott Montgomery
Peter Eastgate
Ylon Schwartz
Darus Suharto
David Rheem
Craig Marquis
Kelly Kim
So who is the Joe Hachem at the table and will the Jamie Gold or Jerry Yang sitting to his right just scoop his chips and move on to a huge win? Is it a good thing that anyone can win the ME? Do the pro's think it's as big of a challenge as they thought it was years ago OR are they just hoping to win to prove that the donkey boom is at an end?
So many questions...so many donkeys still winning huge tournaments.
A side note, Poker Stars looks to have sealed most of the final table up to endorsement deals. My hope for the delayed final table was that we would see the players actually take longer to make decisions on their endorsements. I semi-supported the move to a delayed final table because it might create situations where we could get behind people, but I have to say if Mike Matusow or Phil Hellmuth were at the final table, I would have an easier time. I guess time will tell and it will come down to the ESPN coverage as to how each person is portrayed on camera.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
4 comments:
Actually two of those players are very notables to the poker fan. David "Chino" Reem was runner up to Allen Cunningham in a wsop event. Scott Montgemery made a final table at a WPT table this year. The episodes leaning up to it should be great since Matusow and Hellmuth made it so far. Just adding my two cents.
I'm going to defend Moneymaker a little here.
First off, without him, poker would not be what it is today. I just don't believe that if Farha had won the main event poker would be quite so popular today.
His ordinary man to millionaire poker champion story has inspired thousands of players to take up the game, and has pumped more money than ever before into the game. World class players that used to be unknown outside of the casino are now household names.
And secondly, while I accept that Moneymaker has not had astonishing success since his main event win, he has made one WPT final table, and had 4 cashes in WSOP events, and one cash in an EPT event, earning him over $300,000.
So I called him a fluke...
I agree with your point that poker would not be what it is today without him. He was the catalyst for the poker boom, which also makes him the reason that the main even has turned into a sea of 6000 donkeys fighting for millions of dollars. So in the sake of the "purity" of a completely unpure scene, Moneymaker has as much to do with the downfall of true poker and what have today so far as quality, as well as bringing poker to the masses. Its a double edged sword. And for the sake of argument, in the 5 years since Moneymaker became a WSOP champion, he has made $300k in tournament winnings...which averages to about 60k per year, or the average salary for a beginning level programmer. It's not exactly the cinderella story that the poker media has fed us because the guy just may not have the chops to consistently compete like Hachem, for example.
So the question is "is he a fluke?" I still say yes, but it boils down to personal opinion based on your own thoughts. I give him the same credit you do in bringing poker to the forefront and definitely to my kitchen table, but we also have to blame him for bringing horrible players to the freerolls as well.
With regards to his winnings, that is only a small part of his earnings. Thanks to who he is he is a paid celebrity spokesperson for the WSOP, paid by Harrahs. I would imagine he has secured a number of sponsorship deals. I know for a fact he is a Poker Stars Pro, they get paid for that. And each time he is on TV, he gets money for that too. So I imagine he has earned more working than he has playing poker. And hey, good luck to him.
It's hard to agree with your double edged sword argument. Frankly, I don't mind donkey players. I'd rather have a bunch of idiots on a table than a bunch of people who play like Phil Ivey. Sure, in the short term they will suck out on you. But in the long term, and it's all about long term, a good player will prevail.
When it comes to the WSOP, I think that Harrahs is the reason it is the circus it is today. They want thousands of people, a spectacle, a massive prize, TV footage etc. That's why they haven't put the entry fee up.
But for the pros, they now have the HORSE event which is rapidly becoming the 'real' judge of who's best.
Post a Comment