The WSOP - Main Event: and Why I Loathe It
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by Rawbeezeitz
The Main Event is the largest poker tournament of the year. A few thousand people put up $10k a piece to play. Simply making the final table means you’ll pocket at least $1 million. But it’s also the most pointless tournament of the year, and the biggest joke.
Poker to me, is barely a sport. My definition of a sport is a competition in which athleticism is an advantage. The athleticism that gives a poker player an advantage is low-level endurance. In other words: being able to stay alert and awake for a long stretch.
I should probably mention that I’m a poker player, a semi-professional poker player. I average a profit when I play, but I don’t make enough to live off poker playing alone. I used to be 50 pounds heavier than I am, and it is much easier for me now to play long stretches of poker, because I’m not as tired.
Anyway, back to the Main Event. I love watching great poker. Seeing a great player make an amazing fold (like folding pocket Kings preflop), or a great call (like calling with Ace high on the river), or a great bluff, is fun to watch. But ESPN covers poker in a way that makes it unbearable for even a poker junky like myself to enjoy.
Each episode of ESPN poker is an hour long, which means it’s about 45 minutes of program, and 15 minutes of commercial. Each episode usually has 3 or 4 human interest stories about one of the players. These are boring as hell. I really don’t care that John Juanda has two kids and lives in a suburb of Las Vegas. These segments usually take up another 15 minutes.
So there’s 30 minutes of actual poker. However, almost every single hand ESPN shows is an all-in. One guy gets Ace-King, another guy gets pocket Tens, raise, re-raise, re-re-raise, all-in, it’s about 50/50 who wins. This isn’t poker. This is watching people flip coins. Would anyone want to watch that?
But that’s what the Main Event is. The field is so large, and there are so many chips out there, that actual poker playing is irrelevant compared to the power of winning these 50/50 races. Think about it, you start off with 10,000 chips, and your mission is to acquire about 80,000,000 more. No matter how well you play, your fate will be determined by luck.
And let’s say you do play well and get up to 500,000 chips at some point, then someone else getting an insane run of cards moves to your table with 5,000,000 in chips. You’re at a monstrous disadvantage, and no matter how good you are, the guy with 10 times as many chips as you has a much better chance of beating you than vice versa.
The Main Event is nothing but a crapshoot with the luckiest player winning, not the best player. Even if I had the $10k to buy-in to it, I wouldn’t, I’d rather put the $10k on a crap game or on blackjack. I don’t even play those $1 and $2 satellites online for the Main Event, because it’s a total waste of time.
So tonight, many people will find themselves watching Ace-Queen go up against pocket Jacks. Real exciting crap there, two people push all-in and see what happens. When will ESPN air the World Series of Coin Flipping?
