A comment from the USAToday.com sports editor regarding commentors complaints about the “spoiler” of the WSOP Main Event winner in the headline:

To our readers:

We regret offending the handful of commenters who believe we should either not be reporting on the outcome of a news event like the World Series of Poker, or should have dumbed-down the headline so as to not give away the outcome on the Sports front page. However, we believe you are in the minority.

The traffic to the site today — in which the coverage of the World Series of Poker has received more page views than any other story in Sports — suggests the majority of readers are interested in knowing the outcome now. We confront a similar issue every two years with the Olympics, in which some users suggest we are ruining their evening by covering the outcome of news as it happens instead of letting them learn who won by watching television’s tape-delayed coverage. In both cases we feel we are serving the greater good with immediate coverage.

In this day and age, in which information is available everywhere and much of it instantaneously, it is almost impossible for a news organization to NOT report news when it knows it — because someone else will. Indeed, USA TODAY is not the only news organization reporting the outcome of the final table. Fox, CBS, Yahoo, every Website that subscribes to the Associated Press, radio, TV… even ESPN itself has coverage of who won. Unless you get your sports news from www.headinthesand.com, and only that site, how were you planning to make it through the day consuming news and information without stumbling upon the final table outcome? If USA TODAY does not tell you who won, we know that most users will just go elsewhere to find out. Not every user wants to wait, and not every user plans to watch it on tape-delayed television.

Similarly, we would be at a competitive disadvantage to tell users in our headline that the event is over without revealing who won. While some users may have entered our site at our homepage or Sports front and discovered the news, almost half of our traffic these days comes from search engines — people who increasingly start at Google or Yahoo and type in search terms. The more specifics we get into our headlines, including the name of the winner, the more likely we can attract the audience that is searching for that news.

It’s not the same as revealing the outcome of a book or a movie. That’s pure entertainment. This is entertainment too, but it’s also news.

As to the issue of whether poker coverage belongs in Sports or not — we can debate all night long whether poker should be considered a sport. We take no position on that. By placing it here, we are merely indicating that people who follow sports, moreso than other sections of USA TODAY, are most likely to be interested in the World Series of Poker.

Michael Phelps made history at the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics by winning a record eight gold medals. And his comments to the press about wanting to play some poker in the future garnered much attention from the poker community, as in offers from the Asian Poker Tour and Betfair regarding the WSOP Europe. Neither offer was accepted.

It seems that the swimming legend does things on his own terms. Phelps recently traveled to Las Vegas with some friends as guests of the Palms, and one of his wishes was to meet Doyle and Todd Brunson and Hoyt Corkins.

Photo courtesy of DoylesRoom.com

According to the most recent post on Doyle’s blog, he received a call and brought his son and Corkins, along with Jennifer Harman and Marco Traniello, to meet Phelps for a dinner at Nine Steakhouse at the Palms. “What a nice kid!” Doyle wrote. “Phelps and some of his friends wanted books so I took Super System 1 and 2 to them and they asked all kinds of poker questions. Michael said all he wanted to do in life, was to eat, swim and play poker.”

Oh yeah… I can already see Phelps with a Doyle’s Room cowboy hat at the WSOP in 2009. Obviously, no deals have been signed at this point and Phelps has not accepted any invitations to play in tournaments thus far, but I can see an NBC National Heads-Up Championship and World Series in the kid’s future. Just a personal prediction…

Maybe one of these days he will accept an offer.

Swimmer Michael Phelps came off an historic Olympics with eight gold medals. And in one of his numerous post-feat interviews, he mentioned that he might like to play in the World Series of Poker. Suddenly, offers were coming from poker tournament organizers like the Asian Poker Tour. Another offer can be added to the list, courtesy of Betfair, the official sponsor of the World Series of Poker Europe.

Even though Betfair worded it with already-overused terms like “human dolphin” and “shark,” the site offered Phelps the chance to play in the WSOPE later this month, even offering to pay the £10,000 buy-in to the main event on his behalf. And then the statement on Betfair ruined it with this: “Phelps will be free to wear his famous LZR swim suit at the table although organizers fear it may not give him the same competitive edge outside of the pool.” No word on any response from Phelps.

(Note to poker tour organizers: Quite possibly, refraining from the use of swimming/poker analogies might get your offer taken more seriously. And it might keep writers like me from making fun of you.)

The swimmer who stunned the world by setting a new record with his eight gold medals at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing made a statement in one of his post-amazing-feat interviews. Michael Phelps told the Baltimore Sun, “I think it would be cool to play in the World Series of Poker. My game is a little off right now, so I’ll have to start improving it a little bit. But I think that would be cool, and it would be cool to meet some of those poker guys.”

Oh yeah?

Within days, Poker Shrink reported that Phelps was officially invited to play in the 2009 NBC National Heads-Up Championship. And shortly thereafter, it was the Asian Poker Tour, which is gearing up for its Macau stop scheduled for this week. A representative from the APT wrote an open letter to Phelps, which was posted on 4Flush, with sentences like, “Some have said you are a ‘human dolphin’ but we’re keen to know if history’s greatest swimmer is really a fish. You may have feet that can reach angles others cannot to give you the ultimate swimming technique but just you wait until you’ve got sharks like Vegas poker legend Doyle Brunson chasing you. We’ll see how fast you really are then when they smell blood - get some flippers on those size 14’s!” (Really? Fish and shark references? *Sigh.*)

Most likely, offers from Visa are taking precedence over poker tournaments for Phelps, but it will be interesting to see if he takes anyone up on their offers. My money would be on the NBC Heads-Up Championship, but I imagine the guy just wants to go home and have a beer right about now. If he accepts an offer to play in a poker tournament, it would be absolutely huge for the game…

Earl Burton has an interesting post up wondering why the sponsorship dollars for the WSOP main event final tableists haven’t been rolling in. While he leaves room for the possibility that it’s just a matter of time — I agree, as the kinda deals we’re talking about here don’t take place over a matter of days or even weeks — he also highlights an example that has me simply shaking my head:

A recent blog [sic.] on CardPlayer by a former guest on my “The Tournament Trail” show at Hold ‘Em Radio (http://www.holdemradio.com/), WPT champion Roy Winston, indicated that no one has contacted him regarding his offer of coaching for the Main Event.

Sorry, Roy, but I’m laughing. Because no one has contacted me, either, about my offer to put a Pokerati patch on them in exchange for guaranteed internet coverage! No offense, but whothefugk are you? A WPT champion? Big deal! The final nine — whether by luck or skill or some combination thereof — have outlasted 6,400 players to get to where they are. Have you ever done that? I didn’t think so.* Why would someone want to potentially mess their game up by receiving “coaching” from someone other than Phil Hellmuth (who clearly knows how to win WSOP final tables with any starting chip ratio) or maybe Erik Seidel? If I were one of the Nueve de Noviembre, I gotta say, I’d be feeling pretty good about my poker skills in general … and would be having many talks with the poker friends who helped get me there (The Arizona Posse, Batfaces, et al.) and probably just about any other poker player I ran into between July and November. But hire an outside coach? That would be like an athlete qualifying for the Olympics and hiring someone in the interim who happened to win a similar event in the Pan-Am games.

The story here isn’t on whether or not the final table delay was a right idea for the sake of marketing … it’s about how the remaining WSOP main event players are somehow smart enough not to fall for sales pitches from interlopers trying to get in on their action.

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As BJ Nemeth’s earlier entry mentions, there’s been a few Olympians who’ve played at the World Series of Poker. But none of them would top the credentials of Michael Phelps (from the NY Times:)

An avid cards player, Phelps said it would be cool to participate in the World Series of Poker. “My game is a little off right now,” he said, “so I’ll have to start improving it a little bit.”

Race (rowing)
Seat 2 (rowing)
Boat (rowing)

UPDATES:
horse (gymnastics)
skill (gymnastics)
floor (gymnastics)

shuttlecock (not a poker term, but should be)

(Funny … while typing this up and watching badminton, a PokerStars commercial just came on.)

Soccer is more dramatic/difficult/painful (to watch) than poker. Sigh.

While I can’t keep up with all of the Olympic coverage, I’m doing my damnedest. My TiVo has been working in hyperdrive, recording everything airing on NBC, the USA network, and CNBC, and I’m watching a lot and fast-forwarding (with occasional stops) through everything else. With more than 24 hours of coverage a day, it’s a Herculean task.

One thing I’ve noticed is that PokerStars is putting up a fair amount of commercials during the Olympics, at least here in the Atlanta market. (Can anyone watching the Olympics in other markets confirm that it’s national?) The two commercials I’ve noticed the most are from PokerStars — one with Daniel Negreanu (playing pool & playing poker) and one with Vanessa Rousso (bungee jumping & playing poker). Of the two, I think the Vanessa Rousso one stands out much more — more contrast between bungee jumping and poker compared to Daniel’s billiards commercial, and it also has a taste of those “extreme sports” that the young’uns seem to like.

Regardless of what you think of Vanessa as a poker player, I think this could actually be good for the game of poker. One of the things Barry Greenstein came away with during last year’s Congressional visit (to discuss the legality of online poker) was how impressed the congressmen were with the female players who showed up — Annie Duke and Vanessa Rousso. In their eyes, Vanessa is an attractive young woman with a degree from Duke University, and plenty of opportunities open to her. But she chose to play poker. That challenges their view of poker much more than seeing players like Greenstein or Doyle Brunson.

I highly doubt poker will see a post-Olympic bounce from these commercials, but if PokerStars is targeting an entirely new demographic of sports fans, I think they could do a lot worse than putting Vanessa Rousso out front and center.

Brendan Hansen … American swimmer … just got third in his semi-final in the 100m breaststroke. (Really, how amazing is that — to be able to breast-stroke the length of a football field in less than a minute.) Anyhow, apparently he’s been struggling a bit, having posted some disappointing times in some prelims or trials or something failed to qualify for the 200m breast … and the announcer (sorry, haven’t learned who’s doing which sport yet) started speculating that it was a calculated “poker play” — not showing his best cards yet, saving them for the finals? I dunno, the metaphor’s kinda lost on me … but still, poker … olympics. Go NBC!

As mentioned below, I’m currently watching Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh dominate the Japanese in women’s beach volleyball (poker-playing b-baller Jason Kidd is also watching the game, albeit from the stands, not on TV — as the NBA players are apparently making a concerted effort to be part of the Olympic experience) and there’s all this talk about the wonders of the Olympics … the whole world coming together, men, women people from all races, religions, and countries … putting their problems aside to engage in spirited competition … Where else, when else, do you see this sort of thing, an announcer asks …

And though I think he meant it as a rhetorical question … I’ve actually got an answer: in an online poker room. Except instead of every four years, it’s pretty much constant.

In comparing the Olympics to the World Series of Poker, I didn’t plan to write about this, but Justin Shronk asks: “Have any Olympians ever played in the WSOP?” I stayed awake about an hour last night doing some research (discovering three Olympian/WSOP competitors), and did some follow-up research today after Kevin Mathers added Charles Barkley to the list.

I now have a list of six Olympian/WSOP competitors, but I don’t think I’ve found them all. So I’m asking for your help.

QUALIFYING CRITERIA: I’m restricting the WSOP to bracelet events only; charity events don’t count (like the media event or Ante Up For Africa), but restricted bracelet events do count (ladies, seniors, casino employees). We’ll also include the WSOP Europe. For the Olympians, they had to actually compete in a medal event (no alternates, and no exhibition events). Preliminary rounds (like swimming or track prelims) do count. The Winter Olympics also qualify, but I have yet to find any winter athletes who have played in the WSOP.

In alphabetical order, the following six players have competed in both the Olympics and the World Series of Poker:

Charles Barkley
1992 Olympics (Barcelona) - Gold Medal in Basketball (USA)
1996 Olympics (Atlanta) - Gold Medal in Basketball (USA)
2006 WSOP Main Event

Tomas Brolin
1992 Olympics (Barcelona) - Football/Soccer (Sweden)
2007 WSOP Main Event

Jeff Fenech
1984 Olympics (Los Angeles) - Boxing (Australia)
2008 WSOP Main Event

Yevgeny Kafelnikov
2000 Olympics (Sydney) - Gold Medal in Tennis (Russia)
2005 WSOP - $1,500 Seven Card Stud (9th: $10,745)
2005 WSOP - $1,500 No-Limit Hold’em Shootout (14th: $7,535)
2005 WSOP - $2,500 No-Limit Hold’em (76th: $3,645)

Lennox Lewis
1984 Olympics (Los Angeles) - Boxing (Canada)
2006-2007 WSOP Main Event

Antonio Tarver
1996 Olympics (Atlanta) - Bronze Medal in Boxing (USA)
2006-2007 WSOP Main Event

If you have any information on other potential Olympian/WSOP competitors, please list them in the comments. I’ll add all confirmed entries to this post.

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In case your Friday night included something more interesting than watching TV (mine didn’t), I’m here to tell you that the summer Olympics “started” with the Opening Ceremonies tonight. Actually, the ceremonies took place about half a day ago in Beijing, but NBC is presenting them in a “plausibly live” format during prime time. Hmmm … where have I heard that term (”plausibly live”) before? 

For 17 days, the Olympics will dominate NBC’s networks here in the United States, and fill up enough news coverage to finally give Americans a break from the seemingly endless presidential election. (Other countries are fortunate in the fact that they generally get less nationalistic — and often more interesting — coverage than NBC provides here in the U.S.)

During that time, I’ll be writing about some things the poker industry can learn from the Olympics. Not the game itself, or the silly notion that poker should be added to the Olympics. I’m mainly concerned with the media coverage, and what we as poker reporters can learn from it. 

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