Beyond Johnny Weir’s loving him some Lady Gaga, the following Olympic athletes on Team USA like to play poker at charity fundraiser events and/or recreational home games while on the road doing the practice-travel-competition grind:

Ben Agosto (Ice Dancing)
on twitter
TanithandBen.com

Evan Lysacek (Figure Skating)
on twitter
EvanLysacek.com

JR Celski (Speed Skating)
on twitter
JRCelski.com

Hannah Teter, the Annette15 of Snowboarding?

Hannah Teter (Snowboarding)
in Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue

Nate Holland (Snowboarding)
on twitter

Shaun White isn’t known as much of a poker player, but here’s a picture of him at the poker table.

For more information on these athletes, including photos, videos and the full schedule for the 2010 Olympic Games, visit www.NBCOlympics.com or www.TeamUSA.org.

In preparation for the upcoming Vancouver Olympics, US figure skating champ Johnny Weir skated to the song about bluffin’ with muffins for an exhibition performance at US Nationals last week. Glad to see that the word about poker/lesbianism is still spreading.

And to prove we’re not homo just because we’re paying attention to figure skating, here’s Rush Limbaugh tarding rockin’ out to Lady Gaga during the talent portion of the 2010 Miss America contest:

(Oh, wait, Miss America, right …)

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.

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…

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.)

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…

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.

*Note: Roy “the Oracle” Winston has come close — outlasting more than 6,300 players in the 2007 main event, but going out early when it got down to three tables. So maybe it should be the other way around and he could get some coaching from one of them?

Roy’s website: www.OraclePoker.net

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.”

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.)

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.

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.

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.

As you can see, Yevgeny Kafelnikov is the only Olympian to cash in a WSOP event, and just missed a final table (stud final tables only include eight players). Combined with his gold medal in tennis, he has come the closest to winning in both the Olympics and the WSOP.

Here are players who have already been researched, but came up short:

Jan Sorensen
12 WSOP cashes, 3 final tables, 2 bracelets
Played for Denmark’s National Football Team (1977-1980), but no Olympics

Boris Becker
Member of Team PokerStars, but has yet to play in a WSOP event
1992 Olympics (Barcelona) – Gold Medal in Tennis (Germany)

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. 

No analogy is perfect, but the World Series of Poker has some interesting similarities to the Olympics. It’s a multi-week festival that comprises a lot of different events featuring thousands of competitors from around the world. And both the WSOP and the Olympics are much, much more than the sum of their parts. 

What do I mean by that? Well, the story of the Superbowl (NFL) or baseball’s World Series is ultimately the final score. The same goes for a major WPT or EPT event — it’s all about the players at the final table, and which one claims the title and the million-dollar prize. Sure there are other stories along the way, but they all feed into the overarching narrative of “Who wins?”

At the WSOP (like the Olympics), there are a lot of stories that aren’t tied to specific events, like multi-bracelet winners, the POY race, and Vinny Vinh. There are also threats of dealer strikes, stories of competing media outlets, and various poker press conferences — movie announcements (ex: “Lucky You”), lawsuits (ex: players vs. the WPT), and industry deals (ex: Full Tilt signing Patrik Antonius). You even have the Gaming Life Expo, with less eye candy than previous years because there are fewer hookers strippers female models in the booths. 

I’m not suggesting that we should change the WSOP to mirror the Olympics. But WSOP coverage has felt lacking in certain areas to me, and those who cover the Olympics face similar problems — multiple events going on simultaneously, unknown winners, and side stories that often have nothing to do with a specific event. 

I’ve competed in been to the Olympics twice, Atlanta in 1996 and Salt Lake City in 2002. Both times, I went all out, attending multiple events every day and spending as much time as possible in the thick of the crowds. Since 2004 I’ve been spending my summers at the WSOP, and I’ve observed some things that I think could be improved. That’s what I’ll be writing about here at Pokerati the next two weeks. Stay tuned. 

I’ll close out this first Olympic-themed entry with a few basic stats:

2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing
Competitors:  10,500
Events:  302
Unique sports:  28
Total prizepool:  $0

2008 World Series of Poker
Competitors:  58,720
Events:  55
Unique games:  16
Total prizepool:  $180,676,248