This is a little bit of old news, but I just watched it for the first time, and thought some of you who also might not have seen it yet would be interested in Daniel Negreanu\’s very thorough and sober analysis of the WSOP\’s delayed main event final table:
In it he reminds even yours truly about how close the World Series was to going out of business in 2004. He\’s right, of course, even though I had completely forgotten about that.
Ummm, the WSOP was only in danger of not happening in ’04 because Binion’s itself was being run into the ground. The series itself was more or less healthy in spite of its management. The minor player boycott against the WSOP was arguably meaningless, and the WSOP was probably Binion’s most profitable operation at the time, even if those profits were, by all accounts I’ve read, being siphoned off in indirect ways.
So the above comment by Daniel is a bit of a red herring; the ’04 scare is irrelevant. Take it in context. Still might be worth a shot, as Daniel says, and indeed, Harrah’s owns the WSOP. They get to decide.
The UIGEA of 2006 however is real Haley and that means the WSOP has to think of ways to work around it. Think about it, you’re Joe Schmoe and you tune into ESPN thinking the Yankees game is on, but instead you see poker. You stay with and with all of the handy percentages due to the holecam you think these guys are playing a relatively easy fun game. Then you find out the winner got $867,000 and you say to yourself “I want to learn how to play this game!”
But when you get into trying to figure out how to fund your Pokerstars/Full Tilt/Ultimate Bet account it becomes such a big headache you give up and forget about poker all together. How about the idea of suspending the Final Table for a week so players can go onto talk shows and get more newbies out there watching Conan hearing about poker for the first time and deciding to mix it up with us down the road. The bottom line is that’s good for poker. Airing the Final Table live is good for poker, at the very least now you don’t have to waste $50 on a damn pay-per-view event. Getting major Television publicity is always good, something has to make up for that sorry movie Deal, and airing the Final Table live is how it should of always been done to begin with