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.
*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
