The World Series of Poker just started its 42nd Main Event tournament today, and I’m going to give you a good reason why you should care. First off, most people get the Main Event and the WSOP confused, but the $10,000 No-Limit Hold ‘Em event is only one of 58 tournaments played at the World Series at the Rio Las Vegas in June and July. I was there last year, and the Main Event is a crazy mix of legitimate competition, awesome people-watching, and genuine suspense. Many people will use the tournament’s number of participants as a shorthand barometer for the overall health of poker in general, which has taken a beating at the hands of the UIGEA and subsequent “Black Friday” seizures of major online poker sites (and millions of dollars’ worth of online poker players’ money).

The one positive working in poker’s favor right now is the game’s expanded coverage on ESPN, who is actually adding more coverage of the WSOP, 158 hours in all. Some of that coverage will be as close to live poker as we could expect to actually watch. From the WSOP Media Guide (pdf):

ESPN will air the 2011 WSOP Main Event with hole cards on a 30-minute delay from July 14-19 on
ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPN3. There are several nuances to the coverage to ensure the integrity of play,
but the viewing audience will indeed get to see high stakes poker in near real-time.

This isn’t exactly unprecedented; The 2005 Main Event final table was live on pay-per-view, but the real-time broadcast didn’t feature hole cards and was discontinued the following year. But it will be the first time that we could hear about Johnny Chan’s Day 3 and then watch him play that same day, instead of 6 weeks later. That’s usually a good window between a great performance with a prostitute and watching the video afterward, but not so much with watching a poker tournament.

Those are vegan links, by the way, which is why they look like they were freshly squeezed out of a dog’s butt. I’m Brandon Stroud, and for those of you who don’t know me, I’m your editor and paradigm-shifter at With Leather. I co-created The Dugout and have written everywhere from the Village Voice to Deadspin to X-Entertainment.com (not a porn site, I swear). “What makes you qualified to run a sports blog?” you might ask. Well, I don’t eat meat, my favorite hobby involves watching men pretend to fight in their underwear, and my favorite movies are either cartoons or Roman Holiday. So I guess the answer is “f**k if I know.”

If you’re going to run screaming away from me, here is a collection of Internet-style hyperlinks to other paragraphs of interest. The most important link is the Acknowledgements of Punte, who made this site awesome for two years. I know it’s the post below this one, but I’m linking it anyway. Josh, you’re an awesome guy and will be missed, even though you’ll still be writing here regularly-to-semi-regularly.

Sports Links:

Sports Cards For Insane People: Score’s Early ’90s ‘Dream Team’ Subset - Jon Bois is one of the funniest guys on the Internet, and I’m not just saying that because I lived with him for a year and have been writing Dugouts with him for seven. Jokes about baseball cards, Casper Van Dien and Watchmen, as only Jon can deliver. [SB Nation]

Regress to the Meaningful - Jason Fry regularly accomplishes a scientific impossibility — making the New York Mets interesting, compelling and philosophically important. If the sports-o-sphere is a baseball team, Fry and Greg Prince are our Maddux and Smoltz. Or, to put it in Mets terms, our Doc Gooden and somebody else who pitched for the Mets when they were good. [Faith and Fear]

Read the rest of this entry »

This news will make some of you jump for joy, but I personally find it depressing: ESPN has pulled all of its poker programming in the wake of the federal goverment’s indictments of the big online poker sites. The logic here is obvious; if the poker sites aren’t able to buy airtime for those shows, and nobody else is, the shows aren’t profitable.

“We are aware of the indictment only through what has been announced publicly,” Bristol, Connecticut-based ESPN said yesterday in an e-mailed statement. “For the immediate future, we are making efforts to remove related advertising and programming pending further review.”[..]

ESPN, the most-watched U.S. sports network, which airs the “World Series of Poker,” declined to elaborate beyond its statement, according to Chris LaPlaca, a spokesman.

–Bloomberg.

Certainly it’s only a matter of time before NBC and GSN follow suit and pull their shows, “Poker After Dark” and “High Stakes Poker”, respectively. So the poker sites are being shut down and yet Farmville and Mafia Wars roam free. That’s not the kind of world I want to live in.

Whether one plays Texas Hold’em in brick-and-mortar casinos or pot-limit omaha online, there was bad news to digest for the poker world over the weekend. The federal government seized the domain names of three FIVE of the biggest poker sites operating in America. PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker have also been named in indictments accusing executives of those sites in illegal gambling, money laundering and bank fraud.

In addition to the indictments and domain seizures, Friday’s federal actions were accompanied by a civil lawsuit seeking the forfeiture of $3 billion in ill-gotten gains from the money laundering – 1.5 billion from the PokerStars; $1 billion from the Full Tilt Poker; and $500 million from the Absolute Poker.

Although there have been renewed efforts recently to legalize online gaming, it remains illegal in the U.S., one of the few countries where that remains the law. Some challenge the idea that poker is really gambling, arguing it’s a game of skill not chance. –ReadWriteWeb.

The effect of the seizures on the game itself remains to be seen. Last year’s World Series Of Poker Main Event entries–a crude but often-watched barometer of the health of poker today–were the second-most attended tournament ever (and they eventually turned people away). That 7,319 figure will almost certainly drop now, as many of those participants come from satellite games put together by players pooling their money to allow the winner to pay that $10,000 entry fee.

This is sad for anyone that loves playing cards and the camaraderie that comes with that. Many of you will remember that I covered the WSOP’s Main Event in Vegas last year, and the pros that I met there were as down-to-earth and as friendly as anyone a sportswriter could hope to cover. They’re going to be hurt by this, all in the name of “money laundering.” It’s hard to express my disappointment here, but I’m comforted by the knowledge that things usually become more badass with each crackdown from the government. So there’s that.

On Tuesday, it was announced that Annie Duke and Jeffrey Pollack have created Federated Sports and Gaming, and, in cooperation with the Palms Casino Resort, a brand new poker league that will employ a special rankings system to determine the best players in the world, instead of, you know, guys bragging that they’re the best in the world.

The league will also hold players accountable for their success by awarding memberships much like PGA tour cards. Players can earn 2-, 3- or 5-year memberships based on their winnings, but obviously there will be exceptions for legends. Basically, the biggest name players will receive lifetime memberships. In all, 200 players will compete in four FSG tournaments during the year, with the fourth serving as the league’s championship.

Poker News recently posted an extensive interview with Duke about how the league was created and what the events will entail. For instance, what goes into the player rankings, Der Kommissar Duke?

Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s Action: Day 7. We’re playing down to 27 players today. Media access has been restricted to outside the perimeter of the tables, which really has put me in a bad mood. I really have no idea of what the hell is going on now, aside from internet reports from the few people that actually do have access. Whatever. It’s not like I know any of the people still in this damn thing. Johnny Chan? Gone. Scotty Nguyen? Gone. That Canadian guy that’s somehow balding AND has Bama bangs? He’s out, too.

Of the four Mizrachi brothers that made the money, only Michael “The Grinder” remains. My favorite name on the leaderboard was Fokke Beukers of the Netherlands, which sounds like a porn spinoff of a Matthew Broderick movie. Richard Morgan of Columbus is, at this writing, the last Ohioan left in the tournament. Noted Norwegian Johnny Lodden is still in it, along with a bunch of Canadians that I hope don’t win it. No offense, Canada. I simply prefer to see you fail in everything you do.

Poker Quote Of The Day:

There’s no sorry, baby.

–1998 Main Event Champ Scotty Nguyen, after his chip stack taking a hit after doubling up David Liu. Lui’s Ace-King paired against Nguyen’s pocket queens right before a break in Day 5 action. Lui apologized, to which Scotty responded. via PokerNews.

Read the rest of this entry »