What was broken

Though there was little real blame to assign, the 2007 World Series of Poker final table left a bit to be desired. Within 24 hours of the end of ten-handed play, 75% of the Rio's Amazon room turned into a warehouse. Hundreds of poker tables disappeared, a small gift shop materialized, and someone scattered a few television monitors and chairs around the floor. In one corner, the feature table--looking as it did for the entire month of the World Series--sat ready for the final nine. Most of the big lights in the room were turned off. It had the feeling of a giant meat locker at the end of a Texas BBQ festival. It felt used up, nearly forgotten, and cold. The fact that nine largely unknown players were competing for millions of dollars was only evident in the few people who got a seat looking down on the final table. Elsewhere in the room, a few bored people sat in chairs, watching the silent TV monitors, and shivering off the conditioned air. Most of the noise in the room came from a single drunk British guy who was soused on Milwaukee's Best (a final reminder that the bar on the edge of the TV table was probably not the best idea... and yes this is ME saying a bar should go the way of the all-in button, poker sauna, and pocket peek cards).

To repeat, the sterile and anticlimactic feel of the room was no one's fault. The Amazon room's size is necessary to accommodate the huge WSOP crowds. When play is nine-handed, the intimate feel of Benny's Bullpen just isn't possible in such a huge room. It didn't make much logistical sense for Harrah's to move out of the Amazon room, and so we were left with something that felt a little like the last gasp of someone very important.

Despite its many problems, the WSOP final table delay offers Harrah's an opportunity to change all of that. Between now and November, Harrah's has a chance to create a final table atmosphere that will be great for the players, the spectators, and the viewers at home.

WSOP Final Table Location

Harrah's officials said in last week's conference call that they have not yet decided how they plan to present the final table. The only firm decision (how firm is a question that neither I nor anybody else asked) is that the WSOP final table will play out at the Rio. Harrah's hope is that the final table will have the atmosphere of a championship NBA game, with poker's version of Jack Nicholson and Spike Lee sitting in courtside seats and fans who have a screaming interest in the outcome.

If Harrah's stays true to the decision to hold the event at the Rio, it has several choices for the exact location of final table play. The first and most obvious choice is the Amazon room or one of the other big convention halls. They are huge and can easily be customized into whatever the production team and Harrah's see fit. Two other suitable locations offer the kind of necessary space--The Penn and Teller Theatre and the Calypso Room, home of Tony N' Tina's Wedding. Though both rooms have the capacity to host the final table, they both lack a certain elasticity required to customize for the traditional theater in the round style of poker finales. Unless I'm forgetting another big room in my Summer home, those are about the only places in the Rio suitable for the final table. If I had to guess, we'll end up back in the Amazon room. It's really the only place at the Rio that makes sense.

There is, however, the possibility (albeit small) that Harrah's will change its mind and move to a different venue. There is one good reason for doing this. The Rio is a destination hotel and casino. The only way you end up there is if you intended to go there or got lost on your way to the Gold Coast or Palms. Strip casinos get walk-up traffic. They draw wanderers and Joe Sixpack in off the street. Hosting the final table somewhere on the Strip would nearly guarantee a bigger live audience than the Rio. Whether you actually want a thousand loud tourists there is another question. I have my opinion, but it only counts for enough to play the 2am at Binion's.

Still, I tried to come up with a Strip location that would draw crowds. I settled on one place that would be fairly unique: the 4000-capacity Roman Plaza amphitheatre outside of Caesars Palace. While November might be a bad month for such a thing and the weather may not agree, it's hard to ignore how neat a venue it would be for a huge production like Harrah's has planned. [On a completely unrelated note: does anyone know if this was the same outdoor venue that hosted the infamous Boom Boom Mancini vs. Duk Koo Kim fight, or was that elsewhere outside Caesars?]

The amphitheatre is a bit over the top, however. First, it's much too big. Second, Vegas is an odd place to do anything outdoors. Still, I've watched three final tables outdoors and it is possible to pull it off. Thing is, you would need that crowd to make it work. How big a crowd? Well, likely many times bigger than you're going to see at the final table.

Does size matter?

I've spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how big of a crowd to expect for the final table. Harrah's obviously wants a big event and would simply be giddy with a crowd that could fill the Roman Amphitheatre. The problem is, if Harrah's goes with something that big and doesn't fill the seats, the entire production will look silly. If Harrah's goes too small, it stands a good chance of not living up to the advanced billing (not to mention shutting people out or putting them in another area like last year). My old friend, Science, is going to have to get involved at some point and work the math. Fortunately, casino companies are good at that kind of thing and will probably come up with a good number.

I like to set lines on times, crowd sizes, durations, etc. After thinking about this for a bit, I have decided to set the O/U on the number of people seated at any one time (not including media and TV production people) watching the final table at 600. This accounts for 10-20 sweaters per final table player, 50 or so of the poker elite, and then the usual lookie-loos and railbirds who show up for these kinds of things.

The more I think about it, we need something the size of a high school gymnasium. I'm not being silly or trying to put down any efforts to make live final table attendance bigger. I'm simply saying that the seating capacity for the WSOP final table should be commensurate with the likely attendance. It should be big enough to allow everyone a clear view of the table, but not so big that the event looks like nobody showed up. Fortunately, with the right planning, construction, and foresight, such place can be created right inside the Amazon room.

It's all in the presentation

There is precious little the tournament organizers can do about who shows up at the final table. They could end up with Scotty, two Phils, and a Professor or they could end up with Dudley, Whitey, and Teddy Foreskin (three guys from the G-Vegas underground, if you were wondering). The point is, the poker is going to be the poker and there is no way to plan to make it a World Series to remember. So, Harrah's and ESPN production company 411 are going to have to do what Vegas does best. They are going to have to present the final table better than it ever has been presented.

First, as mentioned above, there will need be adequate seating for everyone who wants to watch. This does not mean, as it has in the past, two or three rows of bleachers and a bar/balcony area. This means stadium-style seating completely circling the final table and rising up so that everyone can look down on the action.

Of course, because the action is so hard to follow from a distance, there simply must be a variety of big plasma screens so the hundreds of people watching can see everything. Furthermore, the behind-the-scenes production crew should be staffed with a spot-on director who can punch with the best of them. That is, what appears on the plasmas should appear as what spectators would see if they were watching on television. Gone should be the days of seeing only the flop cam. We should see everything. That includes running chip counts on an overhead scoreboard. Impossible you say? Not at all. One perfect chip count at the beginning, an announcement of every bet, and a spread sheet and you have an accurate chip count to display for the entire event.

It can't be all technological, though. You need good people calling the good action. It's a tough job to maintain focus on the cards as well as have a good enough personality to work the crowd. Johnny Grooms, Jack Effel, and Chris Spears have done a good job in the past. We'll need to see as many people with that kind of talent to call the action perfectly and maintain a decent rapport with the crowd.

Those are the big things. There are others , but I'll save those for the day I get hired as a big time consultant.

That happens to be conveniently scheduled for the same week pigs fly and hell freezes over.

Previously:

The WSOP Final Table Delay is a Bad Thing
The WSOP Final Table Delay is a Good Thing

On collusion

The strongest argument made so far is one that's been made by the Con-Delayers so often that I don't need to hammer on it too hard here. A four month delay multiplies the opportunity for deal-making and yes--just say it out loud--collusion by a factor of about 120 times. We'd all like to think that people wouldn't collude on the biggest poker stage in the world. I'd also like to think someone would've found a way to bust Men the Master for his widely-rumored chip dumping and collusion scheme by now. If anything, this debate will mean just about everybody in the poker media will be looking for a hand in which" X-player absolutely had to call Y-player" but did not. I'd like to think Harrah's will be on top of this, but as someone pointed out in the last few days, no one said anything about the 2 million chip disappearance in 2006 until Amy and Tim produced what was probably the most important piece of poker journalism in the past decade. [For more, read Two Million Questions]. The Pro-Delayers wave off the collusion fears. Jeffrey Pollack says, "It would be a mistake," to mess with Harrah's in this way. I'd challenge you to find an already-inclined cheater to give a diddly damn what Harrah's thinks. If they were going to cheat before, they are going to cheat now. Only now, they have four months to figure out with whom to cheat and how best to do it.

On availability

As a late night IM said to me yesterday, if the final table delay had been in place in 2006, Richard Lee would've been arrested for bookmaking before the final nine reconvened to decide a champion.

Let's just think about that for a second. It's the most important event in any given year and the 11% of the field can't show up? The Super Bowl would be played with 19 players on the field. More than five cars would not compete in the Daytona 500. It's worse in poker, though. If a player can't make it because of death, emergency, or arrest, the seat won't be filled, but the chips will remain. Think of it like this: Jeff Gordon, Kyle Petty, Dale Jr., Mark Martin, and Greg Biffle all go out and get tossed in the drunk tank the night before the 500. In NASCAR, the vehicles would remain in the garage. Imagine if their cars were put driver-less on the track. The point is that a dead stack always changes play at a table. A dead stack at the final table of the World Series of Poker main event? Please. To the people who say, "Well there is always a chance of someone dying or getting arrested on the night before the final table.": Sure there is. Now there is a chance that lasts four months. Imagine if Stu Ungar had a four-month wait between ten-handed and final table play. Hell, what about Vinny Vihn? What if he makes the final table this year?

The point is this: It's not sympathy for the person who can't show up because he is no longer breathing or is breathing in a Clark County jail cell. It's the unnecessary and distinct change in the game that would happen as a result of that player's absence.

On sponsorship

One of the loudest arguments made by the Pro-Delayers is the ability of players to secure better and more lucrative sponsorship deals. Commissioner Jeffrey Pollack has said out loud that he would love to see poker sponsorship become a lot more like NASCAR. For the player, it seems a great thing. It's why pro players gave their blessing to hole card cameras in the first place (more on that in a second).

And so, this is what we've been led to believe is a great thing for players. A four-month delay is...Stop! Agent Time!

As a friend (who can out himself here if he likes) pointed out to me, this decision is great for the nine people who make the final table. They will have four months to get the best possible sponsorship deal. However, this friend pointed out a less obvious consequence: the final 40 or so people in the tournament are going to lose a lot of sponsorship value. I've personally witnessed what I call the WSOP Shirt Dance. As the final five or six tables start to define possibilities for the final table, the sponsors start swooping in with deals, throwing shirts on potential final table candidates. Now, the sponsors can sit back, wait, and get the most value for their dollar. The Shirt Dance will still go on, but I would predict not to as large as a scale as it has in the past. If we're to think of it in Pollack's terms, it's as if sponsors could wait until the final nine laps of the 500 before slapping the Tide or Brylcreem logo on the side of the leading few cars.

In short, Pollack is getting his wish. Sponsorship deals are becoming a lot more like NASCAR...more money for few, less money for the field.

On marketing

Let's just call this what it is: a great decision for the business and marketing of poker designed to make poker a lot more like NASCAR and make a lot more money for the companies involved in putting it on. It will put a new marzipan on the same poker cake we've been eating for years.

The Pro-Delayer's loudest argument for the change is that it will give ESPN a chance to profile the final table players and turn them into stars before the final table plays out. The idea is two-fold. First, it will grow the poker audience. Second, it will boost ratings for main event coverage. I don't begrudge them those goals. Marketing is a big reason poker has become what it has.

But, let's all be honest with ourselves here. I think, as a business, poker has probably spent up the Moneymaker value. There was a time when most people (even you!) didn't know you could qualify for the World Series through an online poker site. The symbiotic relationship between online poker companies and the WSOP, combined with the revolutionary hole card cameras made poker what it is today. We can thank Henry Orentstein, PokerStars, and Chris Moneymaker for that. Still, today, is there a wide market of people who don't know about online poker qualifying? Can the WSOP fields still grow by such huge percentages? Will a semi-live final table change that? Probably not.

Listen, I applaud Pollack and everyone else for trying to grow the WSOP brand. There was a time when NASCAR had a much more limited audience than I does today. There's a reason the NASCAR explosion happened and it's marketing decisions like they have made for the WSOP final table. There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to increase ratings. It will help us all. I'm all for it, in fact.

The problem is, in an effort to market poker to a wider audience, Harrah's is making changes to the game that have a chance at affecting the outcome. Nobody should be in favor of that.

Alternatives to the delay

If we all can agree that the marketing of poker is a great thing if we could somehow get rid of the delay, then I think we should be able to agree that there are better solutions. Four months is an eternity in this world.

The four-month delay serves two purposes. First, it allows people to watch a semi-live event in edited form (Pollack says, "Think the Olympics!"). Second, it allows ESPN to pump up the profiles of the final nine so Joe Six Pack will care about the potential winner in advance.

Both of these are noble goals. There is nothing worse than watching a final table of nine people you don't care about, especially when you already know the outcome. (Note: you would be surprised how many regular Joes out there get really pissed when you tell them who won the WSOP before it shows on TV).

So, what is the solution? Can we have our cake and lick the marzipan too? The answer is yes, if ESPN wants to put up the money and manpower to do it. It's not perfect, but it serves the same purpose without adding unnecessary changes to the game.

Here's how it works: The main event is scheduled to last about a week and half before final table play begins. Full coverage shouldn't start until play is down to the final three tables. At that point, ESPN records the tournament like a live sporting event. Editors work as they go for a next-day broadcast. At the same time, a features crew should already have several features in the can and ready to roll. Finally, when the final table arrives, it is broadcast live (without hole cards) on a secondary ESPN network. Then, for those who want to watch an edited version, 411 (the production team in charge of the WSOP broadcasts) does a cut for the next day.

Would it cost more? Yes. Would it be more difficult? Absolutely. Would it serve the same marketing purpose while not affecting the game? Yes.

Don't think it can be done? Well, an excellent crew out of London does it once or twice a month during the European Poker Tour. Sunset + Vine produces a live webcast of feature and final tables in the final two days of EPT events. The quality is outstanding and the product is very easy to watch. Given, they don't do a next day edit on the final table, but it is possible if people want to do it. If I'm supposed to be thinking of the Olympics, I suppose I'm allowed to point out that we get next-day edits from those production crews.

Simply put, the WSOP is either a sporting event or a reality show. If it's a sporting event, then cover it like one. If it's a reality show, then let's all call it what it is and stop being so high and mighty about it. I prefer the former, but nobody listens to me.

And why it doesn't really matter

The decision has been made here. It has the blessing of some top pros, the Nevada Gaming Commission, and, most importantly, Harrah's, the company that stands to make the most money on the deal. It's a WSOP experiment in poker like...

The 2007 poker peek cards (bad)

Like I said, not every experiment is bad. Just most of them. That's what's made me a neotraditionalist.

I actually have a lot of respect for the people behind this idea. I hope it turns out well. I hope nothing goes wrong. I just think it could be done differently and better. As we move forward, we should always be asking ourselves what is more important...the integrity or growth of the game? Moreover, is there ever a time we should put the latter before the former?

I don't think there is, especially when there are viable alternatives to serve both masters.

***

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Those complaining about this change are being incredibly short-sighted.

Don't tell me you buy into the "integrity of the event" argument. This is a poker tournament we're talking about, right? A tournament that survived two million mystery chips. A tournament that survived Jamie Gold. A tournment that has survived thousands and thousands of players, a percentage of whom have undoubtedly attempted to circumvent the "integrity" of the event.

Let's take some of the complaints, one by one:

Final Table Coaching

Are we really all that horrified by the idea that the final 9 will actually attempt to get better in those four months? Forgive me for liking the idea that players at the final table might all know what they're doing. I don't think it would take much work in Google to find poker blogs decrying the poor play at the final table. Now we're worried about those same players being coached?

The fact is, each player will have the same opportunity to improve their game as everyone else. It's not as if four months of coaching will turn some Moneymaker-like amateur into Eric Seidel. If you're suggesting it's not fair because an amateur can get better, but a pro can't, then you are making an argument not supported by facts.

Final Table Scouting

Again, this is a bad thing? If anything, this kind of scouting would off-set any so-called advantage the amatuers would gain by being coached. In these 4 months, I'd imagine the final 9 would have plenty of opportunity to play high-profile events. Those more experienced players would likely be better able to use information gathered in those events to pick up the tendencies of their opponents.

However, as I stated above, this is an advantage that ALL final table players would have. Not only would they get a chance to see how they made it to the final table on ESPN, but they'd have new chances to play against them or watch them play before the final table. How can something that improves the level of play be a bad thing?

Colluding, Cheating, Soft-play

I dismiss this suggestion without a second thought. From what I can tell, there were 32 hours between the time the 10th place player busted out at last year's ME and when the final table started play. That's plenty of time for someone to decide to cheat or collude. That's plenty of time for some predator to swoop in and make a play.

What if someone dies?

What if an earthquake swallows Las Vegas?

********************

This all brings us to the reasons this is a good thing for the poker world.

Last year, the WSOP ME ended on July 17th. The world saw Jerry Yang win the bracelet on October 9th. And despite that length of time, there was no effort made to promote those people we all knew would be at the final table. Yang probably got five minutes of air time before it got down to the final two tables.

The year before, there was a month and a half between when Jamie Gold raised his arms in victory in one of the more controversial WSOP ME's in recent years and when we all got to see it on ESPN. Gold, despite his long list of flaws, was one of the more compelling champs in recent years. And he was nearly anonymous until the day it aired.

This change isn't being made for you and me. We are the ones who will follow the live-blogging exploits of Otis and Dr. Pauly. We'll know many of the inside stories. But the rest of the world won't.

And aren't they the ones that matter?

Ask yourself, when did poker explode? It exploded when Chris Moneymaker captured the American imagination. He was the first real poker TV star. He was the everyman. Online play went through the roof. And that was good for all of us. Every schulb from Anytown, USA thought he could win the WSOP. They logged on, and they gave us their money.

Since then, I believe the poker world has failed to capitalized on the personalities who can bring even more players to the real and virtual tables. Greg Raymer and Joe Hachem? Nice guys, but have they compelled anyone to play? Jamie Gold could have been the next great villain, but the opportunity was squandered. Jerry Yang? Well... I'm not sure he helps my case.

But it's not just about the winners. It's about all 9 players. For the first time ever, we'll have a chance to delve into the stories of these players. By the time we see the final table, more Americans than ever will know who they are. And for the first time, you won't be able to jump online and Google the winner.

This change is made to increase the exposure of the World Series of Poker. It's to generate a new breed of excitement. And despite all of the selfish, profit-driven reasons of Harrah's and ESPN, this is good for us. It will help convince more people to stop being just a spectator and to start being a player. The more fish in the sea, the more we get to eat.

And what's so wrong about that?