PokerNews Op-Ed: The 2010 WSOP Tournament of Champions, Where it’s 2004 All Over Again

June 27 2010, Nicole Gordon

There’s a reason democracy is difficult. Whether it’s a presidential election, the finals of American Idol or the World Series of Poker’s Tournament of Champions, we don’t always get the results we want. Just ask supporters of John McCain, Crystal Bowersox, or any of the dozens of young poker legends-in-the-making who have recently found themselves on the wrong end of the ballot box.

Your average poker fan was probably not too surprised at the results of the voting for the 2010 WSOP Tournament of Champions. After all, it is a wall-to-wall collection of pros that came to prominence in the salad days of televised poker. However, for the “inside the beltway” crowd around the Rio and on poker forums across the world, the results were more than a little disappointing. Heck, I was disappointed myself, especially after undertaking such a painstaking process when it came to casting my ballot. Where were the young superstars; the Jason Merciers and J.C. Trans of the poker world? Where were the European players like Peter Eastgate or Max Pescatori? And hold on a minute ― Sammy Farha made the Top 20? Had he not reappeared in Las Vegas and won a bracelet a few weeks ago, Farha would be the true “WTF?” pick on this list. Seriously, Farha but not Chris Moneymaker? In case you’ve all forgotten, he’s the reason most of us in the Amazon Room are here right now.

Instead of representing the champions of today’s game, the lineup for the 2010 TOC is a throwback to the poker world of six years go. Back then, Howard Lederer actually had to play poker for a living and even won a few tournaments. Now he needs to make seven-figure bracelet bets simply to keep himself interested in grinding it out for another day at the Rio. The last time Lederer won an open event with a field size over 25 players was in April 2004, yet he made it in with votes to spare. Johnny Chan may have ten bracelets and two Main Event titles, but he has hardly been a presence at the WSOP this year. Chan has played only two events so far and the All-In Energy Drink he had been touting for the last several years at the Series has been conspicuously missing from the tables this summer along with him.

Additionally, a pair of players whom I wouldn’t even consider casting a vote for because of some inappropriate personal behavior at the WSOP made the Top 20. T.J. Cloutier infamously pawned one of his bracelets earlier this year before Cake Poker graciously bought it back for him. Should that type of blatant disregard for the bracelet really be rewarded with a ticket to a million-dollar freeroll? With the drunken buffoonery he displayed during his 2008 Player’s Championship win, Scotty Nguyen disgraced the very legend of Chip Reese that the tournament honors and celebrates. Should simple popularity trump the kind of disrespect for his opponents Nguyen showed that night?

But like I said before, in an election, your candidate doesn’t always win. And in this particular election, there was only one requirement for candidacy: win a bracelet. Therefore, if 5,130 people had mobilized and voted in Russ Hamilton, he’d be taking a seat this afternoon instead of 20th-place vote-getter Antonio Esfandiari. That’s right. 5,130 votes. As one two-time bracelet winner told me on the day the lineup was announced, “If I knew then that 5,000 votes was all it took, I’d have worked a lot harder to get in. I thought I was drawing dead.”

In the first year of public voting, mainstream visibility proved to be the key to winning a TOC seat. It wasn’t social media campaigns or viral videos that earned these 20 players their votes (although Jennifer Harman’s YouTube campaign did reveal her to be quite the comedienne). It was the sort of visibility garnered from years of television exposure that pushed up one’s vote total. A whopping 65% of the players who were voted in have appeared or are currently appearing in a television commercial for an online poker site (Harman, Phil Ivey, Daniel Negreanu, Doyle Brunson, Phil Hellmuth, Chris Ferguson, Allen Cunningham, John Juanda, Erik Seidel, Howard Lederer, Joe Hachem, Greg Raymer, and Esfandiari).

So how did my own picks fare? Six of the 20 players I voted for got in (Brunson, Negreanu, Seidel, Cunningham, Juanda, and Greenstein). Not to disparage any of those six ― they are all obvious legends of the game and more than deserving of their seats ― but if I were to do it all over again, I probably would have shifted more of my votes to the lesser-known players who ended up really needing them. I’m still a fan of having a public vote decide a portion of the TOC field, but I suppose I just wish that the players coming of age on television today had the audiences their predecessors did. Perhaps in future editions of the TOC, the field of bracelet winners could be narrowed in some manner to better reward more recent World Series of Poker accomplishments. Confining the ballot to even the last five years of bracelet winners would still result in a lot of the TV-friendly, popular players getting a nod. Negreanu and Juanda won bracelets in 2008. Seidel, Cunningham and Hellmuth scored wins in 2007. And Phil Ivey won his eighth bracelet only a few days ago. However, some of the more recent champions like Brock Parker, Eric Baldwin, and Jason Mercier might have a fighting chance of getting voted in under such a scenario.

2003–2005 was the heyday of televised poker. It’s when the ratings were highest, the game’s popularity was at its zenith, advertising dollars flowed freely, and the UIGEA wasn’t a glimmer in anyone’s eye. This year’s TOC field is in one way a nostalgic look back to that era of post-boom poker but also a very contemporary reminder that by in large, these are still the faces poker fans want to see. And with a Day 1 ESPN featured table that includes a brother-sister duo, an outspoken Canadian, two World Champions, a craps degenerate, a magician, a Frenchman fond of loud sparkly hoodies, and a man who never met a bottle of Michelob Ultra he didn’t like, it should at least be entertaining.

PokerNews will be following the Tournament of Champions from wire to wire. Check out all the updates right here in our WSOP live reporting pages.

_{The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions PokerNews}

Comments

Nick37
07-05-2010 15:16

I think Sammy Farha was a great addition to the TOC. He's got poker prowess, and he's good for t.v. Ivey, Lederer...They'd probably be ranked higher than Farha, and I'd agree their style is much more likely to win than Farha's fairly loose play, but where's the excitement?

Moneymaker may have won the whole thing in 2003...But what has he done since then? He's had one major cash since 2003, at the 2004 Bay 101 Shooting Stars, where he finished runner-up to Phil Gordon. All the rest have been fairly paltry cashes. He made the final table in one WSOP event since the '03 WSOP, He finished 10th in the 5k PLO event in 2004. And that still was short of the t.v. final table. also, Moneymaker hasn't made the money in the main event since. Farha made it to the cash in 2005. Also, Farha has won two WSOP bracelets since '03, as well as taking 6th in the 10k Mixed event in '08, and making the money again that year in the heads-up event. To win his 2nd bracelet, Farha had to defeat Phil Ivey heads-up. Not an easy feat on the best of days. Farha also has two high finishes (5th and 3rd) at the National Heads-Up Poker Championship (Moneymaker finally cashed in the event this year, his first time ever, in a tie for 9th), and multiple money finishes in the WPT events.

There's no contest. Moneymaker took the big one in '03, but Sammy Farha's achievements since that tournament have overshadowed Moneymakers' by far. So have the accomplishments of Greg Raymer, and Joe Hachem, who consecutively won in '04 and '05 (And who were present in this year's TOC) With all that in mind, I just don't think it's fair to belittle Farha for being voted into the WSOP TOC. Not when he's done so much vs. Moneymaker doing so little.

jdb74
06-30-2010 08:14

Is Bertrand Grospellier not overseas enough for you? They gave him a chance, and he got in. Can't see what you have to complain about there. If "overseas" players want in... it's a worldwide vote. It only took 6k in votes to get in. If they want in, they need to work hard for it like Antonio Esfandiari and Jen Harman did.

I'm ok with keeping the voting exactly the same, but maybe expanding the number of tables (though I'm ok with just 3). It's up to WSOP and the players to properly promote the voting and themselves.

Prieure
06-28-2010 07:59

I'm pretty ashamed of my fellow Europeans for not voting, to have 27 Americans (I think, didn't check for certain) playing this tournament is just shown up in a year when so many Europeans have won bracelets. Next time they need at least one guaranteed place for an overseas player.

I don't necessarily agree about the internet guys, they do not make very good television except if you happen to know who they are and what they have won on their computer. Most of them are convinced of their superiority over live players to the point of arrogance but the only measure of how good you are is if someone else says you are good consistently over time. Give them a few years and maybe enough people will know who they are to warrant their place in a made for TV tournament because that's all this is and the line up should reflect that, although maybe not to the degree it has this time.