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Maryann Guberman has been a writer and editor with many gaming publications, including Sports Form, Card Player, Poker World, Player's Panorama and Systems and Methods. She also has written and edited numerous books on gambling.

June 28, 2008

The King is Alive and Well

Everybody knows The King. No, not that foreshortened, stilted frightening burger touter who could scare the pants off level-headed adults yet along children but the Real King, the Leader of the World of Gambling, the leader of the gaming pack, the World Series of Poker. The 2008 version of this spectacular event has been underway at the Rio in Las Vegas since May 30 and is nearing the end with less than half a dozen events to go before the Big Dance (and the 50,000 H.O.R.S.E event scheduled for the same day).

Now not very long ago, we worried over the facts and figures showing the World Poker Tour's Five Diamond Tournament at Bellagio had faded its entries from previous years and that participation was down considerably. We crunched the numbers for each event to come to the conclusion.

Our concern? Is tournament and/or televised poker on the wane?

Judging from what's happening over there on the corner of Flamingo Boulevard and Valley View, just a short walk from the Interstate, though it tells us nothing about televised poker, we can easily see that tournament poker is very healthy indeed.

This year we dutifully recorded the number of players entering each World Series event and then compared them to last year's totals. We then compared each of those numbers with the total entries for the same tournaments held in 2007. Sure the folks at the Rio and at ESPN have number crunchers who can do this a lot faster and better than we can, but they are not likely going to send out press releases about it.

We did not make a comparison unless the tournament had the same name and the same buy-in, which eliminated a few events since some buy-ins increased.

Here's what we discovered. With just a few exceptions, most events saw an increase in entrants, with the $5,000 mixed limit and no-limit hold'em losing 119 players and the $1,500 no-limit contest losing 324 players. Both years, the latter competition took place in the later half of the series. (Perhaps players were saving up for super satellites or maybe they were afraid they would have to play heads-up with last year's winner, Phil Hellmuth.)

The ladies event lost 90 competitors in 2008 and the event won by a woman last year ($1,500 razz) increased by 112 players.

Stud remained steady.

Of course this is not a scientific study. It was cursory and quick but as thorough as possible. Truthfully, we expected to see a slight decline but instead we saw a slight increase, 50 here, 100 there, 300 here, 200, 100, not big numbers but now losers either.

We have a feeling--and this has nothing to do with intuition since that's one quality we have not honedā€”the Big Dance will host more players this year than last year.

So it is that perhaps something else was going on in the world when Bellagio was hosting their WPT tournament, possibly the airline problems, weather conditions, fires, who knows? We're still pondering that question.

Meanwhile, we can say with confidence that tournament pokerā€”and especially the World Series of Pokerā€”is king and it definitely rules!