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Poker Tournaments for You This Week
There is never a dull moment in a poker player’s life. Obviously, the main reason for that is the constant existence of poker tournaments and poker events that one can participate in. These events are not just for making money, but also to have some fun and get better at the game in the process. Several live poker tourneys are lined up for this week and the coming weeks. Here is a note on some of the tournaments you can … Read the rest
2012 PokerStars Macau Poker Championships Announced
PokerStars is one online poker room that never takes a break from hosting tournaments. The poker room recently released details about its upcoming event, the PokerStars Macau Live Tournaments. The Macau tournaments hosted by PokerStars is one of the biggest and richest poker events held in Asia. It includes 4 major poker series – Macau Poker Cup (MPC) Red Dragon, Asia Championship of Poker, Macau Poker Cup Championship or MPCC and the yearly Asia Pacific Poker Tour event at Macau. … Read the rest
The $30,000 Winner Wednesday Dozen Unveiled
Winner Poker has partnered with pokernews.com to bring a new promotion to its new members. The online poker room announced its new promotion called Winner’s Wednesday Dozen Freerolls, which literally lets you win free money. The new promotion is open to all the new players who register with Winner Poker and make a deposit. The promo will run for three months, and all you need to do is play poker and earn as many Winner Points as you can. Here … Read the rest
Main Event Final Table To Be Delayed 4 Months
Thursday, June 26th, 2008 by Phil
Good luck to everyone who will be playing at this year’s main event at the World Series of Poker. For those of you who haven’t heard yet, the final table of the $10,000 NL Hold’em event is going to be delayed by several months this year.
The main event will begin as it does every year. Only this year, the players will play down to the final table when the tournament will be stopped for a period of about 4 months. During this time, all of the final table participants will be followed around by cameras so that the viewing public has the opportunity to “Get to know” the players before they play at the final table. It sounds to me like they are going to try and turn this into more of a reality t.v show than a poker tournament.
It seems like the majority of poker players are against this decision. It’s going to have a lot of unintended consequences on the way the final table is played. For starters, all of the players will have been able to watch the ESPN footage (with hole card cams) leading up to the final table, before it is actually played. Not to mention that some of these players may have an extra 10 million dollar contract on the line which would provide plenty of opportunities to work out deals behind closed doors.
You could come up with scores of reasons why this was a bad decision, but these are mostly all reasons that pertain to the players at the final table. As someone who isn’t even going to be playing in the main event this year, my main interest is in the way that ESPN covers the event. We have seen in the past with champions like Chris Moneymaker, that coverage of this event can have a drastic effect on the poker world. Just as I mentioned above, it appears as though they are following a model that has been proven to increase ratings in other genres of television broadcasting.
I hate to see a tournament structure altered to improve television ratings, but in the long run I think this could be a good thing for poker. Sponsors will be getting a lot more exposure time, and hopefully the new layout will help to attract a new audience as well. In the end, this could result in a lot more money for players everywhere. Perhaps in 2009 we could have a main event that has more than 10K entrants.
