The Big Deal

If you follow poker, you know why playing the Main Event is a big deal.

If you don't, there's a pretty good history of the event on the WSOP site here.  

I have a lot of respect for the pioneers of the game, the true poker professionals who not only could master the intricacies and psychology of high stakes poker, but would also be regularly arrested, robbed, beat up, cheated, short-changed, and extorted while on the poker circuit.  

These were not frivolous people.  Look at these old pictures of Johnny Moss and Puggy Pearson, Sailor Roberts, and Doyle Brunson, for example:

No sponsorships, no charming quirkiness, no expensive haircuts (they had no hair to cut!)  These were guys who showed up at a construction site or a used car lot looking for a game right after the boss had handed out the monthly paychecks.  They would then light their cigars and methodically and mercilessly clean out the marks.  

The singular focus of these guys was incredible.  Consider the most famous poker duel of all time between Johnny Moss and Nick "The Greek" Dandalos.  They allegedly played heads up for five months in 1949, with Moss winning between 2 to 4 million dollars by the end.  Although I usually hate inflation equivalencies when you tell stories like this, I can't help myself here.  The two million dollars Moss won in 1949 is the present-day equivalent of twenty-four million dollars today.  No wonder Nick the Greek, when he ended the duel, said the famous words, "Mr. Moss, I have to let you go."  

Imagine!  It's like the old days of lawyering, when a lawyer who got offended by what his opponent said would just slug the guy in the face (and the guy who'd got hit would say something like, "That's all you got?")  I got in the profession too late to be a part of that - you slug someone today, you get arrested, sued and disbarred - and I'm not sure that was my style, but you can't help admiring their moxie, just like you can't help enjoying the stories those old poker players would tell about their time on the circuit.

When I play serious poker these days, I aspire to the gravitas those guys seemed to have.  If I'm in a hand, I try to be substantial and kind of dangerous, at least in the poker context.  You want to yap about my play?  You want to try to get under my skin?  Whatever.  Let's play.  Just know that when I'm in the hand, all that talk is just talk.  Here's what I bet.  You gonna call or what?

That's why I wear the suit and tie.  And notwithstanding what my trainer Art hopes for me, my size probably matters too.  At 6-3 and a lot of weight, I can look like one of those big-bellied Texas rounders when I need to.

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The WSOP Main Event became a really big deal when Chris Moneymaker beat Houstonian Sam Farha for the bracelet in 2003.  Moneymaker got his seat by winning an $86 dollar satellite tournament, and he ended up collecting 2.5 million dollars.

A poker boom ensued, with tons of television coverage and poker celebrities and amateur dead money filling out the giant fields in the tournaments.  That boom has kind of subsided now, but I still expect thousands to pony up the $10,000 for this year's tournament.  They will crown a champion in about ten days, which is like ten dog years of poker, twelve-hour days over and over until only one person is left.

But that's why it's the Main Event.  To win it, you have to be simultaneously patient and aggressive, passive and active, thick-skinned and vengeful.  You have to remember everything, but then let it go and play the next hand and the next hand and hopefully all the hands to the end.

With that much going on, how can you not love this game?

Seven days to the tournament!