I was cruising around the internet this week reading a number of poker blogs, as I am apt to do, when I queued up Daniel Negreanu’s. Never one to shy away from giving his opinion, he was adamant that No Limit Hold’em should be the only game played at the final table of the $50,000 HORSE event at the World Series of Poker, just as it was when Chip Reese won the first edition of it in 2006. As much as I am a fan of Negreanu’s, and as much as I respect him, I must disagree.
First, let me say that I completely understand where he is coming from on this issue. For the first three years of the event, almost 150 players entered the tournament each time. This year, only 95 runners competed. Negreanu believes that the reason for this is that HORSE doesn’t deliver television ratings, so ESPN is not broadcasting the event. In turn, many of the players who would have played can no longer afford to, as their online poker room sponsors don’t want to pony up the buy-in if there is no chance for the players, and the poker room logos they would be wearing, to appear on the small screen. The prestige of the event would shrink along with its size as would the “EV [for] the grinders who play mixed cash games for a living.”
It all makes sense. If the general poker watching public doesn’t want it, the network doesn’t want it. If the network doesn’t want it, the sponsors don’t want it. And if the sponsors don’t want it, the players can’t afford to play.
But I still don’t think the final table should be No-Limit Hold’em. Why? Because it’s a HORSE tournament. It doesn’t make sense to change the final table to a game that wasn’t even a part of the previous several days of the event. Why should a player work hard at five different limit games only to make the final table and have it all taken away on one unfortunate hand? It’s not that it’s “not fair”, because, after all, everybody would know what the structure was going into the tournament. It is just silly. Why not make the final table of every WSOP event No-Limit Hold’em? Then ESPN could film them all and then select the most exciting ones for broadcast.
Personally, while I can see some truth in Negreanu’s belief that the no-No-Limit Hold’em format is why ESPN is not airing the HORSE tourney, I don’t feel that that’s really the main reason why it’s not going to be on television. The popularity of poker on television is on the downswing. For the last few years, we’ve been bombarded with poker programming and it has become old. Even for the casual fan, the all-in fests that make up the majority of poker telecasts have become boring. ESPN is now only showing four WSOP events and only two are “real” tournaments – the $40,000 Special Anniversary Tournament and the $10,000 Main Event. The other two – the WSOP Champions Cup Invitational and the Ante Up for Africa Charity event – are being shown for their novelty and for their star power (the former for poker celebrities and the latter for likely appearance of entertainment celebrities).
Really, the $40,000 No-Limit Hold’em event is taking the place of the $50,000 HORSE event in the ESPN lineup. It’s a high buy-in event, which creates a field densely populated with recognizable faces and it’s No-Limit, which ESPN likes. I would not be surprised if the WSOP finds a way to keep an ultra-high buy-in No-Limit event next year to satisfy the desire for an elite tourney.
In the end, the problem might be able to be solved by a simple name change. If it wasn’t called a HORSE tournament, then many people, including myself, would not be so averse to having a “non-HORSE” game played at the final table. The lack of logic would not longer be a problem. Name it “The All-Around Championship” or something and mix several different formats, including No-Limit Hold’em. Now you have an event where players can compete to see who is the best all-around poker player (not that the “best” can be determined through one tournament) and the final table is attractive for television. Make the buy-in high enough to limit the field and you will likely have a final table with a significant proportion of “name” poker pros.
If it sounds like it’s just a semantics issue, it is. But seriously, how can it be a HORSE tournament when the final table isn’t in HORSE format? Would it make sense to have the championship game of the NCAA basketball tournament be a football contest because football gets better television ratings than basketball? Of course not. Sure, the final table was No-Limit when the venerable Chip Reese won it in 2006, but that doesn’t mean it should have been.