Main Event Final Table To Be Delayed 4 Months
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.
Related posts:
- WSOP Main Event Final Table Is Set
- Main Event Final Table Predictions
- WSOP Main Event down to 27 players
- Pre-Day 7 Notes About the Main Event
- Win Your Share of the WSOP Final Table Action
Categories: WSOP Events
