Paradigm Shift

The oft-debated poker questions, "Who are better, tournament players or money players?" and "Which game requires more skill, tournament poker or money poker?" got a jump-start recently when Nolan Dalla wrote a piece for PokerPages.com that stirred up both the issue and quite a few people.

I ran into that article just as I was exposed to two World Poker Tour (WPT) final tables in two days, and the seed of an idea started forming.

I'm not going to endorse either Dalla's position or the opposing viewpoints, but I do want to offer my own take on it, and discuss how my own views have evolved, changed more than once, and expanded. In the process, you'll encounter some ideas that may help you decide where to focus your energies.

Although I've been playing poker for more than 30 years (for most of that time, competing for sums that were quite significant to me), my introduction to the world of truly big-time and big-money poker came much more recently. The year was 1998, not that long after my absolutely impossibly coincidentally timed encounter with Phil Hellmuth in the hot tubs at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.

Hellmuth and I decided to work together on his biography, Poker Brat (a work still in progress mainly because Hellmuth and even more so I each had other projects get in the way), and I started following him to major poker tournaments to collect anecdotal material for the book.

Blame it on Rio

The first big one was the 1999 Rio Carnivale of Poker, and - like many amateurs when first meeting pros - I was a bit star-struck by meeting the players I'd only read about, including T.J. Cloutier and Tom McEvoy, who'd written many of the books I'd learned through. I played against them in supersatellites, and while I did very well (four final tables in six tries), I saw moves and laydowns I hadn't seen before. I knew then (and still know now, even as a hugely improved player) that there were levels to this game of poker that I hadn't perceived as your classic "local hero."

Even though soon thereafter I made the final table in the second no-limit hold'em tournament I'd ever played (the 1999 Shooting Star at Bay 101), I started realizing just how hard it was to actually win a poker tournament, especially one that featured plenty of strong players. This caused me to study the game and practice far more intensely than I'd ever done before.

As I improved, and as I got to watch more and more World Series of Poker final tables up close (and to "debrief" the players afterward, a very handy learning tool), the more convinced I became that successful tournament players possessed a unique set of skills, and that while the great money players were indeed great, I thought the "Who's better, tournament players or money players" debate was moot, a classic case of apples and oranges.

The great tournament players couldn't perform as well in big money games as the great money players could. The great money players couldn't perform as well in tournaments as the great tournament players could. I used to teach tennis, and I thought I had a perfect analogy when comparing the tournament/money dichotomy with what happens to tennis players when they shift from hard courts to clay courts.

Risky Business

Even the exceptions worked. In tennis, most hard-court specialists risk their reputations when competing on clay, and vice versa, but there are a few great players who can win major championships on both hard/fast courts like Wimbledon and the clay at Roland Garros (where they play the French Open), but for the most part, even professionals are usually great on only one of the two surfaces. In poker, there are a few great players who can transcend the money/tournament differences and excel in both.

Even in my starry-eyed tournament phase, I readily acknowledged that the money players probably made more money, year in and year out, while tournament players could enjoy certain ancillary benefits. The publicity they earned enabled them to sell books, affiliate themselves with websites, and even get an occasional movie appearance or mention.

The ancillary benefits from the publicity seemed to balance the equation.

The question was moot, I thought, until I learned still more about the big-time poker world, and started to realize that not only did the successful money players tend to make more money than the successful tournament players, they also went broke less often. I also knew more great money players who could succeed reasonably well in tournaments than I knew great tournament players who could succeed reasonably well in money play.

Money star but inexperienced tournament player Aaron Katz's run in the 2000 WSOP didn't hurt my changing opinion, either.

Even more significant, I didn't know any great money players who were hopeless cases in tournaments … but I did know some great tournament players who were actual targets in money games, players around whom the great money players tried to build games.

"2001" Wasn't "1969"

As a result, I started thinking that if a beginning player was going to make a choice between focusing his study and practice on money games or on tournaments, he'd be smarter to focus on money play. (It's worth noting that this choice wasn't really available back when men were landing on the moon; while there were a few tournaments, tournament poker hadn't yet mushroomed. Starting around the new millennium, anyone who wanted to could play a tournament every day of the year, if willing to enter smaller events, and could play the major tournament circuit virtually full time, if willing to travel.)

Just as I was settling in with my new viewpoint, the "ancillary benefits" started growing. A fascinating television program came out of Great Britain: Late Night Poker. Viewers were able to see players' holecards, changing entirely the reality that the actual poker-playing aspects of poker broadcasts were fairly dull even to experts who could appreciate subtleties that the general public couldn't. A million bucks in cash got people's attention, but a lot of "bet and take it" or "bet, raise, and take it" didn't.

Another European event offered promise: the inaugural Poker Million. The organizers employed similar holecard views, except it was a live broadcast (in Europe; in the United States, FOX ran a two-hour edited version on Thanksgiving).

"Wrestlemania," it Wasn't

Nonetheless, money players still seemed to have the edge. Late Night Poker employed a rather quiet, respectable, and proper format that probably wouldn't play well in the land of professional wrestling, the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, and Joe Millionaire. The Poker Million didn't come together the second year and ran in a smaller format the following year.

Then came Lyle Berman, Steve Lipscomb, and the World Poker Tour (WPT), and I felt a paradigm shifting. That phrase has been around for quite a while, but probably reached its zenith in the business world in the late '80s and early '90s, especially if you were a consultant trying to impress your clients: It was one of the hottest and most oft-used buzz words (buzz phrases?) around.

Loosely translated, "paradigm shift" means that a fundamental assumption or foundation is changing. Business consultants got paid a lot of money to explain that railroad companies thought of themselves as railroad companies, instead of transportation companies.

No "Silver Streak" for Railroads

Because the railroads weren't willing or able to shift their business paradigm, when the airlines started cutting into rail business, most of the railroads went broke. If they'd made the shift to "transportation business," they'd have bought some planes and started applying their scheduling and customer service expertise to the new technology, instead of ceding their market to new companies.

Once the WPT gets through its first year, when the viewing share will probably be limited by the Travel Channel's cable penetration and relatively small audience even in homes that get it (no matter how good a job the WPT does in producing and editing shows), I think we will have a whole new poker paradigm shift on our hands. It's entirely possible that word of mouth might get the WPT a big audience after the first few shows air, but I suspect the financial bonanza lies in season two and thereafter.

Radio Days

The viewable holecards aside, the WPT shows have what they call in the TV and movie industry "good production values," at least compared to other poker broadcasts. Instead of being forced to work around how a particular casino wants to set up its final table, the WPT comes in with its own colorful set, its own table, and a stable set of broadcasters and announcers (why they didn't include my baritone I don't know, unless it's because I have what's known in the industry as "a face made for radio").

Why the paradigm shift? Poker players and promoters have been talking for years about getting corporate sponsorship, so that players aren't merely competing for prize money they have put up themselves, but for added money that is an overlay for every decent player in the field.

L.A. Story

Heck, I just finished playing a WPT event at L.A.'s Commerce Casino that had no buy-in or entry fee but $200,000 in prize money, and you didn't have to finish in the top 16 of a monthlong tournament's all-around points race to get in.

Mike Sexton and Chuck Humphrey's Tournament of Champions probably came the closest to putting together an event that could have drawn corporate sponsorship, because the TOC was a classy tournament based on a unique concept, but without viewers able to see TOC players' holecards, the TOC had no real shot at TV money, and without TV money, there's no corporate sponsorship.

I know there are many top players who aren't happy about playing at final tables where viewers - especially their opponents - can see their holecards and, as a result, their playing style, and perhaps even their tells.

The Big Picture

Others who focus more on the "big picture" get very excited about the notion of not mere fame (and let's face it, to most of us, fame is not "mere"), but also the monetary possibilities of a TV future that might allow them to regularly enter tournaments in which the players put up $500,000 and the sponsors put up $1.5 million.

Better yet, why not a setup like the PGA, where the golfers pay their travel expenses, but once they "qualify," get to play in events where they don't have to put up any of their own money, but still compete for six- and sometimes seven-figure checks.

We're still quite early in the game: The WPT still has to produce great shows, the players have to provide good theatre, and somehow the whole country has to get a chance to see the show … but if all that happens, the paradigm will shift, and the top tournament players will be making more money than the top money players … unless, of course, they take their tournament spoils into the wrong side games!

That some tournament prize money will eventually find its way into side games is just another example of how a rising tide floats all boats. Even low-stakes home game players who would never get near a big-money game might find "significant others" considering their hobby more respectable. Poker could be legalized in more states. Even the uncertainties about online poker's legal future might be affected in a positive way.

In other words, every poker player in the world should be wishing that the WPT succeeds, and if Berman, Lipscomb & Co. can produce quality shows for a reasonable price, we just might be looking at a wish that gets granted.

Andrew N.S. ("Andy") Glazer, "The Poker Pundit," is Card Player's tournament editor, writes a weekly gambling column for the Detroit Free Press, and is widely considered to be the world's foremost poker tournament reporter. He serves as a quality control consultant for www.TotalPoker.com, for which he also writes the free biweekly "Wednesday Nite Poker" e-newsletter. Andy welcomes your questions through the "Ask Andy" feature at www.poker.casino.com.