Integrity - Part II: Sooner or Later? That's the $64,000 Question!

Sooner or later, it's going to happen. The $64,000 question is, "When?"

I'm too young to remember the TV show The $64,000 Question and the other quiz shows of the '50s. But they were the hottest thing on television – hotter even than poker on television is today. They were big money, too; their cash prize money adjusted for inflation translate equivalently to some of the prize money in 21st-century televised poker tournaments. And those shows, like poker, held out the allure that people on the street could have a shot at the big time. They, like today's TV poker, were as much about fantasies and hope as anything.

Television was just entering its prime, the networks dominated the national stage, and big corporate America had its money and power behind the quiz shows. As so tellingly portrayed in the Robert Redford-directed movie Quiz Show, the whole thing came tumbling down in a U.S. Congressional investigation over cheating scandals. American entertainment hadn't seen anything like it since the 1918 Chicago White Sox of Shoeless Joe Jackson, forever to be known as the Black Sox, tanked the World Series, which led to the creation of the omnipotent position of commissioner of baseball.

Not long ago, I watched a major tournament final table on television, in which one of the finalists had been bankrolled into it by another finalist. I know the principals involved fairly well, and I watched the play fairly closely. I genuinely believe there was no collusion involved, and I have some expertise in identifying collusion. They both played to win. But, it got me thinking.

Tournament poker has a fairly short history, really born in the late 1970s. It has enjoyed several growth spurts over the years, fueled by the promotional genius of Benny Binion and Amarillo Slim Preston, the shrewd business sense of Jack Binion, Eric Drache, and Jack McClelland, the California poker boom, the opening of the East Coast to poker, the twin phenomena of the Internet and cable television, and all capped off by Chris Moneymaker's 2003 World Series of Poker win. It's gone from small time to big time, as I've watched.

The tournament phenomenon began about the same time as my poker career, and in my early days, I competed and won a few healthy prizes before I realized that my forte was the live ring game. But I have watched the growth of tournament poker throughout its life, played from time to time, backed a few competitors, bought a piece of a player here and there, and heard almost every tournament story, true or false. One of my favorites is about the well-known tournament trail character with a bankruptcy and a pile of IRS liens who offers to cash your wins for a modest $2,000 fee. He makes a few bucks and takes the (uncollectible) IRS hit. I'm not sure it's true, but it tickles me. Of course, lots of stories involve accusations of impropriety. Most but not all of them, in my opinion, have been unfounded. But I've heard just about every cheat 'em to beat 'em scam theory there is, usually from somebody explaining why he didn't finish in the money.

Sooner or later, there's going to be a Godzilla-sized poker cheating scandal. There's too much money in play – and too many smart people trying to figure out how to beat the system. You can't put that much cash on the table in a population of millions of tourney players ranging from quality poker minds to professional angle shooters to average working Joes to high-IQ geeks to brilliant psychopaths to the lowest form of hustler and expect everybody to act like a gaggle of nuns.

I'm not talking about cheating, collusion, and partnerships in tournaments. I'm talking about a full-blown scandal: millions of dollars at stake on national television, and investigative reporters from the mainstream media, live feeds on CNN and ESPN, and maybe even Quiz Show-type Congressional hearings and IRS audits; a Black Sox kind of scandal, threatening the very existence of one of America's favorite pastimes, creating the possibility of a dictatorial control like that of Kenesaw Mountain Landis to save the game, or maybe even killing off the game in its present form altogether.

Like public cardroom and Internet poker, tournament poker's best interests are served if the games are honest and if people believe they are honest. The people behind tournament poker know this quite well, and very much want it to be honest. Players, sponsors, producers, regulators, and networks are all served by high standards of integrity. The industry must and should do everything in its power to protect the game, for the sake of its own survival.

There's nothing wrong with teams of poker players. Tournament history is full of backers who put 10 or 20 players into a tournament. Competitors taking a piece of each other is practically a tournament tradition. It happens in other individual competitive endeavors, from tennis to golf to bridge to auto racing, although each of those has its own issues, which are different from poker's.

The key is transparency, full disclosure. If everybody knows who has an interest in the outcome of a player's results, the likelihood of impropriety is significantly lessened. It also creates opportunities for examination of the play of hands, a higher standard of scrutiny for those who have an interest in each other. Such transparency, of course, is not an easy thing to enforce.

Players on the same money, potentially colluding, are not the only threat to the integrity of tournaments. From time to time over the years, there have been suspicions about dealers in some major tournaments being in the employ of competitors. The poker industry recognized this for the threat to its very existence that it was, and has made serious efforts to keep it clean. One way to address this risk is to have standards of training and background checks for dealers. Another is to use mechanical shufflers.

The Internet is full of ideas about how to cheat in tournaments, ranging from daubing and contact lenses to advanced electronic communication equipment. With millions, even tens of millions, of dollars at stake in any given event, how far might the unscrupulous be willing to go?

Internet tournaments are just as vulnerable to integrity problems as live tournaments, and perhaps more so. There are thousands of small tournaments on the Internet every day, and dozens of big tournaments every week. The solutions to Internet integrity issues are somewhat different, as addressed in my last column, but Internet tournaments are the path to live tournaments for many players, and must be factored into any long-term plans for tournaments. How much should the industry be willing to spend to protect the integrity of Internet tournaments? What should they spend it on?

As I have written before, the poker industry is under a quiet but steady attack from regulators at the state and federal levels. If and when a scandal happens, they will swoop down on our industry like vultures on roadkill. The biggest money in poker today is in tournament poker. The most public money in poker today is in tournament poker. The richest potential rewards to the scumbags of the world are in tournament poker. Eventually, the weight of governmental scrutiny and regulation will fall on tournament poker – and tournament poker must protect itself, for the sake of itself, for the sake of players around the world, and for the sake of the poker industry as a whole.

In addition to taking proactive measures such as disclosing who has an interest in whom, raising standards to protect the integrity of the shuffle and deal, electronic counter-surveillance measures and the like, tournament poker must develop a strategy, a plan. It must know before something bad happens what it will do when something bad does happen. It must not react to scandal, it must be ready for scandal – or else suffer dire consequences.

Of course, the question is: Who will do this? Who is poker? Who is tournament poker? That is a $64,000 question for another column.

Roy Cooke played winning professional poker for more than 16 years. He is a successful real estate broker/salesperson in Las Vegas. If you would like to ask Roy poker-related questions, you may do so online at

www.UnitedPokerForum.com. His longtime collaborator, John Bond, is a free-lance writer in South Florida.