I realized that as a literary man I had an advantage in this discussion, since I had actually once read a book about the world of high-stakes poker as it was before the game became so popular. The book was The Biggest Game in Town by the British writer and poet A. Alvarez. Mr. Alvarez likes to play poker, and in 1981 he took a holiday in Las Vegas at the same time as the World Series of Poker. Like the enterprising writer he is, he got a book out of it.
The main event of the World Series of Poker was already a big deal in those days. In 1981 it attracted 75 entrants, each of whom paid $10,000 to compete. As it is now, the main event, like the other events, was a knockout competition, and the winner was the last player not to go broke. The first prize was $375,000, half the entry fees. Not bad for a few days’ work.
How the world changes, though, eh? In 2006 nearly 9,000 players ponied up the ten grand (or had the ten grand ponied up for them by poker websites at which they had won tournaments), and the first prize was $12 million. The prize for finishing 238th was nearly $43,000.
Even after changes in U. S. law which restricted the ability of poker websites to subsidize entry fees, the 2007 main event still attracted nearly 6,400 players. The first prize shrank to a paltry $8.25 million, in part because a smaller percentage of the entry fees was put into it.
Back in 1981, the game was dominated by a small group of professional players, several of whom Mr. Alvarez interviewed. Surprisingly, most of these players are still active or were active until recently. While Mr. Alvarez’s interviews were somewhat uncritical, he did use them to put together a good picture of the professional players of the time. Almost all of them were men, and all of them had two other important characteristics:
- ready sources of finance
- a consuming obsession with poker
Their obsession seems to have had little to do with money. Mr. Alvarez notes that some of the players seemed not to understand the uses of money away from the poker table. The winner of the main event in 1981, Stu Ungar, died broke in 1998, although he had won $30 million at poker tables. A large percentage of that $30 million was simply given away; the rest seems to have been pretty well thrown away.
Nowadays things are different. To get into a tournament you no longer need friends with deep pockets. Chris Moneymaker, who won the 2003 main event, won his entry fee online, in a tournament he paid $39 to enter. The internet and the knockout tournament format have proven to be an ideal combination for poker. Because people from all over the world are playing at the big poker sites, you can always get a game. The tournament format means that you don’t have to have big money to get into that game, either. Entry fees reportedly start at under a dollar. If you’re playing in a game with a 75-cent entry fee, you won’t be winning much if you finish first, but you’ll have had some pretty cheap fun.
In Idle Passion: Chess and the Dance of Death Alexander Cockburn argued that world chess champions tend to be narcissistic repressed homosexuals with Oedipus complexes – except for one group. The group which consisted of more or less normal people was the group of champions from the Soviet Union. The reason they were different is that they had been selected by the Soviet government because they had the abilities necessary to become a chess champion, then trained to play well, then required to play chess for their country. The chess champions from the rest of the world had not been encouraged by their countries to play chess, but devoted their lives to the game because of their obsession with it.
A similar process seems to have been at work in poker. Although poker players don’t seem to have a pathological or even a standard psychological make-up, in 1981 playing high-stakes poker for a living pretty well required that you be obsessed with the game and be able to get your hands on large sums of money on short notice. These days, though, a Chris Moneymaker can get to the heights of the field while working as an accountant.
Becoming a poker champion is no longer as much trouble, and the field is becoming flooded with normal people who just like to play poker and can now do it without making the personal sacrifices or taking the financial risk they once had to. Doyle Brunson observed to Mr. Alvarez that as the game grew more popular and amateur play became more competent, the professional players would find it difficult to maintain their dominance of tournament play. Since in tournaments you can’t buy more chips when you start to run out of money, the professionals’ big bankrolls wouldn’t help them when they hit an unlucky streak.
Mr. Brunson was right, of course, even though he couldn't have foreseen internet poker in 1981. Today you can play a lot of poker for very little money and develop professional skill. As differences in skill between amateurs and professionals become smaller the outcome of tournaments comes more and more to depend on luck. Amateurs can have good luck as easily as a professional can. No one has won consecutive main events since 1988; between 1970 and 1988 four players won consecutive main events.
So there you have it – poker has been democratized by technology and sound business thinking. The big poker capitalists have been forced to forgo their monopoly control of the big tournaments, and poker proletarians like Mr. Moneymaker, Greg Raymer, Jamie Gold, and Jerry Yang have begun taking the World Series of Poker main event.
It’s no wonder the American government is trying to kill internet poker. The idea that technology and globalization might give ordinary people a chance against the big guys is not one the current administration is likely to want to see in general circulation.
But you can fight the Man! Stand up for democracy – shuffle up and deal!
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