IT’S mid-May, the days are longer, warmer. Whattya say we stay inside and keep playing poker?
It’s the end of spring training, sports fans, the beginning of the new season, the new TV poker season. The World Series of Poker satellite tournaments begin in Las Vegas two weeks from today. All one needs is $10,000 for the buy-in and an ID showing your DOB to be no later than 5/30/87.
Clearly, predictably, televised Texas Hold ‘Em rooms are tracking younger and younger, lots of fresh college dropouts grinding it out, the survivors among those who crashed and burned or simply washed out in pursuit of a career as a professional poker player.
You have to be 21 to play in the annual U.S. World Series of Poker, which began in 1968. But not until recent years did IDs become necessary. One of the final table players in last year’s WSOP, an ESPN property, was 22. This year, Poughkeepsie’s Hevad Khan returns as a seasoned vet.
In 2006, Jeff Madsen became a TV poker star at the age of 21, becoming the youngest to win a WSOP event. The year before, college dropout Eric Froelich held that distinction. He was 21, too, but a few weeks older than Madsen. Last June, Steve Billirakis, 21 years, 11 days old, became the youngest U.S. event winner.
How’s that for a low-straight draw? The youngest-to-win record at the WSOP has been broken three times in the last three years. Must be the new conditioning programs.
This doesn’t merely reflect a trend, but an epidemic. The next time you’re in a casino, check out the newly enlarged poker rooms, see how many barely legals are spending their days and nights chasing pots so that they can chase another. And for every young big winner, there are how many young big losers? Hundreds? Thousands?
I know a kid – a young man, really – who was more than two years out of college before he got his first job. Finally broke, he’d been pursuing a career as poker pro. He’s hardly alone, but he’s lucky to have lost only two years of his life to the turn of a card. But those stories, and much worse, aren’t told in the player profiles seen and heard within televised poker shows.
A few years ago high school kids in my neighborhood stopped playing ball after school and started playing poker. By the time they graduated, some had never thought or sought to socialize beyond poker. Friday and Saturday nights were spent playing poker.
Two weekends ago, while attending my daughter’s graduation from Indiana University, I was struck by how many students wore shirts and caps (the caps backwards, of course) that reflected the kids’ allegiances to various poker Web sites. HBO’s “Real Sports” in 2005 chronicled a school-sanctioned Hold ‘Em tournament held in IU’s student union.
Poker is now an intramural sport at IU, spring and fall. Seriously.
The wildfire proliferation of money-up poker-playing kids can be attached to two things: the Internet and poker’s multi-network presence on TV – from The Travel Channel, to NBC, to Fox Sports Net, to SNY, to MSG, to VH1, to the Game Show Network and all over ESPN’s networks.
This morning, ESPN Classic was scheduled to show the 1994 and 1995 WSOP. The BET Network – BET is an acronym for Black Entertainment Television, nothing to do with gambling – now includes a show, “The Black Poker Stars Invitational.” Seriously. The Speed Channel even presented a show predicated on racecar drivers playing poker. It was, however, very slow.
Perhaps appropriately, poker’s now on TV all day and all night.
And those who can least afford the habit – kids and young adults, almost by definition the most impressionable, naive and vulnerable, no matter how smart they may be – are the most likely to be all-in.
So what do you think the TV execs who approve the purchase and presentation of such programming think about that? Do you think, 1) It upsets them; 2) It pleases them; 3) As long as they’re not their kids, they couldn’t care less?
Incidentally, I regularly play poker. It’s a great game. And I play for money, not a lot, and for fun. But no one at our table, while in our late teens and early 20s, pursued a career as a poker player. Unlike today, it was not an option.