Top Poker Players Play Poker Online
When the first-place prize money that would go to the World Series of Poker finals champion was piled onto a card table at Binion’s Horseshoe casino in downtown Las Vegas last month, the $5 million in bundled hundred-dollar bills covered nearly every square inch of the green felt.
It was the biggest top prize in the world’s most prestigious poker tournament that had attracted the largest field in the World Series championship’s storied 35-year history.
Just as dramatic as the showdown between the final survivors from a field of 2,576 entrants was who the top winners were. They were not crusty professional poker players who had worked their way up in the game beginning in some backroom poker game. They were a patent attorney from Connecticut and a college student from Texas. And they had both qualified for the World Series of Poker No-Limit Texas Hold ‘em championship through Internet competition.
Greg Raymer, a lawyer from Stonington, Conn., who finished first and won the $5 million, and David Williams, a junior economics major at Southern Methodist University in Dallas who earned $3.5 million for second, qualified for the high-stakes tournament on a Web site called PokerStars.com – one of many such Web sites – where computer users compete against players from all over the world.
More than a third of the players earned seats in the World Series championship field in online tournaments, according to a WSOP spokesman. The presence of so many online poker players – and their success – signaled a fundamental change in the poker landscape that was once dominated by colorful so-called rounders, like “Amarillo Slim” Preston and Doyle “Texas Dolly” Brunson.
In the last few years, Internet players have become dangerous wildcards in top tournaments, sometimes playing aggressively and erratically or with surprising skill and cunning. But in either case, they often bushwhack more seasoned professionals. “You can’t point at a guy any more and say he’s ‘dead money’,” said a top pro, Howard Lederer, using the poker term for someone believed to have no chance.
Texas Hold ‘em is a deceptively simple game. Each player is dealt two cards face down. Five more cards, dealt face up, are community cards. The community cards are exposed in a sequence of first three (called the flop), then one (the turn) and then the final card (the river). Betting occurs before and after each interval. Players form the best five-card poker hand using any combination of their own cards and the five community cards.
Often, players enter the World Series of Poker No-Limit Texas Hold ‘em finals by simply buying a seat; the cost is $10,000. But players can also qualify by winning preliminary events, called satellites, that they enter for lesser amounts. Not long ago, satellites were held exclusively in brick-and-mortar casinos and card rooms. More recently, though, poker Web sites have offered such tournaments. And the game’s popularity has soared.
Here’s an example:
Eighty-one players, each paying about $150 to a poker Web site, enter an Internet satellite. Nine players compete at each of the nine tables. The winner of each table advances to the final satellite table, and the winner there earns a seat (worth $10,000) in the WSOP finals with the Web site passing along the entry fee.
As a result, a poker champion is just as likely to wind up being a 21-year-old online poker nerd as a hardboiled pro. One such pro, the legendary Brunson, who won the WSOP finals in 1976 and 1977, finished 53rd this year, collecting $45,000.
This year’s WSOP finals saw 226 players win prizes from $5 million to $10,000 – many of them online entrants.
The Internet, it seems, has democratized poker. “These Internet players can be very strong,” said Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, who won the title in 2000 and placed 26th this year, winning $120,000. “You learn a lot faster online because you get to play a lot more hands.”
Ferguson cuts a colorful gunslinger image on the poker circuit with long dark hair and a beard, a black cowboy hat and eyes hidden behind sunglasses. The menacing persona belies Ferguson’s Ph.D. in computer science from UCLA. He started out online more than a decade ago when Internet poker was in its infancy.
Online poker explosion
Today, at least 40,000 to 50,000 people are playing Internet poker for cash or prizes during peak hours, according to PokerPulse.com, a Web site that monitors player traffic in online card rooms. During a typical 24-hour period, over $90 million crosses cyber poker tables, according to the Web site.
“I never thought poker could get this big,” Ferguson said after signing autographs and posing for photos with fans at a break in the WSOP. “And it comes down to two things, the Internet and TV.”
Televised poker has also popularized the game, especially among 20-somethings, and has served as a tutorial for poker novices hoping to strike it rich. ESPN, the Travel Channel and Bravo all broadcast taped Texas Hold ‘em tournaments.
Last year’s World Series finals champion was a 27-year old accountant from Tennessee named Chris Moneymaker, who qualified for the tournament, and eventually won $2.5 million, with a $39 investment in an Internet poker competition.
ESPN has shown Moneymaker’s improbable victory in the 2003 WSOP dozens of times, making him an icon akin to a rock star on college campuses where Texas Hold ‘em has taken root and flourished.
“These college kids see some 22- or 24- or 26-year-old win a million dollars and they all want to do it,” said Mike Sexton, a poker Web site consultant and TV commentator for the World Poker Tour on the Travel Channel.
Of the nine players who went to the WSOP final table this year, Matt Dean, a 25-year-old aspiring math teacher from The Woodlands, Texas, was perhaps the least likely to get that far. He has been playing poker for only about a year-and-a-half – mostly on the Internet, he said. He and his fraternity buddies at Southwestern University had their interest aroused by the TV poker shows.
Last school year, he was a long-term substitute teacher earning about $80 a day. He played his way into the World Series finals with a $32 buy-in in an Internet preliminary. Finishing seventh, Dean won $675,000.
He’s put his teaching plans on hold since a poker Web site offered to finance his seat in a tournament in Ireland. “Teaching is in my blood,” Dean said. “But I might never have the opportunity to travel like this on a free roll.”
That a novice player like Dean, starting online with a meager stake, could advance to the final table of poker’s marquee event while poker pros and former champions failed to place in the money has some wondering whether luck has replaced skill in world-class events.
Phil Gordon, a pro player and commentator on a TV celebrity poker show, says “There is still a terrific amount of skill involved in this game.”
Case in point is Dan Harrington, a reserved Bostonian-turned-Californian who wears a Red Sox cap for luck. He finished fourth this year. In 2003, Harrington went to the final table and placed third. In 1995, he won the world championship. Those accomplishments don’t come from luck alone.
Changing the game
Lederer, considered to have one of the most analytical minds in poker, is stoical about the advent of online poker and the players it produces.
“It’s turned into a different kind of event,” Lederer said of the World Series No-Limit Texas Hold ‘em finals. “There was a time when, if you were a good poker player, you would be disappointed if you never won this event. Now, you can’t feel that way.”
Raymer, who spent about $2,600 online playing his way into the World Series finals, had some live tournament experience, but his best finish had been a $48,000 prize.
“I’m not sitting here today because I’m the best player in the world, I’m not,” he said modestly from behind the $5 million in cash. “I still have 10 times more to learn.”
Moneymaker, last year’s winner, is a cover boy for gambling magazines, gets stopped in airports and malls, and is shopping his story in Hollywood. Raymer expects similar instant celebrity after ESPN begins airing this year’s tournament next month.
But the Connecticut lawyer also realizes that his $5 million payday was the result of a simple fact of life in any poker game, whether it’s at the kitchen table, in cyberspace or at the fabled Horseshoe Casino.
“I got the right cards,” Raymer said, “at the right time.”
In: Poker Doctor · Tagged with: Play Poker Online, Top Poker Players, Top Poker Players Play Poker Online, top winners, World Series of Poker
on July 6, 2009 at 10:29 pm
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