July 20, 2007 * THE STRIP SENSE

Is Poker Over?

By STEVE FRIESS

As I type, the final table of the main event of the 38th World Series of Poker is getting underway. Somewhere in that mammoth ballroom at the Rio All-Suites Hotel-Casino, four remaining men are duking it out for the top prize of $8.25 million, the largest single prize of any competitive event, not including the payouts in boxing that are partly not even tied to the outcome.

It is the Super Bowl of gambling. It is a big deal.

Or so I believe, but there's a reason I'm not there. My editors at several of the largest media outlets in America don't think so. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek and Reuters all took a total pass on covering anything surrounding or related to the tournament. Of the media considered to be national by nature, only USA Today, the Associated Press and MSNBC.Com took any serious interest.

Which leads me to the question: Is poker over?

I don't really think so, but I am dumbfounded by this wipeout of major media disinterest and eager to find an explanation for it. Whereas in years past I've made a pretty decent living off this annual shebang, this time out I managed to do a large feature for the Boston Globe on the Venus-and-Serena of poker, Annie Duke and Howard Lederer, who hail from New England and are thus of local interest, and a profile of Annie as the first lady of poker for Vegas Magazine. Oh, and Boston took interest in a 200-word brief for Tuesday's newspaper about some New Englanders who made it far, one lasting to 13th place for $429,000.

My life partner and "The Strip" podcast co-host, Miles Smith, thinks that poker's days in the white-hot spotlight are over because, in the end, it was a fad rather than a genuine phenomenon, certain to fade from public consciousness as soon as it got boring and something more interesting came along.

And yet it's hard not to argue that poker is still a big deal. More than 6,300 people competed in this year's $10,000 No-Limit Texas Hold 'Em event, creating a prize pool of nearly $60 million. ESPN ratings for the first four days of their coverage fell to 869,000 viewers, down 13 percent from 2006, but that still outrates NHL hockey games. The Los Angeles Times and the New York Times cover hockey regularly.

One of the things that got me was that there were some really interesting themes out of this year's series, what with the return of poker black sheep and 2006 WSOP champ Jamie Gold returning to the scene of the crime and the superhot question of just how the Congressional ban on Americans using their credit cards to play poker online would lower the WSOP Main Event population. (The figures fell from 8,773 to 6,358, a 27 percent drop but still a bigger crowd than 2005.) The New York Times did let me break the news that Gold admitted to cheating in last year's event last spring, but since then they've had no interest whatsoever.

Once the Series got going, there was the amazing tale of blind poker player Hal Lubarsky, who initially had to threaten a lawsuit to get to play but then became a fan favorite who finished 197th for a $51,398 pay day. And the final table was amazingly diverse - Russia, South Africa, Canada, Denmark, Britain and Laos all represented - but still the editors of the British-based wire service, used more than the Associated Press in many of those nations, Reuters held fast in their disinterest. An editor told me she'd never received a request from any newspaper editors to cover poker.

That may be because Ryan Nakashima of the Associated Press - and Adam Goldman before him in the same role - did such a terrific job. They both cover it for both audiences, the know-it-all who speaks the tongue of flops and Fifth Streets, and the amateur intrigued by the human dramas going on at the tables. Closer to home, Howard Stutz of the Review-Journal also did a bang-up job.

It may be true that poker has peaked. That sort of intense attention was bound to subside. But I think I expected that it would settle into a situation where, just as the major media take interest in horse racing for its three main events or spelling when the National Spelling Bee comes along, poker would get its due and the millions of fans would get their coverage at least once a year, when the richest event in all of games and sports takes place.

I do have a theory here: Poker is considered gambling and gambling is seen, to the elite media, as disrespectful, unsavory, not newsworthy and thus, not to be covered seriously.

Of course, both tenets are flawed. Poker requires at least as much skill as luck, which is why it stands apart from other casino games and the house doesn't want to play you. It's not gambling. And even if it were, the casino industry is now one of the largest in the United States, MGM Mirage, Harrahs and Las Vegas Sands Inc are major Wall Street interests and Americans can find a place to legally gamble within a four hour drive of any major city. It is a mainstream activity.

I'm not sure how to counter this problem except that next year, if the numbers rise for the main event, maybe the snooty media will dig this predictable narrative: Poker's back!

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