This week's LVW col: After The Flop

Here's this week's LVW col. Let's see if the poker peeps can muster the shock and awe that Batsh*t Bette fans did. -sf

After the Flop
Poker's time in the sun may have come and gone, if recent ratings are any indication By STEVE FRIESS

If there were ever a year when the World Series of Poker should have enjoyed a renewed boost, it was 2009. The stars had aligned in every conceivable way, and grandiose predictions seemed warranted.

“This is going to be the most-watched Final Table in history,” legend Phil Hellmuth predicted to me before it took place in two spurts on November 7 and 9.

And I believed him. It certainly made sense. Alas, he was wrong.

After all the noise in recent weeks about the conclusion of the 40th WSOP Main Event—the $10,000 Buy-In No-Limit Texas Hold ’Em tournament viewed as the pinnacle of the game’s prestige—virtually nobody bothered to report the outcome that actually mattered. TV ratings for the two-hour Final Table broadcast on ESPN on November 10 were actually down from the 2008 broadcast. The difference was nominal—this year’s show drew about 1.8 million viewers, and last year’s drew 1.9 million—but still, down is not up. Worse yet, ESPN says the 2009 ratings for the 31-telecast, 15-week season had a 1.0 share, which was even with the 2008 season.

All of which invites this important question: Now can we say that poker has plateaued in the United States?

This notion is one that makes World Series of Poker bosses groan. Skeptical journalists have long been taking note of poker’s relative weakness versus its white-hot years, 2003-2006, when poker TV shows were all the rage and Internet poker blossomed into one of the universe’s all-time most profitable enterprises. In 2006, when 8,773 players entered the World Series of Poker’s Main Event and the top prize hit $12 million, there seemed nothing that could slow the game’s stampede into the hearts and minds of American popular culture.

Poker overlords like to note that Congress put the kibosh on poker’s growth by passing a law in the fall of 2006 severely restricting the ability of most Americans to easily put money into their online poker accounts. This certainly is true and did result in a dramatic drop the following year in WSOP Main Event entrants. In fact, in the three years since, that figure has yet to top even 7,000.

That’s all well and good, but that does not explain the waning interest in watching poker on TV, and it is only via TV that tournament poker can become anything more than a peripheral part of mainstream American culture. Why would one’s inability to play online reduce one’s interest in following the pros? If poker wants to be compared to the big sports leagues, don’t they know that the vast majority of people who watch the NFL or NBA don’t actually play football or basketball?

Read the rest at LasVegasWeekly.Com.

The Show is UP: Lily Tomlin

This was a particularly fun one because interviewing someone like Lily Tomlin is not what one would reasonably expect from a journalistic career in Las Vegas. (Others who fit this bill have included Harvey Fierstein, Maya Lin and Dominick Dunne.) I hope you agree I made the most of it. Click on the date below to make it play or right-click to save it and listen at your leisure. You can subscribe, too, (it's free!) in iTunes or in Zune.

Nov.9: Ungilding Lily

She’s conquered Hollywood and Broadway and won over the hearts everywhere in between so at 70, Lily Tomlin has finally decided it’s time to become a Vegas headliner. For nine nights, from Nov. 10-18, the comedienne brings her cast of famous characters – Ernestine the telephone operator and bratty 5-year-old Edith Ann among them – to the stage. Tomlin explains this hour her illustrious career never before included the Strip and chats with Steve about her roles in Desperate Housewives, West Wing, Damages and the X-Files. Plus, she explains why she walked off the Dick Cavett show in 1972 in a feminist huff and why she and her longtime partner Jane Wagner won’t be getting married.

In Banter: A CityCenter tour, Bette's departure, the WSOP final table, Miles' Oval Office adventures, the disgraceful debasing of The Harmon, a Top Chef viewing party and some we-toldja-so's.

Links to stuff discussed:

Get tickets for Lily Tomlin’s MGM Grand shows Nov 10-18
The Advocate's current piece on Lily Tomlin
Time's 1977 cover on Lily Tomlin
Steve’s blog about the Bartolotta viewing party
The VegasHappensHere.Com post about the marathon WSOP session on Saturday
Steve’s pieces on Phil Ivey, Darvin Moon and the outcome of the WSOP
Links to blog posts about Barry Manilow and Viva Elvis long before both were official
The VegasTripping.Com run-in with Wynncore over Wynncore.Com
VegasTripping.Com's perfect response to Wynncore
The charming letter from Steve Wynn to RateVegas.Com from 2003

4 a.m. at the WSOP Final Table

If these women look exhausted, forgive them. It's now 16 hours since the Final Table resumed play at the Rio for the World Series of Poker. The aim is to whittle down the nine players who survived the field of 6,494 in July down to two and then have those two go heads-up starting at 10 p.m. on Monday.

It's been colorful, amusing and grueling. I know many of you don't care about poker, but the mechanics of the game are never why I find this so intriguing. It's the personalities and the life-changing sums of money involved. The four guys left right now include a 46-year-old lumberjack from a Maryland backwater who was never on a plane before July and has now won at least $2.5 million. The guy lives in a double-wide, won entry by winning a tournament in a West Virginia casino that cost him $130 to enter. That's nuts.

Also nuts? This lady, the self-coronated Poker Queen:

Also ALSO nuts, the fact that the $27 million they're giving to the players this weekend is in mounds on a table with a couple of security guards who look like Barney Fifes:

Yes, that's real and not newspaper (they even make that anymore, anyhow?) filler as the Las Vegas Review-Journal's Howard Stutz thought until I walked him over to take a closer look. Perched atop that mound is this, the only bracelet most men would want to own or wear:

They're being very loose with access for journalists like me who have stage passes...

...to sit on a risers a few feet from the action and behind some cheering sections. The unmanned Mac there is mine:

The guy to my ghost's left in this image is Eric Ramsey with PokerNews.Com, the guy who is writing these hand-by-hand accounts of the action and that's fortunate because even this close, it's hard to tell what's happening. I've gotten some cool shots like this one when Phil Ivey, the acclaimed poker pro who busted out in 7th place, was pondering a move:

...and when Doyle Brunson, the elder statesman of the game, issued the "shuffle-up-and-deal" declaration to begin play so many hours ago.

Here's one of the dealers in earlier times at the table...


...and an up-close look at the face of the special chips they create each year for this event:

Yes, we were young and fresh once, full of energy. Back when we started, there was a huge line in the hallway of spectators who waited hours to get into the Penn & Teller Theater to watch. It's free, but the demand was huge:

During breaks, famous poker pros like Howard Lederer, whom I profiled with his sister Annie Duke in the Boston Globe in 2007, signed autographs.


Some of the eccentrics got to take pictures with the Holly Madison of poker, online pro and [link maybe NSFW] WSOP hostess Lacey Jones:


As you can see, Ms. Jones works hard to please:


To preview the WSOP Final Table, I wrote a profile of Ivey, referred to as the Tiger Woods of Poker because he's an elegantly handsome, biracial break-through player whose astoundingly winning consistency has folks believing they are in the presence of greatness. Unfortunately, Ivey seems to despise the press and only speaks to reporters when he's in some way being compensated or is obligated to do so. Thus, the press was not sorry that he played lousy and riskless and busted out in seventh. To return the favor, Ivey was the only one who snubbed even ESPN when he departed, much to the WSOP's chagrin. He surfaced playing on a poker website within an hour, the very definition of gambling addiction.

Here's the only shot I got of Ivey up close:

Other pros were more accessible. I chatted up Phil Hellmuth and 2008 finalist Dennis Phillips and got these shots of Doyle Brunson and Daniel Negreanu...

Doyle was signing his new book, "The Godfather of Poker," which I picked up to read and possibly review. Not sure what Negreanu was doing with his hand there.

As the night wore on, I did wander the Rio looking for a place to buy some candy and soda to perk me up. I caught a little bit of this silly show in the casino...


...and found myself pelted by beads from the Masquerade in the Sky:

Not sure what to do with them. Put them on TheStripPodcast.Com trivia question prize list, perhaps? Or hang them on the car rearview as everyone seems to in Vegas?

The reason I need to hang in here is because one of the remaining players -- currently in first with a large lead, in fact -- is Antoine Saout, a 25-year-old college dropout from St Martin Des Champs, France, and one of my clients is Agence Presse-France, the French wire service. Clearly the deeper Saout goes, the bigger a story it is over in France. I love how his cheering section has these special scarves they knitted...

...which seems tres francais, non?

But now, after 265 hands and no sign that these four are going to settle it anytime soon, we're all feeling like we could use a little nap.

Those legs happen to belong to poker star Mike Matasow, who decided to lay down on the floor and rest. That sounds nice, but some of us have to work here.

WSOP On The Brink...Of A Problem

One of the charms of the World Series of Poker in recent years has been how international the final tables have been. A Dane won the thing last year, a Laotian immigrant won the year before, of the last 18 final tablists, half resided outside the U.S. They included three Canadians (one Vietnamese-born), two Danes, a Russian, a South African and a Brit.

This year, not so much. As I type, the field of 6,494 is now down to 14. Of those, only two are not Americans, James Akenhead of England and Antione Saout of France.

Now, there's nothing anyone can do about how the cards go and there were more than 100 nations represented. That number was down some from last year, but still.

At the same time, an All-American Final Table kind of throws a kink in the plan. Once they get down to nine finalists, they will pause play until November. The idea there is to create buzz for the players, most of them unknown. The real growth markets for the World Series of Poker are outside of the U.S., in places not already saturated by poker rooms and TV poker shows. Last year's Danish winner Peter Eastgate, for instance, set off a new poker frenzy in Denmark.

Personally, I'm rooting right now for the French guy because I've spent all day trying to get editors of newspapers all over the world interested in letting me write about today's action and the 27 folks left when they began at noon. All were assured to win at least $352,000, so it seemed like any of them making it this far should be a local story in their cities. Yet my only nibble is with the French wire service Agence France-Presse, and ONLY if the French guy makes it. Times are tough in the media biz.

Now, all this is moot if pro Phil Ivey can hang on. He's a major poker star and having that kind of star power will help propel interest during the break. Just look at him. He's got the style of Tiger Woods and Barack Obama. He makes it to November and the WSOP folks will be ecstatic.

Poker Needs A Superstar

My diagnosis of what ails professional poker as the WSOP opens today, from the Las Vegas Weekly:

The World Needs A Poker Star
Competitive-game fans want someone to admire
BY STEVE FRIESS

A few weeks ago, I was one of millions of Americans who got sucked into watching something on TV that I ordinarily would never, ever care about.

It was a Monday, I was overdue on more than one assignment—including that week’s Strip Sense entry—and I don’t usually watch sports on TV anyway. But the human drama of a hobbled Tiger Woods somehow managing one amazing comeback after another in the U.S. Open was so compelling that it even made watching privileged people using a crooked metal stick to hit a small white ball across a water-guzzlingly lush and exclusive private park worth my attention.

That said, had it not been for Tiger, such a close match with such great heroics surely wouldn’t have drawn my interest.

And that is the probably insurmountable problem that ails the World Series of Poker as its most prestigious event begins this weekend: There are no transcendent stars. What’s more, thanks to the very same factors that earlier this decade turned the WSOP into one of the fastest-growing professional competitive events— how’s that for avoiding the word “sport”?—of our time, there also never will be.

“You can’t buy your way onto an NBA court; you can’t buy your way onto an NFL field,” said Jeffrey Pollack, WSOP executive director. “You can, however, enter the World Series of Poker and potentially walk away as a world champion. We offer a brand of hope that’s more accessible than any other global sports brand.”

Well, that’s great, but where does that leave poker? Without mystique, that’s where. With nobody who has ever attained the same household-name status of a Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan or Andre Agassi. Ask any group of 55-year-old women emerging from a third viewing of Sex and the City, and they’ll all know who each is.

Ask the same people who Doyle Brunson, Phil Ivey or Johnny Chan are; very few will know. Try Joe Hachem, Jamie Gold and Jerry Yang, the most recent three multimillionaire winners of the WSOP’s $10,000 buy-in No-Limit Texas Hold ’Em tournament—aka the Main Event—and expect the blankest of stares.

Being a victim of one’s own success is a cliché, but there is no better way to explain why TV ratings have been in decline for the WSOP. The meteoric rise in the fascination with poker in general and its richest tournament in particular boiled down to the notion, borne of the boom in Internet poker that turned every Midwest frat boy and bored Silicon Valley code geek into a rounder, that everyone is equal at the table. TV poker shows became so popular even my teenage niece watched, a sure indicator of fad status.

The allure was simple: Anyone can win. Even me.

And yet here’s the problem: Anyone can win. Even whatsisname.

Read the rest HERE

Live from the WSOP VIP Lounge!

As I type, I am waiting for prime rib.

I'm working on a profile for the Boston Globe of Annie Duke and Howard Lederer, the Venus and Serena of poker who were raised in Concord, N.H. That's part of the Globe's New England readership. This sibling success story has fascinated me for years and I'm finally getting to write it, so earlier I supervised a photo shoot (above right) at the ESPN Final Table and then I was brought into the World Series of Poker V.I.P. Lounge for a leisurely, fascinating interview with Howard Lederer. (I had interviewed Annie about two weeks ago by phone.) Both of these interviews will likely be available on the podcast feed in coming weeks as the World Series of Poker heats up.

Anyhow, the VIP Lounge is an interesting place. Each poker player who has entry privileges paid $1,000 in a donation to the Nevada Cancer Institute. It's not a large room -- maybe 40 feet by 20 feet, but it has a pool table and a putting green, free Wi-Fi (obviously) and a buffet furnished by Del Frisco's Steakhouse near the Strip. The hostess just told me as I foraged for a snack that prime rib would be out in mere minutes.

Howard Lederer, (holding court on a couch at left) tells me that the VIP Lounge is like a de facto casino in its own right. Phil Ivey, he claims, was betting $10,000 a putt last night. I was putting earlier with Phil "The Unabomber" Laak, boyfriend of Jennifer Tilly, who surprisingly remembered me from the interview I did with both of them last year for Vegas Magazine at the CPK at the Mirage.

Fortunately, Laak didn't insist we bet. It's hard to believe sometimes that I am the son of a man who, in lean years of my childhood, made his living betting thousands on his golf game. He'd be so disappointed.

Prime rib's here! Yum!