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Everyman poker - a modern-day fairy tale

By Marc Weinberg

What underpins this modern-day revolution, which has seen millions of people drawn to online poker rooms? There are a lot of very good reasons to play poker online, but one primary motivator that dwarfs the rest: Online poker affords everyone the opportunity to become rich and famous. It is at once a slight hope but completely egalitarian in scope, to progress through online qualification rounds (known as satellites) and emerge on television at the final table of the World Series of Poker or the World Poker Tour competing for millions of dollars.

It is a fairy tale that becomes a reality on almost a monthly basis these days, and it started three years ago when Chris Moneymaker parlayed his $20 on Poker Stars into a multi-million dollar payday in the WSOP Main Event. He was the everyman player, a hard drinking rotund accountant from Tennessee, complete with baseball cap and shoddy goatee. He proved that it could be done, and it would not be an understatement to suggest that he inspired an entire new generation of poker players to take up the game of poker, and to play it on their computers.

The Moneymaker story seemed like an aberration though, a flash of lightning caught magically in the bottle. Before his victory online poker players who qualified via the Internet for major tournaments were regarded as dead money and dismissed as second-class citizens in the poker world. Many regarded his achievement as a fluke, and his subsequent play did little to dispel that theory. But in 2004, Greg Raymer, a serious and well-respected poker player who was technically an amateur but who had played in a lot of big poker tournaments previously, followed an identical path to Moneymaker and won the Main Event via a seat won online at Poker Stars.

At that crucial moment, when Raymer won the biggest prize in the history of poker (until Joe Hachem eclipsed that amount in last year’s Main Event), the gold rush was officially on. People play online poker because it is quick, anonymous, cheaper than a card room in terms of the rake, convenient, and a host of other reasons besides, but those televised moments in 2003 and 2004 were largely responsible for the initial introduction.

The spell that online poker has cast so successfully is at heart a practical case of economics. In the past only the very privileged could attend a major poker tournament because the buy in amount was generally $10,000. You were either a professional poker player who could justify the expense or extremely wealthy and unaware that it was an expense. The average poker player who sat in a garage and stood to lose $10 on a bad beat could never dream of taking his seat between Johnny Chan and Doyle Brunson. But online poker offers a very simple equation: Bring together 1000 of those guys in garages around the world and pool their $10; offer the winner a $10,000 seat; repeat as often as possible.

The reality is that online poker rooms are not constrained by physical limitations. They can deal an infinite number of hands at an infinite number of tables, and the only constriction is player volume. So, theoretically, they can send thousands of regular Joes to the World Series Main Event, and it will cost each entrant $10 to get there. It’s as compelling as alchemy but unlike turning dross into gold online poker qualifiers have the great advantage of really working. They do turn $10 entry fees for Stage 1 satellites into $5 million paydays, and it could well happen to you.

In 2006 the WSOP Main Event is expected to swell once again and top 8,000 players. The $80 million in total prize money will be unprecedented and the vast majority of those seats will be filled by online qualifiers. The poker rooms win because they charge a rake at every satellite stage, and they receive an incredible amount of free publicity when one of their players is spotted at a featured table. The marketing value of a Chris Moneymaker or a Greg Raymer to a specific poker room is staggering. The game of poker wins because it is a phenomenon that is sustainable because of the Internet and its ability to bring hundreds of thousand of poker players together to participate in the same event.

As with the lottery or a progressive slots jackpot, the thought of one person walking away with a million percent return on her investment is enough of a catalyst to drive many of us to spend a little trying to become that person. But unlike those pursuits, poker is primarily a game of skill with an element of luck blended in, so that the game can and does allow thousands of players to win money in the long run.

On April 18, the world’s strongest players will gather in Las Vegas to play at the World Poker Tour Championship. The buy in for this event is $25,000. That amount would normally preclude all but the very best from sitting down. However, thanks to online poker and satellite qualifiers, the tournament organizers expect 600 entrants and a prize pool of $15 million. The real story is still to be written, because odds are that the winner of this event will not be one of the top poker pros but an online qualifier; a guy you’ve never heard of, a guy just like you or me.







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