I occasionally talk here about how impatient I sometimes get with poker-related analogies. For instance, about a year ago I referred to the Poker Shrink noting how he wasn’t “a big fan of the ‘Poker is like Life’ books and articles” because, in his view, most of them end up being “too general to carry any more wisdom than a dribble glass.” I agreed with the Shrink in saying I also didn’t care much for these analogies — most particularly when they end up making one’s meaning more vague rather than helping clarify what it is one is trying to express.

In other words, I ain’t too keen on someone proclaiming “Poker is like life” and leaving it at that, though I do often appreciate the many ways poker presents us with situations that resemble those we face elsewhere, and thus occasionally provides interesting ways to talk about and assess those non-poker situations. And yeah, I, too, will indulge in such making comparisons now and again, as it is both fun and occasionally even useful.

That said, one has to be careful not to introduce unwanted vagueness when making such comparisons. Another danger one faces when choosing to employ poker-related metaphors is to fall into stale, overused phrases and clichés — also not recommended if the goal is to engage an audience.

The abundance of poker terms and phrases in everyday English is testament to the game’s popularity and significance. But this abundance also means many of these terms and phrases have become pretty well worn by now. People everywhere are constantly bluffing each other. Or upping the ante. Or noting when the chips are down. Or passing the buck. Or trying their hand at something. Or singing that he can’t read my, can’t read my, no he can’t read my poker face. Or warning you about that guy being a wild card, with an ace in the hole. Or up his sleeve. Or simply being an ace.

I’m reminded of George Orwell’s still relevant 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” in which he laments the decline of the language in various contexts, but most especially in political speech and writing. Among his many warnings listed there, Orwell advises readers to avoid “dying metaphors” if at all possible. In his list of examples Orwell does include one poker-related one — “playing into the hands of” — and I’d imagine he’d list most of those appearing in the previous paragraph, too, as often introducing an unwanted “loss of vividness” in one’s language.

Last week Tiffany Michelle appeared on Fox News to chat with Neil Cavuto, ostensibly to discuss the current status of President Obama’s efforts to introduce health care reform and all of the legislative tangling — and political fallout — that has occurred in connection to those efforts thus far. Why Michelle? Well, because she’s “a professional black jack and poker player” — i.e., a gambler — and someone thought it would be a good idea for a person who understands risks and rewards to comment.

Bill Rini wrote a bit about the segment last week in a post that also has the embedded video. Then he came back and transcribed the whole sucker. As Rini points out, the conversation between Cavuto and Michelle — coming in at just under five minutes — is more than a little cringe-worthy, primarily because of the not terribly successful attempt to describe everything in terms of poker or gambling metaphors.

It appears that Cavuto (and Fox) mainly wanted to say that Obama has “a bad hand” here and should fold. And perhaps — as Cavuto hastily adds at the end — also to charge that the President isn’t playing with his own money, but with the taxpayers’. So they brought Michelle on to help communicate that message, but Cavuto’s questions were so imprecise those (essentially banal) observations barely came through, if at all.

If you’re curious, check out Rini’s transcript and/or watch the video. I actually wouldn’t fault Michelle too much here — she does pretty well, I think, to try to respond to Cavuto’s garbled clichés, and in fact probably saves the whole segment from becoming utterly inscrutable.

The hosts of The Poker Beat discussed the segment a bit on their show last week, and there tourney reporter B.J. Nemeth did a good job summarizing why it failed — and why I am sometimes impatient with poker-related metaphors that tend to obscure more than clarify. “The whole point of an analogy is to try and make something easier to understand,” said Nemeth, “and I think what they did is took something the [viewers] had some grasp of and made it incomprehensible.”

Then again, as Orwell notes, what Nemeth is describing is often what happens when language is employed for political purposes. Writing in the wake of the second World War, Orwell notes how “Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Perhaps the stakes were a bit higher then (to use a dying metaphor). But Orwell’s desire for us to view “language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought” is still worth reiterating.

Related posts:

1. Satellites Now Running at DoylesRoom for $1,000,000 English Poker Open Taking place from September 15th to 17th, the inaugural…
2. DoylesRoom.com offers last Satellites to English Poker Open Online poker site DoylesRoom.com is giving players the chance…
3. Free Monday Night Football and Poker Parlay from True Poker Every Monday with TruePoker.com , you have the chance…

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Ended up playing some more Rush Poker over the weekend on Full Tilt and enjoyed it quite a bit. I’m just one-tabling the sucker, sticking with the pot-limit Omaha games (both six-handed and full ring).

Looking at my Poker Tracker stats, it appears I’m playing almost exactly 150 hands per hour. That compares to about 45-50 hands per hour at a regular PLO table. And while I’m not going to get into win rates too specifically, let’s just say there’s been a similarly significant jump there, too, when compared to the regular ring games. (Insert smiley face here.)

As others have noted, the game is such that it is generally difficult to “get a read” on opponents in the way one might do in a regular ring game. In particular, since with each new hand players have been reassembled around a new table, there is no way of knowing what happened with everyone else just prior to the current hand being dealt. Thus, I don’t know if the guy coming out raising pot from UTG just suffered a horrendous beat and is now tilting, or if he’s a tight player who almost never raises from early position without aces, double-suited.

However, it is not impossible to get reads on players, especially when the pool is small enough that you see the same names coming back again and again. When I’ve been playing the PLO games, the player pool has been as big as 170 or so, and as small as 65, with usually about 20% of the players multi-tabling — that is, playing two, three, or four tables. (I know the hold’em player pools have generally been much larger.) Thus, I have had sessions where I’ve encountered players several times and thus eventually come to develop some ideas about them from having seen them play previous hands. Gotta pay attention, though.

My sense is the software is assigning the various seat positions fairly enough, even though there have been times when it seems like I’m in the blinds more often than I should be. Again, looking at Poker Tracker, it appears I am, in fact, moving around the table just fine, occupying each of the positions roughly the same percentage of the time I would be in the regular ring game.

There’s one other aspect of the game that took a while for me to figure out. If you’ve played Rush Poker you know that once you fold a hand you are immediately moved from the table and start a new hand, meaning you don’t get to see the previous hand play out among the players still involved. However, the completed hand does make it into your personal hand histories, so if you open up that “Last Hand” window it isn’t too hard to go back and see how the story ended.

Speaking of going back and examining unfinished stories, this weekend I also became interested in this thread over on Two Plus Two regarding the UltimateBet cheating scandal and its aftermath, the one titled “How goes Sebok’s hunt for the real (UB) killers?” Some interesting info starting to pop up in that one, including the contributions of Haley Hintze regarding both ownership issues and, more recently, the hand histories Barry Greenstein received from UB.

A month ago I shared the story of how — after a full year of emails — I finally received some of my hand histories from UltimateBet. I say “some” because in the end I was only sent roughly two-thirds of the hands I actually played on the site (along with a number of hands in which I was sitting out). As I mentioned then, I stuck to the small stakes, meaning I did not run up against any of the cheating accounts in the hands I played on the site (as far as I know).

Anyhow, Haley has written further about Greenstein’s hand histories on her blog, noting in particular a couple of curious plays made by the cheating account when up against the Bear. You can look at Greenstein’s hand histories, too, if you want, as they’ve been posted over on PokerRoad.

By the way, the scattered, difficult-to-parse text files Greenstein received are in the same user-unfriendly format in which my HHs were sent to me. One difference, though — Haley points out how some of the hands from particular sessions appear to be missing from Greenstein’s histories (i.e., there are some gaps in the numbering sequences). I noticed no such gaps in any of my sessions, although as I said before, I had a couple of sessions for which the hand histories were not sent to me.

Like I say, if you’re interested in that story, check out Haley’s most recent blog post as well as the Two Plus Two thread for more.

Meanwhile, let me remind you that the World Blogger Championship of Online Poker series begins this afternoon on PokerStars with the first event, a no-limit hold’em freeroll. (For more on that, see here.) I’m planning to be there, although I doubt I’m gonna try to blog and/or tweet much as I play. NLHE ain’t my usual game, so I might need my whole jingle brain to focus on the tourney. Good luck to you, if yr playin’ too.

Related posts:

1. Full Tilt introduces Rush Poker, the world’s fastest poker game Full Tilt Poker is taking the online poker action…
2. Poker Strategy Tips On How To Win The Bodog Poker Open IV photo courtesy bodog.com The Bodog Poker Open IV is…
3. Pitbull Poker shuts down Pitbull Poker has seemingly closed its doors for business….

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Continuing what we started yesterday… It was another summer in Las Vegas for yr humble gumshoe helping cover the world’s biggest annual poker circus, and so these middle months are largely taken up with the before, during, and after of the WSOP.

May

The rumble at the start of May was that new legislation was a-comin’ that might affect Americans and their online poker, and anticipating that I wrote a post called “The States of Online Poker” that speculated some about that possibility. Then Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) delivered another bill designed to license and regulate online gambling in the U.S. He proposed a second bill seeking a delay for the UIGEA as well.

I seem to have been in another one of those funks there at the beginning of May, as in “Play the Game” I’m fretting aloud about my commitment to playing poker. By then my mind was becoming increasingly distracted by the upcoming trip to Vegas and the WSOP (as well as other matters), which might partially explain from where those misgivings were coming.

A couple of weeks before the Series began, that “Celebrity Apprentice” finale pitting Annie Duke and Joan Rivers aired, and I opined a bit about the show and its ultimate messages about poker and poker players in “Was It Good For You? (On the Celebrity Apprentice Finale).” Also appearing just before the WSOP was the autobiography of Mike Matusow, Check-Raising the Devil, to which our friends Amy Calistri and Tim Lavalli contributed mightily. It’s a terrific read, and I reviewed the book here (and also here).

There was another pre-WSOP event to talk about, the PokerListings’ Run Good Challenge, WSOP edition. I got knocked out of the first one of those early on by my buddy the Poker Grump, who went on to win the darn thing, as I related in “Grump Runs Good in RGC 3 (WSOP Edition).” There was a second tourney in which I did a little better, though still not good enough for a golden ticket into a WSOP prelim.

In the days before leaving, I had a few “state of the WSOP”-type posts. “On the Economy & the 2009 WSOP” talked some about the possible impact of front-loading the thing with that special $40K event. “On ESPN’s Coverage of the WSOP” and its sequel considered this year’s coverage and the decision to eschew nearly every preliminary event.

I arrived in Vegas the last week of May, played some volleyball — badly — (“Having a Ball”), then quickly found myself “Back in the Saddle” helping cover the Series for PokerNews. These last few posts in May are all taken up with that “Special 40th Annual No-Limit Hold’em Event,” though my favorite is the Animals-inspired “Wave Upon Wave of Demented Avengers March Cheerfully Out of Obscurity Into the Dream.”

June

By the first week of June the WSOP was in full swing, with four, five, or even six events going on each day. I did catch some breaks here and there from live blogging, including one early in June when I had a chance to visit with Tommy Angelo, the poker coach and author of Elements of Poker. He thought we were just having a friendly meal together, but as the title of my post indicates, something more was going on: “Shamus Swindles Poker Lesson for Price of Cheeseburger.”

In “Isolation” I took up the subject of everyone IM-ing, Twittering, and/or being distracted by their iPhones, Blackberries, or other devices either at the tables or elsewhere. The post “Count On It” contains one of my favorite pictures from the WSOP, one of our star reporter Mickey Doft counting chips in a picture of himself counting chips (see above). FerricRamsium took this picture, and B.J. Nemeth took the one on the screen (for PokerRoad).

In “A Hand Worth Remembering” relates a hand I watched in which a dude tried to check-raise Carter “ckingusc” King after having folded his hand. Pretty hilarious stuff. In “Live from the Rio” I briefly relate having been a guest on the Hardcore Poker Show. Followed that with a post titled “Live from the Rio, Part II” which an overview of sorts of what a WSOP final table is like.

The title of “Does Humor Belong in Tournament Reporting?” is self-explanatory. (My answer is sure, why not? Within reason, of course.) Speaking of grins, “It Was Fun” talks about watching Shannon Elizabeth’s table having a good time during a tourney’s first day. That post got some attention from Elizabeth fans (both in the comments and on a fan site, if I recall) who liked seeing her poker-playing written about in a positive manner.

I’m seeing a few posts reflecting on the various challenges of tourney reporting. In “Land of 1000 Reporters” I revisited the issue of everyone broadcasting their progress via handheld devices at the tables. In “The Name Game” I discussed the sometimes absurd-seeming struggle to identify players. And “Seeing Is Believing” talks about the occasional awkwardness of reporting those bizarro hands that probably aren’t going to be believed by readers.

Vera Valmore arrived for her visit the last week of June, and we had a good time, including going to see “Mystère.” I ended the month revealing that a feature film was made about my exciting life back in 1973, titled Shamus and starring Burt Reynolds in the title role. If you somehow missed it, here’s that trailer:

July

I got a chance to play in a charity event that included a number of pros. Eventually Dan Harrington got moved to my table, although unfortunately I was in the embarrassing spot of having an “M” of around 2 when he did, as I reported in “Then Again, With the Name ‘Short-Stacked,’ This Was Bound to Happen Sooner or Later.” A couple of days later I’d get to play in another mainly-media tourney in which I’d sit with both Linda Johnson and Dennis Phillips (see “LOL Freerollaments”).

The Main Event finally got crankin’. The post “Whirlwind” talks a little about the Day 1d fiasco in which hundreds of players had to be turned away. Have another post in there called “Anatomy of a Hand Report” which tells about watching and reporting on a hand involving Terrence “Not Johnny” Chan from Day 2. I kind of dig that post as it gives a good idea what it is like to be a tourney reporter, relating all the various factors that come into play when trying to report even a single hand.

“Theme (In Search Of)” begins with a conversation I’d had with Dr. Pauly. The circus would soon be over, and we were all looking for some way to assign meaning to it all. “Go With the Flow” reports on the chaos of the money bubble bursting (and the PokerNews site crashing). And “Boom, Boom, Boom” reports on the wild finish to produce the November Nine.

There’s a post that provides an annotated list of all the WSOP reports, if yr curious: “2009 WSOP, A Reporter’s Notebook.”

After getting home, I opined a littled “On Shulman’s Spite” — i.e., Jeff Shulman’s announcement about throwing the WSOP bracelet in the garbage, should he win it. “An Application to Consider” proposes an iPhone app for tourney reporting, an idea I wouldn’t be surprised to see happen at the 2010 WSOP. And “A Sporting Chance for Poker” reports on how that European Poker Tour event that had been scheduled for Moscow had been shipped over to Kyiv, Ukraine.

Had no idea at the time that I’d be shipping myself to Ukraine, too, in just a few weeks!

August

Having settled back home for a while, I was getting a little abstract (perhaps) there at the start of August in posts like “On First Choices, Second Guesses.” Was also reflecting some on the state of journalism circa 2009 in “Time Is Money, So Can I Afford to Pause to Reflect?”

Was back into playing online a lot, and fully committed to pot-limit Omaha again. I read Jeff Hwang’s terrific Advanced Pot-Limit Omaha, Volume I which inspired me to think out loud a bit in “To Pot or Not to Pot, a PLO Predicament.” Speaking of poker books, I wrote “On Poker Books” the next day and discussed how book-reading in general has become a relatively antiquated activity.

Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) proposed a bill in the senate that offered to license and regulate online poker specifically (and not online gambling in general, as Frank’s bill does). Wrote on that (with some skepticism) in “On the Menendez Bill (S. 1597); or, Be Careful What You Ask For.”

In “The Writer’s Life” I noted that I’d been invited to go to Kyiv, Ukraine to help cover that EPT event later in the month. Wrote a little more about that in the next post, “Destination Kiev… and the Book Is Out!” (As these posts suggest, I wouldn’t learn the preferred spelling of the city’s name until I got there.) I also announced in that post how I’d finally published my hard-boiled detective novel, Same Difference, which you can read more about and even purchase by clicking here.

The last part of August was taken up with my Ukraine trip — a terrific experience all around, and I remain grateful for having gotten the opportunity to do it. Here are my travel reports from Kyiv: “Arrival,” “Day 1a,” “Day 1b,” “Day 2,” “Day 3,” “Day 4,” “Day 5,” and “Looking Back.” Clearly all of my creative energies were being taken up with reporting from the event, as I had none left for post titles.

Nor have I much energy for more recappin’ today, so come back tomorrow for September through December.

Related posts:

1. Hard-Boiled Poker 2009 Year in Review (1 of 3) Wait a minute. You telling me it is almost…
2. One Week Left to Qualify for 2009 WSOP Main Event Seat at Everest Poker There is only one week remaining to qualify for…
3. Tournament Director Matt Savage returns to the 2009 Aruba Poker Classic for Third Consecutive Year UltimateBet .com is glad to announce that Master Tournament…

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Heard an interesting follow-up to that hand shown on ESPN’s coverage of the 2009 World Series of Poker last week, the one in which Phil Ivey mistakenly mucked what would have been the winning hand at showdown.

You’ve probably either watched the hand or heard all about it by now. With 24 players left, Ivey opened with a preflop raise from under the gun with , and the table folded around to Jordan Smith who reraised from the big blind with . Both players ended up cautiously checking down the flop, turn, and river, with the river having put four spades on the board.

After Ivey checked behind on the end, Smith announced that he’d paired his ace. Ivey waited for Smith to show his hand, then surprisingly Ivey dropped his cards in front of the dealer, obviously not realizing he’d made a flush and thus held the better hand. The two million-plus chip pot went to Smith.

Barry Greenstein sporadically keeps an “audio blog” over on PokerRoad, and at the end of last week he spoke a bit about having talked to his friend Ivey about the hand.

Greenstein asked Ivey whether he knew about having mucked the winner prior to the hand being shown on ESPN, and Ivey said he did not. Ivey also said he was surprised no one called him before Greenstein did to tease him, but Greenstein explained that was because Ivey’s cell phone doesn’t work in Cabo, Mexico where he’s relaxing in preparation for the final table. (For those interested in Ivey’s “self-imposed exile” in Cabo, a recent “The Life of Ivey” video sheds some light.)

“I think this hand is never going to leave me,” Ivey told Greenstein, revealing that he does, in fact, at least have some awareness of how he’s perceived.

What I found most interesting in Greenstein’s audio blog, though, was the Bear’s report that Ivey’s first response after having seen the hand was to ask “Is there a way they [i.e., ESPN] could doctor the hands?” He told Greenstein he didn’t remember there having been four spades on the board, and wondered if perhaps there could have been some funny business post-production. Greenstein said he guessed it was possible to doctor the footage, but he doubted that it had been done.

As I mentioned last week, Change100 was reporting from the feature table that day. Indeed, in her report of that hand, all of those board cards just as they appeared on ESPN. So yeah, not that we really would have suspected it anyway, but I think it is safe to say there was no post-prod doctoring here.

Ivey’s question reminded me of something I’ve witnessed from time to time while covering televised final tables at the WSOP. We all know how the productions are highly edited, well-crafted programs designed to be watched as a seamless narrative. Thus you can assume there are numerous examples of inserted reaction shots and the like that aren’t perhaps representative of the strict chronology of how events actually occurred — and indeed, I’ve been able to pick up on a few of those now and then when watching the shows of tables I’ve covered. But I’m with Greenstein in the belief that there are never any outright doctoring of hands.

However, it does happen that there will occasionally be some on-the-fly “restaging” during the course of a televised final table. I’ve seen it happen several times that during a brief pause in the action, a dealer might be asked to repeat the dealing of a flop, turn, or river in order for ESPN to get a better looking shot. Perhaps the cards didn’t come out neatly enough the first time around, or the dealer’s hand was obscuring one of the cards from the overhead camera, and so a second take is ordered up. I recall one time watching this happen and the crowd reacting, obviously confused about what was going on. Then everyone had a laugh afterwards as it became clear they were watching a recreation of a hand that had just occurred.

In his audio blog, Greenstein speculates that by the river Ivey had become convinced Smith was holding an ace in his hand, and so when the ace appeared on the river he’d completely overlooked the suits. Ivey said as much to Greenstein, noting how when it came to showdown, he was surprised to see Smith show A-9 offsuit, since Smith had reraised him from out of position. When he saw Smith’s hand, Ivey was, to employ one of Norman Chad’s favorite terms, “bamboozled.” So surprising it was to see his opponent’s hand, Ivey forgot his own.

Greenstein goes on to say how common it is to misread one’s hand, even among the pros, and expressed doubts that anyone who claims never to have misread his or her hand is telling the truth.

As I mentioned last week, Ivey’s misstep was hardly the biggest one that happened on that Day 8. Will certainly be watching tomorrow night. Indeed, there’s one hand in particular — one which back in July I said “sort of emblematize[d] the entire frenzied last day” — I know I want to see. Even if I know already how it turned out, and even remember all of the reactions of the individuals involved.

’Cos, well, those editors… they can do some neat stuff.

Related posts:

1. Not Exactly Ivey League Watched that 2009 World Series of Poker Main Event…
2. S.G.S. Gaming gets Nevada Licensing for its Two Cards High Poker Card Game S.G.S. Gaming announced last week that its Two Cards…
3. Phil Ivey wins 2009 WSOP Event #8 ($2,500 No Limit Deuce-to-Seven) WSOP champ and member of the famous Team Full…

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

We’re getting close, peoples. Just a week more and satellites get crankin’ at the Rio. On Wednesday, May 27th, Event No. 1, the Casino Employees Event, a $500 buy-in no-limit hold’em tourney, gets started. Then on Thursday at noon the real World Series of Poker begins with the “Special 40th Annual No-Limit Hold’em” event (Event No. 2), that $40,000 buy-in event everyone’s been talking about for weeks now.

Then all hell breaks loose.

One new event starts each day from Wed. through Sat. next week. Then the following week, we’ll slip into the routine of having two separate events start each day, meaning there will usually be around five or six different tournaments going on at once, with a couple of final tables each day.

Am noticing that on Wednesday, June 3rd there will be a whopping seven different events going on, including three final tables, all starting at 2 p.m. Vegas time. (I think that has to be a record.) I don’t see any other days on the 2009 schedule with seven events running. It’s the conclusion of that $1,000 buy-in no-limit hold’em Event No. 4, the “stimulus special,” that’s causing the pile-up there, I believe. That’s a four-day event, though really five days as it will have a couple of day ones.

So whaddya think? Too many events? There are 57 bracelets being awarded at this year’s WSOP (a new record). Is the WSOP spreading itself too thin?

Everyone’s wonderin’ about the numbers, specifically whether recent economic woes might affect turnouts. Casino revenues have certainly experienced a significant downturn. The Las Vegas Sun reported in late January that casino revenues had decreased markedly in 2008, and that the trend was expected to continue in 2009. A more recent article over on PokerNews Daily reports how Nevada has seen fifteen straight months of decline in gaming revenues (when months are compared year over year), with the drop-offs over the last six months ranging from 11.61% (March 2008 to March 2009) to 22.33% (October 2007 to October 2008).

There was another interesting article over on Poker News Daily yesterday in which Dan Stewart, the owner of PokerScout (that site that tracks traffic on all of the sites), is interviewed regarding the current health of online poker.

That article appears to have been specifically occasioned by the recent spate of overlays in Full Tilt Poker’s FTOPS XII, including an eye-popping $200,000-plus overlay in the $2.5 million-guaranteed Main Event. According to Stewart, Full Tilt’s decision to run a “mini-FTOPS” alongside the regular FTOPS — mirroring the main events with similar events costing one-tenth the buy-ins — appears to have affected turnouts for the big events. Says Stewart, the decision to run a mini-FTOPS was a “mini-disaster” that “cannibalized the business from the big tournaments.” Of course, Stewart also points out that Full Tilt nevertheless is doing just fine, as is the rest of the online poker world, which is “quite healthy” clicking along at an overall 30% increase in revenue over last year.

So live casino games are hurting. But online poker is as healthy as its ever been. What about the WSOP?

There was some discussion of the economy and its possible effect on the WSOP on last week’s episode of The Poker Beat (the 5/14/09 show). The consensus there seemed to be that the currently ailing economy would not have much effect on turnouts.

John Caldwell is now a regular co-host on TPB. Unfortunately, I won’t be working with Caldwell this summer as he is no longer with PokerNews, although I’m sure I’ll see him out there somewhere along the way. According to Caldwell, the WSOP tends to thrive no matter what the economy is doing, being, as he calls it, “the exception to the rule.” He goes on to point out that “the prestige and the cachet of the event sort of insulate it from… the [failing] economy…. Now, it may be an issue in certain specific events… [but] I don’t think it’s going to be much of a factor [overall].”

Caldwell is probably right, although I do think it will be interesting to watch how the field sizes in the $1,500-$2,500 events compare to those of the $5,000, $10,000, and higher buy-in events. The smaller buy-in events are always much more popular, but I wonder if perhaps we’ll see an even more severe “class difference” happening this year, with just the same 200-300 players turning up for the higher buy-in events, while the hoi polloi stick with the smaller buy-in tourneys. (Sort of a WSOP and a mini-WSOP, in a sense.)

I, for one, am hoping for big fields and a highly successful WSOP, although I know it could turn out otherwise. Selfish, I know, as a thriving poker economy certainly is good news for someone like me.

In any event, it’s gonna be a busy time for your humble gumshoe, no matter how the turnouts turn out.