Poker Ping!
Freepmail me if you want on the Poker Ping list.
Posted on 08/02/2006 8:14:08 AM PDT by frogjerk
Steve Hummer Las Vegas August 2, 2006
IT IS going on 10.30pm in the city without clocks, and after nearly 12 hours of poker, Paul Azinger is a deep-down, someone's-just-starched-my-hamstrings tired. His eyes are glassier than a mounted marlin's.
"It's like playing 36 holes," said the 46-year-old winner of 12 PGA Tour events, including the 1993 US PGA Championship. "My lower back is sore. My legs ache. I've got a little fatigue now."
If the trials that come with sitting in one place for long periods of time qualified as a sporting challenge, this would be an Olympic event. That is the great grey area of big-time poker.
The main event of the World Series of Poker, which began here at the Rio casino this weekend, is many things.
It is a scene of unparalleled strangeness. A newcomer enters the huge hall where 206 tables of 10 players each are in high-risk heat and immediately is met by a clatter that is hard to place. It is like a great field of crickets on steroids, playing castanets. It is the sound of a couple thousand poker players shuffling their chips, the constant, mindless energy of nervous hands.
To this event, like the collection at the scene of a house fire, a distinct blend of humanity is drawn. Next to a truly super model named Joanna Krupa is a Florida car dealer named Jim Hill, playing only the third round of no-limit Texas hold 'em poker of his life here in the biggest game ever. "I tell everybody I've got the best seat in the house," he jokes. "A nearby player said he'd buy it for $10,000. But I wouldn't sell."
This poker World Series is a phenomenon, the numbers it is doing now taunting all reason. As of Monday, the final day of the first round of the main event, the estimates were reaching toward 8600 players, which would push the first place pay-off to about $11.8 million. The top 12 finishers stand to win more than $1 million. That would far outdistance last year's total of 5600 players, with the winner earning $7.5 million.
It undoubtedly is one of the great money grabs ever. But is it a sport? "The reason it's a sport is, if for no other reason, it's on ESPN," Azinger said.
Yes, back to our pro golfer, eliminated late in his first round, just in time to get a little rest before the Buick Open. He should know. But even Azinger sounds confused.
"It's really a game. I don't think it's a sport. But it belongs in the sports page. Games are in the sports page. I take it back; it's not a sport."
"The debate over whether poker is a sport is one that people absolutely like to have," said Jamie Horowitz, ESPN's senior producer for this World Series. "Well, there's no doubt it is a competition. And there's no doubt there is a high degree of skill involved."
Yet here, given the huge number of players of widely varying skill levels playing in such a compressed period of time, the element of luck is even more apparent. Poker is still a card game, and the cards sometimes have minds of their own.
"On a short period of time, like the World Series, I think it's about 75 per cent luck, maybe more," said the winner of 10 World Series of Poker bracelets, 72-year-old Texan Doyle Brunson. "The longer you play, the more skill surfaces." Brunson's luck ran out in the first round of the main event.
And the physical toll of poker doesn't exactly suggest bone-rending action. "We do the neck and the shoulders and the hands," said Dawn Acuria, one of a group of massage therapists who knead players at the table.
Whatever poker is, it is big. So big that it can go wherever it wants.
Poker Ping!
Freepmail me if you want on the Poker Ping list.
I love poker, but a sport? I don't think so.
I compare poker to bowling.
In both:
1-Betting is involved. Bowling leagues have pots that either buy trophys or pay cash, or both.
2-Luck is involved. All bowlers know that.
3-You have to be in shape. Sitting at a poker table is tireing.
4- and to be funny, both require balls. In poker, however, you don't have to take off your shoes (hmmmm, thinking about strip poker, however...)
Is soup and a sandwich... a meal?
Poker requires exactly ZERO physical input. If you were a brain floating in salt water, and you somehow were given the ability to communicate through a computer, you could still play poker... or bridge, or war.
It's rediculous to compare poker to any sport.
SD
Like golf, baseball, or the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee..
You got one right, and missed your sarc tag... I guess.
Poker is good.
But it is not a sport. And neither is golf or 8-ball. And I have my doubts about croquet. And badminton(sp?) is just too too gay.
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