Just had a chat with Mark Rogers. We’re in the process of hammering out ouor bracket of sixty-four WSOP legends in order to facilitate the voting process.

I like talking about this stuff with a guy like mark who, like me, has spent a little too much time pondering the results of the World Series. It wasn’t a surprise to me when i got the e-mail from him this morning apologising for not getting back to me last night thanks to too many beers at the Cubs game; it takes a baseball fan mentality to submerge ones’ self into poker’s past this way. When you get two guys like that together/ man, make sure your daughters are wearing their chastity belts boys, because a big party’s a brewin’.

Just to give you an idea of things to come, have a look at a few of the disputes we were going over just now:

- There is only room for four names in the number one seed slots. That means someone from the group of Phil Hellmuth, Doyle Brunson, Johnny Chan, Stu Ungar and Johnny Moss has to get the boot. Is it Ungar, who only had five braclelets but three main event wins? or Moss, who won 8 braclelets, three world championships and the heads-up match against Nick Dandalos that started it all? Can you possibly expunge any of the other three?

- Our sixteen seeds are Mel Judah, Barbara Enright, John Bonetti and Perry Green. Green was the final selection over Steve Zolotow. How’d we make that choice? Understanding that whomever gets chosen here will likely get crushed by the one seed regardless, we decided that there was more educatign to be done about Green, the runner up to Ungar in 1981 who has crusaded for the legalization of gambling in Alaska for the last fifteen years, then Zolotow, who I think most serious players would recognize for his Super System contributions and numerous cashes.

- Where does Jamie Gold rank in terms of his place in WSOP lore? how about Amarillo Slim? Robert Varkyoni? Chris Moneymaker? Remember, this isn’t just about skill or results. To give you an idea of where showmanship and newsworthyness comes into play, a year ago I wouldn’t have even considered Eskimo Clark for a spot. Now, he’s in without much debate.

- Amongst those who aren’t in the bracket: Grinder, Gus, Antonius, JC, Lindgren. They’re all stars of the game who haven’t shone at WSOP. An Tran, Ken Flaton, Artie Cobb…they all have thirty cashes and then some, but were so unspectacular in the way the carried themselves it didn’t crack the public consciousness.

Anyways, the whole point of this excersize is to educate y’all a little bit about the players who have made the game great and to get some discussion going on just what their respective places in the WSOP heirarchy are. if you have any ideas or suggestions, give me a shout. I’m always happy to listen.

Gary Wise
gary@wisehandpoker.com

Before I begin my blog, let me say that I’ve been involved in poker for a number of years, and I fully realize that it’s a male-dominated game. Between the media, the players, and the casino management, I am severely outnumbered as one of the few women in the business. Along with those facts, I understand that there are some outdated stereotypes about women that still float around, and I can sometimes laugh off some of the chauvinism that I witness.

But when the chauvinistic attitudes are perpetrated by none other than Harrah’s itself, it’s a more than a little unsettling.

First, there were the Milwaukee’s Best Light ladies (girls might be a more appropriate term, but I refuse to stoop to the level of Harrah’s with that reference) walked around the Amazon Room and its adjacent hallways for seven and a half weeks in teeny tiny shorts and shirts wrapped up around their boobs. I witnessed the fact that it actually worked on many of the men to whom they talked and promoted the beer. Marketing to men is a funny thing, and while they seemed to be successful, the women doing the promoting were touched, spanked, squeezed, and ogled more times than not. The women rarely looked happy, had to have been freezing in their little outfits, and constantly retreated to the ladies bathroom to bitch about their jobs.

Second, the Ladies Championship tournament was a fiasco. I wrote about why I now think it should be abolished from the WSOP lineup in an article at PokerPages, but besides having complaints about how the women themselves handled the event, Harrah’s treatment of the women was over the top. Not only did they talk down to the women in the tournament - tournament staff told them they were all “winners” when they reached the money, then one of the floor staff proceeded to offer himself up as part of the prize by saying that he cooked and did laundry - but the official prizes were insulting. While the bracelet and money should have been enough, as it is for every other event, Harrah’s threw in a WNBA ticket package and a complete makeover by the creator of “The Swan” television show. How utterly insulting and demeaning.

Third, Harrah’s promoted the Lifestyle Gaming Expo with the theme of “Girls, Games and Gear.” Does it not sound like you can get girls at the expo? And to use the outdated word “girls” in promotional literature and e-mails is downright offensive. Sure, anyone can buy a booth at the expo and promote whatever they’d like, but there were several strip clubs with outrageous booths that included strippers on poles and strippers in a dunking booth. And the kicker to it all was that anyone going to or from the Amazon Room from the parking lot or the casino was forced to walk through the expo room, so it couldn’t be avoided no matter how offended someone might be by it.

I had been under the impression that the poker industry had been trying harder to include women in the game and make them feel more welcome than in past decades. In this day and age, I could only hope that is the case. But Harrah’s took poker back more than twenty years and helped to create an atmosphere of separation and even exclusion when it came to women. Sadly, one of the greatest impressions that I took away from this year’s WSOP is that women are not viewed as equals by many in the poker world, and there need to be some major changes to turn that around.

We’ve got a long way to go, baby.

There’s a lot going on with the website that’s worth reporting on, and this seems like the place to do it. First off, we have a bunch of new bloggers in the wake of the World Series that are worth getting excited about.

if you take a look at that long column on the right sight of this page listing the names of our bloggers, take a look at the end. There, you’re goign to find four new names:

Justin Shronk - Shronk is more than just the guy who produced all of the video content for the WSOP this year; he’s the flucking funny dude who sat accross from me in the media room all WSOP. He actually may have been the final staw holding together my sanity, but I have a lot of trouble thinking about the good stuff because he STIFFED ME FOR $100 ON A PROP BET. Yeah, that’s right Shronk, don’t be thinking I’ve forgotten your inability to lose weight while sitting next to the Poker Kitchen for a month and a half.

Jameson Singer - Networking, networking, networking. Jameson was brought to me by none other than garry Gates admidst WSOP coverage. Garry, of course, was working with pokernews.com and met Jameson, who was experiencing an insatiable need to write about poker. He’s already producing some great stuff in both his blog and our feature articles area, and I expect bigger and better from a guy who definitely knows his way around a keyboard.

Jimmy Fricke - until now, with the exception of Mark newhouse, our regular bloggers have been writers first and players second. Fricke, better known to some as ‘gobboboy’, changes all of that. Gobbo isn’t old enough to play live tournamentsi n the United States yet, but his live results off-continent, namely a high finish at the PCA followed by a second place finish at the Aussie Millions, say the rest of the world should be living it up until he turns twenty-one. In the meantime, he’s going to be sharing some of his experiences here.

Alan Sass - Alan is one of hte bright young stars of the game. Formerly just another online star, he transcended that label with a second place finish at the 2006 WSOP, then stayed on the map with repeated money finishes in the biggest tournaments in the world. brining on Alan and Jimmy all at once signals an expansion for wisehandpoker. There aren;t many young players in the game today who know what they’re doing the way Alan and Jimmy do, but you can expect to see a few more of those names up here with theirs soon.

On top of the blogs, we’re working on a couple of other projects you’ll be debuting in the next few days;

Pages From Poker Past - This is going to be showcased in the featured article section. My feeling is that the turnover there hasn’t been quite fast enough, so this is my way of fixing that little problem. Each day, in my research, I come accross old gems that are getting lost in the chaos of the Internet, so I’m going to start reclaiming them for our use and for poker’s preservation, putting them on the front page, then organizing them in an archive. If you have any that you’d like to see recognized, be sure to send them my way.

Unnamed Mark Rogers bracketology - OK, we’re going to need a couple of more days to get this one up and running, but it’s got me enthusiastic enough that I can’t keep the lid on. With the main event set to debut on ESPN in around three weeks, we’re setting up a bracket to determine who you think is the greatest WSOP star of all-time. Each match-up will provide biographic materials on the competitors along with some comments from Mark and I. Mark, in case you aren’t aware, is the author of ‘52 Greatest Moments of the World Series of Poker’, a beautiful hardcover book on the history of the greatest event in the game.

OK, that’s it for now. I still have to pick out the inaugural Page From Poker’s Past, write two hands of the day and finish the ESPN article and it’s 2:22 AM. It’s a good thing I don’t own an alarm clock.

Gary Wise
gary@wisehandpoker.com

So, i misrepresented the truth yesterday. I wrote that Ali Eslami was calling for that interview and used it as an excuse to sign off. Instead, it was a text message postponing the interview and the post had been made. I could have gone back into the blog and edited with a more appropriate ending, but sleeping sounded awfully good. What can I say, at five in the morning, sometimes you forget to dot the I’s, you know?

We finally got to talk today. Between he and Phil Laak, I have more than enough for the ESPN article, but I still want to speak to the University of Alberta’s Darse Billings before I put it all together. Ali’s interview gave me a lot to think about in terms of where bots are going and the larger implications this research could have.

Ali’s a big techie, which is why get got invited in the first place, but the cool factor of all this didn’t seem to make as big a deal to him as the bigger picture aspect of this work. Right now, he told me, the machines are figuring out how to survive in limit hold’em, thanks to the use of equilibrium-based bots, which basically ignore the opponent and determine the best course of action minus that factor. The alternative, a learning bot, needs many more hands than a human would to understand opposing betting patterns.

Ali’s theory is that the switch to a learning bot would not only enable the kind of creativity needed to be successful at poker at higher levels, but could also be used in non-poker programming. “Instead of figuring out how to oppose a pattern, we can teach the technology to correspond with it.” In other words, we could teach the technology to learn about our particular needs. We’re talking about a comprehensive jump in computer tech here.

It was nice to hear Ali get so impassioned about the project. He and Phil both freely admit they’re not the two most technically efficient players in the world, but to quote both of them “Once the computer figures us out, then we’ll bring in the real geniuses.” Look for Phil Ivey, Patrik Antonius, Brian Townsend and Tom Duan to get the call that day.

What else… I spoke with Newhouse late last night. He’s doing well at and away from the table. Had a confidence to him that had been missing for a little while. be afraid.

Gary Wise
gary@wiehandpoker.com

Who the fuck is Justin Shronk?

Good question. Let’s start with my poker stats first. I have less than $10,000 in career tournament earnings, I have less than $1,000 in online money right now, and until recently, I had never played in a tournament or cash game with a buy-in higher than $500. I am not good looking and have never been on TV (unless you count in the background of ESPN’s WSOP coverage). The most famous people I know, I only know because they are forced to work with me from time to time. So why on earth would anyone care what I have to say?

Again, good question. Well, some would say I have a relatively interesting job in which I get a unique look into the poker world. I am currently the Multimedia Manager for PokerNews.com. What does a Multimedia Manager do? Good question number three. Well, as the title would suggest, I am in charge of decision making for all things multimedia for the website PokerNews.com. Recently at the WSOP, this meant that I managed our video team which consisted of two guys named Steve and Patrick who would shoot and edit video interviews with players conducted by our hostess Tiffany Michelle. (Videos can be found here) I also feel I can usually adequately construct sentences, and every now and then, something that I tactilely punch out is even worth reading.

Right now I don’t really have any great stories or funny anecdotes as my few weeks since the marathon WSOP has mostly consisted of eating Ramen and watching downloaded episodes of old seasons of Survivor - but rest assured, there will be many to come. (Actually, here’s something a little funny. I’m pretty sure I just heard the best reality TV quote of all time. After losing to a gay hairdresser in an American Gladiators style joust event, a backwoods hick steel worker had this to say - “It feels terrible to have mah but whooped by a homersexual. But some of them gays is strong. They be all going to the gym and all.” To which I found myself thinking, “I can’t say I disagree with any of that, sir.”)

So there we go, the first of what will hopefully be a lot of far more interesting and amusing anecdotes, musings, and rants from the mind of a cynical Multimedia Manager for a poker website. Any other questions?

4:26 AM. here we are again.

I’m doing some work while Ali Eslami finishes his dinner in Maui. No typos there. Ali is in Maui vacationing after a long run of World Series of Poker followed by a week in Alberta, where he’s been invited to be Phil Laak’s partner in crime in playing both sides of a heads-up limit match against a computer called Polaris.

Polaris is a big deal. There are all kinds of chess, scrabble and hearts programs that compete sufficiently with the human animal, but poker is the final frontier. The logic goes that the human element of the game couldn’t be overcome, and that may be true in a live no-limit game, but limit is in large part about pattern recognition and so on, and you have to think a computer’s going to be as good at those elements as any dude or dame.

According to Laak, Polaris is already good enough to beat a mediocre player, which to me raises alarm bells. Once the computer is good enough, how far behind can bots be? If they’re good enough to defeat your standard human player, doesn’t that create massive issues for the online game? Time will tell on that one. So will the professors behind the programming; I’ll be talking to them tomorrow. I’d get more into the story here, but I have to save something for espn.

I will say that it’s nice to have something to write about Ali. I’ve known him for almost a decade now, with both of us going back to the Magic: the Gathering world. Ali and I didn’t know one another that well back then, but he was always suggesting I write something about him. His accomplishments were never quite remarkable wnough to write about in m:tg, but I’ve been keeping my eye on him in poker, because he’s been killing cash games in California for years and has gotten progressively better at tournaments. if you take a look at the most consistent finishers in the assorted HORSE events at the 2007 WSOP, you’ll find he had strong showings in every event. That takes one hell of a versatile and dedicated poker player. Good things coming to those who wait.

I htink Ali and Phil did the poker ocmmunity a service in this study, providing their expertise to something respectable. The rusults showed improvement in the computer’s results, but also pointed a hand towards the skill of the game and the superiority of human players.

Ali’s call just came in. Got to go.

Gary

So, while I was ‘away’, a little drama played out on this here site. You all know Mark Newhouse lost a bet to me that forced him to do some blogging on this site, but none of us –not you, not me, maybe not even he — knew the drastic turn of events that would go down while he did so.

Mark is at his roots a good kid who wants to assume the world is full of good kids. Thanks to his enormous talent, he’s learned to treat money like so much fodder, and that’s caused the rest of the world to take advantage of him in some way. I’ve done a lot of reflecting on this aspect of his person and come to realize that while it wasn’t my conscious intention to to the same, it’s hard to deny that what I got was a rediculously good deal and qualifies as taking advantage also. I think I was fooling myself into thinking that the $500/day penalty for not writing would actually be incentive enough to write. Instead, after helping me get in better physical condition, after making my website’s traffic explode, he still owes me $6,500. I’m not going to let him out of it either.

It’s easy for me to say Mark has some growing up to do and there’s a lesson to be taught here. I think he’d be the first to admit the first part, and the second part is inherent in the first. Truth is though, the reason I’m not going to let him off the hook is simple; I wouldn’t have expected him to do so for me. I wouldn’t have even asked, just like he didn’t, because a bet is a bet and once it’s made, it’s made. If I lose my present weight-loss bet to Gavin Smith, it’ll cost me $5,000, enough that I won’t be playing poker for a while if i lose (got to love the writer’s bankroll). I’ll still pay it though, because I know he’ll pay if I win. Frankly (and this isn’t justification), the money isn’t going to make a difference to Mark. He’s always going to be either broke or rich, because in half the ways he’s that degenerate (for now), and in the other half he’s that good.

Mark and I went out the night before he left Vegas and had a good heart to heart. We discussed the lessons he wants/needs to learn, the ‘thank you gift’ (which, sorry to say, will stay between he and I), the new backing arrangement that he’s got going now that seems to be working out very well for both parties, changes he wants to make in his life and more trivial things not worth mentioning here. It was the happiest and healthiest I’d seen him in a while. Amazing what getting away from the table for a little while can do to cleanse a man’s soul.

Right now, Mark’s got debts he needs to be responsible to and he’s staying at the table as a result. While you have to really look for it, I think that decision shows some maturity on his part. His post about Dustin “Neverwin” Wolfe painted him as morally high-handed, not necessarily a bad thing. his decision to keep on playing for the moment, in some strange way, shows he holds himself to the same standards his blogging held Dustin to. Still, as his friend, I want to see him get away from the table for a while.

Mark told me during that dinner that he’d found what blogging he’d actually done to be theraputic, hardly a revelation considering how much he poured onto the page in that one post. I’m glad he found some value in that and hope he sees reason to revisit it, because I was like him once. I was an opinionated kid surviving without a job thanks to playing cards who needed an outlet. It’s what got me writing in the first place. Frankly, I don’t know that’d I’d be happy or healthy today without having discovered the purging sensation writing can provide.

Mark, I hope you’ll keep writing for wisehandpoker, but more, I hope you’ll keep writing. I hope keeping a record will help you learn from your mistakes in life the same way you learn from your mistakes in poker. One thing we all learn eventually is we need to strike a balance to survive. Too much of one thing, even when you’re as good at that thing as Newhouse is at poker, just isn’t healthy for the psyche, and writing is a way to get yourself away from things for a bit. Of course, while you have those lessons to learn, I think you’ve already figured out that there’s such a thing as poker overdose. See that? You’re growing up already.

Keep winning buddy. Then walk away for a bit.

Gary Wise
gary@wisehandpoker.com

Yes, I told you I’d go into detail of my worst experience during the WSOP and here it is. I actually wrote most of this while I was sitting around doing nothing during the early hours of the S.H.O.E. event because the hands are virtually meaningless.

Ah the S.H.O.E. event, I can’t think of a better way to spend my Sunday. Not only are the first 4 hours more uneventful than watching a soccer match, but it’s held in the tent at the Rio. If you’ve ever wondered what cookie dough feels like when it’s placed into an oven set at 400 degrees, the poker tent is where you want to be.

I’ve seen field goals hook right because of the wind, baseball games get suspended because of rain, and even basketball games get postponed because of snow, but I’ve never seen the natural elements affect a poker game until now. Nevertheless, back to my nightmare covering the S.H.O.E. event.

As I look at the faces of the players in the event, I begin to wonder if they’re more bored than I am. The first hour provides intense action as players bet $15 and then $30 and rake in stacks of $5 tournament chips.

Oh wow! Chip Jett is involved in an Omaha 8 or better hand. I’ll have to continue this following the hand.

0:05 later…

Sorry about that. Chip Jett and an opponent were betting back and forth until finally Jett showed the nut-low while his opponent took the high. Chop it up, fellas. Several minutes of my life have been wasted as another observer of this event goes unsatisfied. Split pots are something that should be outlawed for the sheer fact that it goes against everything we’ve experienced in life. It’s like watching a porno scene that ends after the fully clothed girl says, “Maybe you should punish me, officer”.

1:30 later…

Well, it has been an hour and a half and I’ve yet to record a hand. I did, however, watch Daniel Negreanu get a massage. That was exciting. The tournament has now switched to it’s fourth game of the evening, Stud Hi/Lo with a $5 ante, a $10 bring-in, and $30-$60 blinds. Sweet. Now that’s something that will get your adrenaline pumping. Why do something like skydiving when I can watch a pot be split up between 3 people?

Now, I know what you avid poker fans are saying by this point. It’s something along the lines of, “These are great games to play. Just because it’s not your precious No-Limit Hold ‘em doesn’t mean it’s not good”. Let me just clarify now that I understand this. The thing that truly makes me want to stick my head into a microwave, however, is the low limits. $5 red chips are meant for the cash games, not for my tournament covering pleasure.

To further support this let me inform you that approximately 1:40 into this event they’ve just broke the first table. If you told me that was exciting I’m pretty positive I’d then be given the right to throw something at you…like a $5 tournament chip.

There it is. My adventures(or lack there of) while covering the S.H.O.E. event. For the record I did survive it to live another day.

It’s a legitimate question. The biggest event of the year comes around, and suddenly this here site is quieter than a mouse farting in the wind. I can’t say I know exactly what it means, but it’s 5:15 AM and I’m writing by virtue of sheer adrenaline, and when I wrote it felt like it made sense. To explain it more clearly though, I let the site go.

Why’d I do that? part of me wants to say its because i couldn’t maintain the quality, but that’s a lie. part of me wants to make some lame excuse like ‘there wasn’t much to write about’, but that’s obviously bullshit. No, the real reason, and I’m not making an excuse here, is sheer exhaustion. Working sixteen hour days seven days a week, even somewhere as fun as the World Series of Poker, is going to run you down. I’m the living proof.

WSOP was an amazing time. I enjoyed working with Bluff Media and all of its members. I loved the opportunity to do some work in front of the worldseriesofpoker.com cameras, work on my interviewing skills and spend more than enough time with all of the pros. obviously, the additional feather of writing for espn.com/poker was a huge opportunity and a real privilege. Thing is, with all that going on (the espn stuff had to be done after hours), something had to give. It was the hand of the day.

Thing is folks, with all of the names you see on this site, it doesn’t actually make much in terms of profit right now. The only reason to tell you that is to explain that we can’t really afford to hire writers to maintain things while I’m off working…more or less defeats the point of working. The money we made through WSOP though, is going back into the site. You’re going to see continued improvements and additions as the next few months come and go.

there’s a lot of exciting stuff going on regarding wisehandpoker.com and the future, but I don’t want to spoil surprises and get hopes up unnecessarily. I will say this; today, I confirmed that Alan Sass, self-loathing Ship It Holla Balla, online poker legend and live tournament upstart, will begin blogging here this week. he’s only the tip of a very tall iceberg.

Things are going to keep improving. The bloggers will mount, we’re going to start posting more feature content and we have a couple of additional site features in the works that are going to blow the poker world’s socks off. On top of that, I’m starting a radio show ten days from now. There’ll be more information on that soon enough though.

thanks for continuing to check in here. Thanks for your readership, your click throughs and your sign ups, but most of all, thanks for your love of the game. Poker’s obviously seen some hard moments in the last year, but there are a lot of very capable people working on fixing the leaks in our big ole’ dam. All they need is your continued support. If you’re still reading after my ‘time off’, I know they’ll have it.

It’s good to be back. All the best,

Gary Wise
gary@wisehandpoker.com

I’m back!

Arriving home to L.A. less than a week ago, I took some time to recover from the craziness that was the 2007 World Series of Poker. Working long hours doing tournament coverage, being away from home for nearly eight weeks, and trying to enjoy some of the Vegas nightlife, I was cooked when it was all over. But a few days of rest and relaxation at home has done wonders, and I finally feel like I’m back to my normal daily routine again.

As for the WSOP itself, there were positives and negatives.

I was grateful to be able to see the WSOP from a perspective that allowed me quite a bit of access that the general public doesn’t have. At the same time, I worked myself pretty hard and didn’t get to see as many final tables or behind-the-scenes action as I would have liked.

To see how hard Harrah’s worked to try to overcome problems that it encountered during the series gave me some confidence that each year’s WSOP will get better. But I also saw how the corporate entities played such a major role that some of the most obvious issues were ignored during the planning stages.

I saw how hard some of the journalists worked to get fantastic stories for the blogs and news sites, and I witnessed the struggles and triumphs of the players as they grinded it out day after day in those tournaments. I came away with a newfound respect for a number of writers and reporters. I also saw how some of the politics of the Harrahs/Bluff/PokerNews contract severely limited the reporting that others were able to do.

I was able to see parts of almost every single event that took place during the course of the series, but I was disappointed that I missed so many Day 2’s and final tables due to my limited media access. I gained a greater understanding of the importance of tournament reporting to the readers, though I wish I had been able to give a different viewpoint. This is something I will do next year as a freelance writer; I’m going to be there on my own terms and do the kind of reporting at which I excel.

All in all, I was glad for the experience - invaluable lessons learned that I can and will incorporate into my work and my life in general.

In the coming weeks, I will take some time to reflect on some of the issues and stories from the WSOP. For now, I’m just getting back into the swing of things… and I’m glad to be back.