Is Poker as Intellectual as Chess?

Laura Rauch / AP Photo As the 40th-annual World Series of Poker approaches its climax, a grassroots campaign aims to shake poker's unsavory reputation and elevate this game of skill to the realm of chess.

Nine dog-tired poker players, seven of them American, became millionaires late last night by reaching the final table of the main event of the 40th-annual World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. After surviving eight draining days and nights of high-octane poker over a fortnight, most lasting at least 12 hours, they now break (for ESPN’s sake) until November, when one will go on to win this year’s $8.5 million first prize.

Among them is the telegenic African-American professional Phil Ivey, nicknamed "the Tiger Woods of poker," and, at 33, already a millionaire many times over. The proud possessor of seven World Series bracelets—the winner’s golden status symbol that top pros say they covet even more than the money—he would tie his own record of three World Series wins in one year if he goes on to victory in November.

For all its recent popularity, poker retains an outdated, disreputable, Wild West image as a game fraught with chance best confined to casinos.

Ivey may be living proof that poker is a game of skill—as the old saying goes, it takes a moment to learn, and a lifetime to master. But somehow, for all its recent popularity on TV and online, poker retains an outdated, disreputable, Wild West image as a game fraught with chance best confined to casinos. Because of this, poker is routinely lumped in with slots, roulette, and other madcap forms of gambling in antigaming legislation throughout the world—not least in the U.S., where it has been in the bloodstream nearly two centuries.

But now, all that may at last be changing, as a push to change poker's image to that of a respectable skill game gets under way, and as the “November Nine” settle down to four months of studying each other’s styles on TV, taking last-table lessons from previous champs, and mulling lucrative sponsorship deals.

Apart from Ivey and Las Vegan Jeff Shulman, the 34-year-old editor of poker’s house magazine, Card Player, the rest of the November Nine are relative unknowns, one from France, one from England. The chip leader, Darvin Moon of Maryland, has never before reached the money (or the top 10 percent) in any World Series event. This year’s November Nine have beaten 6,485 other starters, each of whom found some way to slap down the $10,000 entry fee, most by winning it online with as little as $20 to start.

The WSOP’s 2009 "main event" numbers are slightly down from last year’s 6,844 starters, but could (and should) have been higher; some 500 wannabes had to be turned away on the last of the event’s four Day Ones—so arranged because the Rio’s card rooms can seat only so many players at once. The consensus among the 60,275 who participated in at least one of this year’s 57 events (your reporter included) blamed the slapdash late arrivals more than the organizers.

"We hate to 'cap' this of all events," said WSOP Commissioner Jeffrey Pollack, who conceded that it might have been a mistake to schedule the start of the event over the July 4 weekend. Although 115 countries were represented at this year’s 50-day World Series, the U.S. turnout was significantly down on the holiday itself.

Still, these 2009 figures are more than decent at this time of global economic downturn, when deluded government thinking has already made times tough for the online version of the game, via which countless amateurs seek to qualify for the pricey WSOP main event. Along with slick TV coverage, the Internet has sparked a pandemic of poker fever throughout the world in less than a decade.

The biggest year of the 21st-century poker boom was 2006, when a Hollywood TV producer aptly named Jamie Gold emerged from all of 8,773 starters to take a first prize of $12 million. Compare that to the $1 million won the same weekend by golf’s Tiger Woods at the British Open, or Roger Federer at Wimbledon. The World Series of Poker is the richest sporting event on earth, by quite a stretch—the one significant difference being that the prize money is paid by the competitors.