NEWS RELEASE
LAS VEGAS – The Golden Nugget Hotel & Casino announces two new major poker projects signed at the legendary resort.
The property has partnered with Game Show Network to film the fifth season of High Stakes Poker in The Grand poker room Dec. 19-21. Also, the Golden Nugget signed a deal with the World Poker Tour to become the new Las Vegas home of their successful and popular WPT Boot Camp, starting with a two-day Tournament Camp Jan. 24-25, 2009.
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AMATEUR SHINES BRIGHT IN WSOP SPOTLIGHT
For nearly four months, Dennis Phillips was in the brightest poker spotlight imaginable as chip leader heading into final-table play of the super-hyped 2008 World Series main event.
The glare didn’t phase him.
The 53-year-old trucking company account manager in St. Louis bore his notoriety like a true champion. He led the way in generous charitable efforts among the nine finalists. He remained gracious despite agreeing to more than 200 interviews. And, although he finished third, no one partied bigger when the action ended last week.
My column on Phillips just prior to the final table captured the kind of person he is, but our conversation covered much additional detail about the man who was the highest-finishing American in the tournament.
I just posted the entire interview transcript so you’ll have an even better view of the man who became a terrific ambassador for the game.
The numbers are in and, certainly compared to last year’s World Series final-table show, it appears the delayed 2008 showdown was a hit on TV.
Nearly 2.4 million viewers were tuned in to ESPN’s unprecedented same-day coverage Tuesday night to see Peter Eastgate of Denmark take the title.
The telecast earned a 1.9 rating, up 46% from 1.3 for the final showdown in 2007, and represents 1,905,000 homes and 2,364,000 viewers in the average minute. Those are increases of 53% in homes (from 1,249,000) and 52% among viewers (from 1,552,000), ESPN reported.
For the 2008 season’s schedule of 32 shows, averages were 0.9 rating, 919,000 homes and 1,126,000 people, up 13% among homes (from 815,000) and 15% among viewers (from 981,000).
You can expect some tweaking next year — 3-hour show instead of 2, summaries of action not shown but crucial to understanding table dynamics, etc. — but the numbers certainly indicate a delayed final-table telecast is in the cards again in 2009.
Here’s what WSOP Comish Jeffrey Pollack had to say…
FROM THE SUBLIME TO THE RIDICULOUS
On the very day poker fans watched the most-anticipated World Series final table ever…
On the very day poker gurus at ESPN and Harrah’s and the WSOP hoped to attract new players to the game and spread some positive poker goodwill across the planet…
The Bush administration published rules for the UIGEA, which threatens a huge chunk of the game’s lifeblood and popularity. Not to mention people’s personal freedoms.
In a crazy one-day twist of events, the poker world on Tuesday went from crowning its new world champion to seeing the GOP-led effort to thwart and punish online poker take a significant foothold.
And, staying in character, the GOP — which pushed the ill-conceived UIGEA into law at the dead of midnight two years ago, attached to a must-pass port-security bill — got the law’s rules and procedures published just in the nick of time so they’ll take effect Jan. 19, one day before President Bush exits the White House. With everything else going on, how ridiculous is that?!
The fight may not be over yet, but online poker just took a nine count in the match and needs to come out battling in the next round.
Here’s an excellent recap of what happened Tuesday and what it means, written by Haley Hintze on pokernews.com.
And this solid report by Bob Pajich on cardplayer.com explains how key legislation favoring online poker will be reintroduced when the new 111th Congress takes over.
ESPN PULLS OFF FAST TURNAROUND WITH FEW IMPERFECTIONS
The mission for ESPN was to put together in just hours a WSOP final-table telecast that would satisfy and even excite tons of hoped-for new and casual TV-poker viewers drawn in by four months of hype.
Tuesday night, in a near-seamless two-hour show full of drama and the customary one-liners by announcers Normal Chad and Lon McEachern, the production team pulled it off! Watching as a casual fan, and not knowing the outcome in advance, I was impressed at how well the hastily-put-together telecast exceeded expectations.
The telecast featured just two hands of the heads-up battle between Peter Eastgate of Denmark and Ivan Demidov of Russia, which actually was played after midnight Monday in Las Vegas. The show’s closing seemed a bit abrupt after Eastgate captured the title, the bracelet and more than $9 million, but leading up to the conclusion ESPN had presented 22 very exciting hands.
What viewers like me didn’t know was that the heads-up battle actually lasted about 4 hours (104 hands) and Sunday’s play leading up to heads-up lasted about 14 hours. This was the longest final table in history, outdistancing the 14-hour 2005 battle won by Joe Hachem. (I wonder if that truck horn being honked over and over by Dennis Phillips’ fans in the arena gave out before he did, in third place.) Still, the hands chosen for the show were exciting to watch.
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Just call me LuckyDog, the casual poker TV viewer, this time around.
I won’t be in Las Vegas covering the most-anticipated and hyped WSOP main event final table, which starts shortly after 10 a.m. today out there.
I won’t be glued to my computer all day today, following hand-for-hand action on any of several Web sites, as the November Nine are whittled down to the November Two. Ditto late Monday night when the heads-up battle is waged to determine the 2008 champ.
I will, however, morph (just for a couple of days) into a non-hard-core poker viewer — exactly the type of person the WSOP and ESPN are hoping to entice into watching this ballyhooed final table prime-time telecast Tuesday evening just 18 hours or so hours after the action ends. Like most viewers tuning in, I won’t know who won — a big goal of the crunched-timing plan.
I’ll listen to Lon and Norman deliver hastily prepared banter, watch nine heretofore largely unknown players stress over millions of dollars at stake, root for my favorite (I have two, actually, but I’m not saying who), and groan or marvel at the players’ performances — which should be at their peak since they’ve had four months to prepare!
Then — because I like to share! — I’ll dash off a review of the telecast right here at luckydogpoker.com, mainly assessing whether the Grand Pause of poker’s biggest tournament worked or not for the casual viewer (that’s me, remember), based only on what I see on the telly.
Check it out late Tuesday or sometime Wednesday, won’t you? And, as always, your comments are welcome!
If delaying the final table for 117 days yields a record TV poker-show audience, the controversial experiment will be deemed a success. If it doesn’t, or if the production is sketchy, then it probably means the WSOP/ESPN tweakers will go back to the drawing board for 2009.
Meanwhile, remember the $24,527,416 still up for grabs (what was left after the final nine were paid ninth-place money of $900,670 in July)? Well, Harrah’s invested it in a Treasury-only money market account to accumulate interest and boost pay-outs to the top eight players.
Enter the stock market crisis!
Everyone who’s watching their 401K portfolio crash and burn in recent months probably will be jealous to learn that the conservative investment of a mere $24.5 mil yielded a gain of — ta-dah — $98,179 in interest. Maybe that’s what we all should have done with our millions (cough, cough).
Anyway, the new final table pay-outs look like this:
1st place — $9,152,416 (up $32,899)
2nd — $5,809,595 (up $19,571)
3rd — $4,517,773 (up $14,421)
4th — $3,774,974 (up $11,459)
5th — $3,096,768 (up $8,756)
6th — $2,418,562 (up $6,052)
7th — $1,772,650 (up $3,476)
8th — $1,288,217 (up $1,545)
9th — $900,670 (no change)
Care to bet whether any of these guys will run out and buy a ton of stock with their loot?
President-elect Barack Obama’s poker-playing background — especially games he enjoyed when he served in the Illinois Legislature — is well-documented.
Whether that history bodes well for U.S. poker players hoping to see the game legalized and regulated online in this country remains to be seen. After all, Mr. Obama has a few other tasks that will command his quick and intense attention after Jan. 20.
Nevertheless, this piece by poker author Anthony Holden entertainingly raises the prospects of friendly poker games returning to the White House after decades of being absent.
ONE OF THESE 9 PLAYERS IS ABOUT TO WIN $9 MILLION!
From left: Ylon Schwartz, Kelly Kim, Dennis Phillips, Peter Eastgate, Darus Suharto, Scott Montgomery, Craig Marquis, Ivan Demidov, and David Rheem. Note: Click on second link below for high-res photo.
ESPN did a nice job with Tuesday night’s World Series main event preview show. We’ll find out this Tuesday (Nov. 11) in prime time if the final-table hype results, as hoped, in the most-watched poker show ever.
I think it’s likely to happen since there’s so much money at stake ($32 million total) and, although there are no “name” pros at the table, those who made it are mostly interesting characters.
I liked the way Lon McEachern and Norman Chad interspersed footage of previous championships and Q&A sessions with top pros to go along with bio pieces on the “November Nine” in Tuesday night’s show. Daniel Negreanu’s analysis of what we’ll see as the final table unfolds seemed the most spot-on.
The two announcers will have their work cut out for them to quickly put together Tuesday night’s two-hour coverage of the final table. Actual play of the event won’t end until sometime in the wee hours after midnight Monday (Central time).
Because the whole idea of pausing the final table for four months was to entice new viewers to the final show, I plan on watching it that way myself to see how it comes across. I will resist the temptation to follow the action hand-for-hand online on Sunday, and then again late on Monday night when the last two remaining players battle heads-up for the bracelet and more than $9 million.
Hard-core poker fans probably will know who won prior to the ESPN telecast, but I think it’ll be fun to treat this championship as if it’s happening right then and there on the TV screen. That’s the impact the folks at Harrah’s, the WSOP and ESPN hoped to accomplish, so I’ll play along.
To get you warmed up for the show, here are three recent LuckyDog columns:
* An in-depth look — with help from popular poker announcer Ali Nejad — at how ESPN, Lon and Norman will pull off this telecast with such a short turnaround time.
* An introduction to the November Nine, their poker histories, and prospects for the 2008 title. This link has a high quality photo of the group, as well.
* An interview, done just last week, with chip leader Dennis Phillips, who is trying to follow in the recent footsteps of other chip leaders-turned-champions: Chris Moneymaker, Greg Raymer and Jamie Gold.
Amateur player Arnold Thimons of Greensburg, Pa., played the poker game of his life this weekend — against 5 top pros on NBC’s Poker After Dark in downtown Las Vegas. Here he tells what it was like. The show will air in about two months.
FOR A MOMENT, I FELT LIKE A CELEBRITY
By Arnold Thimons
Wow, what an experience of a lifetime!
I thought I was a little nervous before the game, but meeting all the poker pros had me a little shaky. Each one of them could not have been more gracious and nice.
Phil Laak really went out of his way to make me feel comfortable, and after the cards went in the air, it was just like being in a home game. The gorgeous Jennifer Tilly was stunning, and very witty with her chatter. Daniel Negreanu and I had a lengthy conversation about the Pittsburgh Penguins, being the hockey fan that he is. Mike Matusow was very edgy, and even his cursing didn’t seem out of the ordinary for the others. I was in the makeup chair next to Johnny Chan, and he was very interested in how I qualified.
After the game, the camera crew followed me out to Fremont Street, and for one brief moment, I felt what it was like to be a celebrity. I even signed a few autographs. This is something I’ll never forget, and the pinnacle was hearing Chan say I was playing great, if not a little tight.
When I think of the whole experience, one thing keeps standing out, and that is although they were all very nice, Phil Laak seemed like a good buddy. He called me Dr. Thimons, and every hand I played against, he would be singing the Jaws theme. Pretty funny.
Arnold J. Thimons