Quantcast

From the category archives:

WSOP

Better WSOP Coverage, Please!

by Bill Rini on July 25, 2009

in Poker, WSOP

99069875 4b190beb87 Better WSOP Coverage, Please!

Recently Pokerati Dan posted the following on Twitter:

@Pokerati: the (temporary) lack of inspiration and passion in poker media’s coverage of late (guilty) makes me giggle.

His Tweet struck me because I have long been on the verge of writing something about my disappointment every year with the WSOP coverage.

Once a year every poker website and/or blog sends an army of journalists to Las Vegas to cover the biggest event in poker. And every year the vast majority of reporting is mediocre at best.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m friends with a lot of these writers (or was before I wrote this post) and I really don’t blame them. I blame the way the system is set up. It’s a meat grinder that chews people up for six weeks and drains them of all their creative juices.

First off, the people footing the bill for all this want something in return. Writers are forced to crank out X number of articles a day to prove their worth whether or not there is anything meaningful to report or not. So sites that might have been posting 2 or 3 articles a day before the WSOP are suddenly cranking out 15 or more posts a day covering some $3000 buy-in event that nobody really cares about. I’m sure the guys going deep care but most of us don’t need several updates a day on an event especially when every other site out there is also posting multiple updates a day. A good dinner break and end of day summary is fine unless there’s actually something newsworthy.

If you really want to go hog wild then provide a feed of how people finish in the tournament but don’t make that part of the reporting. If you’ve got a friend who’s deep in a tournament and you want that info then watch the live updates feed. There’s no reason to try and write a story every 10 minutes and post it on your regular feed. It’s too much noise.

It’s sort of the 24 hour news network effect. You have to fill the space. So every rumor, every bathroom break, every inside joke is reported on as if it has the same journalistic weight as discovering that Mars has condo colonies and little green men walking around.

Even ESPN has caught on to this and has radically scaled down coverage of the smaller events to feature the invitational, the Ante Up For Africa charity event, and the Main Event. Viewers simply wanted to see more Main Event so ESPN is giving it to them.

Second, you take all these writers and you throw them into 12 – 14 hour day grinds for 6 weeks and by the time the Main Event rolls around most of them have exhausted any sort of creativity or inspiration they might have had. Sure they wrote eloquently about the $1500 Go Fish One Eyed Jacks Are Wild Event #3 but go read their Twits by the Main Event and most of them are moaning and groaning about how they wish it would all be over and they could go home.

Here’s a quote from my good friend and poker journalist F-Train:

The last few days of the Main Event all I could think was, “Three more days of this nonsense.” “Two more days til it’s over.” And it has literally taken me a week to feel some semblance of normal again.

Here’s a suggestion – I have no journalistic background other than this blog so it may be FOS, but bear with me – why not save your best tournament reporters for the big events and send the junior writers to cover all the smaller events? Or better yet, have your best writers direct a small group of junior people who spend all day sitting on the rails doing chip counts and such and they feed all of that information back to a senior writer who compiles it all up and puts together one or two really solid pieces every day?

Third, a lot of what passes as journalism is simply PR. Along with all the major news sites every poker room that sends players to the WSOP also sends down their team of bloggers who narrowly focus on how players from their site are doing in each event.

To be fair, they do a decent job of covering the entire event but there is a distinct focus on specific players who are either affiliated with the site and/or qualified via that site. That’s nice and all but after awhile it starts to read a bit like propaganda. The tournament coverage and the writing about how the site’s players are doing seem like they should be completely separate things. Mixing the two just cheapens the reporting.

And it’s not what they write it’s also what they don’t write. Big name players being sponsored by other poker rooms get downplayed compared to their players. In the end, it’s simply not reporting. It’s PR.

So now that we have a year to think about how next year’s WSOP will be covered I hope that any poker writers who are still my friends after this post will figure out a better way to report. Maybe they take my suggestion on how to distribute the workload or perhaps they create different feeds so people can tune into summaries rather than a constant stream of updates. Whatever it is there is room for improvement and it only benefits everyone if coverage becomes better suited for the readers.

Photo cred to eliazar

{ 9 comments }

Slow News Day at Bluff

by Bill Rini on July 4, 2009

in Poker, Poker News, WSOP

I ran across this on Bluff Magazine’s Europe site:

obama Slow News Day at Bluff

I could understand if they used a headline saying that someone was offering to pay Obama’s way into the WSOP main event but to imply this is even realistic is pretty sensationalistic journalism. Since when did Bluff Magazine become Gambling911?

{ 2 comments }

RSS Poker Trivia Quiz Winner

by Bill Rini on April 16, 2009

in Poker, Poker Pros, WSOP

327468409 d70b9e6f6c RSS Poker Trivia Quiz Winner

Winner! Winner! Chicken Dinner!

Wow! What a great response. Sorry for all of those who sent me a response but were beaten to the punch by Cardgrrl from Raise or Fold: A Year of Risky Business. She is the winner of the gift card. Congrats Cardgrrl.

Just to review:

  • The question only appears in the RSS or email version of the post. So if you want to get in on future contests make sure you subscribe to either one of those.
  • First person to send the correct answer wins da prize!

The question that was attached to the Breath Taking post by the always excellent Tommy Angelo was:

Okay boys and girls . . . HERE IS YOUR TRIVIA QUESTION WORTH A $30 GIFT CARD

What are the last names of all the WSOP Main Event winners that have a last name that begins with the letter “M” and in what years did they win the WSOP Main Event?

First person to email xxxxxxx@xxxxxxx.xxx with the correct answer(s) gets the gift card. I will be going by when the email shows up in my inbox so any delays in the inter-tubes are beyond my control.

And the correct answer was:

  • 1970 Moss
  • 1971 Moss
  • 1974 Moss
  • 1983 McEvoy
  • 1990 Matloubi
  • 2001 Mortensen
  • 2003 Moneymaker

I also received quite a few incorrect responses. The most common incorrect responses were either forgetting Moss’ 1974 win or forgetting about Mortensen completely (poor Carlos).

It looks like I’ll try to get some sponsors for future quizzes. I’ve already received a few offers so hopefully I can arrange something with someone fairly soon.

Some things I took away from this first experiment:

1. I should have set up an auto-responder to thank everyone who entered. I wasn’t expecting so many responses.

2. I forgot to HTML-up the quiz itself. Bad habit based on using WordPress that normally handles paragraphs and such.

April asked how I was able to power this and what I did was take Yoast’s very excellent RSS Footer plugin and make some custom mods to it.

photo by .A.A.

{ 2 comments }

WSOP and Sex Workers

July 13, 2007 Poker

Over at the Las Vegas Escort Blog the Las Vegas Courtesan sees the bright side of the WSOP and poker players.
Of course I am still hearing girls moaning and complaining about how slow slow slow it is, but I am still praising the poker players here for WSOP. Thanks guys! You save me at 7am [...]

Read the full article →

I missed it

August 11, 2006 Poker

So who won the WSOP Main Event?

Read the full article →

Jamie Gold or Allen Cunningham?

August 11, 2006 Poker

This is the classic short-term vs. long-term question. While it was in Full Tilt’s best interest to see Allen Cunningham win the 2006 WSOP, I actually believe that Jamie Gold’s win will be better for the overall poker world.
I know a lot of the poker press was also rooting for Allen to win. [...]

Read the full article →

WSOP: Making The Money

August 5, 2006 Poker

Read the full article →

Ryan Busts on Day 4

August 5, 2006 Poker

According to an text message from April, Ryan is busted in 410th place.

Read the full article →

Ryan Makes the Money

August 5, 2006 Poker

April has been cool enough to be my Dr. Feelgood and supply me with my “How’s Ryan Doing?” fix. I have a special ringtone for text messages on my phone and normally when I hear that “Hello Moto” ringtone it means something bad had happened. Perhaps a server is down or some other [...]

Read the full article →