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"Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself,
but talent instantly recognizes genius."
-- Arthur Conan Doyle
A few weeks into the first season of the Travel Channel's World Poker Tour (see
World Poker Tour event reports for individual episode details) I wrote
an article speculating on the effect
the show would have on the game. While I was right in the fairly obvious observation that a lot of terrible players
would be created, at the same time I didn't speculate on how huge that "lot" would actually be.
Since writing that article, poker has exploded in a way few other cultural phenomenon ever have. Poker wasn't a new thing.
It had been around more than a century, and it had been around on a fairly large scale for two decades. This sort of mass
cultural discovery of something that has been commonly around just doesn't happen. It's not like tomorrow fifty times as
many people will suddenly start playing checkers.
This amazing growth is only partly due to the World Poker Tour. In fact, the World Poker Tour was soon surpassed by three
more important things: online poker sites, the World Series of Poker, and the celebrity of Chris Moneymaker. Still, the WPT
was the initial key impetus to what followed. (These days you can find
poker television shows on every day of the week.)
And what followed has been remarkable. First is the aspect I focused on in my original article. The number of players
has skyrocketed, and the number of weak, poor, easily beatable players has spun out of this world. Poker games online
and in casino tournaments are overflowing with far more weak players than before. Casino
ring games also have more poor players,
but not to the degree as online and tournaments of all kinds. This is a secondary result of the World Poker Tour's influence
that I (for one) didn't anticipate.
Tournaments have always interested me
personally more than ring games. Almost all decisions are more important, so tournaments offer a greater intellectual
challenge, to me anyway. It turns out that the tournament structure
appeals to a far higher percentage of players now than it did before televised tournaments were everywhere. Online, twenty-four hours a day,
you can find thousands of people playing all manner of tournaments. Then the WPT also brought to life something deader than yesterday: No Limit
Holdem ring games. Such games barely existed anywhere. Now casinos and online cardrooms offer a wide variety of No Limit Holdem games.
(While the WPT is partly responsible for the boom in No Limit ring games, the greater factor very likely was the
establishment of "limited buy-in" games online, where a more level playing field and smaller stacks in
comparison to the blinds make action much more likely than the old days where unlimited stacks and puny blinds led
to a "sitting contest" rather than any action.)
No Limit Holdem casino tournaments
have changed a great deal too, even though they were already popular before the World Poker Tour since No Limit is much
more suited for a tournament structure than for ring games. These tournaments have changed in that, first, huge fields
make it likely that many great players will never have a chance to win certain tournaments in their lifetime. With
fields of over 1000 players, even if you are ten times more likely to win than average, you still are a 100-1 longshot.
Second, the large increase in poor players afflicted with the Maverick Syndrome coupled with the inherent high luck
factor in No Limit Holdem has led to the "I am all-in" way to play the game. Similar to the phenomenon of
schooling in limit ring games,
whether by accident or not, weaker players have found a way to play "less bad" in No Limit tournaments.
Instead of letting themselves get outplayed in series of smaller confrontations, they easily bet all their chips,
forcing better players to either play 55/45 type edges, or worse, hand after hand continually fold when they have
the best of it -- thus transforming themselves into the weaker player.
This is the revenge of the Maverick Syndrome.
Flashy, goofball play is able to "work"
(to some degree) for weaker players. This may just mean that a person who was 5000-1 to win a 1000 player tournament becomes 1200-1
to win, but while that player still has a negative equity, value has been taken right out of the pockets of the better players.
Fortunately for winning players there is a bright side, and we are seeing that a bit more now as the poker industry has
reached a plateau after astonishing growth. Weaker players now are branching out to play more of the "other" games.
Maverick Syndrome play is catastrophic in Omaha, Stud games or even Limit Holdem. The biggest Omaha games online commonly
have play that is essentially a person setting money on fire -- and a lot of that atrocious play comes from people who
have achieved some success in No Limit games. Fortunately the tedious nature of No Limit tournaments, and the ego-based
nature of the play of those afflicted with Maverick Syndrome leads to many weak (but
delusional) players trying to play
a simplistic style that helps them be competitive in No Limit but is suicide in other games. Needless to say, being able
to say "all-in" fearlessly does not make you a good player of other types of poker games.
As I said in the previous WPT article, the play is not the thing. The game is the thing. A major part of the game for
winning players is to understand how the real game, the game of your poker career, is evolving. Tens of thousands of
folks who were newbies in 2003 are now terminal Maverick Syndrome suffers today. Yummy.
See also Make Money from Playing Poker Tournaments
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