ESPN YET AGAIN SPOILS WORLD SERIES OF POKER BY REVEALING WINNER
By Jonah "Ticklebass" Ansell, jansell@rivalfish.com**no spoilers here, we promise!**
It happened again. For the second year in a row, ESPN has punished me for simply browsing their website. Victimized by my own Saturday-morning hungover curiosity to peruse the latest happenings in the world of sports. Apparently, the 2006 World Series of Poker concluded last night. I know the WSOP winner -- thanks to ESPN's plastering of this headline alongside its other "top sports headlines" in that grey "headlines" box on the right of their mainpage that 
millions of men across America have come to unconsciously scan with the same familiarity and lack of effort that they might display when lackadaisically searching their freezers at 2:39 am for a box of broccoli and cheddar Lean Pockets.
Thanks ESPN, you coldhearted grundlestink of a network. It's not a casual piece of news that will pass lightly. It's not just going to fall to my mind's wayside like the fact that the White Sox topped the Tigers in last night's game. It's a tidbit of information that a poker fan hopes to never encounter, and when one does, it emblazons itself in the folds of your gray matter, never to be forgotten.
Thanks ESPN, for running to your throne at the mountain top of the world wide web and shouting the name and projecting the face of the 2006 WSOP tourney's winner, to the masses below. Since ESPN ruined it for me, I've decided to offer up a brief history of the rise and soon to be inevitable fall of poker.
THE RECENT HISTORY
ESPN did a pretty remarkable thing when they took a cue from the 1998 surprise hit Rounders and recognized that hyping and packaging poker's personalities could make the game far more watchable. Sure, they'd televised poker for years, but before Rounders, the game they aired was your grandfather's game, shot on Zapruder's neice's camera. You know, back when Johnny Chan wore non-blinding shirts and could be easily mistaken for an Asian tourist roaming the Las Vegas strip. But those years are far behind us.
Rounders taught ESPN execs that they weren't doing their job as well as they could be.
PACKAGING POKER
THE CRAZE
ESPN milked this excitement nicely for a while. They turned casino gamblers into household names. The tourneys produced average joe winners in Chris Moneymaker and Greg Raymer and kept us viewers thinking that we might too enjoy a seat atop the poker world. The Travel Network got in on the action. NBC got in on the action. CBS got in on the action. Bravo's Celebrity Poker jumped into the fray and immediatley made us all dumber people. My former college roommate, a sharp and cleverly lazy math major from Amherst became a pro poker player and has made tens of thousands of dollars in the few years since graduation
while the rest of our friends with "real jobs" scraped our way into corporate mediocrity at the junior level, positioning our 4% yearly raises back to our loved ones as signs that we were some hot shot young twentysomethings, really leaving our mark on the world. Christ, my girlfriend bought me a casino-quality felt poker table for Hannukah. Reasonable humans had been swept up by the poker craze. ESPN convinced us that we could win. In fact, entrants to the WSOP have increased each year in the 2000s. This year's winner, who I won't name, took home over $12 million. The money is on the tables but the eyes are no longer on the screens. And when eyes are off the screens, that means less money for ESPN. Which makes this writer on this hungover morning, very happy.
THE DEMISE
Things began falling apart when ESPN tried to Lex Steele us, and shoved
poker far too deeply down our throats. We gagged, we coughed and we clicked off our TVs. WSOP viewership declined for the first time last year and it is bound to plummet again this year. I could bitterly argue that it's solely because ESPN prematurely leaks (not Lex Steele style) the winner's name and face to their target viewing audience, but that wouldn't be fair or honest. But I do promise you that it doesn't help. I may be a big enough clown to still watch the 2006 WSOP, but there are poker fans far more casual than me, who won't sit through pointless suspense as they eagerly await an outcome they already know.
THE FUTURE
American men are still postponing their visits to Thumbzilla.com by spending time at PokerStars.com, UltimateBet.com, and other annoyingly advertised gambling sites that shrewdly created ".net" versions of their sites that don't exchange actual money, to bypass American TV advertising laws. ESPN and American casinos openly cite their concern for any marginally legal online gambling, but it's online gambling that fuels tourney participation and the hoopla around the big dance that ultimately drives viewership. With the recent legislation, crackdowns against online poker players and arrest of a prominent poker site operator, in the next few years, expect many websurfing males to return to their pre-poker late-night online lives, of risking not their wallets, but their marriages, by only going "balls in." Do you think Degree would sponsor it?
millions of men across America have come to unconsciously scan with the same familiarity and lack of effort that they might display when lackadaisically searching their freezers at 2:39 am for a box of broccoli and cheddar Lean Pockets.Thanks ESPN, you coldhearted grundlestink of a network. It's not a casual piece of news that will pass lightly. It's not just going to fall to my mind's wayside like the fact that the White Sox topped the Tigers in last night's game. It's a tidbit of information that a poker fan hopes to never encounter, and when one does, it emblazons itself in the folds of your gray matter, never to be forgotten.
Thanks ESPN, for running to your throne at the mountain top of the world wide web and shouting the name and projecting the face of the 2006 WSOP tourney's winner, to the masses below. Since ESPN ruined it for me, I've decided to offer up a brief history of the rise and soon to be inevitable fall of poker.
THE RECENT HISTORY ESPN did a pretty remarkable thing when they took a cue from the 1998 surprise hit Rounders and recognized that hyping and packaging poker's personalities could make the game far more watchable. Sure, they'd televised poker for years, but before Rounders, the game they aired was your grandfather's game, shot on Zapruder's neice's camera. You know, back when Johnny Chan wore non-blinding shirts and could be easily mistaken for an Asian tourist roaming the Las Vegas strip. But those years are far behind us.
Rounders taught ESPN execs that they weren't doing their job as well as they could be.
PACKAGING POKER
- The game of poker: offered TV producers a Fogo de Chao salad bar of leverageable assets: trash talk, tensions, rivalries, young guns and old pros.
- The late 1990s and early 2000s: offered improved camera technology, flashy screen graphics. The rise of the internet first brought hordes of bored men to adult sites for self-stimulation, but men's biological limitations prevented them from filling a whole evening with uninterrupted masturbation. Unless they planned to tie a crew sock around their "member" the next day to apply consistent pressure to their heavily chaffed victim. With Seinfeld and other hallmarks of the 1990s going off the air, TV getting generally shittier, men needed something to deter them from returning to the wives they began hating six years and two kids ago. Men needed new content to plug the gaps of time in between their nightly online "sessions."
- Poker sites: offered the allure of money and the near-instant realization of the American Dream. Orgasmic enticements, indeed. With men flocking to these sites with the same giddy enthusiasm with which the finer gender flocked to US Weekly newstands, ESPN execs had their pawns, their players, their viewers.
THE CRAZE
ESPN milked this excitement nicely for a while. They turned casino gamblers into household names. The tourneys produced average joe winners in Chris Moneymaker and Greg Raymer and kept us viewers thinking that we might too enjoy a seat atop the poker world. The Travel Network got in on the action. NBC got in on the action. CBS got in on the action. Bravo's Celebrity Poker jumped into the fray and immediatley made us all dumber people. My former college roommate, a sharp and cleverly lazy math major from Amherst became a pro poker player and has made tens of thousands of dollars in the few years since graduation
while the rest of our friends with "real jobs" scraped our way into corporate mediocrity at the junior level, positioning our 4% yearly raises back to our loved ones as signs that we were some hot shot young twentysomethings, really leaving our mark on the world. Christ, my girlfriend bought me a casino-quality felt poker table for Hannukah. Reasonable humans had been swept up by the poker craze. ESPN convinced us that we could win. In fact, entrants to the WSOP have increased each year in the 2000s. This year's winner, who I won't name, took home over $12 million. The money is on the tables but the eyes are no longer on the screens. And when eyes are off the screens, that means less money for ESPN. Which makes this writer on this hungover morning, very happy.THE DEMISE
Things began falling apart when ESPN tried to Lex Steele us, and shoved
poker far too deeply down our throats. We gagged, we coughed and we clicked off our TVs. WSOP viewership declined for the first time last year and it is bound to plummet again this year. I could bitterly argue that it's solely because ESPN prematurely leaks (not Lex Steele style) the winner's name and face to their target viewing audience, but that wouldn't be fair or honest. But I do promise you that it doesn't help. I may be a big enough clown to still watch the 2006 WSOP, but there are poker fans far more casual than me, who won't sit through pointless suspense as they eagerly await an outcome they already know.THE FUTURE
American men are still postponing their visits to Thumbzilla.com by spending time at PokerStars.com, UltimateBet.com, and other annoyingly advertised gambling sites that shrewdly created ".net" versions of their sites that don't exchange actual money, to bypass American TV advertising laws. ESPN and American casinos openly cite their concern for any marginally legal online gambling, but it's online gambling that fuels tourney participation and the hoopla around the big dance that ultimately drives viewership. With the recent legislation, crackdowns against online poker players and arrest of a prominent poker site operator, in the next few years, expect many websurfing males to return to their pre-poker late-night online lives, of risking not their wallets, but their marriages, by only going "balls in." Do you think Degree would sponsor it?
posted by Rival Room Editor at
11:30 AM
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