7
What the World Series Means to Me
The World Series of Poker is the one event that has a history people care about. Everyone wants to know how many bracelets you have. People know when you’ve won the main event. They also know exactly how many bracelets you have. You could have won some other very prestigious tournaments, and they won’t know about it. But they’ll know if you win the World Series.
The World Series is the most important barometer of how good a player you are. It’s how players are judged. That’s what makes it so important, even more important than the money, and that’s actually the reason I am going to play in every single event this year. Normally I wouldn’t play in these $1,500 or $2,500 events, but I do at the World Series because of its prestige. It’s kind of a test. This is where poker players come to test themselves against the best poker players in the world.
It’s so much harder to win a bracelet nowadays than it was in the old days so people who have been around a long time have a big edge. I like to think of myself as a newcomer, which is kind of strange. I’ve been playing in the World Series since ’95, but there are people who have been playing since 1970. They’ve been playing 25 more years than I have. It’s going to be very hard for me to catch these players in the number of bracelets won because they have a head start playing when it was much easier to win a bracelet, back when they had much smaller fields. It’s so much harder to win one now. Dan Harrington going to two final tables when the fields were so large is very comparable to Doyle Brunson or Stu Ungar winning two championships in a row. But I still don’t think they need to cap the fields.
