FULL TILT POKER BLOG

#732 – This is Where I Came in, Part III – Armageddon

Posted by Editor | Filed under Uncategorized

When I first saw the numbers, it made me want to cry. The Bellagio Five-Star Classic, home of so much poker history – mine and everybody’s – was a shell of its former self. The Five-Star is superbly run, prestigious, and anchored by the WPT Championship. If the Five-Star couldn’t draw, what did that mean for poker?

The Five-Star began on Wednesday, April 1. The opening event, $1,500 + $90 NLHE, drew 129 players. The 2008 opening event which also ran on a Wednesday but had a buy-in of $2,500 + $100, attracted 237 players, nearly twice as many. The comparisons got even worse from there. The second event had a $500 smaller buy-in in 2009 but drew just 66 players, compared with 148 a year earlier. The Friday-Sunday events were more of the same: 58 v. 136, 27 v. 106 (for the Saturday $5k event), 81 v. 180 (and it was only that close because the 2008 event had a $2,000 buy-in and the buy-in in ’09 was cut to $1,500).

The comparisons looked similarly awful for the rest of the Five-Star. The Main Event, the WPT Championship, didn’t feature quite so anemic a field but the 338 entries were substantially fewer than the 545 of 2008. (The only event that had close to the same turnout in 2009 as 2008 was the Senior event, with 109 players this year compared with 137, aided by a decrease in the buy-in from $2,500 to $1,500. It was heartening to see that my new/old brethren were continuing to do their part to support the game.)

What does this mean for the World Series of Poker? Despite the entries to the Main Event peaking in 2006, before the passage of the UIGEA and the chill it put on the online pipeline to the Championship, 2007 and 2008 were solid years for the Series with overall increases in participation throughout the seven weeks of tournaments and even a year-to-year increase in the Main Event in 2008.

To me, the natural culprit was the rotten economy, which made Vegas look like a ghost town during my visit to Caesars in March during the NBC Heads-Up Championship. The prospect of a World Series with declining year-to-year, event-by-event participation looks pretty likely. What would such a Series feel like? Would the Amazon Room be empty and quiet? Would everyone acknowledge the situation, or would people act like the crowd of players was just out on break or due in town next weekend?

I decided I needed to get to Las Vegas before the end of the 2009 Bellagio Five-Star Classic and get some answers for myself.

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