From the Cheap Seats

I just wrote a little post over at the UB Blog about the action at the WSOP Final Table yesterday/today and one thing I’ve found myself wondering about is how well poker works as a spectator sport. I’ve covered a fair few final tables and, sure, there’s lots of action and tons of money and/or prestige at stake. The Main Event is one of the largest sporting events in the world, with a player-generated prize pool that dwarfs even the biggest events in golf, tennis, auto racing, and the four major team sports.

But playing a final table to its conclusion can take a long time. A very long time. Yesterday the November Nine started playing at noon Vegas time and finished up at six…AM. That’s 18 hours and we haven’t even crowned the champion yet, as Joe Cada and Darvin Moon will go toe-to-toe for God knows how long before finally deciding things. And that’s a long time to for a fan, no matter how ardent, to watch anything. Think about it, is there ANYTHING you would voluntarily do for eighteen consecutive hours. No matter how much you love Family Guy, no matter how much you love drinking beer and watching football, no matter how much you love having unlimited credit in a strip club, after three-quarters of a day you’ve probably pretty much had it. At the very least you gotta sleep, sometime.

To be sure there was a lot of excitement outside the Penn & Teller theater yesterday, as each player brought his own rooting section along. And there were hundreds of rabid poker fans wanting to see history in the making. This video from Raw Vegas should give some idea what the scene was like before the doors were opened:

But as day turned to night, and then day again, the crowd thinned and the energy in the room dwindled. This was perfectly understandable, as many fans left when their favorite was eliminated and others left as sheer exhaustion took hold. As I followed along with the coverage and read the Tweets of my friends covering the final table it was obvious they were all on their second, third, and fourth wind. Endurance is an important quality for poker players and that’s also the case for poker fans.

So does poker have a future as a spectator sport? There were huge lines winding through the halls of the Rio yesterday, they could’ve packed more people in if they had the space. Greg Raymer was quoted before play started that he hoped someday you might see a poker tournament played out in a football stadium, the stands packed with tens of thousands of cheering fans. I think that’s a bit optimistic, even the most popular players don’t have fans as, well, fanatical as sports teams. But as I thought about it the sport that kinda resembles poker when it comes to a spectacle is…cricket. Like poker, cricket matches can go on and on an on…heck, they have test matches in cricket that last weeks. You have constant activity in cricket, but not always decisive action. The ball gets bowled, the batter decides not to swing, the ball is bowled again…and this goes on all day. Sometimes the batter takes his whack and there’s running and scrambling, but there are long stretches where nothing much goes on.

And there’s a more laid back attitude in the stands. People have tea. They bring a book along. I watched a match once and there was a young couple sitting off by themselves who were engaged in a a serious make-out session. I’m not saying that you wanna have THAT kind of diversion going on in the stands but fans need to be able to get up, walk around, get something to eat, and come back to find some available seats. For a huge event like the November Nine you might see people willing to sit there all day, but if poker is going to attract big live audiences for more than the biggest prize in poker it can’t be a sit-there-all-day thing.

There’s also the fact that I don’t exactly know the rules of cricket, and many casual fans don’t exactly know the rules of poker. A more laid-back atmosphere in the stands could allow for discussion and debate about the hands as the play out. I concede that poker fans are unlikely to take such a genteel attitude towards the game, but a more laid-back attitude in the stands might lead to them being filled to the rafters more often.