“Professional” Poker?

Posted on March 26, 2008 
Filed Under General

aptghThe word "professional" usually comes up in poker when we talk about the players. There are "professional poker players", "professional wannabes", and the rest of us. However, true "professionalism" in poker comes from the management side not the player side. How tournaments and cash games are run with a "professional" style and uniformity comes from the individual card rooms, casinos, poker tours, poker room managers and floor staff. Recently, there have been several examples of how the management of the game is not keeping up with the game itself.

RENO: Today marks the first day of the World Poker Challenge in Reno, Nevada. This annual event formerly played at the Reno Hilton and now at the Grand Sierra (same casino, new owners). When the players were seated today, they were given seats based upon when they registered; so the normally late arriving "professionals" were all put at the final four tables and the many satellite winners over the last several months were all seated together. This pattern of registration is nothing new and is handled with a random draw by every other casino we have encountered in the last three or four years. But without some "professional" standards, this unnecessary situation arises. We can only assume new casino ownership, new poker room staff because we know the former poker room manager and he never would have allow this to happen.

EPT: The European Poker Tour has grown too fast. So far they have had to limit the number of seats in most events because they simply cannot accommodate more players. So there is a black market in tournament seats. As the numbers get close to the cutoff, some local entrepreneurs have been buying seats, only to offer them to late arriving professionals at a premium. Scalping seats to the EPT, a good line of work until they institute the "you buy it, you play it" rule, which has been around on other poker tours for years. It is not necessary to re-invent the rules, just look at how other successful tours deal with such situations or hire one of the several highly qualified tournament directors, who have the necessary experience.

TDA: The tournament directors association has been doing a very good job of seeking to standardized rules for running a poker tournament. The problem is that they have not and will not venture outside of that narrow area of concern. They do not feel they should be addressing issues such as the two mentioned above. TDA wants to focus on the actual running of the tournament from "Shuffle Up and Deal" to "We have a Winner." The problem is that many other issues that affect the players are outside of their self-appointed mandate and there is no other organization to address those issues of "professionalism" in poker.

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