WSOP: Will the WSOP Main Event Miss Phil Ivey
By on June 3, 2011
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Phil Ivey might be the best poker player in the world. With eight bracelets, he is tied with Erik Seidel for the fourth most in history.
Yet, when the biggest tournament in the world, the World Series of Poker Main Event gets underway, Ivey will not be a part of it.
Actually, Ivey has not participated in any of the WSOP events, neither have Chris Ferguson and Howard Lederer. Ivey is boycotting because of Full Tilt Poker's failure to repay the funds of American players.
So, will poker be hurt by the lack of the big names?
Actually, the Main Event will be fine; the lesser events have potential to be hurt far more than the Main Event does.
The reason is that since the poker boom of the early 2000's, the big name professionals just don't win the main event.
No, that entices people for its everyman quality. If a top name professional were to ever win that tournament again, it would actually cause more harm than good.
See, people may know the names of Ivey, Lederer, Ferguson, Phil Hellmuth, and Doyle Brunson, but they don’t do any good to the main event. I should say, them winning wouldn’t do any good to the main event.
Jamie Gold won $12,000,000 dollars in 2006 when he won the Main Event. Since then, there has been a crackdown on online poker, which has put the winner’s share of the main event between eight and nine million.
The reason that these events have grown so much is that people have seen no-names win year and year out.
They sat and watch at home while the likes of Chris Moneymaker, Greg Raymer, and Joseph Hachem won and wondered why they couldn’t do that.
Phil Ivey is recognized as the best player in the world. The vignettes on him are all about how he’s the best player in the world.
That’s hardly an everyman comparison to the guy who has a vignette shown about how he lives in his mother’s basement, isn’t it?
When the best player in the world wins something, it eliminates the everyman variable. When the everyman wins the biggest tournament, it only adds to that.
The World Series of Poker thrives on the everyman variable.
With the Main Event less than one week away, tune to Bleacher Report's Poker Page to stay updated on everything happening at the 2011 WSOP.
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