Tour Poker Players
Introduction
Two quite separate news articles caught my eye this week; that are strangely connected regarding professional poker players. Both of the articles concern the professional poker players on the numerous world poker tours that seem to provide a year round living for them.
Too many poker tours?
The first article to catch my eye related that there are now too many poker tours which means the top poker professionals are spread too thinly across them. The upshot of this fact, according to the author, is that more and more amateur or unknown professional tour poker players are winning them resulting in dull and boring final tables that no one is really interested in watching or reading about. Now then, I might well agree that the number of so called ‘world tours’ should be curbed before the whole concept of a world tour is devalued – but I cannot agree that poker fans all over the world aren’t interested to hear of someone new breaking through. After all, don’t we all dream of making it big in poker one day and therefore will cheer for the underdog or new comer? The article I read went on to say that the author wanted to see only the big names like Ivey, Hellmuth and Negreanu winning these world tours, so it was with a rather raised eyebrow I read the next article.
A pros view of playing
Poor old Danny - wins $11 million so far and now only wants to play for the glory!
In the other article that caught my eye, about what motivates the top players, I found it quite ironic that Daniel Negreanu stated that he no longer plays for the money – lucky him eh! Daniel is apparently now more concerned with setting records and what the history books might say about his poker playing. However, I guess with that amount of money you might be able to see his point as he has won a lifetime $11 million so far and is unconcerned at having ended this season in the red. However, it begs the question as to how much might a player really want to win a tour for the money compared to their eventual poker legacy?