Louisvillians felt called to try luck at World Series
Poker is more of a game of skill than of chance, but a little luck never hurts.
A lot is even better. Ask Joe May, who got on a roll that landed him smack in the middle of the mother of all card games — Texas Hold 'Em at the World Series of Poker.
On May 19, three days before the World Series began, May and his pal Donnie Sinkhorn of Louisville stuffed a few thou in their trou and flew to Las Vegas to take a stab at qualifying for the world's most lucrative poker tournament.
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May, 36, not only qualified, he made it to the third round — outlasting the guys who finished 1-2 in last year's World Series, the pinnacle of what might be the fastest growing game in America, not to mention one of the hottest shows on cable TV.
Bryan Dillon, a 49-year-old lawyer from Prospect, Ky., fared even better. He parlayed a $75 entry fee in an online tournament into a $10,000 payday at the World Series, where he finished 192nd.
"It's the most physically grueling experience I've ever been through," said Dillon, who played 25 hours over three days. "You can't imagine how fatiguing it is to concentrate that hard for that long."
Only 226 players earned a check, less than 10 percent of the total entrants — a pool that tripled in size this year.
"Poker is getting ridiculously huge," said Sinkhorn, 28. "I know hundreds of guys from around here who play on a regular basis. I play once a week with nine or 10 friends, and once a month we have a 54-player tournament. It's a phenomenon that's really taking off."
Is it ever. More than $100million is bet every day in online poker games, according to pokerpulse.com, an industry Web site. The total purse for this year's World Series of Poker was a staggering $49 million.
The poker boom has been the subject of recent stories in Time, Forbes, Sports Illustrated and The New York Times, and it has been mined for hit TV series by Bravo, the Travel Channel and ESPN.
It's impossible to precisely measure the game's popularity at the grassroots level, but anecdotal evidence abounds. Texas Hold 'Em is the game of choice not only in the World Series of Poker and Bravo's "Celebrity Poker Showdown," but also for local fund-raisers staged by St. Therese Catholic Church and the Center for Women and Families.
The game's explosive growth is perhaps best illustrated by a few key stats from the World Series on ESPN.
Last year ESPN broadcast seven hours of tournament play. This year: 22.
Last year the World Series drew 814 players. This year: 2,576.
Last year the winner took home $2.5 million. This year: $5 million.
The final round of the 2003 World Series of Poker drew nearly four times as many viewers as ESPN's National Hockey League broadcasts — and the hockey games were aired live. The World Series finale was shown on tape delay. A four-month tape delay. The tournament is played in May, but the finale isn't aired until September.
Fans don't seem to care. An average of 1.2 million households watched the World Series telecasts last year, and the audience increased with every rerun.
Watching the World Series piqued the interest of May and Sinkhorn. It wasn't terribly hard to do. Both men like to make an occasional wager.
Sinkhorn has a computer science degree from the University of Louisville but earns his living as a professional pool player.
Blackjack is May's game. A few years back, May said, he won $11,000 at Caesars Indiana, then returned a week later and took home another $7,000.
A professional photographer, May has played poker seriously for only 10 months, but he's no "fish" — poker lingo for novices and fools who from their money are soon parted. In January, May won a 472-player tournament at partypoker.com that paid $6,000.
Yet when Sinkhorn first floated the idea of flying to Vegas, May demurred. He's a prudent fellow disinclined to blow his hard-earned dough.
"But when the Golden Nugget (casino) 'comped' our rooms and a buddy lined us up with a cheap flight, I figured it would be silly not to go," May said.
Roughly 48 hours before the World Series of Poker was scheduled to begin, May and Sinkhorn paid $225 to play a 480-person tournament in which the top 20 or so players would earn the $10,000 entry fee required to play with the pros.
Sinkhorn was sunk from the start.
"You can't afford to catch a bunch of bad hands early on," he said. "They only give you $500 in chips to start with, so you need to get hot right away."
May did.
In Texas Hold 'Em, each player is dealt two "hole" cards that only he can play. May started the first game with a pair of nines. He started the second with a pair of aces.
"It doesn't get much better than that," he said. "I was very lucky in the beginning, and you definitely need some luck to do well in tournament poker. But you also have to know what to do with the cards when you get them."
May parlayed his fast start into a top-20 finish — and a coveted seat in the World Series.
"We were both ecstatic," Sinkhorn said. "I was about half asleep when he told me, but I jumped straight up and gave him a big high-five."
About three hours into the World Series, May's luck went sour. He got a good hand — two pair, aces and eights — and bet it aggressively. Alas, another player was holding aces and jacks. It was a classic "bad beat," and it cost May $7,200.
With only $1,200 left, May got conservative and underplayed a pair of aces. Then with just 10 minutes remaining in the third round, the dealer threw May a king and a queen of the same suit. May went "all in," betting his last $600.
The five "community" cards on the table were no help, and May was eliminated by a measly pair of 10s.
"That's not exactly the way you want to finish, but it was still a blast," May said. "I guarantee we'll be back next year — and I guarantee we'll have a bunch of our poker-playing buddies with us. Everybody wants to give it a try now."
Source: Mark Coomes, The Courier-Journal
