The most unpopular WSOP Main Event Champions

For a second there, I was tempted to title this article “The bad guys: the WSOP’s most unpopular Main Event winners” but it wouldn’t be right. Sure, some of the folks I’m about to discuss may not qualify as the best ambassadors for the game of poker, and while some of them would indeed fit the “bad guy” picture, most of them are in fact good citizens and honest injuns that would never hurt a fly. The occasional exception only comes to strengthen this rule.
Despicable or not, there’s only one true measure that accurately reflects a Main Event winner’s significance in the big scheme of things: his contributions towards making poker as popular as it is nowadays.
In this respect, the highest honor should probably be bestowed upon Chris Moneymaker. This is the guy whom everyone credits for the 2003-2004 explosion of popularity that online poker has seen. This amateur, so fortuitously named “Moneymaker”, took the poker world by surprise, and having started off an online qualifier, he achieved the unthinkable: he won the Main Event and he pocketed the millions in prize money, proving once and for all that anyone could follow in his footsteps, provided he played online poker.
Because of the proof that Moneymaker put down to the table, millions worldwide took up online poker in the hopes of becoming the next nameless sensation, the next “rags-to-riches through online poker” story.

On the opposite end of the spectrum sit those Main Event winners whose contributions to the prestige of the game is either non existent or negative.
Jerry Yang is the first such winner who pops into mind when looking at things this way. He won the 2007 Main Event, one that I personally followed with great attention. I remember that back then, the question on everyone’s mind was “just who is this Jerry Yang fella?” Unfortunately, that question hasn’t received a satisfactory answer ever since. Jerry Yang is by no means one of the bad ones. His background story is as classic a rages-to-riches one as it gets. He’d paid his dues and he played his cards well at the 2007 final table as he let aggression do the talking for him and he won. There’s no reason why anyone should ever utter anything negative about Jerry – the guy’s involved in all sorts of charities for crying out loud – yet he still makes the blacklist: he’s taken the art of cashing in and then riding off into the sunset to new heights. Following his Main Event win, he’s only had one minor – one may say insignificant – cash in a live event and then static…a great guy overall, but one that did absolutely nothing for the popularity of the game.

If one was to ask 10 random online poker players who their least liked Main Event winner was, 9 out of the 10 would probably point a finger at Jamie Gold. The 2006 WSOP Big Dance winner may have taken down the biggest first prize in the history of the event, but it was obvious even back then that he wasn’t someone cut out for popularity. His in-your-face way to taunt the other players, his overall “Hollywood slick” image, and his seemingly inexhaustible bag of luck which bordered on the ridiculous most of the time, made him a classical villain in the public’s eyes. After Crispin Leyser had sued him for allegedly breaking their pre-Main Event agreement about the way they’d split the prize money, the palpable reason to hate Jamie Gold was there, and the public jumped all over it greedily.

As universally disliked as James Gold is, the title of the least popular WSOP Main Event winner should go to someone else. Russ Hamilton won the $1 million prize and his body-weight in silver which came with the Main Event title in 1994. I must admit I wasn’t as eager a poker fan back then as I am now (heck I was kid then and anything past basketball and girls was way beyond my sphere of interest), so I don’t have any first-hand experience about that year’s WSOP, but Hamilton was supposedly a popular personality and apparently as fit an ambassador to the game as any.
That image was blown to smithereens in 2008 though, when the bulk of the blame for the cheating scandal that rocked Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet got pinned on him.

Poker – a game of luck or one of skill?

With one court decision after another ruling that poker is in fact a game of skill, let’s take a closer look at this more than controversial question.
We’re going to have to start out from the premise that poker is indeed a game of skill. There are now scientific studies available to prove this and I’ll go into details on them later on. Just how big a role does the luck element have in it though? While I agree that it is a predominantly skill based game, I’d also like to know how one can quantify the element of luck.
Take a look at the following YouTube video in order to see the luck element in action:

It is about Jamie Gold (who else) squaring off against Patrik Antonius in a hand in which the latter has a straight against the former’s set of Ks.

The hand begins with Gold basically telling the others at the table what his pocket hand is. He tries to be subtle about it, but his quiet eagerness betrays him. There are numerous opinions and theories out there about just how skilled a poker player Jamie Gold is, but I suppose we’ll have to agree that in this instance he walks straight into the trap that Patrik Antonius sets him. The Finn picks up all the preflop information he needs about Gold’s hand and decides to see a flop probably hoping that it will bring along an A that will get the better of Gold’s pocket Ks. The flop brings a gutshot straight draw though, so he’s still in search of a hand when Gold commits his second mistake: he gives Antonius a shot at completing his hand on the turn by betting a small-enough amount into him. The Finn pounces on the opportunity, and sure enough, the turn brings a K which doesn’t just give Antonius the nut straight, it also gives Gold a set of Ks, a hand which he would probably never be able to get away from.
Predictably, Gold runs into the trap without a second thought, goes all-in and gets called by Antonius. What comes after this is the interesting part: the two players agree to run the river card 3 times, and even though Antonius has a made hand going up against Gold’s 12 outs, two times out of three he loses the pot.
Now then, Gold makes several mistakes in this hand and Antonius makes none. Of course, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that Gold is a lucky fellow. Not after his 2006 WSOP Main Event run it shouldn’t, but this example makes one wonder about just how much of a factor luck is in this game.

Whether or not poker is a skill dominated game is no longer a question. For years, those advocating that poker was in fact a form of gambling, kept going back to the claim that there wasn’t any clear, science-rooted evidence to support that the skill factor was the dominant one in the game. Nowadays, there are several such studies. Two German scientists from the University of Hamburg ran an experiment based on actual hand histories lifted from an online poker room, which analyzed win-loss fluctuations and players’ win-loss averages to determine how big a role skill had in the outcome. They concluded that those with a skill-wise edge over their competitors did much better than less skilled players, to an extent which is clearly outside of the variation induced by chance.

In a study aimed to offer a simpler and more convincing view on the skill factor, a couple of American researchers have determined beyond any sort of doubt that poker was indeed predominantly based on skill. They looked at a staggering number of 130 million hands played at PokerStars, and concluded that 76% of the hands played never saw a showdown. In a hand which doesn’t even allow the cards to have any sort of say whatsoever, the luck factor is obviously non-existent.
With all this in mind, I suppose we can conclude that poker is a game of skill, except when one adds Jamie Gold to the mix…