Thanks to ESPN’s weeks and weeks of coverage of the first forty some odd events of this year’s WSOP, they’re now televising the main event episodes and I don’t think anybody knows or cares. Even I didn’t know they were airing the main event tonight until I happened to flip over to it towards the end of the episode, and then I wasn’t even interested enough to bother watching. I know I’ve been pretty burnt out on poker since July, but you’d think I would at least want to watch just to see if the camera happened to catch a glimpse of my table or something. But no, I felt like switching to a rerun of Mind of Mencia instead. It’s all that coverage of the prelim events from the WSOP, the limit games, the small entry no limit hold em and the pot limit omaha tourneys. Any casual poker fan would certainly have stumbled across some of the ESPN coverage over the last several weeks, probably got excited that it was the 2005 WSOP, but then got either confused or disappointed that it wasn’t the main event. Then with each subsequent week, interest would dwindle until like me, the main event finally comes on and there’s zero interest. This was the television equivalent of training yourself to hate smoking by going through a carton of cigarettes all at once. Everybody was wondering if this poker craze could go on forever and I thought for a while it might, but not after this. The newcomer to the game won’t be as enthralled by what they see on TV anymore because its on five different channels every hour of the day, much of it piss poor. It will never again be like the last few years where there was only one the WPT and the main event of the WSOP on tv. Sure ESPN played those episodes ad nauseum, but the fact was that everybody saw those episodes and ate them up because that’s all there was. That made the players at those final tables real celebrities. This year, I’ll bet half as many people watch the main event episodes and you won’t be able to have a water cooler conversation about it because nobody else will be sure that the episode they watched was one of the main event ones or not. Next year, we may see one final record number of entrants into the main event, just because all of the fans that have become students of the game during this boom will just be coming into form, having gained enough knowledge and experience to make it to the big show. But after that, the number of newbies and dead money coming into the game will start trending down. Perhaps it was inevitable that the poker bubble would burst eventually, but damn, ESPN sure sped up the process. When the dead money stops being easy to find, there will only be good players left. So unless you’re a superstar, it’s gonna be a grind with most people breaking about even. I saw the same thing happen with pool back in the day when 9-ball first became popular. Everybody got into it and it was easy to get a game. But then the pool of weak players eventually dried up and you’d wake up in a town where the same group of good players only had each other to play, and they would play day in and day out, essentially passing the same c-note between themselves ad infinitum. So sad. Just like it was with pool, I think now may be time to give up the grind and find a new hobby… Well, maybe after next year’s WSOP anyway. 🙂