What It Means to Be Champion

Again, thanks to everyone who offered up question suggestions for my interview last night with WSOP champion Joe Cada. Cada and I spoke for about 25 minutes. It was clear to me that Cada has become fairly comfortable handling interviews a month after his victory. Compare that to his appearance on Letterman, where he seemed slightly off balance. (Cada mentioned to me that if he could, he would go back and do the Letterman interview again and re-phrase some of his answers to Letterman's questions.)

What would have happened had Darvin Moon won the Main Event? Rightly or wrongly, in recent years the winner of the Main Event has been anointed as an ambassador of the game. If you want to be cynical about it, you can say that this role is a result of the influence (and money) of the online poker sites. They have a vested interest in making sure the game continues to grow and therefore lock up the winner under a sponsorship agreement. Then, in Moon's words, the winner becomes their "bitch". In Cada's case, he willingly signed a sponsorship and marketing agreement with PokerStars and he seems eager to embrace his role as a good-will ambassador for the game.

Would Moon have stayed away from the extra money and the extra opportunity? And if he did, would anyone rightly have been able to excoriate him for it?

This past summer, there was a small flap when Richard Austin, the winner of WSOP Event #35 - $5,000 Pot-Limit Omaha, refused all media requests after his victory. He even went so far as to tell WSOP officials that he had no interest in taking part in the "bracelet ceremony" scheduled for the next day and demanded that he be presented with his bracelet immediately following the conclusion of the tournament. WSOP Media Director Nolan Dalla, normally the coolest of cool cats, was apoplectic at Austin's temerity.

But let's be honest -- as former New York Jets head coach Herm Edwards once (in)famously said, "You play to win the game!" In poker, the prize for winning is the lion's share of the cash. A win doesn't obligate the winner to stand on a pedestal for any outside entity's marketing machine (which is what most of those "media" requests and the bracelet ceremony are all about).

We also have to be honest that there's an ancillary benefit for us, as poker players, when an online site like PokerStars offers Cada a bundle of cash to act as a figure-head of poker for a year. It draws players into the game. New players are never bad.

So while I don't believe that winning the Main Event obligated Cada (or anyone else) to act as a poker ambassador, I'm glad that they chose to do so. And if last night's interview with Cada is any indication, he should be a much better ambassador than the last, who never seemed comfortable under the intense spotlight of the poker world.