The BLUFF Power 20

This morning the 2011 Bluff Power 20 list was released on the BLUFF Magazine website. The list is supposed to represent a snapshot, as of December 2010, of the 20 most influential people in poker. After some criticism of the list last year the process was opened up this year. 101 voters received ballots, "consisting of online operators, land-based operators, agents and media".

I put a fair deal of thought into my ballot and was curious to see how it measured up against the final list. Such lists, after all, are ready-made for debate. In fact that's probably their main purpose -- to get people talking. I was pleased to see that nine of my top 10 choices made the final list, and that overall 13 of my choices were there.

The names that appeared on my ballot but not on the final list I ranked 8th, 11th, 15th, and 17th-20th. No real surprise on 17th-20th as those were the slots I found the most difficult. They're also the slots where there should be the least amount of consensus. My #8 and #11 were "outside the box" choices. I stand by them but I'm not surprised they didn't make the final cut.

I debated the idea of sharing my ballot and the thought process that went into it but I don't think it would accomplish much. Different people view the concepts of "power" and "influence" in different ways. My view is neither right nor wrong. It's merely mine.

Still, I have to wonder what some of the other voters were thinking in order to produce this final list. I find the inclusion of one particular person in the Top 10 to be appalling. In other cases I feel like voters may have used last year's list as a starting post for casting this year's ballot without thinking, "Are these people influential and/or powerful in poker in December 2010?"

That's all part of the process when you ask a wide cross-section of 101 people to produce an arbitrary list. At least it was a fun exercise for me. Thanks to BLUFF Magazine for asking me to cast a ballot.

A footnote: no women appeared on the final list. I'm not sure a woman has ever made the list. I had two women on my ballot this year but I ranked them #15 and #19.

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Dateline Sao Paulo

Greetings from the Southern Hemisphere. My poker work has again taken me out of the US of A, this time to lovely Sao Paulo, Brazil for the 2011 PokerStars.net Latin American Poker Tour Brazil Main Event (look at me pimping out the full name instead of saying "LAPT Brazil"). It's my first return engagement with Brazil since I went to Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro in 2002.* I must not stick out too much because I've already been stopped on the street and asked for directions by a truck driver.**

Despite the potential for calamity with three legs to the trip -- one through Chicago -- Donnie and I ran good with our travel. His 1K status got us into the United lounges at LAX and O'Hare for free, and we touched down in Sao Paulo ten minutes early. All of our bags made it ten minutes early too.

The plan is to be here until Monday night. Otis and Change100 are also on the premises. For the moment we're all huddled in our respective hotel rooms, waiting out a "wrath of God" thunderstorm that (of course!) started while I was on the street sans umbrella. In five hours I've spent $7 on ATM fees, $80 on a cab, $175/night for an "adequate" hotel room and $15 on a rather pedestrian lunch. How the hell is Sao Paulo such an expensive town? Aren't I in South America?

Whatever. Vamo!

*Funny story about that trip. Strolling along the "minor league" samba parade one night my friend and I were jumped by a gang of five or six 18 year olds. I was yanked off my feet, from behind and by my neck, before we even knew what was happening.

Now that I think about it, there's nothing funny about that story at all.

**At least I think he asked for directions. I forgot to pack my dog-eared 2002 Portuguese phrase book, so I had no fucking clue what he was saying to me. He very well could have been asking me if I like men. The only Portuguese words I remember from 2002 are "thank you" and "pineapple", neither of which was going to help him with directions around town. Or my sexual orientation.

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The Week That Was

It's been a weird week for poker.

Things started with the announcement late last week that Zynga, the social media gaming company that has created popular Facebook games like Farmville, Mafia Wars and Zynga Poker, will hold a two-day "live event" at the Palms in Las Vegas on March 18-19. Nobody is quite sure what Zynga intends -- either with this live event or its future plans -- but signs are piling up that Zynga will try to move into the regulated online poker sphere (for real money) if and when that becomes a reality in the U.S. Zynga claims to have 7 million players daily and 37 million players overall. Even though all of those players are "play money" players, the poker industry should be watching Zynga very, very carefully.

Next came the announcement that Gabe Kaplan has been replaced as host for the new season of High Stakes Poker (which begins airing later this month) by Norm MacDonald. MacDonald is the kind of comedian you either love or hate. I happen to be a fan of his acerbic wit and am at least curious to see how that will translate to HSP. I didn't mind Kaplan as host but sometimes a product needs to be made fresh with a small change. We'll see.

A footnote to the HSP story was the continuing battle between PokerStars and Full Tilt over which TV shows their sponsored pros can appear on. No Full Tilt pros will be appearing on HSP this season, which most notably means no Phil Ivey and no Tom Dwan. I don't understand why this "battle" continues to rage. Both sites would seem to stand to have more to gain from cooperating with each other regarding TV shows that competing with each other but seem content to cut off their noses to spite their faces. Zynga's looming presence in the distance makes that strategy seem even more foolish.

Then came the Ashton Griffin ultra-marathon prop bet. If you missed this one, Griffin laid 3-1 on $300k that he could run 70 miles on a treadmill in a 24-hour period. Ordinarily I would pass over this type of story but for two blog posts that recently were written on CardRunners by one of the losers of the bet, Haseeb Qureshi.

Qureshi put himself through some searing soul-searching during and after the bet about what he was willing to subject people to all in the name of money. My good friend Otis, a veteran scribe and one of the first to enter the poker writing business some 6 years ago, said of these posts, "If on the level, probably the most important pieces of poker writing in years."

Finally, this morning Peter Eastgate announced his return to poker. He said his 8-month "hiatus" was a means to re-connect with who he is as a person and who he wants to be. The timing of the announcement was keyed to the release earlier this week of a partial list of competitors at the NBC National Heads-Up Championship (set for March 4-6). Eastgate is on that list. It was an amazing coincidence that Eastgate should be so candid about spending "quality time with my family" and having "an opportunity to figure out who I am" on the heels of Qureshi's tales about the Griffin prop bet.

All of these stories have a wait-and-see component to them: What will Zynga do next? Will Norm succeed? What's the next battleground for PS and FPT? Will there be any lasting take-away from the Qureshi and Eastgate tales? For a culture that celebrates instant gratification, that qualifies this week as weird.

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