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Integrity - Part II: Sooner or Later? That's the $64,000 Question!
by Roy Cooke
Sooner or later, it's going to happen. The $64,000 question is,
"When?"

I'm too young to remember the TV show The $64,000 Question and the
other quiz shows of the '50s. But they were the hottest thing on
television - hotter even than poker on television is today. They were
big money, too; their cash prize money adjusted for inflation translate
equivalently to some of the prize money in 21st-century televised poker
tournaments. And those shows, like poker, held out the allure that
people on the street could have a shot at the big time. They, like
today's TV poker, were as much about fantasies and hope as anything.

Television was just entering its prime, the networks dominated the
national stage, and big corporate America had its money and power
behind the quiz shows. As so tellingly portrayed in the Robert
Redford-directed movie Quiz Show, the whole thing came tumbling down in
a U.S. Congressional investigation over cheating scandals. American
entertainment hadn't seen anything like it since the 1918 Chicago
White Sox of Shoeless Joe Jackson, forever to be known as the Black
Sox, tanked the World Series, which led to the creation of the
omnipotent position of commissioner of baseball.

Not long ago, I watched a major tournament final table on television,
in which one of the finalists had been bankrolled into it by another
finalist. I know the principals involved fairly well, and I watched the
play fairly closely. I genuinely believe there was no collusion
involved, and I have some expertise in identifying collusion. They both
played to win. But, it got me thinking.

Tournament poker has a fairly short history, really born in the late
1970s. It has enjoyed several growth spurts over the years, fueled by
the promotional genius of Benny Binion and Amarillo Slim Preston, the
shrewd business sense of Jack Binion, Eric Drache, and Jack McClelland,
the California poker boom, the opening of the East Coast to poker, the
twin phenomena of the Internet and cable television, and all capped off
by Chris Moneymaker's 2003 World Series of Poker win. It's gone
from small time to big time, as I've watched.

The tournament phenomenon began about the same time as my poker career,
and in my early days, I competed and won a few healthy prizes before I
realized that my forte was the live ring game. But I have watched the
growth of tournament poker throughout its life, played from time to
time, backed a few competitors, bought a piece of a player here and
there, and heard almost every tournament story, true or false. One of
my favorites is about the well-known tournament trail character with a
bankruptcy and a pile of IRS liens who offers to cash your wins for a
modest $2,000 fee. He makes a few bucks and takes the (uncollectible)
IRS hit. I'm not sure it's true, but it tickles me. Of course, lots
of stories involve accusations of impropriety. Most but not all of
them, in my opinion, have been unfounded. But I've heard just about
every cheat 'em to beat 'em scam theory there is, usually from
somebody explaining why he didn't finish in the money.

Sooner or later, there's going to be a Godzilla-sized poker cheating
scandal. There's too much money in play - and too many smart people
trying to figure out how to beat the system. You can't put that much
cash on the table in a population of millions of tourney players
ranging from quality poker minds to professional angle shooters to
average working Joes to high-IQ geeks to brilliant psychopaths to the
lowest form of hustler and expect everybody to act like a gaggle of
nuns.

I'm not talking about cheating, collusion, and partnerships in
tournaments. I'm talking about a full-blown scandal: millions of
dollars at stake on national television, and investigative reporters
from the mainstream media, live feeds on CNN and ESPN, and maybe even
Quiz Show-type Congressional hearings and IRS audits; a Black Sox kind
of scandal, threatening the very existence of one of America's
favorite pastimes, creating the possibility of a dictatorial control
like that of Kenesaw Mountain Landis to save the game, or maybe even
killing off the game in its present form altogether.

Like public cardroom and Internet poker, tournament poker's best
interests are served if the games are honest and if people believe they
are honest. The people behind tournament poker know this quite well,
and very much want it to be honest. Players, sponsors, producers,
regulators, and networks are all served by high standards of integrity.
The industry must and should do everything in its power to protect the
game, for the sake of its own survival.

There's nothing wrong with teams of poker players. Tournament history
is full of backers who put 10 or 20 players into a tournament.
Competitors taking a piece of each other is practically a tournament
tradition. It happens in other individual competitive endeavors, from
tennis to golf to bridge to auto racing, although each of those has its
own issues, which are different from poker's.

The key is transparency, full disclosure. If everybody knows who has an
interest in the outcome of a player's results, the likelihood of
impropriety is significantly lessened. It also creates opportunities
for examination of the play of hands, a higher standard of scrutiny for
those who have an interest in each other. Such transparency, of course,
is not an easy thing to enforce.

Players on the same money, potentially colluding, are not the only
threat to the integrity of tournaments. From time to time over the
years, there have been suspicions about dealers in some major
tournaments being in the employ of competitors. The poker industry
recognized this for the threat to its very existence that it was, and
has made serious efforts to keep it clean. One way to address this risk
is to have standards of training and background checks for dealers.
Another is to use mechanical shufflers.

The Internet is full of ideas about how to cheat in tournaments,
ranging from daubing and contact lenses to advanced electronic
communication equipment. With millions, even tens of millions, of
dollars at stake in any given event, how far might the unscrupulous be
willing to go?

Internet tournaments are just as vulnerable to integrity problems as
live tournaments, and perhaps more so. There are thousands of small
tournaments on the Internet every day, and dozens of big tournaments
every week. The solutions to Internet integrity issues are somewhat
different, as addressed in my last column, but Internet tournaments are
the path to live tournaments for many players, and must be factored
into any long-term plans for tournaments. How much should the industry
be willing to spend to protect the integrity of Internet tournaments?
What should they spend it on?

As I have written before, the poker industry is under a quiet but
steady attack from regulators at the state and federal levels. If and
when a scandal happens, they will swoop down on our industry like
vultures on roadkill. The biggest money in poker today is in tournament
poker. The most public money in poker today is in tournament poker. The
richest potential rewards to the scumbags of the world are in
tournament poker. Eventually, the weight of governmental scrutiny and
regulation will fall on tournament poker - and tournament poker must
protect itself, for the sake of itself, for the sake of players around
the world, and for the sake of the poker industry as a whole.

In addition to taking proactive measures such as disclosing who has an
interest in whom, raising standards to protect the integrity of the
shuffle and deal, electronic counter-surveillance measures and the
like, tournament poker must develop a strategy, a plan. It must know
before something bad happens what it will do when something bad does
happen. It must not react to scandal, it must be ready for scandal -
or else suffer dire consequences.

Of course, the question is: Who will do this? Who is poker? Who is
tournament poker? That is a $64,000 question for another column.



Roy Cooke played winning professional poker for more than 16 years. He
is a successful real estate broker/salesperson in Las Vegas. If you
would like to ask Roy poker-related questions, you may do so online at
www.UnitedPokerForum.com. His longtime collaborator, John Bond, is a
free-lance writer in South Florida.

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[email protected] wrote:

[igotskillz.com]

I mentioned how a few Big Names have helped me and i forgot to mention
Roy Cooke. Although I haven't studied much of his theory I owe much
credit to the life story he tells. His Auto-Bio gave me strength when i
didn't "know" that i could be a profitable player.

Thanks again to the great players who pass along knowledge that would
take us many years to learn.


www.igotskillz.com