Live coverage of WSOP made it one to remember

By Mark Lasser

Somewhere around 1 a.m. on a recent night I wondered if I was going to see the sunrise as I watched the final two players in the World Series of Poker battle six hours and through 119 hands in one of the longest heads-up matches in the history of the main event.

A few months ago, 6,865 folks sat down to play a game of cards in an elimination tournament that culminated early in the morning of Nov. 9 when one man, Pius Heinz from Germany, played a final hand against Czech player Martin Stasko.

As the final card hit the felt at around 1:30 a.m., one player remained with all the chips. Pius Heinz knocked out Stasko and won $8,715,638 and a gold-and-diamond bracelet as confetti rained down from the theater at the Rio hotel in Vegas.

Heinz ran to his fans in the stands, who were mostly adorned in white hoodies, the informal uniform Heinz had adopted. Stasko, who took home a consolation prize of over $5 million, paced the floor a bit before moving to his supporters and getting a hug from his father.

In the final moments, Stasko made a mistake. And that’s all it takes to lose this game, whether it’s the first day, the final table or heads up. One mistake. Stasko tried to bully back at Heinz with a 7-10 of clubs, but Heinz was holding an Ace-King and called. Neither player paired, so the Ace high won giving Heinz the victory.

ESPN should be credited with the best coverage ever of the WSOP main event. This year, for the first time, they carried the event live. That’s a challenge for any competitive event, but televising poker live presents unique challenges since the players can’t be allowed to know what their competition is doing, yet the audience needs to know in order to be engaged.

To make it all work, ESPN delayed transmission by 15 minutes and showed hole cards only after the hand was completed. This did change the dynamics of the game, though. At one point, when the table was down to four players, the game recessed for a dinner break. At this point, Stasko’s fans, who were watching the game and taking notes, gave Stasko feedback about the hands he was folding. Stasko is a very math-oriented player and was playing too tight, a fact that the other players were exploiting by liberally raising him light (with weak cards) because they knew his folding percentages were high.

Heinz is a particularly aggressive player who has no problem betting several rounds with no pair to induce incorrect folds. Like a kid being bullied on the playground, Stasko had to push back at some of this aggression if he was going to win. When play resumed after the dinner break, we saw a new Stasko. All of a sudden he was raising pre-flop with a much wider range of hands and calling Heinz and Ben Lamb’s raises and continuation bets rather than folding.

This gear shift was primarily a result of the new format ESPN rolled out allowing players to know what was happening in close to real time.

The other huge benefit of seeing this event in real time is it more accurately reflects the game of No Limit Texas Hold’em. So much of a final table occurs in hands that never see a flop. It’s a slow, patient process that’s completely lost when the event is edited down to only the action hands.

So many amateurs have been influenced by the non-stop action of edited poker broadcasts that they become manic players and can’t figure our why they’re losing. Now they can see how deliberate professionals players actually are in every hand and in every betting round. That’s a giant leap for poker.

A final note on the quality of play. This may have been the highest quality final table that I’ve ever witnessed. In past years we’ve often seen a weak, lucky player penetrate to the end. Not this year. I’ll be happy to dodge any of the players at the 2012 final table. A great year for the game and a big congratulations to Ben Lamb as Player of the Year and to recent Poker Hall of Fame inductees Barry Greenstein and Linda Johnson.

Mark B. Lasser is Denver writer and international poker player. He regularly plays in Colorado, Arizona, California, Missouri and Nevada. You can hear him talk about gambling and casinos every Friday at 5 PM on KEZW AM 1430. Readers can send questions and comments to him at ColoradoPokerMark@comcast.net.