I’ve heard a lot about players in the past who have poker backers.  Basically what happens here is that the backers will put up some money for another player’s buy-in and possibly hotel room (or players) as something of an investment.  There are different arrangements depending on who the backer is but in the end, the backers always expect more in return than they give (hence the investment idea).

These backers can come in the form of major players or as just companies that invest in different interests and they almost always take some kind of huge cut from a big cash the player makes.  In addition to taking a cut, sometimes the backers will even want past money they put up for the player back as well.  Over the weekend I actually had the chance to talk to one of these backed players and get a little more insight into the backer world.

He said that he was backed by a company out of New York and had made some cashes during the WSOP this year and had cashed in some previous major tournaments as well.  However, he also said that he found himself almost 120K in debt to these backers before the WSOP and has had to win a lot of that money back.  With his WSOP cashes and mostly through online play, he has cut that debt down to about 15K but all of this has me wondering about something.

Why doesn’t he play exclusively online?  It seems as if he makes a lot more money that way and he won’t have some outstanding debt owed to a backing company either.  Sure he won’t get to travel to all the cool places that he does under the backing company as he’d be pretty busy playing online most of the time but eventually he’ll earn enough money to do what he wants anyways.  

In the end though, it’s his decision and it would be hard to give up all that traveling to different cities and countries to focus exclusively online.

Back when Jamie Gold was busy lucking into the $12 million prize pool in the 2006 World Series of Poker Main Event, the game of poker was rising into heights it had never experienced before.  Then came the dreaded UIGEA in October and poker players worst fears had come true.  The game they loved had become regulated and the money going towards it was being depleted. 

Last year’s top WSOP prize, which was won by Jerry Yang, fell down to $8.25 million and this was mostly the effect of less and less online players being able to get into the WSOP through satellites.  And clearly, just by judging from the top prize, things had fallen off a little bit in terms of overall buy-ins for the Main Event. 

However, this year the results are already in and the Main Event prize pool will be an enormous $64.3 million dollars with 666 players earning a share of it.  Even better news, the top prize this year is moving back up again to the tune of $9.1 million.  The 6,844 players who paid, or won, the $10,000 buy-in made this all possible.

But WSOP commissioner Jeffrey Pollack warns that, “The fact that we broke all of the records we set last year is terrific, but there may be years where we’re up, years where we’re down.”  But he did finish his statement by mentioning, “Bottom line is that we’re here for the long term and we’re not going anywhere, and I don’t know many poker properties that can say that.” 

Hopefully in the future the buy-ins will continue to be more towards the up side rather than the down so that the Main Event top prize, as well as other prizes, can climb back to the height they were at in 2006. 

Ever since 2003, the game of poker seems to have grown to epic proportions with each passing year.  Not only has the number of players entering poker shot up but so have the amount of TV shows dedicated to it.  But this growth seems to have really slowed as of late in both the online and TV sector and many people around the industry are starting to worry.

For instance, the 8th annual Full Tilt Online Poker Series just finished up on Sunday and perhaps the most telling numbers of the event were that the highest number of participants in a single tourney was 5,090 and the amount of people in the Main Event was 4,750. 

These numbers certainly indicate that poker is still popular enough to where people will pay $100 to $500 to buy-in to major online tournaments but contrast the FTOPS 8 figures with that of FTOPS 7.  In the 7th annual Full Tilt Online Poker Series, the stats were significantly higher as the biggest tournament featured 6,000 people in it while the Main Event had 5,291 people in it. 

Looking at the Main Event, this means that 541 more people chose to play in 2007 than did this year.  And it can’t be blamed on the buy-ins either as both years they were set at $500 +$35 (maybe 541 people just didn’t like Jennifer Harman as the host).  The prize pool was down too from $2,645,000 to $2,375,000.   

And while the FTOPS Main Event is just a single online tournament, it is one of the biggest and most publicized on the net and definitely deserves a look.   It also prompts one to question whether the popularity of poker as a whole is going downhill.  Thursday, I’ll talk about some of the TV trends as well in order to bring this into a bigger perspective.

I can’t help but thinking what life would be like to have the luck of Jamie Gold.  And no, I’m not just talking about the time he won $12 million using some of the luckiest bluff in the history of the WSOP.  Instead I’m talking about how he has the good fortune of co-hosting the third annual Celebrity Poker Tournament at the Playboy Mansion. 

Gold will host the event which takes place on May 17th with Khloe Kardashian from “Keeping Up with the Kardashians”.  Not only will Jamie have Khloe by his side as long as she can stand him but he will also be amidst the usual crowd of curvy Playboy Bunnies.  It’s almost enough to make a man jealous.

But not jealous in the sense that Gold actually has a chance with Khloe or the Bunnies (unless he brings some of his 2006 winnings along).  More so of the simple fact that Gold, despite his consistently average poker ability, seems to remain one of the stars of the poker world.

Anyways, for all of you West Coast people, the Celebrity Poker Tournament is a fund raiser as well for the Urban Health Institute which means it’s general admission.  The general admission is a little pricey at $500 and so is the buy-in for the tourney as it’s $1,500. 

Obviously though, this isn’t your average $1,500 buy-in ($2,000 counting admission) considering that you’d be inches away from the Bunnies and will get to see celebrities such as Phil Ivey, comedian Anthony Anderson, Phil Laak, Super Bowl Champ and Giants linebacker Antonio Pierce, and others listed that I have no idea of who they are.

Plus anyone who attends can participate in a silent auction where one of the items up for bids is private poker lessons from Jamie Gold.  Now this must be the real reason everyone is going.  Expect some fierce bidding.