If you saw Celebrity Poker Showdown on Bravo last night with James Woods, you heard him say that playing poker against rank amateurs is especially challenging, because you don't know what they're going to do, because they do random things that don't make any sense. In the long run, you'll beat them, but in the short run, they'll frustrate you and take your money. And I agree with that -- I used to play pretend-money poker at PokerRoom.com, and eventually, it got boring, and one of Pool Boy (The Poker Fiend)'s arguments was that I was bored because people who aren't playing for real money play stupidly and badly, and it's boring. Which is true, and which is why he always wanted me to play for money. And because I wasn't interested in that, I stopped doing it, for the most part, because . . . well, stupid, bad poker is boring.

And what Woods was saying, it seemed to me, was that when people who don't know what they're doing are put in a position like they are on Celebrity Poker Showdown, where they're playing for charity, it's essentially not real money. They don't really have anything riding on it. They play like the assholes I ran into online, not playing for real money and therefore just sort of testing theories of how to do it. People just behave differently when they don't actually stand to lose anything.

But the Slate piece seems to assume that everyone who came to the World Series of Poker because of Moneymaker completely sucked, and therefore only have a chance of winning because their mere presence drives the role of luck up to such a feverish pitch. And I doubt that they all completely suck. Quite frankly, it's just as easy for me to envision serious sucking from a rich guy who has all the money in the world and buys a seat at that thing because it's fun as it is to envision sucking from a guy who watched Moneymaker on ESPN, spent ten hours a day at one of the online poker games for six months straight, and is now in Vegas. I mean, consider this quote from the Slate piece:

When the field gets bloated, there is less chance that the smartest, wiliest players will win, and it is more likely that the final table will turn into an extended amateur hour. In an NCAA tournament with more than 2,000 teams, the top seed would probably lose on a buzzer beater eventually.

Okay. But there's also an argument to be made that part of what's going on is just democracy -- that poker, like everything else, is less likely to have five guys win every damn thing when you open it up to everybody in the country and make it insanely more popular. In other words, not all of those guys showing up for "amateur hour" suck. I mean, they point out that the guy mentioned in the first paragraph who booted Dan Harrington was an economics and math major. Come on. It's possible that in addition to the field being "bloated," poker actually does favor an economics and math major. It's not like being good with numbers isn't helpful.

Ultimately, I think his thesis -- that competitions are boring if the winners are people you've never seen before -- isn't sound. Everybody plays poker differently, and the reason poker on TV is fun is both that it has a kind of puzzle-ish aspect and that it has a dramatic aspect. My personal opinion is that the guys you're going to see rising up out of the online tournaments are guys who can learn (or are inclined toward) the face-to-face aspect, as opposed to just the numbers game. Playing online is as close to . . . I don't know, "cold" poker as you're going to get. No faces, no nothing. The guys who are just numbers geniuses are going to get trampled by the BS that some of the guys at the World Series are capable of pulling.

But I'm not sure I agree that it's intrinsically boring seeing unknowns beat pros. God knows I would pay good money to watch some no-name whip some of the professionals I've seen on TV. And if you've ever watched World Poker Tour, you know some of the nitwits I'm talking about, HELLMUTH.