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While scouring the WSOP updates this summer, you can’t have failed to notice numerous campaigns for nominees for the Poker Hall of Fame.
One name that seems to have come up time and again is that of Mike Sexton – poker player, Ambassador of Poker, WPT legend. Over a 40-year career, he’s played for the highest stakes, currently sits in the Top Ten of WSOP all-time cashes, has consistently earned the respect of his peers, and contributed, through his association with online gaming and the WPT, to the ongoing growth of the game. Oh, and he has one of the biggest smiles in poker. The perfect reason, then, for the man himself to give up a few moments of his precious time for WPT Poker magazine.
Mike - tournament of champions winner, WPT announcer; what else are we missing out on here?
Oh, I don’t know. I’m so old I’ve done everything there is to do in the poker world!
Over the years, you’ve seen poker tournaments grow, expand and explode. We’ve just had over 6,000 people in the $1,000 event [at the WSOP] and 201 people show up for a 40K buy-in. What do you think of the attendances at the series overall?
Well, it’s fantastic. I think they were expecting a little more in the $40,000 buy-in. Still, that’s a lot of money to come up with; you’re talking about no time to run satellites or anything. People have to come and fork out the 40K to enter that tournament and it’s a very tough field. As you can see, though, the smaller buy-ins are just overloaded and selling out every day. It’s just impressive how many people have come into the poker world, how many people want to try and get a bracelet at the World Series of Poker.
What’s the strangest tournament structure you’ve ever seen, somewhere you just went ‘Wow, this is insane!’?
Oh golly, looking back, probably the early main events of the World Series of Poker. I mean we’ve always just started with 10,000 in chips. They didn’t give you these two or three times the chips like they do nowadays when you play big tournaments. And we didn’t have structure to match, you know, so you had to get off to a good start or you went out early in those days. Now, when they double and triple up the amount that you start with it’s fine as long as the structure stays the same as it would have done at the lower buy-in.
We’ve seen some pretty long final tables this year, despite players saying the main body of play is fairly well-structured. Is there a happy medium in there somewhere?
I think there is a happy medium and I think even players understand that you just can’t take 16-hour final tables and expect to run them with the same staff and players – it’s a bit much. I don’t think any final table should last over eight hours.
OK, some quick ones. If you could relocate your own mini-Vegas to any place in the world and you built it according to Mike Sexton’s rules, where would you do it?
It’d have to been some warm weather climate, obviously, and maybe some Californian paradise would be my guess.
Fantasy poker leagues are all the rage right now. Who would be your top 5 picks?
You want to pick the guys who are good players, but who play a lot of events. So I’d have Barry Greenstein, Chris Ferguson, Daniel Negraneau, Erick Lindgren. Plus, if I knew for sure Phil Ivey had a $5 million bet on himself against other players to win a bracelet, where he’d be focussed and play in all the tournaments, you’d have to pick him. I think he’s the best poker player in the world.
Sounds like Ivey’s got the golf bets on again. You’ve played golf with all these guys; what’s the craziest golf bet you’ve ever seen?
The great think about golf is that the difference in skill level doesn’t matter. That’s the beauty of it and why it’s the greatest gambling game there is because you can equalize skill, by either taking distance off the tee, or by giving a guy strokes, and once you know your opponent’s skill level, you should be able to match up accordingly to give yourself a fair game. All the best poker players that I know, all the high stakes poker players, they love to play golf, and they love to gamble.
Out of all the players from the last season or two of the WPT that you’d have had nailed on to do well in the World Series, who would it have been?
I’ll tell you what, the guy that just won our WPT World Championship in Season VII, Yevgeniy Timoshenko. He’s just turned 21 years old, has never even been old enough to play in the World Series, yet has over $3 million in career earnings. He looks like he’s about 13 years old, but when Stu Ungar came around and won his first two titles, he looked like he was 13 years old as well, so you just wonder if it’s going to be deja vu for this kid. [At time of writing, Timoshenko had just the one cash in this year’s World Series of Poker but the main event had yet to be played]. |
