It’s been just a few days since Philly-area player Joe McKeehen took down the “November Nine” finale of the World Series of Poker’s 2015 main event, finishing off a rout of the final table unseen since 2006 and Jamie Gold’s luckbox romp through the competition. But comparing McKeehen to Gold isn’t exactly fair to McKeehen, who despite his relative youth (age 24) is a better player today than Gold was or is or ever will be.
Instead this is more of a retrospective look at the November Nine finale, its expectations and results, and how it all fits into both Caesars’ and the poker world’s wants and needs moving forward.
To a lot of people, expectations for this year’s November Nine weren’t all that high. There weren’t any huge names remaining, once Daniel Negreanu was bounced from the proceedings in 11th place. Eight of this year’s nine finalists were, however, professional players, in the technical sense that they all make their living playing the game both online, live, or both.
Joe McKeehen does the money-brick pose after winning the 2015 WSOP main event. (Photo source: WSOP.com)
A lot of us find the parade of 20-something online pros taken down the WSOP ME year after year to be boring, and yes, McKeehen largely fits that profile. McKeehen is the ninth straigbt under-30 player to win the main event, — oddly enough, Gold was the last “oldster” to do it, back in 2006 — and that’s a testament to the endurance and concentration required just to get through to the November Nine, if nothing else; it’s become a young man’s game.
Yet McKeehen at least presented himself as amiable, and post-win, has been making the public rounds. That’s a far sight better than Jerry Yang was capable of back in 2007 or that a couple of others have been able to do since. And any of the nine finalists this year was heaps better than the prospect of the eventual 14th-place finisher, Justin Schwartz, taking it down; had the noxious Schwartz won, it may well have killed televised poker as we know it.
So the November Nine began with few expectations. The big good guy of Day 6 (Negreanu) was out, as was the big bad guy (Schwartz). There weren’t huge story lines remaining, it seemed, and industry interest seemed low.
When the first of three November Nine sessions played out, those low expectations seemed justified. The players appeared plastic and the slow play was beyond tedious, in a nearly six-hour broadcast of nearly unwatchable poker.
And then, it got better. Day two of the November Nine (or technically, Day 7B of the event), was faster-paced and featured plenty of interesting hands, and the three-player conclusion — even though it was essentially a walkover by McKeehen — still had its moments.
There were decent side stories as well. While record-setting 72-year-old Pierre Neuville fell fairly early, in 7th spot, 61-year amateur Neil Blumenfeld held on all the way to the final three, until a poorly played pair of deuces spelled his exit, dashed by McKeehen’s waiting pocket queens. Both players were the oldest November Niners ever (Steve Gee was 57 when he made the final table), and Neuville was the oldest main event finalist since 2007, when South Africa’s Raymond Rahma (also 72), made it all the way to third.
And there was the tale of McKeehen’s earlier escape via bad beat on Day 6 to Beckley, another Philly-area player who ended up being McKeehen’s final foe. By that time, though, McKeehen had the field covered, and Beckley had spent enough of his time backing up the pay scale to second that he never mounted a serious charge to McKeehen’s giant stack. That stuff all ended quick, and it was just as well, since the good-theater part of it was over.
So, one could write the tale of the 2015 November Nine like so, and not be accused of being inaccurate: Slow, often-boring play, and no serious challenges to the primary chip leader.
Except it was better than that, really.
This writer was among those who wondered exactly how marketable the November Nine was going to be in the future, if the 2015 finale lived down to its advance hype and early returns. The good part of that story is that the conclusion, sessions two and three of the November Nine, were quite a bit better than expected. I found the watching of those sessions to be enjoyable, and I think most poker fans will as well, as they become available on various ESPN channels for replay in the months ahead.
The WSOP and televised poker in general face plenty of challenges in the coming years, and let’s face it: there’s not the mainstream excitement over poker that existed a decade ago. That’s why every single WSOP November Nine is important, in its own way. The poker, and the packaging thereof, doesn’t have to be great; it just has to be good enough. And this year, I think the WSOP main event succeeded.
That’s good news for Caesars Entertainment as well. The beleaguered casino-entertainment giant doesn’t have a lot of good-news outlets these days, amid the corporate parent’s ongoing financial woes. The World Series of Poker has been one of the company’s consistent profit-makers for well over a decade. That’s why the WSOP and its corporate overseers spend so much time tweaking the slate of events from one year to the next, and why they’re so ready to try something like the entire “November Nine” concept itself… if the marketing opportunities arise.
In that environment, it’s more crucial to avoid the huge negative experience than it is to try for the maximum positive outcome. It’s why the possibility of a horrible 2015 November Nine was so awful, something that loomed even larger once Negreanu departed. That wholly negative scenario didn’t come to pass, fortunately. Pretty good? Yeah, the 2015 November Nine was that, overall. And that was plenty good enough.
