For many of us in the poker world, being the next victor in the World Series of Poker Championship Event would be a lifelong dream, the epitome of playing the game. Becoming poker’s next World Champion is the goal of anyone who seemingly has ever picked up a hand of cards and a few poker chips. But is being poker’s World Champion a curse rather than a benefit?
2008 World Champion Peter Eastgate was recently the feature of an interview with Dirk Oetzmann of PokerListings.com in which Eastgate made several controversial remarks. Playing at the WSOP Circuit event in Tbilisi, Georgia, as a guest of the online sports betting/casino/poker site Adjarabet, Eastgate honestly answered Oetzmann’s queries as to where he has been over the past seven years in regards to poker. For some it may come as a surprise that Eastgate isn’t very interested in pursuing the lifestyle of the jet setting poker player.
“I haven’t been playing poker seriously for about six years,” Eastgate mentioned to Oetzmann in the interview. “I moved from London back to Denmark in 2013 and tried to study bio-medicine, (but) I failed four out of four exams so I couldn’t continue. Since 2014, I’ve just been drifting around…I’m not bored, but I need to set some goals, find a passion one way or another. I don’t have any financial worries, so I can’t complain.”
When asked if he missed the game, Eastgate didn’t sound like he really desires to be a part of it anymore. “When I started out 10 years ago, I thought I’d do this every day for the rest of my life,” Eastgate says to Oetzmann. “Around 2010, I realized that I had accomplished everything I wanted (but) I grew tired of how my mood depended so much on how I fared at the tables…I was an addict, a degenerate gambler (and) at some point I just got fed up. I’ll play here in Georgia but I’m not going to play (when I return).”
While it seems that Eastgate is aiming to find some balance to his life, it does lead one to ask the question – is being the World Champion a blessing or a curse?
We’ll have to look at this fairly logically. Let’s start by taking away the last three men who have been crowned poker’s mythical “World Champion” – 2015 winner and reigning World Champion Joe McKeehen, 2014 victor Martin Jacobson and 2013 winner Ryan Riess – because they are all still in that proverbial “honeymoon” phase, the afterglow if you will, of having captured poker’s greatest prize. Looking back ten years from the men who have won the WSOP Championship Event previously – which just happens to coincide with the “Internet Age” of the WSOP – and we have a mixed bag of success and…well, you be the judge.
Success Stories
By any metric used, we’d have to put both 2005 World Champion Joe Hachem and 2010 World Champion Jonathan Duhamel in this category.
Since his victory, Duhamel has gone on to capture two more WSOP bracelets, oddly enough in High Roller tournaments. He won the 2015 “High Roller for One Drop” (the $111,111 buy-in version) and, at the WSOP Europe, earned his third bracelet in winning the €25,000 High Roller in Berlin. Along with his World Championship in 2010, Duhamel has been able to lock down 83 professional cashes around the world from tournament poker, earning almost $15.5 million. That’s not too shabby.
Hachem may not have had the success at the WSOP that Duhamel has, but he’s done pretty well elsewhere. Hachem is one of only five players to have won a WSOP Championship Event bracelet and a World Poker Tour title (joining Doyle Brunson, Carlos Mortensen, Scotty Nguyen and Dan Harrington in that exclusive club) after winning the 2007 WPT Doyle Brunson North American Poker Classic. In his 80 cashes around the world, Hachem has racked up $12.1 million in earnings.
Jury Still Deliberating
While it may seem as though they’ve been successful, there are several former World Champions – Chris Moneymaker (2003), Greg Raymer (2004), Joe Cada (2009), Pius Heinz (2011) and Greg Merson (2012) – that just haven’t seemed to have rung up the success that you might expect from a former world titleholder. Cada has the best argument as to being bumped up to the level of Duhamel and Hachem, with a second bracelet win in 2014, but those two years constitute more than 90% of his career earnings.
Moneymaker and Raymer have been able to parlay their Championship Event victories into long-term sponsorship deals with PokerStars (Moneymaker continues to enjoy the fruits of that relationship; Raymer ended his deal in 2011) and both still continue to play the game and be great ambassadors. Moneymaker even was able to become one of the managers of a Global Poker League franchise (named after him, even), so it might be disingenuous to say that it’s been a dud of a career for him. Raymer has also played well in many events but hasn’t been able to grasp that brass right again.
Heinz and Merson have ambled along also and, since they’ve just come off their “honeymoons,” they might just be figuring out that it’s time to get going and that they can’t continue to live off the glow of “World Champion.” Still, with this group of men, it is best to say that the jury is still out on them.
Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?
There are two men that fall into this category – Jamie Gold (2006) and Jerry Yang (2007) – and it isn’t like they dropped off the face of the earth…it just might seem that way.
Winning the World Championship arguably did little to help Gold. First there was the nasty little tete a tete with a former associate over a verbal agreement that was settled out of court, then there was the factor that Gold just really wasn’t that good at poker. Before we hear Gold, a former television producer/talent agent, scream so loud that the “HOLLYWOOD” sign shatters, consider this: that 2006 World Championship victory scored Gold a $12,033,015 payday, the largest in Championship Event history. Gold’s career earnings since 2005? $12,446,538…that’s right, in every year other than 2006 and 2015 (where he had his best year since 2006 in earning $132,221), Gold earned five figures each year from tournament poker…you’d think a “legendary player” could do a bit better than that.
Yang’s issues are similar to Gold’s. After his win in 2007, he started a restaurant, Pocket 8’s Sushi and Grill, that took up a tremendous amount of his time. Not really a “professional” poker player to begin with, Yang doesn’t spend a great deal of time chasing the circuit and, as a result, his record shows it: of his $8,441,789 in career earnings, his 2007 World Championship winnings ($8,251,324) constitute virtually all of it.
Summary
So is winning poker’s mythical “World Championship” a curse? There are many people who would like to be cursed with the demons of having millions of dollars fall on them, the adulation of an entire community and basically a free pass into any casino around the world (OK, maybe just Caesars properties) for the rest of eternity. At the end of the day, however, these men are probably all quite happy with the courses their lives have taken them – and what being the victor of the World Series of Poker Championship Event has been able to do for them.
