WGM#38 NOV/DEC 2015

杰 克 的 扑 克 旅 程 The house that Jack built
These days I’m the WSOP guy when it comes to
all things poker operations offline. It’s been a great
journey. In 2005 I came in as an assistant, the second
year I came in as co-director and since 2007 I’ve been
on my own in terms of the tournament director role.
But since that time my role has also expanded to
handle more things outside Las Vegas whether it be
the circuit events, international expansion, setting
up poker rooms, selling sponsorship or whatever it
might be. It’s been fantastic.
BB: Looking back to the poker boom you
mentioned, it obviously all started in 2003 when
Chris Moneymaker won the WSOP Main Event
and then Joe Hachem’s win in 2005 had a similar
impact in Australia which saw the game gradually
spread across Asia. Your timing couldn’t have been
any better!
JE: It was an interesting time, right? I came along
at a time when a lot of the guys in poker were
the old time poker guys and although they were
knowledgeable and great in their own right, it was
just a different time. Everything was much smaller.
It was a smaller community, the hospitality side of
things was different – everyone could get a buffet.
This was coming off of Binion’s closing and the
WSOP moving to the Rio. The ownership of the
WSOP moved to Harrah’s so there was the whole
corporate side of things for running poker.
At the same time online poker and poker
on television were coming through so they were
looking for people that could speak the language
but also understood the business. I had the benefit
of knowing how to deal with the poker players but
I also went to business school. Being able to work
with the players, understand the operations, the
maths behind all of the events, the structure and
payouts, the logistics of moving all the bodies in
and out, the registration program – I’ve been an
integral part of the development of all of those
processes over the years.
A lot of the stuff we do here when you look
back to those early days, I created a lot of it. I made
all the early errors when we were running those
first big tournaments but I also came up with the
solutions on how to run them better. There were a
lot of things people didn’t know because no one
ran multi-thousand people fields. Now we can run
a 22,000 player field [the new Colossus event at this
year’s WSOP attracted a record live field of 22,374
players – Ed] like it was a 200 player field because
the processes work. The things that change are the
dynamics that surround the tournament such as
the processing of the payouts and decreasing wait
times. Now that we’ve figured out how to run these
tournaments, our main thing is how to make the
experience better.
Every year we take feedback, we talk to
players, we brainstorm and we think of new events
that can enhance the schedule. Some things we
get right and some things we don’t. This year I
think we got a lot of things right and a couple of
things wrong but the things we got wrong weren’t
oversights, they were just things nobody thought
of. That’s where you learn and you grow. The
challenge is trying to oversee the improvements
we make through everyone that’s working for you.
I have 1,400 or 1,500 employees between all the
different areas and they all roll up to me one way
or the other. Some things you can’t predict like
computers going down on the night of Colossus
for four hours when you’ve got 700 people waiting
to get paid out of the 2,200 you were paying.
Or deciding to hold such a big event and have
everyone pre-register – we didn’t know we were
going to get 12,000 pre-registrations! Things like
that come up and you go, “Wow.”
BB: The WSOP has made a habit of introducing new
and innovative tournaments like the Colossus each
year. How do you come up with these new concepts?
JE: A few years ago we decided we’d create an
event, theme it like an anchor and build something
around it. When we first started tinkering with
anchors they were just basic No Limit Hold’em
events held each weekend throughout the WSOP
and we figured those would draw the masses.
People would come out for the weekend, some
would play two weekends and that was about it,
but then we realized there were so many similar
events available all over the place that people
would just pick and choose when they would
come. They’d think, “Well, if there is always a No
Limit Hold’em event every weekend I’ll just pick
the weekend that suits me best and play that one.”
So we then started thinking about how to
differentiate events to make people want to play
more weekends – to give the players a bit more
variety. That’s when we started coming up with
things like the Millionaire Maker and the Monster
Stack and now the Colossus. One thing we’ve
determined through feedback is that players want
the events to have a meaning or a definition – to
be defined as something. So the Millionaire Maker
had a guaranteed US$1 million for first place, the
Colossus had the biggest live tournament field
ever, the Monster Stack had a 10-times starting
stack which is unheard of.
The other thing unique about the WSOP is
that it’s the only place where you can really play all
the disciplines of poker because they’re not played
anywhere else. Some disciplines aren’t played a
great deal as a percentage but this is the place you
can come to play them because we keep them
alive. This is poker paradise and we want to keep
it that way. You can come here and play whatever
you want but also have a shot at really making it
big. You can win a bracelet, win a lot of money,
get on television and become a household name.
Your dreams can come true here at the WSOP and
I’m not sure anyone else offers anything remotely
close to that. You might go and win US$1 million
in another poker tournament but is it the same as
winning a WSOP bracelet and what comes with it?
I don’t think it’s even close.
BB: Obviously when running an event of this size,
problems will arise from time to time and there
was a fairly sizeable one this year in regards to the
new Modiano cards being used for the first time. A
number of players complained that the cards were
too thin and were easily marked. What went wrong?
JE: Well, Modiano has been a card manufacturer
for over 100 years. They’ve been around since
1868 and have been used all over Italy. They are
highly respected on every single level. We looked
at them because we had a connection through
our personnel and they were very gracious and
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