Our guest this week is Mike Sexton, poker player and ambassador, and cohost of the WPT. Mike has a new book out called Life’s a Gamble which we will discuss. Shoot us your questions for Mike.
Gambling With an Edge this week
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I believe I heard a past interview where you interviewed Mike where he briefly talked about playing home games in NC. Can you ask him what poker games he was playing back then and if he had an edge over his opponents?
Ask him about the current state of the World Poker Tour in the present and where does he see the organization going in the future? Ask him if they can add more variations of poker to play on the WPT website.
Both your questions made the podcast — which will be posted tomorrow
Awesome! I like Mike. I think he is a good commentator and has done good things for the poker community.
1. I’ve found that it’s much, much harder to do well in tournaments than it was 10-15 years ago. This is because of two factors: a) the skill level of the average player is greater, and b) the casinos running the tournaments are taking much bigger fees out of the prize pool (the WSOP being just one case in point).
So my question would be twofold: is there still enough “dead money” in the average WPT field to enable an above-average player to overcome the rake/fee/house take, and at what point does the house cut become so large that EVERYONE has negative equity (9% at the WSOP seems to skate awfully close to nobody-can-win; it’s like the house take at the race track)?
I would observe that for California live poker, that “nobody can win” point has already been passed due to the rake size and structure there, so it stands to reason that such a point exists for tournaments, too. (And if Mike doesn’t want to discuss this question for fear of biting the hand that feeds him, I understand.)