Annie RKH 8 Mar 2015

From Perfect Storm to Down Cycle and a Whole Different Ball Game. Poker Interview with Jack McClelland

Our #WeeklyHero @Jack McClelland is a man who has seen it all in his 37 years in poker and who has helped shape the industry as we know it. He talked to @Nicolas Levi about the 'perfect storm', the rise of televised poker and the 'lottery mentality', and the subsequent down cycle.

Stay tuned for Part II of the interview with Jack McClelland and his thoughts on poker as the casinos' 'doorstep child', on the importance of personal service in poker, and his own top 3 professional priorities!

After a huge poker boom, the industry is now contracting, and some are seriously worried as to its future. Professional poker is suffering, while amateur poker seems as strong as ever. Could poker as we know be about to die? How is the industry going to adapt?

Well, in a way, we had the perfect storm. The Internet came along and suddenly people could play at home and learn poker - for free or for a small amount of money. Because if you just go to a casino, poker is a very intimidating game.

Television and the 'lottery mentality'

Before 1998, when I used to run the World Series, it would take months before the ESPN had it on TV, And you never knew when it would be on, it might be a one-hour show at 3 am, or 4 pm, you had to be a really dedicated poker person to find it.

I was fortunate enough to do the first major televised live tournament in the Isle of Man. You could simply feel the electricity hundreds of yards away. A few months later, I was in Vienna, and I did a televised heads-up tournament where two teenage guys from Finland had these little lipstick cameras and four nights later it’s on TV in the United States! And I’m thinking, why did it take ESPN nine months?!!..

So I could see the potential. About that time I went to work for the Bellagio and the World Poker Tour came along with the idea to do this tour where they would show the hole cards, And my partner @Douglas Dalton asked me what I thought, and I said it would work. Because I’d seen the Isle of Man, I’d seen Vienna, I’d seen the excitement it creates.

So we got the OK from @Bobby Baldwin to run the World Poker Tour and I called my friends, Doug called his friends, and next thing, they got the whole tour going. And then a year later, when they did TV, it just exploded.

A little bit later, @Chris Moneymaker won $2.5 million on 40 dollars, and you got the lottery mentality in there, 'Wow, with 40 dollars I can win millions!'

That’s what the people want. They can sit in England, or Canada, or France, or Florida, and for 20-40-100 dollars, they can win a seat to the World Series, win a seat to the Bellagio, or anywhere else. And that was what was really enticing about the whole situation.

The Down Cycle

Then, in the United States, when the government got involved, and with Black Friday a little later, it really, really hurt. You know, I’ve been in the business for 5 decades. There are not many tricks to tournament poker that I don’t know and I was at the end of my wits at the Bellagio.

We used to be inundated with Europeans, we used to have a huge Asian following at the tournaments, and it all just disappeared. Asian players would go to Hong Kong and the Europeans would stay home and play in the EPT because of the PokerStars. And I don’t blame them. When I go to Poland, I visit the different sites and PokerStars have all the action. Like Jack Binion used to say, ‘action begets action’. So that’s where people go.

If I was European and I had to come to the United States to pay 30% tax and maybe not get it back, when I could stay home and play big events where I could win a quarter of a million or half a million, why would I come?...

So I don’t blame the players, it’s not the players’ fault at all. Basically, we had non-gaming people get involved and that’s what really did the damage.

When we had the Internet really going, with all the sponsorship deals and so on, there was a lot of loose money around. Once the Internet more or less went away, the loose money went away with it. And then there was the slowdown of the economy, People that had money remained cautious with it. It used to be, if you had $100,000 and you blew it, it was not a big deal, you’d get it back in a month or two. Now, it’s simply not there. Now you go back and start grinding, trying to make a living. It’s just very difficult. I mean, on the operators’ side it’s difficult and on the players’ side it’s 20 times harder.

We were on a run for about five years, when it was just up-up-up all the time. And now we’re in a down cycle. Hopefully, there will be an up-cycle again.

A Completely Different Ball Game

Before 1985, which is when they opened up stud and hold’em poker in California, the average age of the players was probably about 60. The older people were playing and young people were looking for something else. Over the next decade, it dropped to 40 then as we got closer to 2000, it went back up to 50. But then the World Poker Tour came along, and ESPN got connected to the World Series, and they started showing Poker After Dark, and all the other television shows. The next year at the World Series, all of a sudden, the average age was around 23 years! It just made a completely different dynamic.

I’m 63 years old and I started palying when I was 6. But the way you learned was by playing. You play, you go broke, you learn, start over again, go broke again... Nowadays, by the time they’re 18-19 years old, kids have played 3 million hands, and they’ve got the computer to anayze what they should have done in this or that situation. It’s a completely different ball game.