The PokerListings Daily 3-Bet is hard-to-remove Malygos, a Babbling Book minion and one soul-crushing afternoon poker news polymorph hail mary.
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Today in the 3-Bet we find the WSOP Main Event on ESPN going to almost (real-time), Gus Hansen gets ready to gamble and a gamer ditches poker for Hearthstone.
1) Bye Bye N9, Hello Real-Time
This, poker fans, is the droid we've been looking for.
ME gets spotlight it deserves.
In a major announcement this morning the WSOP revealed a major shift in its signature 2017 Main Event coverage with a new 4-year deal with ESPN and Poker Central.
What does it entail? In short:
- The end of a 4-month delay for the final table (aka the November Nine)
- Daily live coverage (on 30-min delay) on ESPN from July 8-17 and July 20-22
- Main Event final table plays out live (on delay) July 20-22
- Poker Central will have select live streams tba
Which, wow. That's a big deal. First, it brings the immediacy of both playing and watching the Main Event alive again.
It also brings back the mental/physical grind of going all the way from Day 1 to the Final Table in just two weeks.
It's the media/sports coverage poker's marquee event truly deserves and we can't imagine anything but record viewership numbers and a stunning new ME story developing live on TV.
See the new full schedule for the 2017 WSOP here. See the TV schedule below:
2) Gus Gets Ready to Gamble
As if the WSOP Main Event news above wasn't enough to make us giddy we also saw this this am:
Gus really hasn't played the WSOP in much earnest since 2014 and, even if he has popped in to Vegas, like last year, it's been entirely for the juicy cash games.
We still expect him to do plenty of the latter but if he does manage a deep run in the Main Event our hearts might actually explode with joy.
3) From Hustling Poker to Crushing Hearthstone
You don't see a lot of card player/gamers featured in Rolling Stone magazine but most of those players aren't exactly Andrey "Reynad" Yanyuk.
Now the CEO of one of the top eSports teams in the world, Tempo Storm, the 25-year-old Yanyuk got the rockstar RS treatment this past weekend with a feature piece on his rise from Magic: The Gathering nerd to Hearthstone kingpin.
Reyand (right) rules the world. (Photo: Hearthstone)
Now one of the biggest names in eSports and on Twitch Reynad apparently redefined Hearthstone deck-building and, at least momentarily, 'traipsed around America squeezing dollars out of poker games' along the way.
We took a quick look for a Hendon Mob profile but came up empty. Since it was also post Black Friday we assume he wasn't playing online. Anyone know where those games might have been?
We've seen lots of M:tG and video gamers make the leap to poker for more money before, of course, so it's an interesting twist Reynad just skipped right over poker (he says he found it boring) for bigger things.
It's also interesting, as Vice Sports points out, that Hearthstone is now facing an issue very familiar to those in poker: balancing the needs of pros vs. recs. Those Babbling Book suckouts are mfs, too.
