[CrisBrown]

Hi Bogey,

I asked Phil Hellmuth about this, and he said it made no difference to him. He explained that the top players all scout each other regardless, and that the comparatively few hands you see in a WPT or WSOP broadcast don't make all that much difference in their scouting.

I then asked him if the extensive scouting gave an advantage to newer players -- e.g.: Chris Moneymaker, Phil Ivey when he first started, etc. -- and he said that was very much the case. He was able to win the WSOP main event early in his career by playing extremely aggressively and taking lots of chances to build his stack. Of course, once everyone figured that out, they began calling him down, and he had to start playing solid hands.

I think this also provides some answer to a question posed on another forum: has 2003 been the year of the newcomer, and is that good or bad for poker as a sport. I've thought about this at some length.

Consider the PGA Tour, where on a given tourney a handful of surprising players can emerge on the leaderboard, but you'll still see many of the same players week in and week out. But golf is an very different game, in that players are essentially independent actors. Apart from nerves and the occasional need to take risks to catch up or play safe to sit on a lead, one player's performance has no effect on another player's strategy or swing.

In poker, the players are not independent. A substantial part of the game is reading and deception; scouting makes the former easier and the latter more difficult. So I just don't see it as likely that any player can be as dominant, because the more a player excels, the more others on the tournament circuit will notice and scout him/her, and thus diminish his/her advantage.

Yes, over the course of a season, the best players will rise to the top of the money list. But in terms of week-to-week results, I just don't see someone running off six or seven tournament victories in a row....

Cris