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Magic Versus Poker
What Happens When Competitive Card Players
Have to Choose?
by Jeff Zandi - Sept. 3, 2004
Magic’s Pro Tour came into being eight years
ago to promote the game and give top players
an opportunity to compete for large cash
prizes. After experiencing the satisfaction
of playing Magic for so-called “serious
money”, a lot of Pro Tour players have moved
on to greener pastures, as in the
mega-greenbacks of professional poker. For
the past several months, ESPN has spent two
hours each Tuesday night showing action from
the biggest poker event in the world, the
2004 World Series of Poker, held earlier
this year in Las Vegas. In just a few more
weeks, the Tuesday night ESPN coverage will
center on the final table of professional
poker’s richest championship ever.
At this table, a young man will finish in
second place, pocketing an unheard-of $3.5
million. This young man is David Williams,
the same David Williams that was possibly
the hottest young player in Magic’s Pro Tour
just a few years ago. Before playing in the
World Series of Poker, Dave was a
professional Magic player trying to save up
enough money to buy a used car.
Today, Diamond Dave is shopping for Bentleys
and Mercedes.
For a long time, competitive Magic players
have gone through a familiar progression.
Players start out as casual players, loving
the elegant game mechanics and the rich
playability of Magic: the Gathering. As time
goes by, these players become more
competitive and start trying to qualify for
Magic’s professional tour. After competing a
few times on the higher plane of competitive
Magic, players find themselves inescapably
drawn to THAT OTHER card game that has had
even more money attached to its tournaments
for at least a hundred years. One by one,
Magic players become poker players.
The purpose of the article is not to say
that Magic is a better game than poker, or
vice versa. The purpose of this article is
to compare high stakes Magic with high
stakes poker, to think about the future of
high stakes gaming as well as the rise of
the Professional Gamer.
Magic Versus Poker
Plenty of people play either or both of
these games at a very casual level.
There are actually a fairly small number of
people who have played both of these games
at the highest competitive levels. When
these players compare their tournament Magic
experiences with their experiences playing
poker, poker seems to outshine Magic.
The arguments are compelling. In Magic, the
cards and formats are ever-changing. The
skills you hone today preparing for Mirrodin
block constructed tournaments have very
little to do with the your preparation next
Spring for the U.S. Regionals, for example.
In poker, the skills you learn this year
will be just as valuable to you next year.
Aces are aces. Of course, this argument can
work both ways, some players might prefer
Magic to poker BECAUSE of the fact that
poker presents a static game in comparison
to Magic’s ever-evolving world of strategic
exploration. The higher you probe, however,
into the competitive levels of Magic
players, the more you learn that these
players find their investment of time in
poker pays greater dividends, both in cash
and satisfaction, than does their investment
of time in the game of Magic.
Both games feature tremendous opportunities
to compete from the comfort of your own
home, thanks to the ability to play either
Magic or poker on the internet. When you DO
leave the comfort of your home to play in a
big Magic tournament, you are likely to be
sitting in a poorly ventilated space amid
every manner of antagonistic youths, many of
whom will not smell particularly appealing.
Poker games are held in attractive
surroundings and often include complimentary
beverages.
Even at the highest levels of Magic
competition on the Pro Tour, much of the
competitive day is spent milling around,
waiting for all three or four hundred
players in the event to finish a round of
play so that the next round of play can
begin. In poker tournaments, the action is
continuous. At a big poker tournament, most
of your day is spent playing the game, not
waiting around for your next opponent.
At a big Magic tournament, luck may have an
even bigger role in your success or failure
than in poker. This argument is primarily
based on the relatively small number of
chances you have in a Magic tournament
versus a poker tournament. A full day of
Magic is often seven or eight rounds, of
which you must win at least five or six
matches. Both Magic and poker involve a
tremendous amount of random chance. Poker
smooths out this problem by allowing you to
look at and assess a much larger number of
hands during a given period of time. If you
play in a Magic tournament for eight hours,
you will probably play seven rounds and
about eighteen total games of Magic. In
eight hours of poker competition, you could
easily play in, or not play in, hundreds and
hundreds of hands/games.
Finally, there is the issue of prestige, or,
if not prestige, simple social acceptance.
Every competitive Magic player has faced the
problem of how to describe what they are
doing to “civilians” not familiar with the
finer points of collectible card games.
Frankly, a lot of Magic players have been
telling people that they were spending the
weekend at a poker tournament when they were
REALLY trying to qualify for Magic’s Pro
Tour. A long time ago, poker playing was a
lot less popular and a lot less socially
accepted.
Today, however, it’s VERY COOL to be a poker
player.
The Future of Big Money Gaming
The future of big money poker will include a
lot more Magic players. Pro Tour Magic
players are good with numbers, good at
reading their opponent’s non-verbal
communication, and most importantly, are
good at playing a pressure-packed game where
skill and luck are often equally balanced. A
year or more ago, the average poker club
featured a lot of middle aged and older men
and only a few men under thirty. Today, the
person sitting next to you at the poker
table is very likely a very young adult.
What’s more, the person sitting next to you
is increasingly a female, something almost
unheard of in the poker world in the past.
The time may be right for Magic to raise the
stakes in its eight year old Pro Tour.
Originally, the Pro Tour paid out a million
dollars in total prize money during the
year. Since then, the prize money has gone
up significantly. Very few Magic players,
however, can actually claim enough Pro Tour
prize money in a year to call themselves
truly professional players. That may need to
change. Professional poker tournaments like
the World Series of Poker and the World
Poker Tour, as well as the big money
tournament tour put on by Upper Deck
Entertainment in support of their superhero
based card game Vs., are putting pressure on
Wizards of the Coast to improve their
professional gaming project. If Wizards
wants to keep the best Magic players in the
world in their game, the Pro Tour money
needs to be raised. Doubling or tripling the
amount of prize money laid out for Magic’s
Pro Tour, to numbers perhaps approaching
five or six million dollars a year, would go
a long way to cementing Magic’s Pro Tour as
a premiere gaming event and would further
secure Magic: the Gathering as the
“intellectual sport” that the game’s
creators envisioned more than ten years ago.
It’s always easy to spend SOMEONE ELSE’S
money, but I believe Wizards of the Coast
would get a lot more from the outlay of a
few more million dollars a year in Pro Tour
prize money than they would get from a lot
of other similarly funded marketing efforts.
Just as Pokemon players evolved into Magic
players, Magic players evolve into poker
players. Within the next year or so, Magic
players, or possibly ex-Magic players, may
be filling up the final tables of the top
poker tournaments in the world. If you
haven’t seen this change occurring, don’t
take my word for it, turn on your television
Tuesday night and look for the black kid in
the cheap black wraparound shades and the
blue zip-up running jacket. If you do, you
will be looking at more than another new
millionaire, you will be looking at the
future of big money gaming.
As usual, I’m always interested to know what
YOU think.
Jeff Zandi
Texas Guildmages
Level II DCI Judge
jeffzandi@thoughtcastle.com
Zanman on Magic Online
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