The Best Seat in the House: A Short History of Poker Tournament Reporting

1990 world champion Mansour Matloubi, watched closely by the poker press corps

If winning a major poker tournament represents the game’s greatest glory, reporting on such events can sometimes be its worst drudgery.

The best seat in the house rarely means actually being seated.  More typically, tournament reporting means standing on one’s feet for hours at a time.  It means arriving earlier and leaving much later than players.  If you think sitting at a poker table and playing in a tournament is work, then try standing for a very long while and then running back and forth to a laptop to regularly in order to update player chip counts for what might be as many as a dozen poker tables.  Most egregious of all, however — tournament reporters rarely receive much notice from anyone, except in the rare instances (relatively speaking) when some detail gets reported wrongly.

Frankly, the poker community disappoints me to a great extent — and by this I mean the players.  Many are thankless and have become spoiled.  I’ve worked with dozens of dedicated poker enthusiasts over the years, including many who have worked for the very biggest poker websites to the smallest foreign-language outlets struggling to survive.  When these reporters initially start out, they’re often thrown straight into the fire.  These young writers are almost always eager to do a good job.  But they rarely get a simple thank you or a kind word from anyone.  That’s even the case today.  Think about it.  When’s the last time you showed some appreciation to someone working hard to do a good job out on the floor, someone who is actively contributing to the game and not just its legacy, but yours, as well?