I feel cheated by poker once again. The “best player in the world” this year is a 21 year old kid who sucked out at the final table as a 4-1 underdog, twice, getting his money in preflop with a pair-under-pair situation. The guy he beat heads up won two 70/30’s at the final table during his mindlessly aggressive donk-and-pony poker show. For those lawmakers who are trying to get casino poker regulated, I feel terrible for you. It’s sure going to be hard to convince people that poker is a skill game after this monstrosity! But in all seriousness, sometimes the end of a poker tournament does take a lot of luck. If you don’t cold deck someone, you’re likely beating them in a coinflip or a close race situation. So even though some major injustice happened at this year’s final table we can associate the outcome to variance and stack sizes. The good thing about this WSOP is that the average Joe can once again feel confident in the game of poker. Lately the poker world has been taken over by young internet poker savants and the recreational players have fallen to the wayside. If a logger from Maryland can beat nearly 7,000 people then that says something about the game. And we all know that whoever wins the WSOP is not the best player in the world, they just happen to have had the best outcome. On any given day anyone can win a poker tournament. In this series, the winners obviously had some luck, but they also had to manage their chip stacks over the course of an entire week. They had to play smart and responsibly. The same thing goes for your everyday tournament; anyone can win. Even the most recreational players these days know what it takes to win a tournament. If you are blessed with a little luck and have the patience to carry yourself out to win, you’re all set. Hopefully now the regular Joe’s will find themselves back to the casinos!