GPInterview: Barry Greenstein | Living Legend

It’s hard to describe how it feels to interview someone that has been around poker longer than you’ve been alive! It’s hard to describe how excited you feel sitting down with a living legend, a man who’s done it all, a man that even those who aren’t the least bit interested in poker would recognize.

I got that opportunity earlier when I met Barry Greenstein for the first time and we enjoyed a great conversation – here it is, I hope you enjoy it as well:

You’ve been around poker for over 40 years now, you’ve experienced poker before the poker boom, you lived through the poker boom and now today, is there a specific “era” in poker you have preferred the most?

The poker boom was good for poker because it took a profession that was something you really didn’t want to talk about, it took it from out of the gutter and into the mainstream to where it should be, it’s a competition, like sports, we compete, we play for money and it’s interesting for people to watch so I think for poker overall, the poker boom and what’s come since then has been very good.

For me personally, I was doing better before the poker boom because the recreational players were playing in cash games so it was way easier to make money, the economy was also better before the poker boom and once tournament poker became big we had a lot of players who were playing cash games suddenly playing tournaments and a lot of money came out of that economy, money that I might of gotten in the past.

One of my favorite things to come out of the poker boom was “High Stakes Poker on GSN” – the first few years were must-see television with yourself, Sammy Farha, Eli Elezra, Freddy Deeb and the gang, do you think there is a chance that those shows come back on television?

We’ll get them back. A lot of those television shows are on hold until legislation is made right in the United States. These are shows that PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker were losing money on, there were “infomercials” essentially and so, there is no reason for PokerStars to be spending money on these shows when they can’t have people playing in the United States as they were the main television audience.

Once we get PokerStars back in the US, we’re going to have lots of shows and a lot of people, not only poker players, recognize me from those television shows and most of them aren’t poker players, they’re poker fans, and they come up to me or contact me via Twitter to say that they really miss those shows, but they’ll be back, we’re just waiting for the US government to do its part and figure out how to bring back online poker.

We’re fast approaching the 10^th anniversary of your book “Ace on the River” (published in 2005). I re-read the book just a few weeks before coming to the WSOP and find that it is still so very relevant, was that important to you when you were writing it?

Well, that’s like talking to the ancient Greek philosophers and asking them how come their stuff is still relevant over 2,000 years later J. I talk about the human condition and that doesn’t change that much over time.

I wasn’t necessarily thinking of writing something that would stand the test of time but I think anyone who’s been in this business, like I have, for 40 years is going to have, I think, some worthwhile advice and I think that a lot of people who read it have gotten something out of it. It wasn’t fixed in a time so I don’t think it’s surprising that someone can still get something out of it.

Is there a plan, further down the line, to maybe write another book?

I do have something in the works that I’ve been working on since 2008, so about five years now, I’ve been keeping it under wraps because I’ve been busy, it’s a lot of work to get a book out, I’m kind of a perfectionist so a lot of editing goes into it.

I did put out a small book called The Badugi Chapter but that didn’t sell as well as Ace on the River surprisingly J but people seemed to appreciate that book as well.

This year marks the 10^th anniversary of the Chris Moneymaker Main Event victory here at the WSOP. Your good friend Phil Ivey was deep in that Main Event and it took a few tough beats to eliminate him from that tournament to bubble the final table. What happens to poker if Ivey wins in 2003 and not Chris Moneymaker?

The truth is I like Chris and people like to connect it (the poker boom) to Chris and there are a few people who started playing poker because of Chris Moneymaker, we started getting over 1,000 people qualify for the WSOP on PokerStars so I’m sure the numbers went up because of Chris Moneymaker.

But really, online poker kind of drove the whole boom, it made poker so accessible to people. Television helped with the whole card cameras, that got people interested but that television audience wasn’t necessarily people playing, it just made it a spectator sport. Online poker just got huge and that was the main driving force.

Phil Ivey winning it or Chris Moneymaker winning it or even Sam Farha winning, I don’t think it would have changed anything.

The only thing I can think of that might have been a little different with Phil Ivey winning is that it kind of reminds me when Tiger Woods won his third U.S. Amateur golf title. I’m a golfer and used to out to the driving range everyday and the day after Tiger’s win he kind of became a household name and the very next day at the driving range, I saw three or four black guys with their five or six-year old kids hitting golf balls for the first time. And I had never seen, at the driving range where I play, a black man and his son out there so I expect that there are now some good collegiate black golfers that probably wouldn’t have been there were it not for Tiger’s success so I could imagine that Phil Ivey would have peeked the interest of some young black kids to start competing in poker – but that’s the only difference when you ask me about Phil Ivey but we were going to have a poker boom no matter who won it.

Finally, what’s next for Barry Greenstein? You’ve been around for so many years; do you still have a passion for poker?

Poker, surprisingly, has never been something I have ever been passionate about. Obviously my kids are my passion. But it’s (poker) been my job for a long time, it’s a job that has allowed me a lot of freedom, I make my own schedule.

But, I’ve never looked at poker as a real passion as some people do; this is the way I make money. The way I’ve always thought about money is if you can make money, then you want to use that money to do things that are your passion or do some helpful or creative things; poker’s been a gateway for me to do positive things is the way I look at it.

Getting to interview Barry Greenstein was one of the best moments of my career, we thank Barry and PokerStars for making it happen!  Be sure to  follow Barry on Twitter: @barrygreenstein

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