DEBATING MY VOTE FOR THE POKER HALL OF FAME PART 2: THE SHARKS

Last week, after writing part 1 of this series, I let my editors know there was a chance I’d be getting them parts 2 and 3 immediately so they could post them in succession if they saw fit. While the intention was there, I ultimately did have the time over the weekend to get the installments done, so I let it slide until my usual filing time. In between, a funny thing happened.

Howard Lederer’s interview with PokerNews is all the community is talking about this week, and it’s shed new light on a plethora of Full Tilt-linked players, including one of the promised subjects of this second installment looking at the Hall of fame nominees. According to Lederer (and keep in mind, it’s only one man’s point of view), Juanda was blatant in his regard for player payments and was one person who refused to sign the now-fabled Binion agreement that would likely have saved the franchise from another year of awfulness. My guess is that there are at least degrees of truth in what Lederer says, and I think with other voters having access to similar information, my educated guess is that, for this year, Juanda’s chances of Hall of Fame enshrinement are greatly reduced-if even existent–at this point.

With the above statement made, I group the Juanda, Scotty Nguyen and Jen Harman-Traniello candidacies together because I thought there was an interesting compare/contrast to be done between the three of them. Harman brings her example to female players and extensive charity work to the positive side of the ledger and Nguyen brings both positive (“You call this one it all over, baby”) and negative (his embarrassing 2008 WSOP HORSE final table performance), and now Juanda’s legacy is looking a little tarnished, but all three are excellent players. The question for our purposes here, is how well do they compare?

To my mind, there are two questions we need to try to answer in a comparison: Who is the best poker player, and who had the best results? Neither is entirely quantifiable. The former question lacks objectivity from those offering opinions. The latter takes results only from that history that’s been recorded. Answering both questions to the best of our ability gives us a whole greater than the sum of its two parts.

Looking at the results first, we find the following:

Juanda:

• 5 WSOP bracelets
• 30 WSOP final tables
• 60 WSOP cashes
• 6 WPT final tables
• $14,197,535 in total live tournament earnings

Live total earnings these days can be a little misleading, but they’re not in Juanda’s case. He’s 7^th on the all-time money list, 8^th on the list excluding invitationals, 11^th on the list excluding buy-ins greater than $50,000 and 9^th on the list excluding invitationals AND big buy-ins.  His five bracelets have come in five different poker disciplines, showing that he’s more than just a hold’em machine. All this at just 42 years old. In short, this is the guy the numbers backed up for the Hall of Fame.

Nguyen:

• 5 WSOP bracelets
• 37 WSOP cashes
• 1 WPT win
• 8 WPT final tables
• $11,650,886 in total live tournament earnings.

Scotty is 11^th on the all-time list and the all-time without invitationals list, while ranking 7^th on the list excluding buy-ins greater than $50,000 and 6^th minus big buy-ins and invitationals, so in some ways, his record is better than Juanda’s. Of course, there’s a counter argument. If he was the player Juanda was, he’d A) have the money to buy into high-roller events himself or B) would have found someone with the faith in that investment to buy him in. Scotty’s HORSE event win shows us he is more than a one-game man, and he actually has multiple Omaha bracelets, but you don’t hear much about him as a cash or online player.

Harman:

• 2 WSOP bracelets
• 12 WSOP final tables
• 30 WSOP cashes
• 2 WPT final tables.
• $2,645,976 in total live tournament earnings.

Harman’s tournament numbers obviously don’t stack up, but that doesn’t exclude her from the debate. The reality is that unlike the other two, tournaments are an obvious side-gig for her. The problem when discussing any Big Game player’s legacy is two fold a) We don’t know for certain how successful they’ve been and b) The only witnesses who will know with any certainty how good a player is will have a long term interest in bolstering that player’s esteem and reputation. No one is ever the fish right? That said, the reality we know is that Harman has played in that game for a long time, playing any game anyone ever threw at her. That’s hundreds of thousands of hands against Brunson and Ivey and Reese and the others that she’s at the least survived and very probably profited from. That she isn’t in a gutter is a positive result and a powerful one.

Ask around Vegas, and I think more often than not, you’d get people telling you Juanda is the best all-around player of the three, though a few of the Big Game denizens would vouch for Jen, while a few others would put Harman behind Scotty (Juanda would almost never rank third). That’s not much of an answer, but really, there isn’t much more to be said on it. So, in the end, how do the candidacies measure up?

Well, like I said off the top, I don’t think Juanda has a chance this year. Lederer’s interview may well have drastically changed the course of this year’s election because Juanda’s numbers are so hard to argue with if there isn’t a powerful external factor to dissuade voters from supporting him. That leaves us with Scotty’s damaged reputation and superior stats facing off with Harman’s similar player reputation, charity work and pioneer status. So where do the votes go? I’m still not sure.

I’ve always felt poker was an equal opportunity game and that women should be judged as players instead of as women when it came to how they played. I hold to that, but Harman’s candidacy is in part about laying the roads for other women to walk. She showed the world during poker’s boom that a tiny, quiet blonde could hang with and inspire fear in the alpha dogs of the boys club and I’d guess that if you spoke to women poker players today about any trepidation they might have had venturing in, they’d tell you Jen Harman was a part of putting that aside. That’s a big deal.

I like both Jen and Scotty, and I’m really curious to see how they split votes this year. I would guess though that at least one of them will get in.

Next week, Part 3: the Pioneers

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