Every summer the Brunson family travels north from Las Vegas, away from the sweltering heat and high-stakes celebrity life to the shores of Flathead Lake near Rollins. This pastoral shoreline community has become a home away from home, a place to relax and recharge far from the cutthroat action of professional poker.
“Montana is everything I remember about country living,” 79-year-old poker legend Doyle Brunson recently wrote online to his global legion of fans.
But that doesn’t mean the Brunsons leave their cards in Vegas.
Doyle’s son Todd, a longtime professional with a World Series of Poker bracelet and over $3 million in career winnings, holds a multi-day tournament in Bigfork that annually draws almost 100 players, including his famous father. In terms of money involved, the Todd Brunson Montana Poker Challenge has consistently been the largest tournament in the state, if not the Northwest, according to Todd. This year’s sixth annual event features live games Aug. 22-26 at the Marina Cay Resort in Bigfork. In conjunction with the tournament, Todd will help teach two half-day World Poker Tour Boot Camp training courses at Marina Cay, Aug. 22-23, with fellow professionals Nick Brancato, Nick Binger and Rick Fuller.
This week’s tournament has a notable change, though. The Gambling Control Division of the Montana Department of Justice recently informed Todd that satellite games were prohibited, meaning any small-stakes games for players to advance to the costly weekend main event have been eliminated. State law allows only one tournament every seven days, and the Gambling Control Division made changes last December that clarified tournament rules, specifically that there could only be one payout, or prize, per tournament. Under this stipulation, satellite games are considered separate tournaments. Brunson said the DOJ told him his satellite games were genuinely a part of one tournament, but the agency still had to follow the letter of the law.
“I was always following the law,” Brunson said. “Other people were running different tournaments every day and calling them the same tournaments. I talked to a lot of these guys and told them you’re going to get in trouble. This is what happened. It was a backlash.”
The state Gaming Advisory Board is currently looking at a proposal to allow daily small-stakes tournaments. Rick Ask, administrator for the DOJ’s Gambling Control Division, said the proposal would be vetted at a Sept. 21 meeting in Missoula. The proposed change, which would require the approval of the Legislature, would allow organizers to hold daily tournaments where players could buy in for up to $80. Higher-stakes tournaments would stay the same, Ask said.
Ask said he was unaware of the specifics surrounding Brunson’s situation, but did say that state law clearly stipulates that only one prize can be paid per tournament, which could be the limiting factor for satellite games.
“It’s really stupid. These laws are really hurting the tourism,” Brunson said. “It’s hard to ask somebody to come all this way to play one tournament. Imagine if I could bring 1,000 people in here. Imagine those 1,000 people realizing how beautiful it is here and wanting to come back every year. That’s kind of what I envisioned happening (when I started this tournament).”
The strict crackdown on Brunson’s tournament reflects the current state of play in the poker world.
After being overlooked by the mainstream media and the masses for years, poker “boomed” in the last decade. Brunson, who’s been playing professionally for over 20 years, remembers seeing the sudden influx of attention and action. He credits three specific changes — more celebrities began playing, increasing the sport’s exposure; the development of the “Hole Cam,” which gave television viewers an insider’s perspective of players’ cards; and the proliferation of online gambling.
Suddenly ESPN and other channels were rushing to televise tournaments and other high-stakes events. As a result more and more players flooded into the sport, and tournaments went from offering $200,000 for first place to $2 million, Brunson said.
Then came “Black Friday.”
The U.S. Department of Justice dealt a fatal blow to online poker in the spring. The ripple effect is still being felt. On April 15, the DOJ shut down and seized the assets of the three largest American poker sites and charged them with bank fraud, money laundering and illegal gambling. The DOJ was following orders laid out in the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, a late amendment added to the SAFE Port Act. The fine print of the legislation essentially declared war on poker. The amendment did not explicitly outlaw online play, but it made it illegal for financial institutions to accept payments directly from online gambling.
Following Black Friday, as banks and credit card companies pulled funding, online sites quickly began fleeing the U.S. market and taking their lucrative sponsorship deals with them. For example, Party Poker, the largest online poker site in the world, paid a $105 million fine and left the U.S. in exchange for not being federally prosecuted.
“That hurt a lot,” Brunson said. “All the poker shows came off TV because all the sponsors were the online sites.”
He said if online poker were reinstated in the U.S., the television shows would return and possibly spark a second poker boom.
But even there, he has mixed feelings. Brunson is old school, just like his father, who helped popularize the sport over the last 50 years. Doyle Brunson, wearing his trademark cowboy hat, is called the “Godfather of Poker” and considered by many to be the most influential force in the poker world. The Hall of Famer has won two World Series of Poker main events and 10 bracelets overall, tied for the second most ever. He’s written several books, including the sport’s most hailed, which he co-wrote: “Super System: How I Made Over $1,000,000 Playing Poker.”
Even though the emergence of online poker helped fuel the sport, there were drawbacks, too.
“Online poker is not poker, in my opinion. Poker is sitting and watching your opponent and knowing what’s going on. You can’t do any of that online. It’s not the same thing,” Todd Brunson said.
“For one thing when there’s no Internet poker, people have to come into the card rooms and play. It helps live poker, which is what I play. But obviously the down side is that we’re not picking up a lot of new players like we were before. I have mixed feelings about it.”
Registration for the Todd Brunson Montana Poker Challenge is open the day of the tournament. For more information visit www.toddbrunsonmontanapokerchallenge.com, or call the Marina Cay at 837-5861.