Big names during the Poker Boom years resurgent at the 2013 WSOP

The 2013 World Series of Poker has seen a resurgence of sorts for a number of players that dominated the game during the Poker Boom years, but have fallen off the map a bit in the past few years. The names that have collected WSOP bracelets this year pretty much say it all, Mike Matusow, Tom Schneider, Erick Lindgren, Jeff Madsen, David Chiu, and Cliff Jospehy.

Not only have the above mentioned players won bracelets, but players like TJ Cloutier, Jonathan Little, and Allen Cunningham, have made deep runs in tournaments. Perhaps the most remarkable stat of the WSOP is this: Four previous WSOP Player of the Year winners have won bracelets in 2013: Daniel Negreanu (who won his bracelet at the WSOP APAC), Erick Lindgren, Tom Schneider, and now Jeff Madsen.

So what gives? Why have these players been able to reinvent themselves during the 2013 WSOP, when the trend has been for WSOP bracelets to go to unknown young guns from the Internet? Don’t get me wrong, these are talented poker players and obviously capable of winning a bracelet. But you wouldn’t expect this many players (players who were once dominant but have won very little over the past three or four years) to have such success at the WSOP, so something has to give right?

Part of the answer has to be that with the loss of Full Tilt Poker paychecks some players (like Mike Matusow and Erick Lindgren) have realized they now have to perform to make money, and have probably spent a lot of time working on their game in order to keep up with the younger players. I’ve mentioned this in the past when people would say that “so-and-so can’t beat today’s games” that it’s not a matter of skill; it’s a matter of time and effort.

Without consistent payments from the site like Lindgren was receiving, or in the case of players like Madsen or Matusow, losing your sponsorship deal and having to buy your own way into tournaments, undoubtedly made them more anxious and put some pressure on them to perform for the first time in a long time. With the loss of many sponsorship deals, and the enormous distributions Full Tilt Poker was paying their owners, once again most poker players are without regular income and have to win their paychecks.

Another answer is also something I have touched upon recently: Playing style. Poker players have gotten so aggressive over the past few years (with light four- and five-bets and three-barrel bluffs becoming a standard play) that the perfect style to counteract this aggression is a tighter, somewhat passive approach to the game. It seems as though poker players have become enamored with being the most agro player and too many slip into the classification of maniac which makes them exploitable.

Some of these resurgent players simply play a style that counteracts these ultra-agro practitioners and this could be one of the reasons they have had so much success at the 2013 WSOP as well.