By Garth McLennan, Sports Editor

his past weekend I put together a big
poker tournament with friends of mine
and we had a good, long game. We
started at around seven o’clock with two full
tables of players and eventually progressed to
one final table where the winner took home
the grand prize of $200.

Now, this game lasted around eight and
a half hours. As it was, I ended up winning
the tournament and was there for around
for the entire thing. At the end of the night,
or the next day I should say, I found myself
wondering whether or not poker was a real
sport.

On the surface, it seems like a ridiculous
question. By looking at it, it’s very easy to
say that poker is not a sport. After all, there is
zero physical contact, seemingly little physical
exertion; all you’re doing is sitting in a chair
for hours.

When all was said and done though, I
was more worn from poker than any hockey
game I'd ever played in my life. With a few
quick breaks aside, to play poker well you
have to be mentally sharp for hours at a
time with little room for any sort of lapse in
Judgement. You have to pay extraordinary
attention to detail and track the betting
patterns and strategies of the players around
you while at the same time devising your own
strategy for success. You have to do frequent,
on-the-spot number crunching to quickly
calculate the odds of making any given hand,
all the while trying to make it look like you’ re
not doing exactly that. You have to take into
account the varying chip stacks of everyone
else at the table and anticipate their reactions

16

 

to whatever you do. You have to constantly
adjust your game and style of play to suit
who’s in and out of each hand, and when
certain players leave the table.

Then there’s the added mental pressure of
waiting for strong hand and not being bullied
into playing whatever you’re dealt. A good
hand can come often, but it can also disappear
for hours at a time. There are the heart-
pounding scenarios where you’re suffering in
silence, hoping against hope for the right card
to fall on the turn or the river.

Plain and simple, poker is a furious
mental grind. It may not require you to bench
press tremendous amounts of weight or run
fast, but it still calls for an incredible sum of
fortitude, endurance and stamina.

Plus, in the last few years, poker has risen
meteorically in the national consciousness.
After all, almost every major sports network
carries poker on television, and the annual
World Series of Poker has become a mega-
event.

THE VERDICT:
As much as I love poker, I have to say that it
isn’t a sport. Mentally, it can be just as taxing
as any physical sport out there. But physically
it just can’t compare. Yes, it is tiring, but in
the end that just isn’t enough. Consider the
aforementioned World Series of Poker. This
year featured the oldest competitor in history,
Jack Ury, who was 96. It’s tough for me to
classify something as a sport when its main
event has a 96-year-old participant.

Poker requires a tremendous amount of
skill, just as much as most sports, but in the
end, poker is not a sport.

 

 

Garth McLennan

sports editor

 

Shane O’Brien

By Garth McLennan, Sports Editor

ne of the most anticipated
parts of the upcoming season
for the Canucks is about how

successful the newly bolstered defence
corps will be. After Mattias Ohlund
departed for Tampa Bay, a void was
left for several weeks. Soon however,
that was filled when GM Mike Gillis
went out and signed veteran rushing
defenseman Mathieu Schneider and
swung a trade with the San Jose Sharks
to bring in Christian Ehrhoff and Brad
Lukowich.

While all of this was going on, one
person was quietly forgotten about by
most Canucks fans. Rugged defenseman
Shane O’Brien went from being a guy
who was presumed to be inheriting most
of Ohlund’s ice time to quite possibly
off the team.

With Kevin Bieksa, Willie
Mitchell, Alex Edler, Sami Salo,
Ehrhoff and Schneider seemingly
entrenched as the top six, plus O’Brien,
Lukowich, Aaron Rome and Lawrence
Nycholat all here, Vancouver now has
10 defensemen on one-way contracts.
They currently have $23.125 million
invested in their defence, and that’s
without a bona fide superstar in the
line-up. With the Canucks seriously
pressed against the salary cap, that’s a
lot of money tied up in a backend whose
leading scorer had just 43 points last
year.

While O’Brien is a reasonable
cap hit at $1.6 million, he’s clearly on
the outside looking in when it comes
to the top six in terms of talent. In 77

 

NHL games last season, he didn’t score

NS

once and had just 10 assists. However,
he established himself as a guy who
brought it every single night and at
six-foot-three, 224 pounds, brought
much needed size and toughness to the
Vancouver roster, as evidenced by his
196 penalty minutes.

But if he is unable to crack the top
six and play every night, is O’Brien
worth keeping around? After all, for
a team presently over the salary cap,
should the Canucks really be paying
their seventh and presumably eighth
defensemen $1.6 and $1.8 (Lukowich)
million? That seems like an easy place
to cut costs.

There is also zero chance of
O’Brien going through waivers. At
just 26 years of age and with a ton of
upside, he’d be snapped up by another
club in a second. He could be used as
trade bait, along with Lukowich, who is
a solid veteran with a Stanley Cup ring,
but there is little chance that Vancouver
would get fair value back seeing as how
they are trying to dump salary, unless
they fleeced another team in draft picks,
which is unlikely to happen.

That leaves both parties in an
odd spot. After all, O’Brien can’t be
happy. He’s fully capable of playing
15-18 minutes per night and has shown
himself to be a valuable commodity.
However, barring a blow-everyone-
away showing at training camp, he may
not be able to make the Canucks this
year with the money he’s earning.

It’d be a shame to lose such a good
player because of an economic squeeze,
but that’s the way the game works in a
salary cap world.

 

ae