This article is a spoiler and will give you some results of the recent HU Championship to be aired on NBC. On day one of the event Don Cheadle (notably from the films Hotel Rwanda and Crash) wore a Full Tilt Poker hat as he faced off against Phil Ivey. Phil Ivey is the face of Full Tilt Poker, he is their machine, and he is the one everyone points to when people ask, “Who is the best poker player in the world?� Cheadle beat Phil pretty soundly; everyone in the poker world dismissed this as random luck and moved on. Cheadle went on to lose the next match.

Collectively the poker world breathed a sigh of relief. Oddly enough, however, one of the celebrities almost won the HU championship and had a huge chip lead in the semi final match before Paul Wasicka did the impossible and saved pokers good name. Who was this cerebral celebrity that pulled off 4 defeats against some of pokers best players? It was former Playboy playmate who also played the foreign exchange student from those “American Pie� movies, Shannon Elizabeth. Shannon apparently is quite good and there is no man in the poker world that would not chomp at the bit to give her advice. But she should not have been playing in the event!

Promoters of these shows want celebrities on the show because they are recognizable faces. Even with the recent explosion poker has seen, the sport (is poker really a sport?) gets very little coverage outside of the industry. The best that poker can hope for is that B rate celebrities will get them some YouTube coverage. To be fair the poker players invited to the event are of limited talent as well. It would not take you much Google time to figure out that many of the women poker players–apparently male viewers like to look at women, who knew?– do not have good historical results and some of the men have not won a poker tournament since Truman was in office.

Through the Poker Players Alliance (PPA), an organization I am a proud member of, we now have former Senator Alfonse D’Amato from New York fighting on our behalf. Mr. D’Amato is going to argue something that I have argued to my family many times, that poker is a game of skill. Over time the cards break even and the best players win in poker based on the way they play them. That argument was also the basis for Billy Baxter’s argument to the IRS that he should be able to write off losses incurred by gambling in poker. The courts agreed that poker is a game of skill and Billy could write off his losses. He was poker’s version of Curt Flood, who started the free agent era in baseball and changed sports entirely.

Some of the other biggest supporters of the PPA wear Full Tilt Poker hats. Howard Lederer and Chris Ferguson to name two have gone to Capital Hill to argue the virtue of poker being a skilled game.

The HU championship is one of our only showcases for poker talent on network television. This is an opportunity for poker to show off its best 64 players and show the world that we are not rollerball, and show Capitol Hill that America’s real sport is poker. What other sport can boast 70 million active participants?

The irony about this all is that many online poker sites put celebrities in poker events to enhance their coverage as I mentioned above. You could certainly argue that NBC wants it this way but it is the online companies paying the bills. The line up was littered with people wearing PokerStars and Full Tilt hats. If you do not think those companies could have had some say as to who is invited just look at the list of invitees. Said simply, the poker sites chose who played and who did not with few exceptions.

So now you are reading and you are saying “wait, he is saying these sites got what they wanted�. Indeed I am; they got a B rate celebrity wearing their hat and getting more coverage than someone in poker ever could. Here is the problem though; it flies in the face of poker being a skilled game. If poker is indeed a game of skill sites like Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars are worth tens of billions. If it is not a game of skill they could be illegal under the Unlawful Gaming Act. So there is a lot at stake regarding the question of poker as a game of skill for these companies.

As advertisers that can influence programming it is not just important to get more people playing at your site. It is also important to show those people that they have a future in poker if they take the time to develop their skills and you are a venue for that. Instead you are letting producers claim “entertainment value� while they are turning us into the next Gong Show.

Simply put, the 64 best poker players should have played in this event, and we missed an opportunity to do so.

Written by Paul Nobles.