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Pogonology I hope this pogonology will help you become a WSOP main event winner. Read my predictions for the WSOP main event. Throughout history, men sporting a beard or other ostentatious facial hair have been celebrated or ostracised to varying amounts. Some think it displays wisdom, sexual virility, and nobility while others would condemn a beard or moustache as filthy and crude and mark you down as an eccentric. Like them or loath them, the beard as a trend, has been varying since man first found the remains of last nights dinner in his whiskers. Now, they are taking over the top spots in the WSOP rankings and appear more often in general throughout the poker world. As early as 3000 b.c. Egyptian men grew and dyed their chin hair, plaited it and even wove gold strands into the beard. The Mesopotamian gentry used curling tongs to create ringlets on their chin-lets. Across ancient Asia the beard was a symbol of dignity and of wisdom. It was not until Roman times that men began shaving. One, Scipio Africanus, is said to be the first barbered man in Rome, some 450 years after the great city's foundation (around the 8th century b.c.). From there the fashion spread quickly. The chin became a symbol of division between the hairy Greeks and the smooth faced Romans. Throughout the dark ages until the late 19th century, the beard came and went as fashions and manufacturing advances enabled a smoother ride of the blade over the skin. In more modern days until the 1960s, a beard was a rare sight in the western world. In late 1970's and early 1980s, designer stubble blazed across hero's faces as film and television made more realistic reflections on society. Facial hair was back. Bearded chins will from now win more WSOP main event titles than baron chins. You don't believe me? Seven different players won the first eleven WSOP main events, all were clean shaven. Of the last seven main event Texas Hold'em poker champions, four proudly sport a beard of one kind or another. In the year 2 b.p. (before poker) or 1968, Crandall Addington won through an invitational event without a wiry wisp to his fresh face. As the WSOP began and the fields grew larger throughout the 1970's, no man with a beard won the main event. It was the 1980's that saw the birth of a new era in poker faces when Perry Green came close to winning the main event, sporting more facial hair than a mammoth's arm pit, though the baby faced Stu Ungar was too good for him in 1981.
Left: Perry Green's attempt to become the first mammoth's arm pit to
win the WSOP. Right: Jack Strauss hit the big time, keeping it bushy. Then the following year, as ostentatious as a Gus Hansen early order
raise, along came Jack Strauss and his beard that changed the way poker players the
world over were viewed when he beat the clean chin of Dewey Tomko and
so started the revolution. It wasn't all plain sailing though. Tom McEvoy and Jack
Keller showed a clean pair of heels and cleanly shaven chins, before
Bill Smith and his yard broom moustache, brushed off all comers to
take the 1985 title. The smoothies fought back and for five years a dimple
chin won the title until in 1991 Brad Daugherty (a Ned Flanders
look-a-like) ended that baron spell, which included Phil Hellmuth and
Johnny Chan's three victories. We were never likely to see five
o'clock shadow from that duo as Hellmuth looked too young for bum
fluff, and Chan is too well presented for face fuzz.
Russ Hamilton kept the beard side up winning in 1994 but the modern
revolution picked up a pace when in 2000 Chris (Jesus) Ferguson's full
goatee and shoulder length hair won the WSOP Texas Hold'em main event. Since then, Chris Moneymaker with his scruffy mutton
chops, Joe Hachem with his stylised chin split and Jerry Yang's
designer stubble have all taken the honours. Crandall Addington who'd been close to the main event
title without a beard ending as runner up in 74 and 78, realised the
tide had turned and tried his luck in 2005 with a full set beard, but did not
succeed.
If Huck Seed is to repeat his 1996 win he'd better pick which year to
shave and which to leave fallow. Written in 2007; Written in 2008;
Written in 2009;
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How long will it be before the WSOP main event final table will feature these players
Stylistic Help
Bearded Wisdoms There are two kinds of people in this world that go around beardless—boys and women—and I am neither one. A man without moustache is like a cat without a tail. The beard is the handsomeness of the face, and a wife is the joy in a man's heart. How womanly it is for one who is a man to comb himself and shave himself with a razor, for the sake of fine effect, and to arrange his hair at the mirror, shave his cheeks, pluck hairs out of them, and smooth them!… For God wished women to be smooth and to rejoice in their locks alone growing spontaneously, as a horse in his mane. But He adorned man like the lions, with a beard, and endowed him as an attribute of manhood, with a hairy chest - a sign of strength and rule. And Shakespeare wrote. Leonato: You may light on a husband that hath no beard. Beatrice: What should I do with him? dress him in my apparel and make him my waiting-gentlewoman? He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man and he that is more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a man, I am not for him. Back to top of page |
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