For The Good of the Game: Matt Savage Looks Back on 25 Years in Poker

Poker’s most recognizable and accomplished tournament director began his career as a lowly chip runner, worked his way into a front row seat to the poker boom and successfully standardized tournament poker rules around the world. He has helped guide the game’s global growth in the modern era.

But what many people don’t know about Matt Savage is that he started out as a poker player.

“I was always a player,” he told PokerNews. “A bad player, but a player.”

Savage was a service tech at a Bay Area alarm company in 1991 when he realized he could make more money as a chip runner at the Garden City Casino in San Jose, California. Seeing dealers making $200 to $300 a day made him want to get in the box, and when the Bay 101 Casino opened in 1994, Savage somehow convinced them to take a chance on him.

“I wasn’t really qualified, but they liked my attitude toward poker and they hired me anyway,” Savage said. “I started dealing and I just loved it. I loved working with people, I loved the money I was making and I would take all the overtime I could and pick up shifts whenever anyone asked. I’d probably still be dealing if I hadn’t burned myself out and had to go on the floor. Carpal tunnel set me on the path to where I am today.”

The pain of carpal tunnel syndrome forced Savage to take a floor person position at Bay 101 and he quickly developed a reputation as a fair and just one. When the card room’s tournament director would take time off, Savage would fill in and he continued to play tournaments himself in the Bay Area and beyond for the next few years.

Seeing firsthand how tournament rules seemed to change from room to room, Savage said he started thinking about the need for standardization, and in 2001, he headed to the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas with a plan to convince others in the industry of exactly that.

“I went to the WSOP with the intention of talking to key people in the industry about a standardized set of rules for tournaments,” Savage said. “Right away, Bob Thompson, who was the World Series of Poker tournament director at the time, and has since passed away, and his son Robert, said it wasn’t going to happen. Back in those days, I was a young person in the industry and there were all these old guys running events that basically felt there was no need to hear from some young guy how they should do things. Luckily Linda Johnson, Jan Fisher and David Lamb gave me a chance and more importantly, realized that a standardized set of rules would be better for the different properties and the players.”

Johnson gave Savage a little time at her World Poker Industry Conference at The Orleans Hotel & Casino. Twenty-four different tournament staffers showed up, and after a bit of back and forth on the topic, the Tournament Directors Association was born.

The organization, whose stated goal is to advance the industry and help adopt uniform poker tournament rules, has since grown to over 2,500 members in 63 countries. There’s also an annual summit where they debate, discuss and adapt rules to change alongside the game.

Savage took over as tournament director at the WSOP within a year, and in his second year on the job, he was witness to easily poker’s most unforgettable moment.

“It was definitely a career highlight when Chris Moneymaker won the Main Event,” Savage said. “It really was a special time. It was the perfect storm, with his name, the online satellite story and the ESPN coverage. It was really the moment that poker boomed and became so popular.”

Savage said no one really knew what to expect that year.

“Most of us thought it was going to be the first year that attendance would go down a few hundred people or so and we certainly were not expecting the huge boom that came after it,” he said.

The 2003 WSOP Main Event drew 839 entries, up from 631 the year before. After Moneymaker won, the tournament drew 2,576 entries.

“We weren’t even sure Binion’s had enough tables,” Savage said. “We were completely swamped and putting players in on ten-and-eleven-handed tables. It was a crazy time, but it was also special time. We saw the growth and we all knew the story of 2003 was a big part of the huge number in 2004. Everyone could see poker was booming.”

The boom brought a lot of big opportunities for someone with Savage’s unique set of skills and expertise.

“The industry was changing a lot and there were people like Gary Garcia creating a lot of poker TV shows for Fox Sports Net, all the different Internet companies out there and a whole lot of different opportunities,” he said. “Howard Greenbaum, who ran the WSOP for Harrah’s at the time, said he wanted to have me back and there was a place for me there in 2005, but I would have to be exclusive to Harrah’s. It was a bit of a gamble, but I decided it was a growing industry out there …

continue reading in source www.pokernews.com