What Happened To The 'TV' Pros At WSOP 2013?

Although most of the winners at WSOP 2013 were professional players, the big ‘TV’ names we are used to seeing scoop bracelets year in year out seemed to have been sorely lacking.
WSOP 2011 bracelet winners, for instance, included John Juanda, Jason Mercier and Bertrand Grospellier, while last year Antonio Esfandiari, Vanessa Selbst, and Phil Hellmuth made the headlines.
Perhaps the biggest household names to have won bracelets this year were Mike Matusow, Eli Elezra and Erik Lindgren, although the latter’s recent bad press involving gambling addiction and unpaid loans dampens any great publicity, somewhat.
After winning the WSOP APAC Main Event earlier this year, Daniel Negreanu did come painfully short to picking up another bracelet at the 2-7 Triple Draw event, but eventually finished the runner-up, otherwise 2013 may have been known as the year of Kid Poker.
Phil Ivey, too, won a 9th career bracelet at the WSOP APAC $2,200 Mixed Event, and even made a hefty bet on himself to cash multiple times at WSOP 2013. Unfortunately for Ivey, he had one of his poorer WSOP ever and cashed just once at the $1,000 No Limit Hold’em event for $15,544.
Epitomizing the big ‘TV’ names’ lacking performances at WSOP 2013 is the fact Full Tilt Ambassador Viktor “Isildur1” Bloom preferred to stay at home and play poker online, instead, while fellow FTP Ambassador’s Tom Dwan and Gus Hansen preferred to allow their $10k Main Event stacks to blind away in favour of playing in a juicy Open Face Chinese Poker game.
However, perhaps the biggest shock of WSOP 2013 was 13-times WSOP bracelet winner Phil Hellmuth’s decision to opt out of the charitable $111,111 One Drop event, simply tweeting at the time:
“Yep, It’s true, I skipped #WSOP One Drop Tourn today. I LOVE “One Drop Charity” and will continue to support it, but wasn’t feeling it.”
On the plus side, though, WSOP 2013 will still be remembered for a host of other reasons aside from the performance of household pros. These include 10 players winning a second career bracelet; 2 women poker players, Dana Castaneda and Loni Harwood, winning open event; and Canada winning 10 bracelets despite representing just 5% of the 79,471 player field.