Lest anyone think that this blog is going to turn into another guy complaining about his bad beats at the tournament table and life, let me just stipulate that I do have some winning sessions, and that as much as many of my old colleagues from my professional (not poker) career express bewilderment at how I ended up in my current circumstances, there are a lot of people worse off than myself, a middle-aged guy who’s had to go a thousand miles away from wife and home to take a job that’s populated mostly by people who could be my children (and who have more experience as live reporters and better poker resumes than me, in most cases, though perhaps not the same world-weary perspective on, well, everything).
Live reporting hours are long. If an event starts at 3pm on a Day 1, there’s no dinner break, you work 10 hour-long levels with an hours of 15-minute breaks every 2 levels, so it wraps up about 2am. But as a reporter, you need to write an intro for the day as well as finish up any hands and write a recap at the end of the day, and someone needs to write the intro for the next afternoon, so you get there an hour early don’t usually leave the building until 2:30 or 3am. A 2pm restart for Day 2 or Day 3 means you get to the Rio by 1pm or 1:30 at the latest, and with the dinner break, play goes through to 2am again, and again with the recap. So figure 13 to 14 hours at least two days in a row. a little less on the third day if someone wins on schedule, but I’ve had one event where the last two players at the end of Day 3 agreed to play an extra level to finish things off, and then with the Mixed Omaha we had three full days plus the extra hour in Day 4. I’m on salary, but I figure with the number of days I’m working, if I was getting paid overtime, I’m still well ahead of what I have been doing to pay the bills, but it’s not what I was making ten years ago as a programmer or twenty-five years ago in the printing industry.
If the only people who want to hire me any more are poker people, I’ll take it. I’ve made a lot of friends in the world of poker and I’ve got enough of an ego left (did I ever mention that I was once in the Oregonian’s list of the 200 “Most Interesting People in Portland”?) that I get a kick out of someone mentioning they read the blog. Got an invite to a party yesterday at the house where a bunch of the Oregon dealers are staying out in Summerlin (see photos above).
Refreshed from Jello-O shots and America beer, I returned to the house and fired up a 0.25/0.50 PLO8 table. Played 35 minutes and made almost 200 big blinds. Then jumped into 3/6 Stud 8, jumped out after 20 minutes up 6 big bets. Made 18 big blinds profit in a 5-Max NLHE game, then went to bed.
Two more weeks here in Vegas. Tomorrow I jump into the middle of the $1,500 Stud 8 tournament.
I’m thinking about putting a pin on the “NO PLAYER” button I found the other day so I can wear it just to alert people of my status. Of course, most of the time, I’d wear it with the They Might Be Giants snowman that has been my go-to gear for playing poker the past few years (though the hoodie pre-dates my poker playing).
I got to the Rio yesterday a bit early. We were supposed to be setting up on one of the feature tables, but the only setup going on was for the $50K Players Championship, on Feature Table 3. Andrew Lichtenberger and Craig Blight were still up on the main feature table, so I sat down in the stands for the first time ever. Sort of odd that I hadn’t yet, though I had tripped and gone down face-first a couple of weeks ago walking around on the outside of the main stage (there’s luminescent tape on the edges of a platform that runs from the table to the back of the stage area but that doesn’t work if the lights aren’t on).
Live reporting going on. The real action at the WSOP.
Day 4 of the $1.500 PLO8/O8/Big O tournament did not last long. We had five players coming back, one of them got knocked out in the second hand, then the two chip leaders got into a hand close to the end of the first hour that ended up with Gavin Smith out in fourth place and Allan Le with more than 80% of the chips in play. It was all over before we were out of the level.
So, I’d skipped a couple of things I had been thinking about playing on my day off because of the extra day, went back to the house, played a little bit of PLO8 on WSOP.com (and lost), then got myself ready for another Survivor tournament at the Venetian.
I thought things might be kind of interesting while I was in line at the cage waiting to get my ticket when I heard one guy trying to explain to another why it didn’t matter how many players were in the tournament, it didn’t affect the size of the payout. But even he seemed to be getting it wrong somehow.
Unfortunately, I was the fish in this case. We were only in the second level of play—100/200—when I raised to 5,100 in early positoon by grabbing a 5K chip instead of a 500 chip. Then a guy who appeared to be a regular shoved for more than my stack from the big blind after everyone else folded to my obvious mistake. I weighed my options. I had AxJx. I’d misclicked and put half my stack in, with the blinds going up, I’d be down to about 15BB on the next hand or so if I folded. I figured I was probably about 30%, I was going to have to call off another 5K to get 15K back, so I took the plunge and lost to his JxJx. That was humiliating. BTW, does anyone know if Kristi Gazes is still playing tournaments? I could have sworn that the woman sitting in the 4 seat on the table was Gazes, but I don’t see a Hendon Mob cash for her for years.
I wasn’t prepared to reenter but I did. I walked into a table where there had been some sort of heated discussion involving an older, maybe Italian, guy wearing a hat and dark sunglasses (which seemed not to be helping his view of the action) and the guy on my right at the new table. Don
‘t know what it was about, but there was a stench of acrimony hanging over the action for a while. The old guy then lost a pot that took him down to about 3K, and when he shoved over a raise from me and a call by the Lebanese/New Zealand guy on my left, I re-shoved my KxQx. The guy on my left folded what he said was AxQx and the Italian guy showed KxJx. King on the flop and an ace on the turn which got the guy on my left exclaiming about how he shouldn’t have laid down his hand. I thought that maybe my luck might be turning around.
The Italian guy re-entered and pulled his own seat card, so he came right back to the table, where he picked up aces twice and started building a big stack. Then, thankfully, our table broke. Things went relatively well there, I picked up some pots, though I was contending with some sicko Euros on my right who were showing down 7x4x and 9x2x for bottom pair to win a couple hands. Took some chips off the Italian guy, who ended up at the table after a break and promptly picked off a player with a pair of kings. He had to lay a hand down to me after I shoved on him with top two for a pot of about 15,000, and said he would get the chips later. I reminded him that I’d been the one to bust him earlier, and he said (from his admittedly larger stack) “Where are all your chips, then?” I guess I could have replied that he didn’t have all that many when I busted him.
Then things started to slide a bit, though not so much for me as the Italian guy, who lost his entire stack to the sicko who’d called down with 9x2x. His aces this time were better than what the Italian guy had, and that put him up to about 120K at a time when I had maybe 18K left.
41/135 left in this @VenetianPoker Survivor tournament. Just 28 to get through and I'll have enough to play @RemkoMedia 4/8 Mix tonight
More than half the field was gone already four hours in, but I was on about 12BB. I picked up 9x9x in the big blind, there was a raise, an all in from the guy on my right. I shoved, the original raiser thought about it and folded, and the guy on my right flipped over queens. Then the card in the door was a nine, he looked kind of sick, and the guy who folded was patting himself on the back for folding AxKx because there was an ace on the flop as well.
Lost a couple pots, blinds went up, and I was back down to 15BB when another one of the European players opened for about 3X and I shoved KxQx from the button. He dithered about calling with KxJx before he did it, but he did, and everything ran smooth for me until the river, which was the jack. 100 players gone out of 135, 21 spots from the money, and while a double up there would not have assured me of making the money, it would have given me a fighting chance. Very disappointing.
Prostitute or Notstitute?
I’m walking from the Venetian Poker Room to the Palazzo parking garage.
In the mall between the buildings, I notice a young woman ahead of me in a short skirt with a large tattoo on her thigh. I turn my attention back to my phone.
Never been to the Monte Carlo, so I’m looking at Google Maps, and as I pass the young woman, she alters her course to come talk to me and asks what I’m doing, offers up that she’s been playing blackjack, etc.
I am under no illusions as to my appearance. I am fat. I’m dressed in a t-shirt and shorts, with an unbuttoned short-sleeve shirt over the t-shirt. I’m easily old enough to be the woman’s father. I don’t look like I have money (and I don’t).
Schlubbing along in a hotel that’s way out of my price range.
This young woman is…
a) …a prostitute.
b) …just another Vegas victim looking for a fatherly figure with whom to commiserate.
c) …it’s Vegas, baby.
After that, I headed over to the Monte Carlo. PokerNews celeb/broadcaster Remko Rinkema hosts a 4/8 Mix game there on a semi-regular basis that I’d been hoping to make it to, and after blasting off two buyins at the Venetian, it seemed like a perfect time.
I got there during a round of Razzdugi and promptly scooped two pots. DIdn’t do as well in 2-7 Single Draw, but Std 8 and PLO8 were good. I wasn’t close to recouping my Survivor buyins or anything of the sort, but I picked up a little bit of a profit.
Then the vultures swooped in and we got a couple new players Someone who shall remain nameless made up a PLO game with three river cards that lasted all of one hand, but that hand was exceedingly costly to me. And one of the new guys was whining about the $80 cap and wanted to play every game no limit, even the stud games. Flipping for rollz just isn’t my thing, plus I got no rollz to flip, so I slunk off into the early morning to lick my wounds.
BTW, you may have heard about the parking fees instituted at the MGM-brand casinos on the Strip starting this month. Here’s what your $20 buys along with 3 hours of parking at the Monte Carlo:
That’s the inside half of the elevator door half-way open. Don’t worry, you can slip out through the open section before it goes back to whatever mechanical hell if comes from.
I’m not sure I need to add anything to that, but here it goes.
We started Day 3 with 27 players. Seven-handed, that meant three full tables and one with six. The first hour was a little insane, as we lost six players, had a table redraw to three tables, lost two more players almost immediately as the first level ended (one of whom was Dan Saltmarsh, the last Portland-area player).
My reporting partner for Days 2 and 3, Valerie Cross (a live stream commentator for Stones Gambling Hall, and waaay back in the background on the left in the photo above) took a bit of flack for the lack of updates in the next level as we tried to catch up. Things slowed down a little bit: during levels 22 and 23 we only lost four players. Kate Hoang from Federal Way, Washington was the last PNW player in the field, and when she busted in 15th, we redrew again to two tables, moved to the outside feature tables (where the photo above is from) and Valerie and I had to each cover a table on opposite sides of the main feature table, which means watching and taking notes on hands while trying to write up what’s already happened.
That’s the point where Jackie’s tweet catches the action. Fu-Bang Huang has his back tot he cameras in the foreground. He’d been a chip leader earlier in the day but hit a bad patch after going to two tables. Allan Le is in the red hoodie. The guy in the suit standing behind me is one of the tournament directors actually standing on the Thunderdome floor, where they were streaming something: I really have no idea what it was, we were just that busy. Poker, or some such. Oh, yeah, Andrew Lichtenberger was there, so it must have been the $3K NLHE. I know that because the rail for Keith Ferrera on our event would yell out: “Chewie! Acknowledge us!” from time to time.
The first three players to bust from the feature tables were all on Valerie’s side, which put more of the work on her because those hands have to be written up. By dinner break (about 9pm due to the table redraws and a couple of other things that paused the clock), we were down to five players per table. Then I lost a couple (including the Day 2 chip leader John (@angryjmonnett) Monnette. Down to eight and we consolidated into the unofficial final table in the level after dinner.
Only three hours to go and eight players left though, meant there was no way we were wrapping up by the end of the tenth level. We sort of knew that when 27 came back for Day 3, but even with all of the eliminations at the start, and hoping against hope that there’d be some carnage in the middle that would get me to my day off on Sunday, that wasn’t going to happen. We ended the night with five players led by the OG Gavin Smith. Got back to the place about 4am, now I’m awake and about to head back to the Rio.
More storms and flash flooding in the Las Vegas area overnight but I saw absolutely nothing but a little standing water when I came out of the Rio this morning at 2:30am.
My day was essentially all working the PLO8/O8/Big O event, which went from 207 down to 27, hitting the money four hours into the day. The new 15% payout structure meant 101 of the original 668 players got paid, but the payouts from 101st to 28th were $2,243 at the bottom to $5,639 for 28th (which was the beginning of another payout tier), which is still only about a 275% ROI for twenty hours of play. Watching these folks grind out relatively small returns is making me wonder why the heck I’ve been playing tournaments.
My colleague for the day and I were set up for Day 2 in the Pavilion Room, with all of the cash games and the Deepstacks, and instead of our usual digs at the back corner of whatever tournament area we’re covering, the table we had to use was right near one of the main entrances to the room, so we were the target for anyone with questions, as well as a dumping ground for used glasses and other debris.
I got to the room and started putting out the seat cards we use to (try to) track players, and noticed that though the tournament had been played with only seven players at the table on Day 1 that there were eight chairs at the table. Mentioned it to the TD and they had someone get the extra chairs out, but it threw a wrench in my player ID plans since we were rushed a bit at the start of play.
Despite a decent stack going into the day, my host busted early in the money, and the next-to-last Portland-area player went out shortly before the end of the day. One still remains!
Keeping track of players is one of the primary job functions, and it’s a bit daunting, even in a smaller field. We lost track of several of the Day 1 chip leaders because we didn’t get useful descriptions of everyone before they moved in some of the early-day busts and table balancing. Then, as the end of the day approached, there were several players neither of us had any idea who they were; names that just popped out of nowhere (to us) that were still in the counts but hadn’t been in a reported hand by name.
With four tables left for Day 3, I sort of wonder if we might not be in for either a long day or even a Day 4.
Flying into the blasted heath. West of Vegas in the mountains the trees just stop. WTF is up with that?
Not much to say for this update because I did almost nothing since the last post except for report and sleep.
It was Day 1 of the Mixed Omaha event yesterday. Lots of Portland-area and Oregon players, including my host and one of the players renting a room in the house. There are still five Oregon players in the 207 coming back for Day 2 (including my host), which is a decent percentage considering the relative population of the state. None are in the top 40, but three are above the median chip count of 20K (John Monnette has nearly 87K for the chip lead).
Yesterday was all about finding people and hands to write about. It seemed like most of the big hands were in Big O; you have to wonder how long it’s going to be before it gets its own event.
I got to the Rio when it was sunny an hot. Not too long after I got there, I got an emergency announcement on my phone warning about flash floods. So when I walked out of the building at 2:30am, it was wet. No standing water on my way home, though the wipers seemed to be surprised to be put to use.
Just about time to head back. Got a shower, shaved (so wierd), and now I’m ready for Day 2.
Shout out to John F, who was waiting for a gate-checked bag as I was deplaning yesterday morning and somehow recognized me despite the lack of facial hair. Had a nice chat about poker and comedy on the way to the baggage area.
I was determined that after a five-day hiatus between the previous two posts, I would get back to daily updates. As it’s now been two weeks, you can see how well that’s gone.
Like so many other dreams in Las Vegas, that one’s been broken. It’s bad, because it not only means that I’ve broken the chain of daily info, but that I have to leave out material in order to keep this post at a manageable length, if I remember them at all, that is.
We’re now just over a week to the start of the Main Event, which is #68 on the calendar this year. The day I started this post, two events got under way: Events #41 and #42, the $1.5K NLHE Monster Stack and the $3K NLHE Shootout. I’m getting back to it as Event #53, the PLO/O8/Big O is a couple hours off. Determination, eh?
The day after my last post was the beginning of Event #26, the $1,500 Omaha 8 tournament. One of my concerns about taking this job was my ability to remember faces and attach them to names. Much better with remembering trivia, numbers, and dates than people I’ve met. It’s not an age thing, just one of those little quirks I’ve had to live with all my life. But apparently faces and names of poker players that I don’t talk to for the most part are more like trivia than the faces and names of poker players, dealers, or anyone else in daily life that I do talk to, so over the course of two HORSE tournaments I’d picked up a certain amount of familiarity with the people who play limit tournaments at the WSOP. Benny Glaser won the $1,500 a couple of days before winning the $10K version of the same game.
Benny Glaser and his mates just after he won his first bracelet of the year.
I played five Bovada tournaments on Sunday—Father’s Day—after the O8 tournament and min-cashed in just one—my only positive poker experience since the Survivor at the Venetian a couple of days after I got here. Played the Orleans HORSE tournament and only made it about three hours in.
Had the next day off, as well, and bricked three Bovada tournaments, then got halfway through the Orleans O8 tournament. Then the next day it was back to reporting, this time on Event #36, a $2.5K O8/Stud 8.
Three-and-a-half weeks’ worth of notes on WSOP events, more or less.
Let me just note: keeping track of actions and cards in limit split-pot games is not an easy task. For one thing, there are a lot more cards exposed in stud and Omaha games to start with. Sometimes it’s difficult for players to see what’s out there, and as live reporters, we’re supposed to be as unobtrusive as possible, so despite the occasional stink-eye from players who think we’re crowding them, we really are trying to give them room. And it’s just not all that clear sometimes where the chips are going, who got the high, who got a low, if there’s a quarter, etc. I do my best for someone with crappy handwriting.
Keeping track of moving players isn’t any easier.
With image enhancement, I’m almost visible in the Thunderdome, with Aditya Prasetyo next to the dealer, Fabrice Soulier in the white cap, and champion Hani Awad on the right.
The night Hani Awad won the bracelet he’s been heads up for in 2015, I headed over to the Orleans to play some poker myself since we wrapped up around 11:30pm instead of my usual 2:20am. All the O8 tables were full—it was the day of the first flight of the Monster Stack—but after about 5 minutes, I got a seat at a 1/3 NLHE game. Called a raise to $8 with KxJx, with me, the original raiser, and the blinds into the pot, flop KxJxTx, small blind bets $25, original raiser calls, and I put $80 in only to have the original raiser put me all in and suck out with KxQx on the turn. I wasn’t about to go to the cash machine for more,
Played 0.5/1 PLO8 on for a total of about 20 minutes and blew 100bb and went to the Golden Nugget to try out the PLO8/O8/Big O format that I’ll be covering starting today (assuming I get this post up on time). Had a couple of good hands, but busted out after about four-and-a-half hours.
I had been scheduled to report on the $10K Stud 8 tournament, but the Monster Stack grew to monstrous size. We had three people covering a Day 1B field of 4,507, which meant about 1,500 players—or 150 10-handed tables—apiece, and even with much simpler hands to write down, it was still a little bit of nightmare just trying to find and update people. I wrote an early post about Portland’s Steven Harper, who turned out to be the Day 2 chip leader. I’ve been kind of out of touch except with my particular events, but I did manage to plug the PDX players a little:
Only 276 left @WSOP#MonsterStack lots of #PDXpoker: #27 Moshe, #34 James, #36 Zhu #83 Harper #84 Grube #247 Dumdeang
I was also the first reporter (I think) to notice Arizona economics professor Mitchell Towner, the guy who won the thing. But I wasn’t there by then. I headed home to Portland for a couple of days. Now it’s back to work in half an hour. I promise not to take so long on the next one.
I had another title and theme picked out for this post the other day, but it’s completely escaped me.
If this trip has done anything, it has given me even more respect for the abilities and stamina of Martin @hardboiledpoker Harris, and the work he’s done on his “Hard-Boiled Poker” blog. I also might hate him a little bit now, for making live reporting look like a task a mere mortal might be able to take on and still have a life.
I’ve been reading Martin’s work for several years, including his accounts of live reporting from stops in the US, Europe, and Latin America, as well as essays on politics and poker, plus articles on PokerNews. When I first considered branching out from this blog, Martin—by then an editor at PN—was the person I reached out to, and he’s been my editor there ever since. Oh, and he also teaches a course on poker and popular culture and has a farm with horses. After I’d applied for this job, and while I was waiting to hear back about whether I’d be hired, I read through Martin’s daily accounts of covering the 2008 WSOP, back when he was new to the game.
Since then, I’ve come to the conclusion that people like Martin are either just much better at this than I am, or that they have some sort of fucking time machine they’re not telling me about.
The first day of the $3K HORSE wasn’t anywhere near the car crash of the $1.5K. I was on with a different partner this time, another newbie to live reporting, but one who had some experience as a dealer at the WSOP, and we both had a couple of events under our belts, so we had a better feel for things.
The $3K was a smaller field, as well, though that meant even more concentration of big names to cover, and one issue we found ourselves with was a too-expansive list of stacks to track. Chino Rheem, Jason Somerville, Justin Bonomo (runner up in the $1.5K HORSE), Hellmuth, Ho, David Chiu, Robert Mizrachi just off his Stud bracelet, etc. No dinner break on Day 1 and we wrapped up around 2:30am. Monday. There was a lot of non-poker emotion around, as it was Sunday afternoon that Ryan Laplante talked about the Orlando shooting—which had happened early Sunday morning—at his bracelet ceremony.
I got to the house, finally got to sleep as light was starting to seep from behind the blackout curtains on my window, then woke up at 9:30am. Wrote up the report for the start of Day 2 and posted it, tried to catch up a little on the world outside and what was going on in the rest of the WSOP, but before I knew it, it was time to head back to the Rio for the 2pm start of HORSE.
The Millionaire Maker had been running over the weekend, and there were a number of Portland poker faces I ran across in the halls. Wayne Keller rolled up to me to say hi, and later on I ran across Darin Stout and Jim Rostel (among others), who were there to rail Danny Elmore, who came in 18th out of nearly 7,200 entries. Elmore busted late on Day 3, but by now everyone knows that another Portland-are player, Lisa Meredith, went on to Day 4 to win half a million dollars after mostly playing $20 tournaments at Claudia’s, a mile from my house. Day 2 of the HORSE tournament wrapped up about 2am again, with two tables of eight players each coming back for Day 3.
Back up at 9:30 or so. Write the Day 3 intro (our guidelines say they’re supposed to be written the night before, but so far that hasn’t happened for me), then into the fray. We had two tables in an otherwise empty quarter of the Amazon Room to start with. The reporting desk was on the far side of the section, a “problem” Martin would sneer at. Then two minutes before the tournament was to start, the floorperson told players to put their chips back in their bags and ran them all the way across the room. My fellow reporter and I had to grab our computers and hurry to catch up, because we were fairly certain one of the players was going to bust on one of the first hands, since he came back for the day with just a single big bet.
Little did we know that there would be such a flurry of action as we had, with seven players busting in the course of ninety minutes, which meant a move to a secondary feature table, which was next to the “Thunderdome” where the final table of the Millionaire Maker was taking place. Fortunately, the placement of the media table was a little more protected than on the other secondary table (tertiary table?), which had been an issue on the $1.5K HORSE.
The chip leader through most of late Day 2 and up until almost dinner break on Day 3 was Jared Talarico, who I described in my Day 3 intro as having put on a “master class in relaxed aggression” (which was edited out) due to his being continually massaged for most of three days, blew up just before dinner break on the final table, losing a huge pot to Marco Johnson. In a series of about three hands, Talarico went from having more than half of the 6M chips in play to less than a 1M. There was no masseuse after the dinner break.
Johnson won the bracelet about midnight. I got home, watched the latest Game of Thrones, and slept until 10:30 (it was Wednesday, by now). I had planned to play the 11am 6-Max tournament at Planet Hollywood, but I was going to be late. Played it anyway and busted in Level 6, when I played 6x6x and the board ran out QxJx5xQx6x, natch, my caller had the QxJx and the better full house before I even made mine. Thought about playing the afternoon Big O game, but went back to the house, helped chop stuff up for tostadas, ate too much, had a couple of drinks, and went to bed earlier than I normally do even when I’m not reporting late into the night.
What happened to W-Days Plus 6 through 8, you might ask? Well, Event #8, the $1.5K HORSE tournament is what happened.
The first day of the event, I got to the Rio early and set up in the Amazon Room. The displays showed the tournament clock for the event. My colleague joined me and got his computer set up, but with fifteen minutes to go, nobody else at the table, no dealer, and no players, we were getting the feeling we were in the wrong place.
We eventually decamped to Brasilia, which was half full of eager HORSE players, but by then we were already behind the eight-ball, to use an analogy from a different game. As it turns out, the two of us were the coverage team, and the we got to work setting up the details of coverage for the tournament, spotting notable players, figuring out which sections we were covering, etc. HORSE uses up more tables because it’s played eight-handed. It isn’t like 6-Max, where you need half again as many tables as 9-handed, but still, 10% more. By a couple hours after starting time, the field had grown from over 500 to more than 700 (capping out at 778) and the two of us were feeling a bit overwhelmed.
That wasn’t helped by the fact that since HORSE whose player base is generally more experienced and established, the field was studded with big names who you really don’t want to make a mistake writing about. Of course, you necer want to make mistakes, but they do happen. The fear of getting the first name of a bracelet winner from the night before wrong, or writing down the wrong card for someone like Scotty Nguyen (who made the final table) or getting action wrong for a hand involving Greg Raymer (I’m not saying any of those things happened, just using them as examples)can be daunting. These are people who live poker, and however much as a player and reporter I sort of live poker, it wasn’t my job until last week, so I don’t have the same years of investment in what happens. If I put someone’s name into a post and get something wrong, they might bad, but my name’s not on the post. I might get in trouble or get fired, but nobody outside of the organization will have the slightest idea who I am.
Anyway, Day 1 didn’t feel like it went so well.
It also didn’t go well for Seattle-area player Ian Johns, who was down to 2K at the end of the day.
We wrapped up sometime about 3 in the morning, I got to bed around 4, and was back at the Rio by 11 by 11am.
Day 2 started to go better, as we got a feel for the project. Also, only 202 players to cover. It went bettter for Johns as well, and when I checked on his seat, I wrote a post about him being up to nearly 20K. He continued to climb throughout the day, my partner and I got better (plus there were fewer players to cover), and we were down to 20 by the end of the day, barely getting the three-table seat draw up before having to scurry around to get chip counts and table balancing seating changes.
Home at 4am again and back to the Rio by 11am. By Day three, I was starting to feel a bit sleep-deprived. I don’t normally sleep much anyway, but three-and-a-half or four hours a night for a week grinds even me down.
Day three started with three tables, with each one picking up exactly where they left off the day before. By four hours in, the field had been whittled down to a single table of eight, including Scotty Nguyen, and we were moved over to the secondary feature table, while a match in the last stages of the $10K NLHE Heads Up was going on the main stage.
The rail on the HORSE tournament was incredibly loud, which made writing updates—even getting into my seat at the table—kind of hard. The reporter’s table is right next to one of the entrances to the play area, so spectators tended to sort of blur the line of demarkation, with one two-fisted drinker resting a hand on the back of my chair every time I was out of my seat.
On the secondary feature table in the Amazon Room, with (counter-clockwise from the dealer) Chris Vitch, Andre Akkari, Noah Bronstein, Georgios Sotiropoulos, Ian Johns, and Svetlana Gromenkova (the last two with their backs to the camera). To the right out of the camera were seated Scotty Nguyen and Justin Bonomo.
After that I slept. Woke up after the customary four hours, got something to drink, and laid back down to get some more sleep for the first time in days.
Friday was a day off, the first of two. I hung around the house for a while, helped my host and his web guy with a couple of issues, listened to a lot of talk about DFS and—I think—baseball that I didn’t understand, then finally headed about about 4pm to the airport to pick up a friend from the airport.
I thought I’d get into town with enough time to grab a late lunch at Krung Siam, but Friday afternoon traffic, amirite? Ended up just grabbing a cheeseburger from a McDonald’s near the airport, then driving around in circles a bunch of times while Brad got his luggage and out to the passenger pickup.
Dropped him off at the hotel, then we headed to the Venetian for another Survivor tournament. My table was next to Brad’s, but the noon game was going on with lots of tables in the main poker room, and our tables were in the aisleway next to the sports bet, where there was a lot of noise coming from the Golden State vs. Cleveland game, which made conversation a bit difficult.
I was in seat 8, and got talking with a woman on my right from the Bay Area named Carey who knew Angela Jordison. I was doing reasonably well for three hours, contesting a couple of times with an aggressive European player in seat 1, then things went bad about three hours in. I had QxQx on the button, there was a raise to 1,100 from seat 3 in early position, Carey called, and I eyed the stack of the player in seat 3, then put out 4,500. He went all in, with what I thought was a call and Carey folded. Seat 3 had 2x2x and flopped a set in the window. When the payout needed to be made, however, it turned out he had a 5,000-chip at the bottom of his stack, which was almost indistinguishable from the color of the table. No raise had been announced, I hadn’t actually said “call,” and I hadn’t put any chips forward to indicate a call. I would have called the extra 2,600 preflop, but I would have put out my full stack if the 5,000 had been visible.
I knew I was likely on the hook for the extra money, but I asked for a floor ruling. It took a while for the floorperson to get to the table and the Euro guy and a couple of others were telling me to just put the chips out. Maybe I should have, and eventually the floor ruled it was a call. Maybe I’m turning into a douchey angle-shooter.
Brad had busted out of the tournament before I did, but Daryl, who was in town on a weekend trip with his wife, made it to the 12th place extra money payout, which was decent since there were 7 players contributing to it.
Brad and I headed back to his hotel and met up with his brother for dinner at Ping Pang Pong. Dan Idema was there having dinner with three or four others at the next table before they moved to a bigger table one away and were replaced by a couple where the guy kept asking Brad and his brother about their food. I think he was hungry. I got some XO Shrimp Lai Fen, which said it was spicy, and the other guys said they thought it was spicy, but it wasn’t holding a candle to anything from Krung Siam.
Headed back home and slept some more for a long, long time.
MSPT Media Director Chad Holloway and Venetian Tournament Director Tommy LaRosa
The poker media have been described as the all-powerful masters of the poker world by some in recent months. I was disappointed that Chad Holloway, host of the Mid-States Poker Tour’s media invitational tournament, didn’t take the opportunity to play that up with a name like MSPT Poker Overlords Tournament or something of the sort.
MSPT put up a seat in their $2M guarantee Main Event for first (and only) prize, and TD Tomma LaRosa—apparently knowing just how high-living most of us writers are—threw in $10 food vouchers, which were snapped up by the participants like fish rising to the top of the tank.
Pretty much everyone there was someone you would know the name of, if not the face. Mo Nuwarrah and Marty Derbyshire of PokerNews (Marty, when he got to my table, said I was “too serious,” but I think it was just three three long days of Colossus). Mark Hoke, Bernard Lee, and even a brief Joe Stapleton sighting.
There were three of us from the WSOP team among the field of 25, including Will Shillibier and Molly Mossey. Will—barely old enough to enter a Vegas casino—is already a far more experienced poker reporter than I am. He was out before me, but Molly was still there after I left (she didn’t win either). The structure was pretty turbo, with the intent that the game would end in a couple of hours, over before the start of the first flight of the $2M tournament, and I never got above the 2,000 starting stack. Finally got it in under the gun with AxKx and was broken by Diana Cox, the media overlord for the Venetian Poker Room, who had JxJx in the big blind. Also an Oregonian, which I only found out after the fact.
Funny thing is, that’s my photo. I only posted it to the WSOP media team’s Slack feed, but somehow it got around into the general population. And for the life of me, I can’t figure out why the lighting is so much better than any of the other photos I took, most of which make people look like trolls (see Stapleton and Hoke below, for example). Maybe it’s just Molly.
Stapleton was sitting just a couple places to the left of Molly on the same table, though he was gone by the time I got her picture on the way out. This is why we have professional photographers.
Rich Bak, winner of the Final Table’s $100K guarantee event in May
Rich Bak hailed me from across the room as we were waiting for the tournament to get going. Like Molly, he took a good photo.
Headed over to Planet Hollywood to play their noon HORSE tournament since I haven’t played it for a while and I’m covering the HORSE tournament next. Did very well on one hand when I made a set of queens in Stud, took out a player who said he was playing the WSOP event (a number of people were there brushing up) then ran into an old man with rolled-up aces on the next Stud rotation as I was drawing to a straight.
Headed back to the house in the late afternoon and sat in the pool while I talked to folks back home. Stayed up later than I planned watching Silicon Valley and Veep and the live stream of the $10,000 Stud final table, then got some sleep before the HORSE tournament in the morning.
I wasn’t even sure if I was going to write it or wait to combine a couple of days into a single report, but let’s give this a try.
Day 2 of the Colossus was set to get under way at 2pm. I got back to the house from covering the last starting flight (Day 1F) at around 4am. Had to stop at a Wal-Mart to pick up something to drink (Diet Coke, natch) and noticed that this town—for all the malls and mini-malls it has—doesn’t have many large groceries. In Portland, pretty much every second or third mall is going to have a grocery store. It might not be open at 4am, but it’d be there at least. Only the fourth or fifth time I’ve ever set foot in a Wal-Mart, and two of the other times were here in Las Vegas.
Slept the sleep of the dead for about four hours then woke up, talked to Barbara at home and the guys in the house, then had to start getting ready to head back to the Rio. It’s about 12 miles. I use an off-brand route that—except for a crossing over US95—avoids the freeways and is pretty much a straight shot with just a couple of turns from Flamingo and onto the street that runs by the subdivision gates. The one downfall being that the first night I drove the last leg, I screeched to a halt at two stop signs that were almost impossible to see in time on unlit sections of a four-lane road road.
I made it back to the Rio safe and sound. When 2pm rolled around it was time to get to work. The plan for me was to run around and familiarize myself with the faces attached to big names, but that sort of went to hell when I ran across a hand for a write-up and tables were breaking at a rapid clip. There were 21,613 entrants total, 846 (under 4%) of them came back for Day 2, and just 78 of those (about 0.036% of the total) made it through the day.
My find of the day was Marek Ohinsko a Czech player with just $3,000 in reported tournament earnings, who had a good read on Michael Mizrachi and made an impressive call for all of his chips. I spotted him before he had reached the top of the chip count, and tried to keep an eye on him the rest of the night.
OK, I’d write more, but I’m falling asleep and I don’t even have to read this.
Live reporting hours are long. If an event starts at 3pm on a Day 1, there’s no dinner break, you work 10 hour-long levels with an hours of 15-minute breaks every 2 levels, so it wraps up about 2am. But as a reporter, you need to write an intro for the day as well as finish up any hands and write a recap at the end of the day, and someone needs to write the intro for the next afternoon, so you get there an hour early don’t usually leave the building until 2:30 or 3am. A 2pm restart for Day 2 or Day 3 means you get to the Rio by 1pm or 1:30 at the latest, and with the dinner break, play goes through to 2am again, and again with the recap. So figure 13 to 14 hours at least two days in a row. a little less on the third day if someone wins on schedule, but I’ve had one event where the last two players at the end of Day 3 agreed to play an extra level to finish things off, and then with the Mixed Omaha we had three full days plus the extra hour in Day 4. I’m on salary, but I figure with the number of days I’m working, if I was getting paid overtime, I’m still well ahead of what I have been doing to pay the bills, but it’s not what I was making ten years ago as a programmer or twenty-five years ago in the printing industry.
I played five Bovada tournaments on Sunday—Father’s Day—after the O8 tournament and min-cashed in just one—my only positive poker experience since the Survivor at the Venetian a couple of days after I got here. Played the Orleans HORSE tournament and only made it about three hours in.
I got to the house, finally got to sleep as light was starting to seep from behind the blackout curtains on my window, then woke up at 9:30am. Wrote up the report for the start of Day 2 and posted it, tried to catch up a little on the world outside and what was going on in the rest of the WSOP, but before I knew it, it was time to head back to the Rio for the 2pm start of HORSE.
