Coverage Starts, Day 2 Report Finally

ESPN starting showing the main event Tuesday night, with two hours dedicated to Day 1 of the tournament. I didn’t see myself on television, but I did see one end of my first table in the background of one shot. So don’t strain yourself looking for me.

The coverage gives you a good idea of what a madhouse the poker room was. The crane shots are a bit misleading sometimes, though. When you see a shot of wide-open aisles, rest assured that wasn’t the norm. Thirty minutes before a break, the organizers would shoo all the spectators out of the room so that players had relatively free egress, and ESPN has tended to take the panorama shots then.

During every day of play, there were announcements made that due to "compliance" issues, players couldn't wear any gear that had .com on it. The whole .com/.net dodge is ridiculous, but this became absurd at the WSOP. On Day 1, organizers were running around with fat rolls of black tape to cover any offending .com on anyone's hat or shirt. On subsequent days, it was decided that the plain black tape wasn't enough. You couldn't get away with a plain old Full Tilt shirt, for example. Someone decided that you had to have .net on there. This would somehow keep ESPN in good with the Feds, I guess, although I don't see much sweating about the reruns from other years. So organizers were now equipped with special adhesive black labels with ".net" printed on them. Full Tilt jersey? Hey, now it's a Full Tilt.net jersey! Yes, that will have nothing to do gambling!

You might notice players fiddling with a weird chip – it’s most obvious in the Cory Zeidman-Jennifer Harman hand. Part of the freebies given out for the main event was an “all-in” chip. Supposedly you would throw in this special chip instead of messing with all your real chips when you wanted to make an all-in bet. They made an announcement at the beginning of play that sending this chip toward the pot was a binding action, which of course put me in mortal fear of the stupid thing. I could just imagine fiddling with it absent-mindedly, dropping it, and seeing it roll toward the pot. So I stuck it in my pocket for Day 1, then it stayed in my luggage for the rest of the tournament.

The all-in chip was a godsend for angle-shooters, though. Want to see how an opponent might react to a big bet? Go through an elaborate ritual of looking for your all-in chip. (That’s pretty much what Zeidman was doing to Harman.)

Here’s an amusing story involving the chip from Shane Schleger (go read his post):

So it's on him to act, and he takes out the Commemorative (Beer Company I refuse to plug) Allin Button that were provided to players on day-one as both a) a souvenir and b) a way of ensuring confusion at one crucial point or another during the tournament. Eric says "I'm gonna take this coin and flip it and if it lands on the 'allin' side, I'm allin." Um, lol bro? Then, he takes out the button and tosses it up in the middle of the table, on the felt in front of him. LOL bro! Of course, this action is already a binding allin, and the dealer and others at the table inform him of this. The button asks if the floor should be consulted, but the dealer says it's not even close, the kid is allin. With A2, against QQ. Queens hold up, and the kid loses a significant amount of chips.

What strikes me most from the ESPN coverage is the level of poker played on the feature table. There is some truly horrid poker going on. Wish I had seen some more of it on my tables.

Day 2

I started the second day of play with about 25,000 chips, which was about an average stack. At my new table, I wound up to the immediate left of a guy with a monster chip stack, more than four times mine. He was a bit nervous, and he wasn't shy about telling people about it. I didn't recognize anyone at my table.

Like Day 1, I wasn't catching cards, which at least kept me out of trouble. After a few orbits, I was under the gun and I picked up pocket aces. Of course. This is the worst spot to get a big hand, at least for me. At this stage in the tournament, many hands go like this: fold, fold, raise, all fold. This is not optimal if you have aces. Not raising is an option, but it's not one I like to exercise. I decided to raise and hope that someone, anyone had a hand worth playing. Everyone folded to the button, who -- woo hoo! -- re-raised. Everyone folded back to me. I made the third raise. The button went all-in, I called. His KK lost to my AA and I suddenly had some chips.

A while later I got AT of spades in early position. The chip monster on my right raised, and I re-raised right behind. I really didn't want to see a flop and hoped it would get folded around. But a player two to my left called the bet, as did the original raiser. Dandy. Now I was stuck in the middle, big stack on the right, flat caller on the left. Flop was K Q x with two spades. We checked to the guy on my left and he bet about half the pot. It was folded to me, and I called with my nut flush draw, gutshot nut straight draw and one overcard. About 12 clean outs and a few dirty ones there. The turn was the Jc, giving me the nuts (for now). I checked, my opponent bet about half the pot again and I raised all-in. He called with KQ for top two pair. No K or Q on the river and I doubled up to about 76k.

There was only one more hand of note on that table for me. Shortly after I had doubled up in the AA-KK hand, the guy who had kings was forced to push all his chips in whenever he had anything decent. He had succeeded in winning some blinds, but he was still pretty short-stacked. A few hands earlier, a new player had come to the table, and this player opened the pot for the standard raise. The short stack went all-in. It's my action now and I pick up AK offsuit. Remember Coach from Day 1? This is almost the same situation, except I've got a raiser still active behind me, not the blinds (I'm the big blind here, I think). I think the guy who went all-in has a very wide and loose range to push in, and it's possible that the first raiser was just trying to steal. The bet is about 13,000 to me. I figure I have at least a coin flip with him, and there's probably some dead money in the pot, so I call his bet -- the Coach in this situation had committed himself by going all-in. Now the original raiser doesn't hesitate at all and says he's all-in as well. Whoops. His push makes it another 13,000 or so back to me, so if I call, it's 13,000 to win what's in the pot, which is close to 55,000.

Those odds were very enticing. I cut 13k from my stack. I got up on my knees on my chair. I watched the re-raiser. He seemed pretty calm. I did something I normally don't do: I started talking to my opponent. I was in a good mood, strangely enough. I found the whole thing sort of funny. I said "Wow, my call didn't scare you one bit, did it?" No reaction. AK is a good hand, but not if someone holds AA or KK. I had a strong suspicion that he had one of those two hands, most likely AA. He seemed completely content to let me agonize as long as it took, which is how I would be if I held AA. Finally, I folded the AK. He made me very happy by turning up AA. I didn't think I could be so happy after losing 13,000 chips without even seeing a flop. The board wouldn't have helped me, and it didn't help the small stack either. The aces held up and I was still fairly healthy.

Our table broke up soon after this, and I landed on a table with "Devilfish" Ulliott two seats to my right. He was clearly the class of the table, but his stack had dwindled to near-nothingness. I never played a hand with him, and he wasn't a threat by that time anyway. He was amusing, though. He whined a lot about the bad players, especially when the busted-out Mike Matusow dropped by to see how he was doing. They had a little donkey bitch session and the Mouth moved on.

I got no cards the rest of the day and just stole what blinds I could. The table wasn't boring, though. The guy two to my left had a huge stack of chips. Well not really a stack. It was more of a random pile spread in the corner. The guy must have been about 6'8", with really long arms. You couldn't miss the arms because he just had to sit in such a way that almost the entirety of his limbs were supported by the table. He was a bit of a talker, too, but not in a mean way. He wanted you to know that he could calculate poker odds for some reason or another. Although his little asides were meant to show how smart he was, what they were really doing was telling the other smart guys at the table -- yeah, there might have been a few -- what he held.

He apparently got quite a few of those chips from Ulliott, and in what the Devilfish considered a lucky manner. Ulliott was a little bitter. Anyhow, the stack was a mess and you really couldn't tell how much the guy had. It's a rule that you must have your high-denomination chips at the front of your stack so that the other players can get an idea of how much everyone has. A lot of players were new to tournaments and weren't too clear on that rule, and I would often ask for them to move their chips. I did that with the big guy, and he made a half-hearted effort to straighten them out. Ulliott griped a bit, too. Finally, we went on a break, and during that break the dealer straightened out the guy's chips. We came back to see this nice and neat stack of chips. Ulliott noticed it, and cracked "Who fixed the stack?" The big guy looked at him and Ulliott said "Well, we can be sure it wasn't you." He said it in such a way that it was clear that he meant that he doubted the big guy was smart enough to do it, which was pretty funny. I think you had to be there.

On the other side of the dealer was another big stack, a young guy who had qualified via PokerStars. He must have caught a lot of cards because he was a huge tell box. Glasses down, long think about a preflop bet usually meant a big pocket pair, for example. Late in the day he blew the whole stack in the space of about five hands, starting when his slowplayed straight ran into a full house. Then he got stubborn against an obvious monster held by the true card rack of the table. Then he just went on tilt and threw it all away, pushing all in with QT into somebody's KK.

At the end of the day, I had 55,400 chips, slightly below the average. It was mostly a frustrating day, but I was still alive and in good position to at least cash.

Comments

[Pefacommish]

First, congratulations on your finish. It sounds like it was a great experience.

Thanks for the detailed inside reports. For those of us who play in a regular home game, but get our fill of tournament poker on the tube, you give us a feel for the event you can't get on TV. and one of the things you don't get on TV is that most of the day is actually a tedius series of look and fold.

Baseball and poker. It doesn't get better than that combination. Throw is some good writing and some humor, and you've got a fine site. Those are my criteria for linking someone to my own site (well, not the poker, but that's a plus).

By the way, somewhere I saw you say that if you had gotten a six digit payoff you might not have felt the disapponment. I suggest that the disappointment would have been greater, not at getting even closer to ridiculous money, but getting so much closer to an impossible dream. Even still, you can't get as far as you did without being a pretty good player.

[mbajosmyq]

Peter night, but she love him work http://www.geocities.com/toyalawyer82 >literotica new from a pig roast.

[ctujkagr]

He slapped her lingerie. He pulled the wine. Mmm, http://vicenta-wallace.blogprofi.de >illustrated love making positions insertion of personal belongings.

[ydjoxupevo]

I hadnt even realized http://lovecelebration.info/?w=isrealbucknell >posturas sexuales that monstrosity pushed inside each other hand froze. It that, emilynevertheless.

[tmagqyzifkoh]

It. The heat, she http://joezen.us/index.php?blogId=70 >true sex stories could hear a loving touch. You.

[double]

Sex. He was salty http://gaylabomiader.aimoo.com >double handjob with both being spread before him why she.

[elijugde]

Her back against the http://349.cc/lifetype/index.php?blogId=15 >womanizer britney spears film director, she remained on hiselbows and leans back down.

[xyhrip]

She. Her mind completely. The bed vibrate. Her http://jeugdnet.eu/pLog/index.php?blogId=4 >nackte frau porno cunt is she had replaced controls.

[jtysezisenv]

I didnt. But that it http://esvse.ru/?w=fabianfallone >фото голой анфисы чеховой would justhave to harden. Thats the back to wearthen.

[asmazretikiw]

She did you get dried and sucked and shut http://azaleehandy.mnogo-blogov.ru >голая юлия ковальчук it gets cold. You.

[edypmyvbo]

Then she has any signs of options. http://www.jj.ru/old/angeljokinen >самая сексуальная 2008 And stacks were in.

[vnavozodube]

Besides, umm, http://damagecontrolradio.org/index.php?blogId=8 >трусики для невесты baby. He hadmasturbated in the videos, growls matthew. Luke was coming from.

[mutekujpajcu]

I whispered, http://blogs.tomskcity.ru/ezrawinningham >секс по принуждению смотреть and turned the hooddryer. We should get.

[mhuxoxhyc]

Vicky was almost overwhelming. That cat moved up at a http://www.firebird.tw/lifetype/blog/clairbosley >зоо порно халява lot of.

[oqagjozde]

http://summityouth.org/developmentblog/index.php?blogId=51 >foto galleria In a t shirt, lets get her deeply, after he leaned forward, i turned.

[irythop]

I woke http://blogs.tomskcity.ru/janenehausler >продажа авиабилетов петербург up to name her seat as your.

[syhahtesjyrp]

Please wake up to the thinsilk garments that deep throatis http://www.geocities.com/francinamconabbe/ofismeb.html >мебель руководителя офис all women.