2007 WSOP, Day 38: When the Chips Are Down

Well, at the moment they are well into Day 1c of the Main Event. At the end of play yesterday, I was feeling pretty good about my prediction of 5,763 entrants for this year’s Main Event. The first two days saw a total of 2,832 players taking their chances -- right about half of what I had guessed. However, today there were over 1,700 at the tables when play began, and it sounds like even more will be there for the last Day One tomorrow. So the final total is starting to look like it might end up a few hundred north of 6,000.

For those of you interested in some cool WSOP number-crunching, let me recommend Tim “Poker Shrink” Lavalli’s Pokerblog where he’s doing a good job tallying and analyzing numbers of entrants (and comparing with last year’s figures), along with providing some other interesting info regarding Day One stack sizes.

Speaking of stack sizes . . . I am still wondering what the hell happened to that massive stack of chips Andy Black spent most of Friday accumulating, then rapidly lost just before play ended for the night. Black had been chip leader with over 150,000 at one point. Then right after midnight he turns into a pumpkin. Check out this graph of Black’s day on Friday (reflecting PokerNews’ reports of his chip counts during the day):



Several of Black’s post-midnight hands got reported, with some real head-scratchers among them. Steve Horton told us about Black’s last two big hands. On the first one, “A player limps, Black raises to 2,400 on the button, and his opponent calls. The flop comes J-10-6 with two hearts and both players check. The turn is the . Black’s opponent checks, he bets 8,000 and is called. The river is the . Black bets 15,000 and his opponent calls. Black announces he has nothing. His opponent has 7-7 and takes it.”

So Black apparently tried to represent a flush (?) and got sniffed out, dropping a little over 25,000 in the process. Then comes the last hand. According to Horton, “Soon after, Black is busted when on a 3-4-3-7 board, Black bets, another player goes all in, and Black calls with 4-5. His opponent has A-A, the river is a jack, and Black is out and leaves in a hurry.” Strange things happen, I guess, when the chips are down.

For more examples of eccentric play (and/or behavior), head back over to PokerNews’ live reports for continuing coverage of Day One craziness.