2008 WSOP, Day 13: Birthday

Caffeine. Consciousness. Brain waking. Senses returning.

In an hour or so I’ll be heading Rio-ward once again to cover Day 2 of Event No. 19, the $1,500 Pot-Limit Omaha event. With 46 players remaining, we might be in for a short day today as the goal will be to play down to the final nine. Blinds will start at 800/1,600 (Level 11), and the average chip stack is 49,500, meaning theoretically players have a ton of play. But pots get real big real fast in this game, so I imagine we’ll see eliminations pretty much from the start.

Vanessa Selbst is the chip leader by a good margin with over 200,000. Indeed, only three other players have more than 100,000. She was sitting at Table #1 for the last five or six levels last night, right in front of our workstation, and I watched her continually pressuring her opponents pretty much the entire time -- especially once she made that jump up to 80,000 or so and grabbed the chip lead. Wouldn’t mind seeing Selbst take the whole thing down, frankly -- she is such a solid player. I believe Selbst and Allyn Jaffrey Shulman (of CardPlayer) are the only women left in the field.

Eugene Todd is still there as well and thanks to a couple of big hands near the end of the night has built up a stack. I reported once last night that he was overheard saying he’d never played Omaha before. I heard him say it again later on. You could sense in his voice that sincere mix of enthusiasm and wonder when someone performs well at something new. I’m hoping he makes it deep, bro’.

Let me also give a quick shout out to BWoP, who made a deep run in the tourney yesterday, finishing in the top 100. A terrific accomplishment. Have to admit this is the one tourney that I had harbored (mostly private) fantasies about entering, not that I have the tourney chops to have done anything remarkable in it. Thus I found it fairly inspiring to have seen BWoP do so well. Read her account of her day here.

Entering today’s action, we’ll have names of all 46 participants and seat assignments. I’ll be running around at the start in order to get to know all of the faces I don’t already know. I’m definitely looking forward to a more thorough (and perhaps more satisfying) day of reporting.

I’d like also today to be able to sneak a peek at that final table for Event No. 18, the $5,000 No-Limit Deuce-to-Seven Draw Lowball w/Rebuys event. What a stacked line-up they have over there: Jeffrey Lisandro, Mike Matusow, Tom Schneider, Erick Lindgren, Barry Greenstein, Tony Guoga (i.e., “Tony G”), and David Benyamine. Just nuts. Would have been cool to televise, but there is no friggin’ way ESPN is putting Deuce-to-Seven on the air. A game with no up cards? Fugghedaboutit. They start up an hour after we do, so I might run over during our breaks to catch a glimpse.

The final table in the $1,500 No-Limit Shootout (Event No. 17) was originally scheduled for today, but it appears they squeezed in the first two rounds on Day 1 -- a ridiculously long, 19-plus hour day of poker -- and thus finished that one up yesterday. That means today “only” has five events going on: the PLO one I’m covering, the Deuce-to-Seven final table, Day 2 of Event No. 20, the $2,000 Limit Hold’em event, Day 1 of Event No. 21, the $5,000 No-Limit Hold’em event, and Day 1 of Event No. 22, the $3,000 H.O.R.S.E. event.

So another busy day of poker. Not a bad way to spend my birthday. That’s right. Another year of this mortal coil in the books for yr intrepid gumshoe. Some will go on and on today about this being the day Hellmuth won his 11th bracelet last year. But you and I know what’s really more important about June 11.

As always, you can follow it all over on PokerNews.