Gonzo Gareth

Writing hastily today from the Philly airport, taking advantage of a pause between flights to France where I will be helping cover EPT Deauville next week. I had to take the opportunity to pop online to read one particular tournament recap from last night, one I hadn’t had a chance to call up yesterday.

The report was for Event No. 3 of the just-begun Tournament Championship of Online Poker (TCOOP) on PokerStars, a $215 buy-in turbo “knockout” event which attracted just under 5,000 entrants. I’d railed the end of the sucker once I’d become aware that a fellow blogger, Gareth Chantler, had managed to find a seat at the final table.

I follow Gareth on Twitter and so had seen his occasional updates regarding the event in which references to his “running hotter than the sun” began to pick up the deeper he got in the event. Being someone who has watched countless tourneys online, it was fun to observe one with a genuine rooting interest for a change.

Just yesterday I was mentioning what is essentially my most remarkable achievement as a “writer-player” in poker, namely luckboxing my way to winning a media event in Ukraine several years ago. Another third-place finish in a WSOP Media Event remains memorable to me as well, thanks largely to my having claimed a trophy for the effort which I just repositioned on my bookshelf at home following a recent move.

But really, as someone unlikely to enter even modest-sized buy-in events any time soon, such trifling finishes will likely together represent the pinnacle of my own tourney triumphs. Thus do I get an especially big kick out of seeing my poker blogging brethren breaking through for big scores, which is why I followed the end of TCOOP Event No. 3 intently last night as Gareth pursued the footsteps of James McManus, Change100, and Chad Holloway to take a turn at becoming the subject of a tournament story rather than the author.

Gareth ended up making it to three-handed and then agreed to a chop that guaranteed him more than $97K -- even more than Chad earned for his bracelet win last summer! He’d make it to heads-up before being bested for a second-place finish. Exciting stuff.

Then I saw Gareth send the above tweet. Sure, he was going to be featured in the tourney recap... but he was also going to be the one writing it!

This morning Brad Willis who heads up the PokerStars blog tweeted “Gave ‪@GarethChantler assignment to cover poker tourney last night. So, he PLAYED it, finished 2nd for nearly $100,000 & then wrote the piece.”

Gareth had a ready response for Brad: “In my defense I thought it was a Gonzo assignment.” (For those unfamiliar with the variety of reporting pioneered by Hunter S. Thompson and his ilk, here is the Wikipedia explanation of “Gonzo journalism.”)

Like I say, I was intrigued to read how Gareth would be writing up the story of what is easily the most exciting tournament he’s ever played. And he did not disappoint, including a priceless (and inspired) “brief, exclusive interview” with the runner-up.

Read and enjoy Gareth’s account here: “TCOOP 2014: K_Heaven07 ascendent in Event #3, $215 NLHE Turbo, Knockout.” Impossible to do so without grinning, I promise.

(Talk to you next from France!)

2013 WSOP, Day 21: Min Cash, Max Fun

It was a day of poker playing yesterday for your humble scribbler, not necessarily what I’d expected to do during my one-day respite before joining the PokerNews live reporting team later today. But after arriving Monday night, Rich told me that several guys happened to be off yesterday and were planning a trip downtown to play in a cheap tourney at the Golden Nugget, and I snap-called, glad to have the excuse both to play as well as to hang out with some of the fellas.

Six of us made the trip -- Rich, Chad, Josh, the two Matts (Whitefield and Yorky Pud), and myself. Was a $125 buy-in no-limit hold’em tourney, part of the Golden Nugget’s month-long Grand Poker Series 2013 that features a ton of different games, including mixed games, a Chinese poker event, a Badugi/BadAcey/BadDeucey event, and other off-the-beaten-path fare.

Someone suggested a last longer between us at $20 per, and I agreed while insisting I was dead money among the group. I hadn’t played a live tourney in many months, while all of these guys play regularly. Hell, one of them had even won a WSOP bracelet this summer. (No shinola.)

I had played at the Golden Nugget once before, back in 2009 in a charity tourney hosted by Howard and Suzie Lederer that also involved their old “World Series of BBQ.” (Talk about a blast from the past.) That was the tournament in which I found myself in the embarrassing situation of having Dan Harrington come to my table while I sat with an “M” of 2.

We joked at one point about the sign advertising the Grand series and the non-specific “Big Chip Stacks” item listed as one of the tourneys’ selling points. The list also included “Great Structures,” and even though we were having some fun inserting those phrases into various absurd declarations (“Me? I only play events with Big Chip Stacks”), the tourney did in fact have a lot of play. Levels were 40 minutes, and with the $10 bonus buy -- “optional,” though everyone took it -- we started with 12,000 chips and blinds of 25/50.

After not playing for so long, I enjoyed getting reacquainted with the rhythms of tourney play. Was sort of like getting back in front of a class to teach after taking off for the summer. I knew what to do, but at the very start there was that tiny bit of anxiousness about it all that often characterizes such situations.

I settled in quickly, though, and enjoyed having Josh at my table a couple of seats to my left to chat with here and there. I chipped up a bit during the first three levels to get over 15,000 by the first two-hour break. Then in the fifth level I earned a boost when I came along from the button with a few others following a middle-position player’s raise after being dealt . The flop came , giving me Broadway and a nut-flush draw to boot. The original raiser -- an aggressive player against whom I’d already won a couple of small pots -- continued with a bet and only I called, then I called another bet from him after an offsuit four fell on the turn.

The river brought another king to pair the board, and my opponent shoved for 6,700 (about two-thirds the pot, I think). I thought a while before calling, he showed , and I had just about doubled my starting stack.

I continued to win a few small pots while mostly sitting tight, the next highlight coming in a hand in which I opened with from late position and got a caller from the blinds from another aggressive, more skillful, hoodie-wearing player. Three overcards and two hearts came on the flop, which we both checked, then I turned my flush and ultimately got two streets’ worth of value from him and a surprised look when he saw my hand at showdown.

Meanwhile Rich busted early, re-entered, then busted again before heading off to play cash. Chad went out as well, with the two Matts also hitting the rail to leave just myself and Josh. I mostly just treaded water during the latter part of the afternoon, making it to dinner break with just over 27,000 which at the time was only around 16 big blinds. Out of the 166 entries about 55 other players made it that far, too, with the top 18 scheduled to get paid.

Josh was still in, too, with an above average stack, and the two of us met up with others for a dinner at the Hash House a Go Go located across the street at the Plaza. I had a reasonably sized (and tasty) portabello mushroom sandwich and fries, watching in wonder at the other mountainous dishes around the table including multiple orders of Andy’s Sage Fried Chicken and Bacon Waffle Tower. The meal resembled the tourney, with me short-stacked relative to others’ intimidating “towers.”

After dinner I managed to add chips without putting myself at risk, and with 30 players or so left was sitting at around 40,000 (by then only 12-14 BBs or so). Across the room the Spurs-Heat game was on and it was just about the time Ray Allen hit that game-tying three that I was four-bet jamming, watching the original raiser tank and then fold, then getting a call from the reraiser.

We both had ace-king and would chop the pot, kind of mirroring the game being tied and heading to overtime, and afterwards the original raiser noted he’d folded a pair and would have won the hand. Not long after we were down to about 25 players when I was all in again with A-K and this time was up against A-9. The board ran out a weird 4-4-4-K-K, and suddenly I was up over 80,000 and well out of the danger zone with an average stack.

Somewhere in there a highly unfortunate situation arose for one of my opponents. I was in the big blind, and the player to my left open-shoved all in from UTG for about 17,000. It folded around to an elderly gentleman in Seat 5 (the cutoff) with about 12,000 or so, and he declared he was calling.

He pushed his small stack of chips forward, his small, circular metal card protector sitting on top. It appeared he might have set his cards forward slightly, too, and unfortunately the dealer reached out and slid them into the muck. The player quickly noted what had happened, but it was already too late. The floor was called, and after some discussion it was determined the man’s hand was dead.

That inspired a torrent of what I imagine to be uncharacteristic language from the senior citizen before he departed, then lots of predictable table talk afterwards especially once the chagrined dealer had left. A few noted they’d seen such occur involving players in the 1 or 10 seats before, but never the 5. All agreed it was a crummy way to bust, but several also pointed out that if he’d used the card protector to protect his cards rather than as a chip stack ornament, it wouldn’t have happened.

A total of 23 of us made the next break. I had 82,300 while Josh had just taken a hit to fall to around 77,000. Then he had the bad fortune of running A-K into A-A following an ace-high flop to bust in 22nd, earning me the last longer in a fashion not unlike what Josh had endured in the Casino Employee’s Event when he’d finished 12th and Chad won.

It took a while, but the super-shorties finally ran out of chips and we hit the money around 10 p.m. I had about 15 BBs then, but lost a chunk after doubling up a short-stacked player. He’d pushed with and I called from the big blind with pocket fives, and the flop came 8-2-2. Another player said he’d folded eight-deuce.

I endured a bit longer, then down to around 8 BBs I watched the table fold to a player in the small blind who limped, the same hoodie-wearing one from my first table, in fact. I then jammed from the big blind with A-J, he instacalled, flipping over A-K, and five cards later I was out in 16th for a $258 min-cash, my profit padded a little more by the hundy I’d won for the last longer.

I came away pleased and with a renewed appreciation for those who do this stuff more than just once in a while. I’d made a few small mistakes, and of course left with the inevitable second thoughts about my exit hand. But I was glad to have played reasonably well and most of all to have kept focused throughout, which is a lot easier said than done.

I cabbed it back to the home-away-from-home, the others having all long gone. I thought about how tourneys gradually evolve into these elaborate, fascinating puzzles to solve, with players’ approaches toward the task perhaps overlapping in several ways, but all ultimately being unique.

I probably only had two or three genuinely difficult decisions to make during the entire day and night. In the end, I was only all in and at risk those couple of times with Big Slick on the money bubble prior to my final hand. Of course, my ability to avoid too many crises along the way spoke more to my willingness to fold and patiently await less troubling situations than anything else.

Like a decent percentage of the field yesterday -- perhaps a third or so -- I have gray hair. And I’ll admit I play like gray-haired guys play a lot of the time. Ultimately it didn’t add up to a winning strategy, although I’d like to think I’d have been able to adapt had I gotten any further along.

Best of all, though, was I had a lot of fun playing a great game. Had been awhile.

Now I get to watch others try to figure out these things. I’ll be on the second day of Event No. 32, the $5,000 NLHE 6-max. with lots of big names among the 128 returning. Check over on the PN live blog today to read how the pros do it.

Chad is Champ; or, Has Everybody Heard About the Bird?

If memory serves, I believe I was first introduced to the “bird shirt” at the World Series of Poker a couple of years ago.

I’m hardly the kind of person who gets too uptight about fashion decisions. Nor am I that well-versed when it comes to making judgments about clothing choices. But even I instinctively understood the garment to be one of the most hideous imaginable.

However, my colleague and fellow blogger Chad Holloway felt differently. He not only would wear the bird shirt with confusing, strangely-placed pride but somehow successfully encouraged others to don the sucker at times while covering that year’s Main Event. Later we all got a kick out of occasionally spotting the bird shirt flying through the background during ESPN broadcasts.

Moving forward, I’d seen this week that Chad and a couple of other PokerNews guys had entered Event No. 1 of the 2013 World Series of Poker, the $500 Casino Employees Event, and that both Chad and our buddy Josh Cahlik had made it through to yesterday’s second and final day of play. In fact, they both had decent-sized stacks to sit near the top of the counts with 55 left.

That made me much more interested in checking out the coverage yesterday than I would’ve been otherwise. So I dialed up the Live Reporting page on PokerNews during the afternoon, and before long saw Day 2 photos of both Chad and Josh had been posted.

First I spotted the one of Josh, looking appropriately serious and engaged. I looked a little further....

And there it was. Staring up out of the photos as if to prove -- defiantly -- that it was not extinct, no sir.

That’s right. I’m talking about the bird shirt.

I couldn’t help but grin.

As the night wound down I kept refreshing the updates to see that Josh was in fact chip leader with about 15 left and Chad just a few spots back. I’ve worked with both numerous times over the last few years, both at the WSOP and at other events, and so was both excited and eager to see how things might play out for them last night.

Almost exactly a year ago I was in Punte del Este with Josh, waiting in long lines as we battled with great difficulty to get back to the States thanks to some canceled flights along the way. Have to say I feel an extra kinship with Josh as he not too long ago completed an English degree, our shared major giving us some common ground that will sometimes filter into our conversations.

Josh is also a creative type who has recently launched plans to make a feature film for which he’s written the script. The project -- titled Multiplex -- sounds pretty cool, actually, and he’s got a Kickstarter going to help get it off the ground. I’ve contributed a few bucks to it, and it looks like he’s more than two-thirds of the way to his goal at the moment -- check it out.

Josh ended up making it all of the way to 12th last night for a $5,010 cash, which I’m assuming will help out considerably budget-wise once shooting gets underway for Multiplex later in the summer. Meanwhile, Chad kept hanging around and was still there by the time the final table started with an above-average stack and in third position.

I lasted a little while longer -- it was already midnight here on the east coast -- before hitting the sack. Then later on during the night I got up and rechecked things to see Chad was still in with four left. Went back to bed and woke up this morning thinking about the tournament.

Still in bed, I had several of those weird half-dream half-waking visions flitting through my brain before I became fully conscious, several times imagining that I was checking the PokerNews app on my iPhone to see the results. You know what I’m talking about, how you’ll sometimes lay there thinking-slash-dreaming about getting up and taking a shower or doing whatever you are about to do?

A couple of times I saw other, less familiar names listed as having won, with Chad going out in fourth or third. Then once I saw he’d won. Then I finally got up to check for real, and damned if he didn’t get there. Chad had really won -- no shinola -- the bird shirt still staring dumbly, only now looking up out of a winner’s photo.

I checked my Twitter feed to see a lot of congratulatory tweets heading in Chad’s direction as the tourney had only ended an hour or two before. I also saw Chad’s tweet saying “Today a dream of mine came true.” I chuckled again, thinking about my own weird waking dreams of the tourney’s conclusion.

Chad and I were just up at Foxwoods covering the WSOP Circuit event that took place there in April. Like me, Chad’s a big fan of poker history and that always gives us lots to talk about. He’s also a solid player who plays pretty much year round and has had some success before, so I wasn’t too surprised to see him do well in the event.

But we all know how poker tourneys go, and how even when the favorites win there’s always an element of surprise. Unlike in most sports or games there’s so much uncertainty and chance involved no one can ever be assured of anything.

All of which is to say I’m happy for Chad and still shaking my head a bit to think that he actually managed to emerge from the 898 who entered to win a WSOP bracelet. Hard to believe, really. Kind of like that shirt.

Good thing Chad now has that piece of jewelry to wear so as to distract us.

Travel Report: 2012-13 WSOP-C Foxwoods Main Event, Day 3 -- Saul Crushing

Another airport posting here as I await my flight out of Providence back home. The WSOP-C Foxwoods Main Event wrapped up a bit before midnight last night, with Kevin “BeL0WaB0Ve” Saul emerging as the winner.

After the tourney ended, I saw some of the congratulatory tweets coming through for Saul, including one from Jason Somerville ending with the hashtag “#saulcrushing” which I immediately wished I had thought of at some point when posting his hands over the last couple of days. (So I stole it for the post title above.)

Saul started the final day of play with a below average stack among the final 16, but it had been clear since the middle of Day 2 that he was probably an odds-on favorite to make it deep, if not win the sucker. My blogging partner Chad and I were discussing at night’s end how this often happens in these events, namely, that a particular player tends to emerge even with six or seven tables left as a likely candidate to win, and while it doesn’t always work out that way it often does.

It was a similar story a few weeks ago at the WSOP-C Caesars Atlantic City Main Event, where Joseph McKeehen had already distinguished himself as a tough player on Day 2, then he picked up significant chips late in the day to be a prohibitive favorite going into the last day (when 19 were left). Also happened at that Sands Bethlehem Deepstack event from December with Chris Klodnicki, although in that case he was already a seeming favorite with 100 players left.

Actually everyone at yesterday’s final table distinguished himself, I’d say, with all having good moments in which hands were played well and most getting lucky here or there, too. Saul even experienced some good fortune yesterday in a hand against Bobby Corcione.

In that one Saul and Corcione traded bets after a flop to build a nearly 3 million-chip pot, with Saul ultimately all in and Corcione just barely having Saul covered (by 10,000, it turned out). Corcione had and Saul , which meant it was almost exactly a 50-50 flip -- kind of uncanny, actually, considering they’d begun the hands with nearly even stacks, too. A diamond came on the river and Saul survived.

“That’s not good,” said eventual third-place finisher Cory Waaland to me off to the side, remarking on Saul’s having not only avoided elimination but had built himself a big stack once again. Paul Snead -- who’d end up fourth yesterday -- had said nearly the same thing to me the day before when Saul had won a big pot while eliminating a player, again indicating the respect others had for Saul.

Snead actually was knocked out by Saul in another near coin-flip of a hand in which Snead was all in with ace-king and up against Saul’s two red eights, then the two black eights came out on the flop to give Saul quads.

Saul was on the other end of a number of bad-beat scenarios, too, both yesterday and the day before. But when such hands occurred he always had the chips to sustain himself afterwards, and continued to apply pressure and play smartly to build back up time and again.

There was an even more eye-popping flop than that quads hand yesterday, one that saw Waaland find himself in what I called a “hand-in-the-cookie-jar” moment after shoving from the blinds with and getting called by Ethan Foulkes who held . The flop then came , driving everyone into hysterics. The turn was the , thus giving Foulkes a flush draw, then the river brought the , giving Foulkes the flush but Waaland a better full house.

It was a nutty hand, and while both Waaland and Foulkes played well throughout the tournament, it is funny to think how a hand like that can affect how these things turn out. (Foulkes ended up finishing seventh, Waaland third.)

Saul is probably the best known player to win a WSOP-C Main Event during the 2012-13 season, aside perhaps from Dan Heimiller who won the ME at the Horseshoe Southern Indiana stop last October. Heimiller needs to update his awesome website to reflect that triumph.

Foxwoods was a fun place, although Chad and I didn’t have a heck of a lot of time to explore it much other than to sample a few of the restaurants. We didn’t play any poker either, although we did use our $10 freeplays to try our luck at Caveman Keno, with Jay “WhoJedi” Newnum tutoring us as we did.

Besides being a great blogger and photographer for the WSOP and an expert in all things Star Wars, Newnum also has advanced training in Caveman Keno, and thus advised us regarding optimal play. Alas for your humble scribbler, I couldn’t turn a profit with my Fibonacci-derived numbers (skipping 1 and 2 and using 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55), but Chad did manage to walk away with a small win of $14 or so.

From here it’s back home for a couple of days, then I’ll be trucking it over to Harrah’s Cherokee for the Main Event there (which starts Friday). Am very curious to see the scene, and bracing myself for what will likely be a huge turnout for the Main Event. I expect I’ll see a number of the same folks from this weekend’s tourney at that one, although the difficulty of flying in -- the closest airport is Asheville -- might keep some away from Cherokee.

All in all it was an exciting tourney in Foxwoods with a somewhat satisfying result, confirming once more the curious combination of luck and skill that distinguishes the game.