Tom Makes It Three

Was up late last night following various poker-related happenings, including that Event No. 15, the $1,500 H.O.R.S.E. event in which my friend Tom Schneider, a.k.a. the “Donkey Bomber,” was leading as the final table played out.

From a starting field of 862, they’d gotten all of the way down to three-handed with Schneider ahead of Owais Ahmed and Viatcheslav Ortynskiy when I finally hit the hay. Got up to discover Schneider had won, and thus began the day with a grin much like was the case about a week-and-a-half ago when I woke to see Chad Holloway had managed to outlast the final few players to take down that Casino Employees Event No. 1.

Schneider joins Mike Matusow atop the weekend headlines from the WSOP, as “The Mouth” also managed to claim another bracelet -- his fourth -- after winning Event No. 13, the $5,000 Stud Hi/Lo. Meanwhile the Canadians keep grabbing gold, with Mark Radoja picking up a fifth bracelet for Canada in Event No. 16, the $10,000 NLHE Heads-Up event. (The U.S. has won the other 11 bracelets thus far.)

Schneider has been cashing at the WSOP for quite some time, his first in-the-money finishes coming in 2002 and including a 36th-place in that year’s Main Event. He became better known in the poker world in 2006 after a third-place finish in the televised WPT World Poker Challenge (during which Mike Sexton first dubbed him the “Donkey Bomber”).

Anyone who missed that show finally got to know Tom the following summer when he won his first two bracelets at the 2007 WSOP on his way to winning that year’s WSOP Player of the Year. He’s continued to post frequent cashes and deep runs both at the WSOP and elsewhere during the years since, including a 52nd-place finish in the 2009 Main Event.

Long time readers of this blog might remember I first met Tom way back in 2007, just a few months prior to his breakthrough at the WSOP that summer. I’d become a fan of the podcast he, Karridy Askenasy, and Dan Michalski (of Pokerati) were doing at the time, called Beyond the Table. After having interacted with those guys several times previously online, I happened to be in LV on a trip that spring at a time when Schneider was there, and so we had a chance to meet up in person. I wrote about that meeting here in a post titled “Shamus, Get Your Ass in Here!”

Kind of interesting to look back at that post, actually, written before I’d gotten involved in tourney reporting myself or really writing about poker anywhere except here at HBP. Later on I was thrilled to see Tom soon winning bracelets, then once I started in 2008 going out to the WSOP every summer, he and I would generally get together at least once each summer to catch up.

I have continued to report on those later meetings with Tom from time to time here. This morning I’m remembering in particular one post from 2010 titled “On the Schneid” in which I shared some of Tom’s comments to me over dinner regarding the emotionally-challenging grind the WSOP can be. I’m also recalling that deep run Tom made in the 2009 Main Event, as well as an unintentionally funny text message I sent to him then which I revealed here later that summer.

You can click above to read the whole story, but I’ll sum it up quickly here to say I’d accidentally sent Tom a memorable text message that I thought I was sending to Vera. It was a message in which I had referred to the recipient as “mama” and ended with “xxx.”

Waking up this morning to see Tom had claimed his third WSOP bracelet -- just a week after his wife, Julie, made her second career WSOP final table in Event No. 5, the $2,500 Omaha/Stud Hi/Lo event -- I couldn’t resist sending him a text in acknowledgement:

“Congratulations, mama!”

That’s the Way We Do It!

Last night I dialed up ESPN on the crystal receiver to watch the ongoing coverage of the 2009 World Series of Poker Main Event. Got there an hour early (the show is starting at 9 p.m. Eastern time now rather than 8 p.m.) and therefore happened to catch that terrific one-hour documentary about Baltimore Colts football fans, “The Band That Wouldn’t Die.”

Directed by Baltimore-guy Barry Levinson (Diner, The Natural), the focus was on the Colts marching band that persistently stayed together even after the team left for Indianapolis following the 1983 season. Great stuff -- even moving, at times -- that said a lot about how sports can genuinely bring people together and help build community (in my opinion). I highly recommend the special, if you happen to see it being repeated here anytime soon. (Here is the trailer, if yr curious.)

I suppose poker can have a similar effect on us, bringing us together via a common interest and thus enabling the further forging of relationships and meaningful interactions. Watching the coverage of the end of Day 6 of the WSOP Main Event last night was great fun, and reminded me, in fact, of what it was like to have been there as the field shrunk down to just 64 players. This was the day when the media and others there in the Amazon Room now most certainly were outnumbering the players, and the sense of being part of a small “community” of sorts became ever more evident.

We’d arrived at a point where we had enough reporters and bloggers to cover just about all of the big hands and bustouts, and so most of what was shown on ESPN last night I recalled fairly clearly, whether or not I happened to have been the one reporting a given hand.

Glancing back through the PokerNews live blog for Day 6, I’m seeing that I did happen to write up that hand in which Ludovic Lacay was all in with pocket kings versus Hamid Nourafchan’s pocket aces, and ended up spiking a king on the river to survive and win a whopping five million-chip pot. Don’t think they mentioned it on air, but I see in the post that Adam Bilzerian had said he’d folded a king, so that was the last one in the deck that saved Lacay. Had another post later on in which Lacay again saw a fortunate river card come, “Ludovic Lacay Lucky and Lovin’ It.”

My buddy FerricRamsium was reporting on the TV table that day, and he has a post in there describing that hand between Dennis Phillips and Darvin Moon in which Moon had A-K and Phillips pocket queens. An ace flopped for the Maryland logger, and Phillips managed to escape without too much harm. The ever-prescient FerricRamsium titled his post “A TV Hand.” Nice call, sir.

Tom Schneider was in that hand, too, although had fortunately dropped out preflop with his A-J. Got a big kick out of the segment late in the second hour focusing on Tom and his wife, Julie, who has been frequently shown on the rail cheering on Tom over the last couple of weeks. Julie’s own poker-playing was mentioned last night, and I believe last week the announcers did point out her third-place finish in an earlier bracelet event (Event No. 55, $2,500 2-7 Triple Draw). I’m remembering watching some of her fantastic finish play out in that event, and how Tom was on the rail then -- less vocal than Julie but no less supportive, utterly unable to stop smiling as he watched. Cool stuff.

Here’s my write up from July of that day of play in which I talk some about Schneider, Joe Sebok, and Dennis Phillips, and how cool it was to be going back to the Rio on Day 7 with those guys still in contention. Toward the very end of the ESPN coverage last night, a big hand for Phillips was shown, one that pushed him back up over 2.3 million. Seeing that hand caused me to remember how I had spoken to Phillips while walking out of the Rio that night. I’d last seen him with a shorter stack, so it was news to me when he told me about having hit a big hand near the end to get back into a healthier range heading into Day 7.

Was an exciting time, with lots of interesting possibilities still in play. And our little community of poker people would be back the next day to see what would happen.

Have to say, after several weeks of being less than enthused by this marathon coverage of the Main Event, I really dug the programming on ESPN last night. Some good poker, a few examples of genuinely clever storytelling, and fairly riveting throughout. As Julie sometimes says from the rail after Tom wins a hand, “that’s the way we do it!”

2009 WSOP, Day 35: Being There

Day 35. Five weeks. Amazing how quickly they’ve seemed to pass. Two more to go.

Event No. 56, the $5,000 No-Limit Hold’em Six-Handed event, drew 928 runners. That was a decent bump up from last year’s total in this same event (805). Was also more than the 865 listed in that WSOP Staff Resource Guide as a projected total for Event No. 56.

Was talking a few days ago about how the previous event I covered, the Limit Hold’em Shootout (Event No. 50), had a smaller-than-anticipated field, but resisted using that event or the $50K H.O.R.S.E. (the number of entrants for which was also down significantly) as an indicator of what might happen with regard to the size of the field for the Main Event. The fact that Event No. 56 drew a large field is probably a good sign, I’d think, that no-limit hold’em in particular is still going strong. And that maybe, just maybe, the Main Event will attract 7,000 players after all.

The day went fairly well from the reporting side of things. Had some truly interesting hands come up. Dario Minieri busted on a kind of crazy hand in which he open-raised from the button, got reraised Roy Matthews in the blinds, Minieri four-bet, his opponent five-bet, then Minieri shoved with just enough chips to perhaps make a player not holding pocket kings or pocket aces fold. But Matthews had K-K and called, and Minieri was forced to show his 8-3.

There was also Daniel Negreanu’s crazy cameo in this event. He was busy playing Day 2 of another event, where he’d built a stack, and so wasn’t too interested (or able) to devote much time to Event No. 56. So he’d rush over, take his seat, and ship it hand after hand. I wrote one very long post titled “Diary of a Madman” describing a manic, up-and-down sequence of a half-dozen hands or so that Kid Poker played. He’d eventually bust, having once again gone all in after flopping a thin draw, but not getting there.

There was also a curious hand that came up involving Scotty Nguyen. Nguyen had open-raised from the cutoff, got reraised by the button, and it folded back to Nguyen who called. Then, before the flop was dealt, the button asked the dealer to deal him his second card -- he’d only gotten one. And he’d had the cojones to reraise Nguyen anyway. The dealer ended up delivering the second card, and the hand proceeded, with Nguyen betting the flop and his opponent folding. Weird stuff.

As anyone who has followed the coverage closely this year has noticed, PokerNews made a couple of changes with regard to how Day 1 gets reported. We’re not trying to do the impossible and track chip counts for even a small percentage of the field as we did last year. Even with just a couple of hundred players, it really isn’t feasible -- nor even that meaningful, when it comes down to it -- to try and give ongoing counts for even a significant percentage of the players. Never mind how doing that sort of accounting work often takes away from the time and energy available to write posts.

So we pick up the counts on Day 2, and really it isn’t until the end of that second day when we get to the money and the top 50 or so players do we try to provide that comprehensive view of everyone’s stacks and how they’re changing. As my tone probably indicates, I like this change and think it makes sense both on a practical level and in terms of what makes for the best coverage.

Another change this year is a consequence of the relatively smaller cast of characters we have working this time around, which has meant for many events we only have a single blogger working the first and second days, and even sometimes the last day, too. Last year I don’t believe I ever worked without a blogging partner, while this year I’d say two-thirds of my days have been me working solo with a field reporter or two.

I suppose I’m mostly ambivalent about this change. I don’t think it has affected the coverage that greatly, although obviously with two bloggers there’s going to be more quantity and a greater variety in a single live blog of an event than otherwise.

It has affected the experience of covering events somewhat, though. As I wrote about frequently last summer (and a little bit this summer), a lot of what made things fun and gratifying last year was getting to work closely with a number of smart, funny, interesting people who were all genuinely focused on helping each other in the pursuit of a commonly understood goal. That’s also been true this summer, it’s just we’ve had these long stretches of working separately, then getting back together only briefly, say, at a final table.

The big reunion happens Friday, though, as we’ll all be working together to cover the Main Event. Looking forward to it, to be sure.

Speaking of getting together with friends, when the night was over I ignored the $50K H.O.R.S.E. entirely -- where David Bach finally took it down at about ten o'clock this morning (sheesh!) -- and instead headed over to the Miranda Room where they were playing out the next-to-last day of Event No. 55, the $2,500 2-7 Limit Triple Draw event.

Why did I go over there? Because Julie Schneider, wife of 2007 WSOP Player of the Year and two-time bracelet winner Tom, is still in the hunt! I hung out with Tom, Karridy, and Pokerati Dan to watch the last levels of play, leaving just before they wrapped it up for the night. Julie is currently one of nine players left, sitting right in the middle of the pack (5th place) in a group that includes John Juanda, Blair Rodman, Nam Le, and some other formidable 2-7 players.

As you might imagine, Tom was as happy as could be. And I was happy for him and Julie both. Was a neat way to punctuate the day, hanging out with some buds, watching someone I know making good in one of these suckers. Just slowing down a bit and enjoying being there, in the company of others, taking it all in.

Vera left yesterday, and so the likelihood had been high that I might’ve hand one of those lonely-seeming-why-am-I-still-here kind of days. But that didn’t turn out to be the case. Indeed, as I left the Rio I had a big ol’ dumb grin on my face, thinking about Julie’s success and the sheer joy it was bringing others. And how cool it was to be there, at the World Series of Poker.

It had been a good day.