2010 WSOP, Day 49: Intense

Helluva day at the 2010 World Series of Poker Main Event yesterday. It was an intense and stressful nine hours of poker for the players as the field whittled from 205 down to 78. They’re getting to bigger paydays now, with the next few to go out now getting $94,942. Pay jumps come every nine spots currently, with the jumps getting bigger as they go along, and a lot of players are becoming ever more mindful of that fact.

Lost Johnny Chan relatively early on Day 6, as he was eliminated in 156th. He ran kings into aces to lose most of his stack, then was finished off soon thereafter with jacks versus aces. Some of the other eliminations included Dragan Galic (183rd), Bryan Pellegrino (143rd), Phil Galfond (141st), Robert Mizrachi (116th), J.P. Kelly (111st), Jesper Hougaard (108th), and Andrew “Foucault” Brokos (87th).

Of course, all of us juveniles on media row were especially saddened to see Fokke Beukers go out (in 94th). Though I did report one hand involving Beukers earlier in which he knocked out a player, the headline for which wrote itself.

Was kind of a stressful day on the reporting side, too, for various reasons. One was that the PokerNews site had a few hiccups during the middle of the afternoon, lasting maybe 45 minutes or so. Not really sure what the deal was there, but the ship righted itself soon enough.

There was another kind of interesting, sort-of-stressful situation early on involving the Mizrachi brothers, Michael and Robert, and our reporting on them.

Robert was short-stacked to start the day, and would remain so pretty much until his elimination. Michael, meanwhile, began the day with almost 1.8 million, putting him in 30th with 205 left, and from the start he added to that total, eventually ending the day in 2nd place overall with a little more than 7.5 million.

Anyhow, while we were covering pretty much everything yesterday, we were focusing on a few stories in particular, including Johnny Chan, the last woman player Breeze Zuckerman, Gualter Salles (who had been down to one yellow 1,000 chip on Day 5), and the Mizrachi brothers. So we were constantly reporting on both Mizrachis’ hands and keeping their counts updated from the beginning.

Early on, we had reported on Michael a couple of times, including seeing him win a pot to move to 1.93 million, then win another to get to 2.3 million. (Reported here.) That was right about the time -- 1:30 p.m. or so -- that Michael’s brother, Eric, who also cashed in the Main Event (finishing 718th), sent out a Twitter message saying Michael had doubled to 4 million.

It didn’t take long for Eric’s message to get forwarded around the web. I know ESPN’s Andrew Feldman passed it along, as did many others. We heard about the message, too, and so made a quick check back at Michael Mizrachi’s table.

Yep, still 2.3 million.

Of course, the forwarding of the message soon was supplemented by editorial comments about how PokerNews had failed to report the big double up. But we couldn’t report it. It didn’t happen!

Adding to the fun, about 40 minutes after Eric’s message, the Grinder did in fact win a big hand (not exactly a double-up) that put him at about 3.9 million. It was a great hand, actually, requiring a huge call from Mizrachi on the river. (Report here.) And the surge would continue for the Grinder, pretty much throughout the day.

Anyhow, the timing of all that perhaps made it seem like we were 40 minutes late with some news, but in fact that wasn’t the case. Kind of funny in retrospect, but at the time it seemed a bit weird (and hard to explain).

Will be back over there for Day 7 today, where the plan will be to play down to 27. Should be exciting. Still some big names left -- Mizrachi, Alexander Kostritsyn, Eric Baldwin, Johnny Lodden, David Benyamine, and Jean-Robert Bellande among them.

Of course the biggest name is Meenakshi Subramaniam. I mean, really, that is one big name! Be cool if he went deep and developed a big following of Subramaniacs.

This’ll actually be my last day this summer over on PokerNews, and in fact I’ll finally be heading home on Saturday and so won’t be there at the very end when they get down to the November Nine. I’d like to see it, of course -- last year that final day was probably one of the most exciting days of poker I’ve ever been around -- but I’m also very glad to get on home and be with Vera. Too, too long, it’s been.

See you over at PokerNews later today. Also, be sure to check out my interview with B.J. Nemeth over at Betfair Poker which went up today. Nemeth talks about his WSOP photography, and the interview includes a couple of especially cool pictures Nemeth took at last year’s WSOP accompanied by his explanations of how he took them. Cool stuff.

On the Economy & the 2009 WSOP

We’re getting close, peoples. Just a week more and satellites get crankin’ at the Rio. On Wednesday, May 27th, Event No. 1, the Casino Employees Event, a $500 buy-in no-limit hold’em tourney, gets started. Then on Thursday at noon the real World Series of Poker begins with the “Special 40th Annual No-Limit Hold’em” event (Event No. 2), that $40,000 buy-in event everyone’s been talking about for weeks now.

Then all hell breaks loose.

One new event starts each day from Wed. through Sat. next week. Then the following week, we’ll slip into the routine of having two separate events start each day, meaning there will usually be around five or six different tournaments going on at once, with a couple of final tables each day.

Am noticing that on Wednesday, June 3rd there will be a whopping seven different events going on, including three final tables, all starting at 2 p.m. Vegas time. (I think that has to be a record.) I don’t see any other days on the 2009 schedule with seven events running. It’s the conclusion of that $1,000 buy-in no-limit hold’em Event No. 4, the “stimulus special,” that’s causing the pile-up there, I believe. That’s a four-day event, though really five days as it will have a couple of day ones.

So whaddya think? Too many events? There are 57 bracelets being awarded at this year’s WSOP (a new record). Is the WSOP spreading itself too thin?

Everyone’s wonderin’ about the numbers, specifically whether recent economic woes might affect turnouts. Casino revenues have certainly experienced a significant downturn. The Las Vegas Sun reported in late January that casino revenues had decreased markedly in 2008, and that the trend was expected to continue in 2009. A more recent article over on PokerNews Daily reports how Nevada has seen fifteen straight months of decline in gaming revenues (when months are compared year over year), with the drop-offs over the last six months ranging from 11.61% (March 2008 to March 2009) to 22.33% (October 2007 to October 2008).

There was another interesting article over on Poker News Daily yesterday in which Dan Stewart, the owner of PokerScout (that site that tracks traffic on all of the sites), is interviewed regarding the current health of online poker.

That article appears to have been specifically occasioned by the recent spate of overlays in Full Tilt Poker’s FTOPS XII, including an eye-popping $200,000-plus overlay in the $2.5 million-guaranteed Main Event. According to Stewart, Full Tilt’s decision to run a “mini-FTOPS” alongside the regular FTOPS -- mirroring the main events with similar events costing one-tenth the buy-ins -- appears to have affected turnouts for the big events. Says Stewart, the decision to run a mini-FTOPS was a “mini-disaster” that “cannibalized the business from the big tournaments.” Of course, Stewart also points out that Full Tilt nevertheless is doing just fine, as is the rest of the online poker world, which is “quite healthy” clicking along at an overall 30% increase in revenue over last year.

So live casino games are hurting. But online poker is as healthy as its ever been. What about the WSOP?

There was some discussion of the economy and its possible effect on the WSOP on last week’s episode of The Poker Beat (the 5/14/09 show). The consensus there seemed to be that the currently ailing economy would not have much effect on turnouts.

John Caldwell is now a regular co-host on TPB. Unfortunately, I won’t be working with Caldwell this summer as he is no longer with PokerNews, although I’m sure I’ll see him out there somewhere along the way. According to Caldwell, the WSOP tends to thrive no matter what the economy is doing, being, as he calls it, “the exception to the rule.” He goes on to point out that “the prestige and the cachet of the event sort of insulate it from... the [failing] economy.... Now, it may be an issue in certain specific events... [but] I don’t think it’s going to be much of a factor [overall].”

Caldwell is probably right, although I do think it will be interesting to watch how the field sizes in the $1,500-$2,500 events compare to those of the $5,000, $10,000, and higher buy-in events. The smaller buy-in events are always much more popular, but I wonder if perhaps we’ll see an even more severe “class difference” happening this year, with just the same 200-300 players turning up for the higher buy-in events, while the hoi polloi stick with the smaller buy-in tourneys. (Sort of a WSOP and a mini-WSOP, in a sense.)

I, for one, am hoping for big fields and a highly successful WSOP, although I know it could turn out otherwise. Selfish, I know, as a thriving poker economy certainly is good news for someone like me.

In any event, it’s gonna be a busy time for your humble gumshoe, no matter how the turnouts turn out.