Watching the High Rollers

Have to admit my eagerness to follow what has been going on at the World Series of Poker has been coming and going here over the last week or so. Kind of surprising to look up and realize the Main Event is almost here (it starts Sunday).

In fact, I’ve found my attention as a poker-spectator divided this week somewhat by what’s happening over at the ARIA Resort & Casino, in particular by that big three-day “Super High Roller” cash game featuring $400/$800 blinds, $200 antes, and a quarter-million minimum buy-in. That’s leading up to a $500,000 buy-in “Super High Roller Bowl” tourney at the ARIA that starts tomorrow.

All of the action at the ARIA is being delivered over the PokerCentral Twitch channel, albeit without hole cards. It’s all being shot as well for broadcast later on NBCSN. The cash game has at times resembled the old High Stakes Poker shows given the emphasis on table talk and having lots of well known personalities sitting around the table. And I think I heard something about Gabe Kaplan and A.J. Benza coming back to do the commentary, although I’m not 100% on that.

Among those taking part thus far have been Jean-Robert Bellande, Bob Bright, Doyle Brunson, Daniel Colman, Antonio Esfandiari, Phil Ivey, Matthew Kirk, Paul Newey, Doug Polk, Andrew Robl, David “Doc” Sands, Scott Seiver, Jennifer Tilly, and Sam Trickett.

There have been some huge pots and interesting props -- if you’re curious you can read PokerNews’ recaps of Day 1 and Day 2 and/or look through the live reporting blog.

You might’ve heard about one hand from yesterday involving Daniel Colman and Doug Polk in which the flop came -- that’s right, a second queen of clubs snuck in there. The craziest part of the hand, though, was the fact that neither Colman, Polk, nor anyone else at the table seemed to notice the duplicated card, and in fact the hand played to a conclusion before the fouled deck was realized. Take a look:

Seiver had a funny line soon after when Robl holding ace-queen called a preflop all-in by Polk who had a pair of kings. “Obviously Andrew’s playing this because there’s a bonus queen in the deck,” Seiver cracked.

The did fall on the flop in that one the first time they ran it, and Seiver said “I’m rooting for another queen of spades.” The then came on the turn to put Robl ahead, but a king came on the river to give Polk kings full. (Polk won the second run, too.)

Going back to hand with the duplicated card, though -- everyone’s so unfazed, despite the huge amount of money on the line. Safe to say if something similar happened at the Rio -- say, at a WSOP final table -- the response would hardly be so ho-hum.

Dropping in on “The Big One for One Drop”

Was writing yesterday in general terms about watching poker on the tube, then tonight I found myself getting surprisingly absorbed by a couple of hours’ worth of poker TV while watching the finale of the “Big One for One Drop” on ESPN. Have to say I enjoyed the show more than I’d expected I would.

The first hour showed them play down from nine players to three. There would be 13 hands total shown during that first hour, selected from a span of 41 actual hands. From those hands, no less than 12 featured players all in, most often preflop. And in all but one of those hands the all-in was called and a player either doubled or was knocked out.

That hour was actually a little fatiguing to wade through, save the one hand featuring Scott Seiver make a bold all-in shove on the turn with an open-ended straight draw (and king-high) to force Tobias Reinkemeier to fold his pocket aces (an overpair to the board). Here was the hand from PokerNews’ reporting, and here the clip on the ESPN site, if you’re curious.

The hand took over 10 minutes in real time, and they actually took up around eight minutes of the program for it, not counting the gimmicky commercial break stuck in the middle. It was the only all-in bet not called during the first hour, and it was easily a highlight of the entire night.

The second hour began similarly, with a short-stacked Christoph Vogelsang all in three times in the first five hands shown (culled from about 30), finally busting on the last one. Then came what turned out to be a fairly enjoyable rest of the program showing 11 of the 46 heads-up hands between the two Daniels, including some very interesting reads by both players of each other -- some correct, some not.

Negreanu’s big call with K-Q on a 4-8-J-A-4 board against what turned out to be Colman’s full house with A-4 was the most intriguing decision (Hand #103). I remember reading James McManus writing about the “Big One” final table for Bloomberg and mentioning Negreanu had king-queen in the hand, something I hadn’t seen reported elsewhere, and so was intrigued to see that confirmed.

Then the final hand provided some uncanny symmetry with Colman using K-Q to beat Negreanu’s A-4, the latter actually flopping two pair before Colman turned his winning straight.

Poker-wise that heads-up portion of the show was more fun to watch than I’d anticipated it would be, although I think Negreanu had a ton to do with it thanks to both his table talk and the somewhat infectious excitement he was showing right through to the end. (Negreanu’s tweets during the night commenting on hands actually added a lot to the enjoyment, too, I came to realize.)

ESPN’s occasional acknowledgements of Colman’s disinterest in chatting it up with the media were mostly fine, I thought, although the montage of pros commenting on the subject felt more like another excuse to squeeze Phil Hellmuth into a poker show than anything else. Hardly that gripping of a side story, but at least ESPN didn’t go overboard and try to construct a full-blown villain out of such meager materials.

Talk of folks buying pieces wasn’t ignored, with shots of Colman backers Olivier Busquet and Haralabos Voulgaris a fairly frequent reminder, although not a lot of focus was placed upon it. (Then again it never felt as though the millions for which players were vying were all that significant to anyone involved.) Meanwhile references to the One Drop charity and other positive messages about poker came often enough to represent a minor theme for the night.

Like I say, I found myself more engaged by it all than I thought I’d be, especially knowing the outcome, something I wrote about a couple of weeks ago being a big deterrent when it came to viewing. Was still nowhere near as captivating as your average live sporting event, but once I dropped in on the show it nonetheless kept my attention.

2011 WSOP, Day 35: I See What You Are Doing, But What Are You Thinking?

“Poker used to be a gentleman’s game. Now they let any idiot play.”

So said Scott Seiver to Phil Hellmuth yesterday evening as Day 4 of Event No. 55, the $50,000 Poker Player’s Championship, was playing out. On the surface it might sound more like something Hellmuth would say than Seiver. But a little bit of context might help explain what was happening here.

When covering these events we tend to hear a lot of table talk. And in events such as the $50K Player’s Championship, when the field is made up of seasoned veterans and the best of the younger players, the chatter is often especially intriguing.

While it can be fun sometimes to report what players are saying at the tables, one has to be wary when doing so. A passing comment, taken out of context, can be highly misleading when reported. Often if I have any doubts about what was said or the speaker’s intended meaning, I’ll choose not to report comments as I don’t want to misrepresent anyone. And to be honest, even here I wasn’t completely sure about what Seiver might be getting at with his comment, although I did see enough of the action at the table and heard enough from others to get an idea what might be going on.

They were playing six-handed at the time, with Hellmuth, Seiver, and David Bach (who won the $50K H.O.R.S.E. event in 2009) sitting at one end of the table, and three young players, Alexandre Luneau, Steve Billirakis, and (I believe) Roman Yitzhaki sitting at the other. The dealer and two empty seats were positioned between the the two groups, and it was obvious that an interesting “old guard vs. young guns” dynamic had begun to develop at the table.

I came upon the end of one Omaha/8 hand in which Hellmuth lost to Billirakis. From late position, Billirakis had aggressively played Q-J-3-2 against Hellmuth who was in the blinds with A-K-x-x. Billirakis rivered a Broadway straight and Hellmuth called him off with top two pair, prompting Hellmuth to grumble some about the “young guys” and their play.

The talented Seiver is of course one of the young guys, too, still in his mid-twenties. But from his comments he appeared to be siding with Hellmuth, and kept referring to “those guys” at the other end of the table and their crazy play. Meanwhile David Bach sat silently between them, smiling underneath the brim of his leather “gunslinger” cowboy hat.

It struck me that Seiver was likely egging Hellmuth on, his joining him in the criticism of the players at the other end of the table forming part of a larger plan regarding Hellmuth. And, of course, there was something inherently funny about the idea that “any idiot” could (or would) lay down $50K to tangle with this stacked field in a mixed-game event. I felt like I was starting to understand what was happening here.

The table soon broke, at which point Seiver made another comment that seemed to support my read. “I do all of this work to get the table tilting and playing like sh!t,” Seiver said with a grin. “And now the table breaks.”

But Seiver’s work at the table had been interrupted. As had mine.

Hellmuth took his new seat card, then moved over to an empty chair at Matt Hawrilenko’s table. I watched Hawrilenko’s face as Hellmuth sat down a couple of seats to his right and couldn’t help noticing him smile. I thought about that infamous LHE session the two had played on UltimateBet a little over two years ago, the one in which Hawrilenko (“Hoss_TBF”) won so thoroughly that Hellmuth said in the chatbox he was going to ask UB security to review the session to ensure he wasn’t being cheated. (I wrote a little about that in a post here titled “I Am Irony Man.”)

Was Hawrilenko thinking of that -- or other encounters with Hellmuth -- when the Poker Brat took his seat? Who knows? There’s only so much one can see or know when standing by the table, watching players play hands against one another. Contexts shift and overlap, adding layers of meaning that one can’t possibly appreciate when simply jotting down flops, turns, and rivers.

Still, just like at the tables, it’s fun sometimes to speculate about what the people sitting there might be thinking.

While Hawrilenko did not make it through to today’s Day 4 of Event No. 55, both Hellmuth and Seiver did. In fact, both will be returning to big stacks today. Follow along over at PokerNews to see reports on what they and the other 27 players still alive in the event end up doing today.

But not on what they are thinking.