Who Would You Select Among the 2013 Poker Hall of Fame Nominees?

In a rush today and so just thought I’d post a quick one noting the announcement of the 10 finalists for this year’s Poker Hall of Fame. I’ve had the honor in the past of being one of those called upon to vote in this process, and as I look at the finalists for this year I’m again thinking about how difficult a task it will be when it comes to deciding between them.

As you’ve probably read elsewhere, the following players all made this year's list of finalists: Chris Björin, Humberto Brenes, David Chiu, Thor Hansen, Jennifer Harman, Mike Matusow, Tom McEvoy, Carlos Mortensen, Scotty Nguyen, and Huck Seed.

Of those, McEvoy and Nguyen have both been nominees for each of the past five years -- indeed for every year since they instituted this new process by which fans were able to nominate candidates over at WSOP.com and then the panel of living Hall of Famers and poker media then vote on finalists culled from those who were nominated. Harman has also been nominated each of the last four years.

Meanwhile four of this year’s nominees are back for a second go-round, with Björin, Chiu, and Hansen on the ballot for a second consecutive year while Seed is on for a second time after being a finalist once before in 2011. The other three candidates this year are all first-time nominees -- Brenes, Matusow, and Mortensen.

Matusow won his fourth WSOP bracelet this past summer and has the unique distinction of also having made a couple of WSOP Main Event final tables (in 2001 and 2005). Mortensen of course won the WSOP ME back in 2001 and very nearly made another final table this year before being ousted in 10th.

Brenes, meanwhile, might surprise some as a nominee, but I knew his nomination was a distinct possibility after learning about a groundswell of support for him when at LAPT Peru a couple of months ago, something I noted in one of my reports from Lima for the PokerStars blog. Brenes’s standing in that part of the world as an important ambassador of the game is not unlike that of Hansen in Norway where Hansen is viewed as the “Norwegian Godfather of Poker.”

Interestingly, six of the 10 nominees were born outside of the U.S. (Björin, Brenes, Chiu, Hansen, Mortensen, and Nguyen). Four won WSOP Main Event titles (McEvoy, Seed, Nguyen, Mortensen). And all 10 have won at least two WSOP bracelets.

Gotta think McEvoy, Nguyen, and Harman will have an edge when it comes to the voting, given their having been on ballots for several years running by this point, but like I say those voting will have a tough decision to make. Only two at most will be voted in to join the other 44 already inducted in the Poker Hall of Fame.

Say you could only pick two of these candidates... how would you cast your vote?

2013 WSOP, Day 31: Mixed Games, Vegetables

Back on the beat yesterday with Event No. 50, the $2,500 10-Game Mix. And yes, I did report some Badugi hands.

They’re down to 20 now from a starting field of 372, and last year’s 12th-place finisher in the WSOP Main Event Scott Abrams leads everyone at the moment. In addition to Abrams, Robert Williamson III returns to a healthy stack, while Greg Raymer, Bruno Fitoussi, and Konstantin Puchkov are among those on the short side who’ll need to gather some chips early.

The tourney was fun to follow, although frequently challenging. Tables all start with the same game but then change games every orbit, meaning it doesn’t take long for all to get out of sync and be playing different games as you move from one to the next. Thus is it necessary when sidling up to a table first to get a peek at the stack of black, rectangular placards indicating the different games and see which was on top, then follow the action from there.

At times one could tell players and dealers were having to slow down and remind each other what the games and stakes were. There were frequent references to laminated copies of the complicated structure sheet throughout the day and night. Comments were made about certain games being mostly foreign to some (especially Badugi). I’m sure there were errors made here and there as well, although we couldn’t always pick up on those.

Scotty Nguyen busted in 21st late last night in a stud hand, for instance, and I actually think from something he said on seventh street after looking up at the placard that he might have possibly thought the game was stud/8. Perhaps he did not, though, as I’m convinced with Nguyen almost anything is possible, baby, including feinting what might appear to be the making of such a slip.

That said, I do think it’s true that even the best players can occasionally get a little mixed up by the 10-game mix.

Of the 10 games, four are flop games (NLHE, LHE, PLO, O/8), three are stud games (razz, stud, stud/8), and three are draw games (2-7 NL single draw, 2-7 fixed limit triple draw, and Badugi).

As an observer, if you don’t get a glimpse of the placard right away it’s easy to be confused by what you’re watching as a hand play out, even though the larger categorical distinctions (flop, stud, draw) are stark enough. But it can still be challenging, say, to note all of the cards coming out in a stud/8 hand and the sequence in which they appear plus catch all the bets and everything else, especially if you start out with any uncertainty about which stud game is being played.

I found myself thinking a lot about the draw games, and how from the standpoint of an observer they appear a much more abstract form of poker insofar as it is only the drawing and betting that signifies and no community cards or upcards. We know nothing of the hands, and so the decisions made regarding bets and draws come to represent the terms of conflict between players, providing evidence of certain hand strengths but no actual cards onto which the viewer can fix.

From the players’ view, the draw games aren’t as abstract as they do have cards to look at in their hand and thus knowledge about what cards their opponents cannot have. I think on some level there exists a great deal of overlap between the 10 games for the players as far as making hands and the application of tournament strategy is concerned.

Was a long day and I enjoyed getting a chance to work with Josh before he leaves in a few days to start production on his film, Multiplex.

The day was pleasantly interrupted by an hour-long dinner with Vera for which we ordered some All American Dave for dinner, which was definitely as good as advertised by all of the players, staff, and media who’ve been championing it. I had the Dijon Almond Chicken while Vera got the Mango Wasabi Glazed Tuna, and there was a nice mix of vegetables to go along with our dishes including broccoli, asparagus, sweet potatoes, bell peppers, plus avocado slices and brown rice. Delicious.

The convenience of ordering -- they’ll bring the food right to the table, or you can walk out the back of the Rio and pick it up -- makes it a great option for players. It seems wrong, actually, that a healthy alternative such as this should be such a unique thing, but in any case it’s nice to have a not-so-difficult way to get a few veggies while working 14-15 hour days like this.

Vera and I got to pack a lot into the days she was here, and I was grateful for having a little time off to enjoy with her. Just took her back to the airport this morning, and so will be riding out these last couple of weeks solo. Hard to believe the Main Event is already right around the corner, starting a week from today (!).

Meanwhile, if you’re curious to see how the 10-game mix plays out and whether any more Badugi hands get reported, check the live reporting today on the PokerNews blog.

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.

On Poker Mags (Redux)

Got a chance over the weekend to glance at the latest Card Player, the one with Layne Flack on the cover (Vol. 21, No. 19, Sept. 30, 2008). Have yet really to peruse the issue, but I did take a gander at Jeff Shulman’s “From the Publisher” intro, headlined “Card Player Readers Sound Off About Scotty Nguyen’s Televised Antics.” And, well, I thought I’d sound off a little, too.

Shulman begins by noting how “many loyal Card Player readers were upset” after watching Nguyen’s performance on ESPN a few weeks back, adding that Nguyen had posted an apology over on the Card Player forums. Shulman summarizes the letters as being “nearly” unanimous in their condemnation of Nguyen’s conduct, with “many” of those who took the time to write suggesting that “Nguyen’s actions cast poker in a negative light outside of our industry.”

“We couldn’t agree more,” says Shulman in response.

As a conclusion to his response, Shulman then shares that “many readers asked why our magazine overlooked Nguyen’s conduct” in the August 19, 2008 issue (Vol. 21, No. 16). “We received more than a few questions about whether or not we saw the tournament or just reported the results,” says Shulman.

I had noticed the same, of course. It was hard not to, given how that issue -- with Nguyen on the cover being christened as “The King of Poker” -- had arrived in the mail the day before the ESPN program first aired. I didn’t read the issue until after I’d seen the show, and thus like most readers had the spectacle in mind as I scanned the articles reporting the event.

There were three different articles in that issue that focused on the H.O.R.S.E. event. One (“The King of Poker”) is a straightforward summary of the action that indeed reported nothing beyond key hands and eliminations. A second (“Three-Handed Nightmare”) also simply reports a couple of key hands from three-handed play and nothing more.

A third article, titled “An Interview With the Players’ and People’s Champion,” consists of a five-question interview of Nguyen about his victory in the event. In the interview Nguyen does talk about having lost his temper just before being eliminated in the 2007 Main Event, and explains how this year he had redoubled his efforts to control himself. “This year, I said no more personal [grudges]. I don’t care who it is, if you make me mad, I’m going to walk away.” The interviewer then asks Nguyen about a moment during the H.O.R.S.E. finale when he did just that -- he walked away “to blow off steam” -- though the focus of the question is not on what made him angry, but instead about how he had stopped to sign autographs and pose for pictures with fans during the interval.

To the reader who hadn’t seen the ESPN broadcast, there’s very little indication that Nguyen conducted himself in anything but a professional manner at that final table. To the reader who had seen the show, the interview certainly contains a couple of ironic-sounding moments, which I suppose might have further inspired some of those letter-writing readers to ask Card Player why there was no indication of the ugliness in any of their reporting.

I remember thinking as much at the time, but frankly passing it off as a familiar bit of sugar-coating. Back in February I wrote a post called “On Poker Mags” in which I stated that while there were many things I liked about Card Player -- e.g. the strategy columns, some of the features, and the book reviews (although I think they’ve stopped doing those) -- Card Player could not realistically be considered “a reliable source for unfettered, ‘journalistic’ treatments of the poker industry . . . even if it does refer to itself as ‘The Poker Authority.’”

In other words, I don’t expect Card Player to judge Scotty Nguyen or make any pronouncements within its pages about whether or not his actions cast a “negative light” on the industry. I’ve been reading the magazine for a good while, now. I know better.

Even so, Shulman felt the need to respond to readers’ complaints about Card Player’s perceived silence regarding the unpleasantness at the H.O.R.S.E. final table. “Unfortunately, due to strict WSOP media guidelines,” explains Shulman, “Card Player was unable to observe the tournament live, and instead reported on the event from a media room that was not equipped with an audio feed.”

Now that’s simply disingenuous. In several ways.

Probably the most obvious is the implication that Card Player somehow had no idea whatsoever about any of the extracurricular activities that went on that night until after the ESPN show aired. I was over in the Brasilia Room that night covering a different tournament, and I’d heard all about Nguyen’s antics even before the night was done. Indeed, for the next couple of days it was all the buzz there at the Rio. Absolutely no one who covered the WSOP this summer -- regardless of the level of access -- could possibly have made it through mid-July without some inkling of what had happened.

Furthermore -- as the interview with Nguyen shows -- it is not as though Card Player couldn’t have done some further investigation after the event took place to help them find out what happened that night beyond key hands and the order of eliminations.

In fact, Shulman is being a little less than sincere about those “strict WSOP media guidelines” when he suggests non-credential reporters couldn’t even enter the same room as the final table. The truth is, anyone could walk in off the street and take a seat in the arena to watch a final table. Again, just silly even to imply poor Card Player had to sit way over in the media room and watch it all play out on a silent television screen.

But really, the biggest problem I have with the disclaimer is the insinuation that the magazine would have reported something about Nguyen’s antics if they could have, but they were not allowed to.

Oh, they could have said something, if they really wanted to. But they didn’t. And like I say, I don’t really expect them to.

But the suggestion that they woulda if they coulda.... Frankly that strikes me as more misleading than any of those articles about the H.O.R.S.E. event were.

The Chicken or the Egg?

Was unable to catch ESPN’s coverage last night of the $10,000 pot-limit Omaha World Championship (Event No. 50), though I’ll probably try to pick it up later in the week. While I worked several PLO events at this year’s World Series of Poker, that was one I did not. Still, I am always curious to see how non-hold’em games get presented. Coverage of the Main Event begins next week.

Speaking of ESPN, for those still interested in further context and/or analysis of Scotty Nguyen’s “performance” at the $50,000 H.O.R.S.E. event (Event No. 45), first aired on ESPN last week, tournament director Matt Savage provides a response over on PokerNews centering on the various rules that were violated that night. Also, there have been a couple more podcasts of late concerning the final table and/or ESPN’s coverage that are worth checking out.

One was Gary Wise’s Wise Hand Poker podcast (the 8/20/08 episode), which features an interview with Event No. 50 runner-up and primary Nguyen antagonist Michael DeMichele. DeMichele does a good job explaining his perspective of the various goings-on from that evening, candidly answering all Wise’s well-chosen questions. (Looks like DeMichele is also on the newest episode of the TwoPlusTwo Pokercast, which I have yet to hear.) Incidentally, that show also features an interview with current Main Event chip leader Dennis Phillips, in which Phillips again proves himself an interesting, likable, “everyman.”

The other was the most recent installment of Big Poker Sundays (8/24/08), on which the always thoughtful Shane “Shaniac” Schleger joined Scott Huff. They spent an entire hour discussing the H.O.R.S.E. final table, Nguyen’s antics, ESPN’s manner of packaging the program, Norman Chad’s editorializing, and other, more general topics related to etiquette, rules enforcement, and the ol’ “good of the game” issue.

Toward the end of the Big Poker Sundays show, Huff and Schleger talk about the effect of television and the potential rewards it brings to professional poker players, as well as the impact the prospect of such rewards sometimes has on how they behave. Says Huff, “It’s gotten to the point now in poker that some of these guys who are quote-unquote ‘stars of the game’ have really gone off the deep end” in terms of how they present themselves to the public -- especially when the television cameras are around. To Huff, it appears that “promoting yourself has become [such] a big deal for some of these guys to the point where they’ve totally lost it.”

Schleger’s response made me think a little of what I had written last Friday about the incident, particularly those observations of Tommy Angelo’s I shared concerning the stressful nature of poker. Schleger half-jokingly observed that sometime during this year’s WSOP he’d concluded that “95 to 99% of all full-time poker players have some kind of, you know, clear mental disease... clear mental illness... myself included,” listing traits such as an “extreme level of self-absorption,” “paranoid delusions,” and “manic depressive psychosis” as evidence that “we’re all messed up in the head, severely.” Circling back to Nguyen and the H.O.R.S.E. event, Schleger concluded “you add television cameras, you add alcohol, and this is what you get.”

As I say, Schleger is half-kidding around here, but he makes an interesting observation (I think) about the kind of person who gravitates towards poker/gambling in general, and professional tournament poker in particular.

Angelo spoke on that TwoPlusTwo Pokercast (the 8/18/08 episode) of how poker “tests us,” presenting numerous stressors (all at once) that are very similar those we encounter away from the poker tables, kind of like a “little microcosm” of the larger world.

In other words -- and I’m overgeneralizing points made by Angelo and Schleger just a bit here -- Angelo is talking about how poker makes us crazy, while Schleger is suggesting it is the crazy ones who find poker. “We’re diseased, screwed-up individuals,” says Schleger, “who are very lucky something that something like gambling came along that we can make a living at.”

So which came first? Were we crazy before we found poker? Or did poker make us that way?

“It’s no fun when Scotty got the gun”

Like most of you, I took a break from the Olympics this week to watch ESPN’s coverage of the $50,000 H.O.R.S.E. final table from the 2008 World Series of Poker (Event No. 45). As I wrote back in late June, I saw exactly zero hands of this heralded event when it happened. I was off at the beginning of it (Vera was in for her visit), then was live blogging other events for PokerNews during the remainder of its five-day run.

I do remember the night of the H.O.R.S.E. final table. Pojo and I were over in the Brasilia Room covering the long, long Day 2 of Event No. 49 (another one of the $1,500 no-limit hold’em events). It was getting close to dawn by the time we finally left, although we knew as we were heading out into the Rio parking lot that the H.O.R.S.E. was still going on. Too whipped to go check it out, though. (It would be another hour or so before it finally concluded.)

Every now and then during the night we’d click over to see what Mean Gene and Change100 were reporting and check those chip counts, just like everyone else. We also heard some stories during the night from those who’d been over there about how raucous a scene it was, and how Scotty Nguyen, the eventual champ, was pretty much blotto. “How is ESPN gonna edit this?” was a commonly heard question for the next day or two, with most agreeing it was going to be difficult to preserve the good reputation of the “Prince of Poker” given the extreme nature of his behavior.

The show was compelling, all right. And a bit jaw-dropping at times. Definitely not one I’d choose as a way of introducing poker to someone unfamiliar with the game.

Mean Gene says the night was “filled with bad energy,” and one definitely picks up on that atmosphere from the telecast. Gene also mentions that while he knew a lot about what went on that night, he “really had no idea that Michael DeMichele and Scotty had locked horns as they did.” I can definitely understand how some of what went on happened without our guys seeing or hearing it. When we reported on those final tables, we were stationed a good 12 feet away, too far to hear most table talk. (That wasn’t the case at other final tables, or on earlier days of tourneys, when we could get much closer and hear and see much more.)

Watching Nguyen’s drunken descent from jovial to disagreeable to tactless to wretched (made to seem more rapid thanks to the necessarily condensed coverage) brought a few different memories and/or ideas to mind.

One was that experience we’ve all had at some point or another, being around someone whose state of drunkenness has removed him or her from the realm of communicativeness but not consciousness, and suddenly realizing the “nasty” has come out. Now your friend has suddenly become dangerous. “It’s no fun when Scotty got the gun, baby” was the line that most evoked that unpleasant feeling for me. Uhhh... somebody... make sure to get his keys, okay?

The show also reminded me of a couple of moments from the 2007 WSOP. One was early in the series, Event No. 24, the $3,000 Seven Card Stud Hi/Lo event won by Eli Elezra. Once Elezra and Scotty Nguyen had made it to heads up, the drinks began to flow. B.J. Nemeth described it as a “carnival atmosphere” in his reporting. That sounded like a mostly harmless, fun time in which two pros with a friendship and history (and a ton of side bets that dwarfed the prize pool) weren’t terribly concerned with who came out on top. I was also reminded of Scotty Nguyen’s disappointing blow up in the Main Event from last year in which some of that mean-spiritedness we saw more extensively displayed this week was captured and shown in ESPN’s coverage.

Finally, I found myself involuntarily comparing Nguyen’s behavior to other examples of what might be deemed poor sportsmanship. Perhaps not really a valid comparison, but I couldn’t help thinking along those lines, anyway.

This week the president of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge, strongly criticized Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt for his behavior at the conclusion of the men’s 100-meter final, won by Bolt (who broke a world record in doing so). Well ahead of the field with twenty meters remaining, Bolt actually slowed his pace, looked to the crowd, and held his hands out to each side -- a bit of early celebrating. “That’s not the way we perceive being a champion,” said Rogge, adding that in his opinion Bolt “should show more respect for his competitors and... not make gestures like the one he made in the 100 meters.”

Unsurprisingly, Rogge’s comments have provoked a lot of debate. I’m frankly not too interested in judging either Nguyen or Bolt. I agree that good sportsmanship -- even in poker -- is a trait to be valued. I think also that highly-competitive endeavors like Olympic track and field or poker introduce inordinate stressors upon those who participate in them. And those participants, being human, necessarily react with wildly varying degrees of skill, judgment, and/or tact.

If you haven’t heard Tommy Angelo on this week’s Two Plus Two Pokercast, I highly recommend the interview. As Angelo does in his book Elements of Poker, in the interview he points out numerous truths (or “elements”) of poker a lot of us probably recognize but do not necessarily appreciate very much.

At one point in the discussion he characterizes the stressfulness of poker in a particularly accurate way. “Poker really tests us,” Angelo says. “We have a lot of hardship. We have not just the bad beats [to endure], but there’s money involved. And then there’s the boredom factor, and then you’ve got people there agitating you.... [E]very single possible problem that we encounter in our regular lives is... brought to bear in this little microcosm of the poker table.”

Angelo goes on to say how that makes poker an “opportunity to practice dealing with all that stuff” and thus be able to handle those challenges when they come up away from the poker table. But I think some folks -- including those who play at the highest levels and for the highest stakes -- don’t react that way. Rather, when presented with these immense stressors, they react erratically, perhaps in ways deemed inappropriate to others.

Or they react by trying to avoid ’em. Thus comes the cry, “Cocktails!” Or, in Nguyen’s case: “Where’re the f*cking cocktails, man? What’s up with this, man? We play this way forever?”

Not apologizing for anybody here. (Looks like Nguyen has done some of that.) Just sorting through some of the reasons why, perhaps, people act the way they do in these situations.