Travel Report: PokerStars Festival New Jersey, Day 2 -- Extra Innings

Was another fun day at the Resorts Casino Hotel helping cover the second Day 1 flight of the PokerStars Festival New Jersey Main Event. The overall turnout for the sucker is coming in at just over 200 players, I believe, so while it’s a small one there’s nonetheless a lot of excitement surrounding it, plus the players -- many from the area, unsurprisingly -- appear to be having a good time.

While the poker was interesting, that thrilling Game 7 of the World Series gradually began occupying everyone’s attention more and more as the night wore on. It was near the very end of play when Cleveland’s Rajai Davis hit that stunning two-run homer in the bottom of the eighth to tie the game, and the whole tournament room exploded in noise in response.

We’d more or less finished up everything we had to do by the end of the ninth inning, and so were seated at an empty poker table before a big screen when that sudden rain delay gave everyone an extra 15 minutes to think about what had happened and what was to come. Brad Willis snapped that pic above of the team adding an extra hour or so to the day as Chicago and Cleveland prolonged their battle into the 10th.

It all seemed fittingly apocalyptic for an Indians-Cubs World Series Game 7, and the finish was nail-biting as well. Fun stuff to experience with a group.

The group returns to the tournament room today for Day 2 of this Main Event, where 70 players are returning. Later tonight is the Third Annual Chad Brown Memorial Tournament which I plan at least to check in on as it happens. I had the lucky opportunity to get to know Chad a bit and am glad at least to be around as his friends gather to remember him and to raise some money for charity.

Check the PokerStars blog today for news on that event as well as the PSF New Jersey Main.

Travel Report: PokerStars Festival New Jersey, Day 1 -- Main Events and World Serieses

Was a fun, not-too-stressful day helping cover the first Day 1 flight of the PokerStars Festival New Jersey Main Event at the Resorts Casino Hotel in Atlantic City yesterday.

The turnout for the $1,100 tournament was modest (81 players), and while there ought to be considerably more for today’s Day 1b I don’t think the bar has been set too high as far as expectations go. Kind of an early run of the Festival format, I think, plus just getting back in the U.S. is a big step for Stars regardless.

During the evening one interesting side story was both the World Series of Poker and the baseball World Series happening on the big screens around the tournament area. (I know, the correct plural for “series” is of course simply “series,” but it’s more fun to be less serious and say “serieses.”)

Since the Cubs jumped out to that big lead versus the Indians to force a do-or-die Game 7 tonight, the attention was drawn more so to the last night of the WSOP Main, especially thanks to all the fireworks early on with Cliff Josephy doubling up, then Gordon Vayo doubling through him, then Josephy’s attempts to get back into things before busting on the 16th hand of the night.

Kind of a funny moment during the last break of play here, as the players were drawn to watch the crazy set-over-set hand between Josephy and Vayo, making it necessary to extend the break by a few minutes in order for them to see it through. That’s a hastily-snapped shot above of players watching it play out.

We finished before midnight and so I got back to the room to watch a little more of that crazily long heads-up between Vayo and Qui Nguyen. Then I slept with the television on, waking occasionally to crown noise whenever Vayo would double-up again. Was fully awake to see the conclusion this morning -- it ended around 6:30 a.m. here on the east coast -- and Nguyen’s victory.

From what I could tell, Nguyen played a bold style throughout the final table and presented lots of challenges to the others, making his win seem well deserved even if he did run well by picking up big hands in key spots along the way.

And even though I didn’t sit and study every single one of the 384 final table hands this time, I watched enough to appreciate ESPN’s coverage, which is probably just about as good as it could possibly be at this point.

Back at it here in New Jersey in a little while. Check the PokerStars blog to see how the Main Event they have going here continues to play out.

Missing Game 7

I was mentioning yesterday how that other World Series -- of baseball, not poker -- had emerged for me as one of several distractions from ESPN’s coverage of this year’s WSOP Main Event. Tonight the Kansas City Royals and San Francisco Giants play a winner-take-all Game 7, something that comes along rarely enough that even a long-lapsed baseball fan like me will be forced to take a look.

I’ve written here before about how devoted I was to baseball as a youngster. It was easily my favorite sport both to play and watch up through my middle teens, at least, although by the time I was a senior in high school my devotion to the game had begun to waver. In fact, it was that fall I can pinpoint a particular day when baseball suddenly became less important to me.

During the Royals’ playoff run this year many have been pointing back to the last time Kansas City made the playoffs way back in 1985, when, coincidentally, they won the championship in a World Series that also went seven games. Those references reminded me of that Game 7, not because of what happened during the game, but because I didn’t see it at all.

The game was on a Sunday (I remember). It was my senior year, a time when I’d already started looking at colleges. I can’t remember if I’d sent any applications by late October or not, but I probably had. I made decent grades in high school, good enough to put me in the running for some scholarships, including one for the school I wanted to attend, UNC-Chapel Hill.

The specifics escape me, but for this particular scholarship there was some sort of get-together I could not avoid that was scheduled for that Sunday evening. I’d submitted some written materials, including an essay showing whether or not I knew how to put sentences and paragraphs together. Then on this day there was a personal interview with a committee, followed by a dinner for all of the applicants.

It was a novel experience for me. The only thing I remember about the interview was that the person leading the five-person committee was blind. He smiled a lot, though, and had a friendly tone that helped keep everything from becoming too intimidating. And the only thing I remember about the dinner afterwards was commiserating with some of the guys from other schools about how we were missing Game 7.

I suppose I could have gotten out of it, but at the time it seemed like one of those things I just had to do. Looking back, it’s tempting to read my decision as one of those fork-in-the-road moments where I chose not to watch a baseball game as my younger self would have done, but instead did the “mature” forward-looking thing with an eye toward my future. That surely exaggerates the moment, though, charging it with more meaning than it really had.

I also remember how missing the game turned out to be much less of a big deal than it seemed at the time. Maybe it was because the game was -- much like last night’s Royals win -- a laugher, with Kansas City winning 11-0. Or maybe it was because lots of other interests had already begun to crowd into a boy’s still-forming mind, pushing baseball over into what would become a mostly-neglected corner.

I didn’t get the scholarship, although I did end up going to UNC-Chapel Hill, and that led to all sorts of other good things for me (not the least of which being meeting Vera during our first week on campus). The next fall I was a college freshman, way too distracted to pay much attention to another great World Series between the New York Mets and Boston Red Sox that would go seven games as well.

I’d look in on the World Series occasionally thereafter, and I became somewhat invested in the Atlanta Braves (my team as a kid) as they finally started winning and playing some exciting playoff games in the 1990s -- among them a heartbreaker of a Game 7 in 1991 which I did watch.

But I’d never again be as big a baseball fan as I had been prior to October 27, 1985, the day I didn’t watch Game 7.

World Series Time

Sitting down to watch Game 1 of the World Series tonight between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Boston Red Sox. Was joking a little last week about how baseball really doesn’t capture my attention so much anymore until the postseason rolls around, and with the playoffs now extending deeper into October the Series is probably the only time when I’ll sit down and watch every game, or at least most of every game.

If this year’s Series goes the full seven games it will be ending on Halloween, which means it will be over and done with when that other World Series -- the World Series of Poker -- finally cranks back up with the “November Nine” starting on Monday, November 4.

Thanks to the way ESPN now presents its coverage of the Main Event, most who watch probably think of the WSOP as only the Main Event. That is to say, there must be a decent number of casual viewers who are aware of the WSOP having a big tournament every year in which a world champion is crowned, but aren’t necessarily aware or concerned about all of the preliminary events, never mind what’s happening at WSOP Europe, WSOP Asia Pacific, or even all the other tours and tourneys filling up the calendar from January to December.

Interestingly enough, though, I feel like the actual final table of the WSOP Main Event has kind of receded relatively speaking when it comes to its imprint on the broader cultural memory. In fact, when I compare baseball’s World Series to the WSOP Main Event, it almost seems like for poker its the long lead-up -- the “regular season” or early playoff rounds, we might say -- that gets at least as much attention and/or review, ultimately, as does the final table.

Think about how often we saw the WSOP ME final table rerun on ESPN from 2003-2005, that seemingly incessant loop of showings that we all basically memorized by the time the next year rolled around. Then think about how little the 2006-2012 final tables have been shown -- or watched, I should probably say.

I watched every hand of the 2012 WSOP Main Event final table last year -- all 399 of them -- focusing on it quite closely when it was all playing out. But while I was aware of later edited showings of it on ESPN that followed, I never really paid that much attention to them nor was I that aware of others discussing those broadcasts or even hands in that much detail in the months that followed.

It’s certainly the case that the “almost live” coverage of the WSOP ME final tables is lessening interest in the later reruns, but even so, it feels like the “highlights” from Greg Merson’s win a year ago have already faded almost entirely.

Anyhow, what happens between the Cards and Red Sox over the next week will certainly be relived over and again until next spring, and I suppose that once the WSOP ME plays out November 4-5 we’ll spend at least a week or two talking to each other about that, too. But after that I wonder if we’ll think about it much at all, already having moved on to something else.