To win the match Joe Cada had to let Darvin Moon back in. His best way of closing out Moon was to let Darvin over-extend himself on a bluff or a marginal hand. But because Moon was betting so often, this also put Cada on the path to having to make some expensive lay downs. Maybe Joe made some mistakes on these hands but he had a plan – I think a very smart plan and he was doing his best to execute it.
The final table looked a lot different on TV than when I watched it live. For that matter, Joe Cada looked much different playing heads-up compared with how I saw him on ESPN on Tuesday night. Heads-up, he dominated Moon and seemed like a very savvy player. He was much less a focus of my attention on Saturday, especially because of the time he spent short-stacked. I didn’t see, didn’t notice, or didn’t keep track of all the times on Saturday when he got his chips in bad – but it seemed like always. On Monday he played like a stud. On Saturday more often than not, he looked like a dud.
Tom Dwan has hit the ground running as the newest member of Team Full Tilt. He has started a new blog and his initial post shares some fun details from the life of one of the world’s highest-stakes, most successful, and youngest poker players. Tom also promises some juicy details about his game. I recommend you keep up with his blog, but these were the highlights from his first entry:
Bless their hearts; Darvin Moon’s friends did their best to keep up with the Joe Cada cheering section. They did a fine job, but like their representative at the final table they were overwhelmed by the prospect of Michigan actually being first in something.
Harrah’s better watch what it wishes for. It tried to make the Final Table of the 2009 World Series of Poker into a spectator sport and tournament director Jack Effel encouraged the audience to behave like spectators. Unfortunately, they did exactly that.
What is the highest goal TV poker can attain? To me, the best TV poker makes you want to PLAY POKER. For the most part, the way poker is televised fails to do this. I don’t necessarily blame TV for that. Their goal is to get people to watch, not to get them to play. Even though showing the players’ hole cards was a great innovation that made certain aspects of televised poker more exciting, few people realize how it pushed aside other means of presenting poker, including some means that may occasionally be more exciting and better.
Shortly before final-table heads-up play began last night between Joe Cada and Darvin Moon, there was considerable speculation in press row about how long the heads-up match would last. Sorry, but by the end of a poker tournament, the media almost always wants it to end fast. Even though the players had 60-135 big blinds, I did not think we were looking at a long heads-up match.
When I said that, I was talking about 25-80 hands. (It actually went 87 hands, according to PokerNews.com, to which I always refer to when looking for hand-by-hand information. In fact, because I may have numbered the hands incorrectly, I’ll refer to their hand numbers, ##277-364.) I was correct that it went fast – it almost ended in one hand.
It took more than four months and nearly 7,000 opponents, but I figured out who was going to win the heads-up match for the 2009 WSOP Main Event Championship between Joe Cada and Darvin Moon in less than a minute. Way less than a minute, in fact. The giveaway was the first action by the first player on the first hand.
Moon called.
At 1:24 AM on Tuesday, November 10, 21 year-old Joe Cada became the youngest-ever World Poker Champion, defeating Darvin Moon in just over two-and-a-half hours of heads-up play to capture the Main Event of the 2009 World Series of Poker at the Rio in Las Vegas.
As I mentioned in this Blog, I failed to outlast Poker From the Rail blogger AlCantHang in the FTOPS Warm-Up. Consequently, I agreed to play the worst tournament he could find in Las Vegas. We originally thought this would be the 2am at Binion’s. For those of you expecting a tale of late-night filth and humiliation, you will be disappointed. (In fact, in a perverse way, so was I.) But I took my medicine, paid off my losing bet, and had fun besides. But it wasn’t Binion’s at 2am.
