#022 - Table of Two Winners

I hadn’t suffered enough tonight, between busting out of the $35,000 Guarantee, the FTOPS event, and the $30,000 Guarantee. I couldn’t resist entered the $7,000 Guarantee, which starts at Midnight for me. I told myself I did it because it’s a double-stack tournament and so I’d have something to do while watching the end of the PLO event, but that’s like saying ”I can give up drinking anytime I want to.”

But I’m glad I entered.

I drew a table with DontBluffMePLZZ, winner of FTOPS #3, and got to chat at the table with him for a few minutes. (I tried to let him know I was simpatico, having pulled down a cool 5% of his $151,000 payday while watching his victory.) Of course, he could have been handing me a line about everything we discussed, but I like to assume people are telling the truth. Here’s what he told me:

1. He’s 21 years old. ”It hasn’t sunk in, a life changing amount of money for a 21 year old.”

2. Even though this tournament started at 1:59 AM EST, more than 21 hours after FTOPS #3 ended, he hasn’t gone to sleep yet.

3. He is a student at Cornell and says he’s not dropping out.

That’s probably what Michael Jordan said back at North Carolina.

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I just read that Marco Traniello (Full Tilt Poker’s newest red pro) won the Caesars Palace qualifying tournament for the NBC Heads-Up Championship. That’s a terrific achievement and he’s proven himself repeatedly to be a solid tournament player.

But, as I wrote in The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King, that wasn’t always the case. Marco and Jennifer Harman met in 2000 while Marco was visiting the U.S. on a vacation from his native Italy. He had no background in poker and had never played it.

Nor did he have any interest in becoming a poker player upon marrying Jennifer in late 2000. While waiting to play Andy Beal for the first time, Jennifer was a bundle of nerves. She’d been losing in her regular game and was afraid that everybody was going to beat Beal but her. To loosen the tension and put her mind at ease, as well as to kill time and orient her to heads-up play, she made Marco play her heads-up.

Marco, “who had played poker four or five times in his whole life,” Jennifer told me, won.

Nevertheless, Harman did what the professionals do: shut out everything but the game and let her skills and reactions take over. She beat Andy Beal on that occasion.

What a difference six years makes, huh?

Hey, what about ONE YEAR? A year ago, Jennifer Harman had to drop out of Heads-Up Championship at the last moment because her father passed away. Now, Jennifer and Marco are parents of twin boys. In fact, I e-mailed Jennifer a few weeks ago to congratulate her and ask if a lot of people gave her poker-themed baby gifts. (Nope, and it never occurred to her that anyone would.) I also told her, and I meant it, that I thought she was going to win the Heads-Up Championship.

But now, I may have to reconsider.