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#082 – Heads-Up Championship Wrap-Up
Paul Wasicka defeated Chad Brown in consecutive matches last night to win the third NBC Heads-Up Championship. It was an impressive-looking performance, even more so because I watched from the NBC production truck so I could see all the cards. Wasicka played a very tricky game and a very gutsy game. The live updates from www.pokerwire.com and, of course, the NBC broadcasts on seven Sundays in April and May will give you a better feel of the hand-for-hand stuff. I hope the thousands of words I spent on the tournament gave you some feeling for what it was like in the tournament room, some info about the combatants, and a little of what I picked up about heads-up play. These are things from my notes that I didn’t share over the weekend, before we leave the 3rd Heads-Up Championship to history and the airwaves.
1. Paul Wasicka is a very nice guy and played great. If I knew him better, I would have followed him more closely during the tournament and had a little better understanding of his game. But he looked masterful in a number of marginal situations during the final. I hope that shows up on NBC.
2. Someone said that Chad Brown got pocket pairs in 10 hands out of 66 against Gavin Smith.
3. During the semi-final round, Clonie Gowen and Jeff Madsen, both in the first row behind Shannon Elizabeth, were betting $25 and $100 per point on the color of the flops in the semi-final matches. They weren’t betting with each other; each found someone ELSE in the front row to bet. I was sitting next to Clonie for part of the match and she was complaining that her neck hurt from looking up at the overhead monitors. “Occupational hazard of being a professional gambler, babe.”
4. Seen rolling around on the men’s room floor outside the Caesars poker room: a broken shot glass.
5. 7 of the last 8 players in the tournament were wearing Full Tilt Poker gear.
6. Gavin Smith has been wearing an Emporio Armanio stocking cap that “some Swede” gave him early in the year. He considered it lucky but switched to a Full Tilt Poker cap before his semifinal match with Chad Brown.
7. More on luck: Shannon Elizabeth was nice enough to reserve a seat for me in her semifinal match against Paul Wasicka. I winked and said, “Until someone kicks me out, right?” No, she told me, she seriously wanted me sitting there in the front row. We were toying with the gods of superstition. Just before the start, I raced up to my computer in press row to unregister for the $400,000 Guarantee, which was about to start, but the site was down. I got my buy-in back because the tournament was canceled, but we were clearly rocking the boat.
8. Last word on luck: Chad Brown was wearing a tan sport jacket and a backwards Full Tilt Poker cap for the final. I didn’t like the look and told the people around me that he was courting bad luck wearing the suit with the hat. I’m sure there were financial reasons for wearing the hat, but unless he had a deal with Hugo Boss, he should have gone more casual to match the chapeau. If you don’t agree, watch Ron Stanley at the 1997 World Series final table. He wore a tuxedo and a baseball cap. That was the year they decided to play the final table outside, in 1000-degree heat.
9. Shana Hiatt looks beautiful from every angle. Occasionally, while she was waiting to tape something, they would zoom the camera in so close that you could count the pores. Perfection.
10. In the Clonie Gowen v. Kristy Gazes “Baby needs a new pair of Choos” match, there was one hand where the button limped and they checked it down. Kristy said, “4 high.” Clonie said, “8 high” and took it. Kristy: “We’re playing like a couple of girls.” I don’t know if I brought it to your attention (I certainly never corrected it) but I misspelled “Jimmy Choo” in an earlier entry. But I did better than the tournament announcer, who referred to the shoe designer as “David Chiu”, though he recognized his error almost immediately.
11. Most of the cameras were focused on the feature table, meaning that when there were eight matches going on at once, most of the action was invisible to TV. (I think a couple of the other tables had hole-card cameras.) The set of pillars behind the feature table had cameras tucked behind them. There were also several camera operators with mobile cameras. These “mobile” cameras looked like they weighed about 50 pounds. The operators would sit on standard office chairs on casters and wheel around to wherever the action was. They trailed long cables behind them and each had a person on the edge of the stage laying out cable and, occasionally, pulling it back in, like a fisherman reeling in a catch.
12. After the first round, I joined a group of about 20 for dinner at BOA, in the Forum Shops at Caesars. Tremendous steakhouse. I was curious, but not curious enough to pull the trigger, on a side dish called “onion brick”. At the end of the meal, Phil Gordon had to leave early.
Phil: “Roshambo? Anyone want to roshambo for their meal.” Andy Bloch, sitting next to him, took him up. “Two out of three?” Andy would play just one throw, and Phil lost. He then lost to someone else and was on the hook for, I think, three dinners (there was a dispute about this). Then he beat Clonie, who got stuck with a piece of the tab, but she claims to have come out ahead because she played roshambo for the bar tab and won. On the way out of the restaurant, Jeff Madsen and a couple other guys started flipping coins for $500 a throw.
13. Huck Seed is going to make some serious noise in tournament poker sometime in the next several months. The last few years, he’s been staying in the mix, cashing a bunch of times at the Series and occasionally making a splash in a TV event or a non-televised preliminary event someplace like the Bellagio. But he gave up drinking about 10 months ago and I think he wants to reclaim his greatness. And I believe it’s going to happen at this year’s Series, if not before.
14. By the way, I understand Humberto Brenes is a very nice man and I never saw anything to suggest otherwise. But I think his antics are fundamentally different than those of Matusow, Hellmuth, Negreanu and other players who focus attention on themselves at the table. Brenes’s act seems completely contrived. I don’t know Daniel well enough to say but I think his table chatter is an extension of his actual personality. From the little I know of Phil Hellmuth, I believe that his TV persona (even if he thinks he’s playing to the cameras) is closely related to the way he really is. I know that’s the case with Mike Matusow. Again, the degree might be for TV, but I’ve heard many people say Mike does some of the same stuff when he’s not on TV. Heck, I’ve seen him behave the same way playing ONLINE.
I’m not saying the antics of any of these players are good for poker or bad for poker or make good TV or bad TV. I’m just against a contrived performance, and Humberto’s act looks contrived. I certainly didn’t see any of it in the old WSOP tapes from the eighties when he made the final table. That’s my opinion, but I feel pretty strongly about it: I believe the attraction of poker on TV is that it is a totally honest drama where the actors don’t know the outcome any more than the audience. Even if the outcome remains honest, if the performances are scripted, that hurts the product.
15. Before Gavin Smith played Andy Bloch in the quarterfinals, Andy asked if Gavin sought advice from his previous opponent, Mike Matusow. Gavin said, “I’ll tell you one thing for sure. I’m not going all-in blind against a fuckin’ math genius.” Mike’s line to Shawn Sheikhan when Ted Forrest sucked out against Shawn was the best of the tourney – “Some spooks never go away” – but this was close.
