FULL TILT POKER BLOG

#093 – The Greatest Poker Game (Redux) – Introduction and Perspective

Posted by Editor | Filed under Andy Beal, Professor/Banker/Suicide King, Ted Forrest, The Greatest Poker Game Ever Played, Wynn

This is the second time I have endeavored to present my unedited notes of what I consider the greatest session of poker ever played. It took place at Wynn Las Vegas on February 14, 2006, a heads-up match between Ted Forrest and Andy Beal. The first time, under the heading “The Greatest Poker Game Ever Played,” I presented four entries, A-D, numbered 034, 036, 046, and 051 in this Blog. At the time, I had not completed typing my notes from that day and expected that I would keep an entry ahead and over a week or ten days, post all the entries.

It didn’t work out that way. I got busy on a number of subjects in this Blog and a number of things in my personal and professional life.

So I’m starting over. I have now typed up the entire day of notes and will reproduce them in their original form (except that they are typed instead of handwritten, are occasionally formatted slightly differently, and include some explanations in brackets).

In October 2003, while playing $20-$40 hold ‘em at The Mirage in Las Vegas, the table chatter was about a $50,000-$100,000 game of hold ‘em going on at the Bellagio. This was the sum of available information: it was heads-up, one of the players was the son of a World Champion, the other was a rich Texan, and there was $15 million on the table.

My curiosity piqued, I followed this lead into THE PROFESSOR, THE BANKER, AND THE SUICIDE KING: INSIDE THE RICHEST POKER GAME OF ALL TIME. It was published in June 2005, but the relationships that developed during its creation continued and grew.

When Andy Beal was itching to again play the world’s best poker players, I helped arrange the game. When they started playing on February 1, 2006, at the upstairs corner table at Wynn Las Vegas, I sat down in seat 8 and began taking notes. No one said anything so I watched all 12 days and took nearly 1,000 pages of notes, filling four large black Moleskine notebooks. Those notes became the basis for a pair of articles in BLUFF Magazine in April and May 2006 totaling nearly 20,000 words. (I have found nuggets that I was unable to use for the articles and have subsequently written several columns and blog entries from the notes. There remain some very interesting matters from those games that are known by fewer than five people and have never been written. Maybe I’ll get around to them sometime.)

So what’s in a thousand pages of notes? For one thing, I described a lot of poker hands. Whenever there was a hand that seemed especially interesting – like the first hand, where the flop was 7-7-7, or the biggest pot, which was worth $1.8 million – I wrote it down. Several times a day, I would write every detail of all the hands for a half hour period. This helped me catch some interesting or decisive hands without the drudgery of noting every hand for 13 days. It also gave me some interesting data, like how many hands were being played, how often Andy or an opponent was raising, what the average pot size was, how often there were showdowns, etc. It was by no means scientific but it gave me more tools to describe the game to readers.

I spent a fair amount of time, especially in the first few days, trying to describe the scene: where Beal and his pro opponent sat, what they wore, how they stacked their chips, what they kept on the table, how they sat, how they did things like looking at their cards and betting. There were also some interesting exchanges between Andy and the pros. Even though Beal wore earplugs and headphones, a back-and-forth camaraderie developed that sometimes included the players looking to me as their audience to laugh or react. On a few occasions, Andy would say, “Mike, make sure you note that ….” Ted Forrest was of good enough humor that he would sometimes add a notation to Beal’s notation.

There were also a number of issues that arose during play. Beal and the pros bickered over who could sit at the table, the stakes they would play, and who Beal would agree to play. I noted all that.

I also tried to reflect on what I was seeing. I was under very tight deadlines for BLUFF and never knew how long (each day or how many days) the games would go. So I looked for themes and turning points. Sometimes, I was prescient in picking out key moments. Other times, I was laughably wrong.

They played three sets of matches:

(1) February 1-5, in which the pros won $3.2 million;

(2) February 12-15, in which Andy Beal won $10 million; and

(3) February 21-23, in which the pros won $17.7 million.

For me, the most interesting day was February 14, Valentine’s Day. Andy Beal had just played two very successful sessions against Jennifer Harman (winning $5 million) and Todd Brunson (winning $1.2 million). Ted Forrest, who gave Beal a miserable time back in 2001 and had bedeviled him – regardless of particular outcomes, though he was ahead – in several sessions during the first matches of 2006, came in to face Andy just after 9 AM.

I have variously called this game “The Valentine’s Day Massacre,” “The War of the Furies,” and “The Greatest Poker Game Ever Played.” There were TWO $8 million swings that day.

I thought it would be fun and interesting to reproduce my notes of that day, verbatim. They started playing just after 9 AM and sat at that table, leaving only to race to the restrooms during the hourly deck changes, until after 7:30 PM. Beal and Forrest were playing $50,000-$100,000 hold ‘em.

Forrest sat at Seat 3, along a side against the back wall of the room. Beal sat in Seat 6, across from the dealer. I was in Seat 8, furiously taking notes. During the 12 days of poker in February 2006, I filled four big black Moleskine notebooks. On February 14, I took 85 pages of notes, pages 614-701 of notebook #3.

After this Introduction, The Greatest Poker Game will proceed in ten Parts, probably one per day.

Part I – The first 31 hands

Part II – The second 37 hands

Part III – Just in time, Ted gains control

Part IV – Beal fights back

Part V – Forrest builds a pyramid

Part VI – “It’s a f-in’ war”

Part VII – War of the Furies

Part VIII – Andy Beal’s Gold Rush

Part IX – “Something to prove – to myself”

Part X – Hand 41 – Andy is ahead. Wow

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