FULL TILT POKER BLOG

#104 – Prisoner of the Bellagio, Part IV – Las Vegas is a very small town

Posted by Editor | Filed under Badugi, Bellagio, Doug Dalton, Eskimo Clark, Me in live tourneys, Mike Matusow, Mirage, Wynn

[Written Friday morning and afternoon, April 6]

Coming into the Wynn Poker room, I ran into Mike Matusow. He was getting picking up his money for making the final table of the main event of the Wynn Classic last month.

“We’re going to lunch. You want to come along.”

I told him I was going to play the Wynn’s noon tournament.

“Then play the tournament. When you’re done, give me a call. I’ll probably be over at the Bellagio, playing cash.”

Who is WE?

I went out of the Wynn tournament pretty quickly. I was pleased with how I played it. I lost a lot of chips early with A-K against Q-Q who reraised me all-in. But I built up, only to lose the rest with K-K when I had put in a big raise over several limpers, only to have every one of them call. I still thought I was good when the flop came J-7-3 rainbow, but one of the limper/callers had J-7. Just for fun, the dealer put another jack AND another seven on the board for the turn and river.

I went to the Bellagio, maybe to play their Friday afternoon tournament. (It was moved back to 7:15 PM, so I signed up for a satellite into Saturday’s event, $1,500+$90 NLHE.)

Leaving the Wynn a little while ago, I noticed a couple things:

1. The Frontier has changed its act – Instead of advertising dirty girls riding mechanical bulls and mud wrestling, they are touting the only bingo on the Strip. Guess they decided to aim their marketing away from men in their twenties and toward women born IN the twenties.

2. Planet Hole – Planet Hollywood has a big, gaudy display for its shopping, called “Miracle Mile.” But they don’t have their entire sign on the roof. PLANET HOL is all they have so far, but they’ve had only two years to get ready for the new ownership, so that’s understandable.

At the Bellagio, Mike is playing $25-$50 no-limit upstairs but he’s agitating the management to get a black-chip mixed game going. For some reason, they won’t start a list for a game bigger than $200-$400. They’ll start a game but not a list.

“No wonder the action here sucks.”

Over in the Fontana Lounge, where I go to play my satellite, I see Ron Stanley playing. He was probably the first pro I spoke with while researching SUICIDE KING. I recognized Ron from old World Series videos and we became friendly while I was playing $30-$60 at the Bellagio in late 2003 and trying to figure out how to write a book about professional poker players.

We exchanged hellos.

I won the satellite, winning my way into the Saturday event, which was the same as cash because I was planning on buying in. While playing, I also saw another face from my distant (Las Vegas) past, a guy named Kenny. Kenny was signing up to play the satellite after mine. I never really introduced myself to Kenny so I wouldn’t expect him to remember me. But in some ways, I am in awe of Kenny as much as any pro.

I played with Kenny several times at the Mirage in late 2003 and early 2004, usually at $20-$40 hold ‘em. Kenny is an affable guy who I think is Asian. He’s a big talker and told some stories (that other people confirmed back then) about his past existence as a tour accountant for Bruce Springsteen on some European tours. (Forgive me if you identify this guy and I don’t have it exactly right. That’s how I remember it. It could be that he was involved in merchandising for Springsteen in Europe, or other groups more than Springsteen, but that’s the gist of it.)

Kenny was amazing in his ability to get people to gamble. He was clearly a very skilled player, but he didn’t act like it. He bet all the way and turned up trash a fair amount of the time. And he was always trying to introduce a live straddle into the game. His other favorite with the tourists (like me) playing $20-$40 at the Mirage was to encourage all nine people at the table to bet blind max raises the first hand of each dealer. (He never got that one to fly.)

But he loved the straddle. No one would go for it at first, so he would do it whenever he was under the gun. After a few rounds, he would announce, “My live straddle with the three-bet guarantee.” He would agree to call at least one raise. (In fact, he called as many raises as there were.) After he won a pot or two with ridiculous random cards, a couple other guys – especially if there were some young guys in a gambling mood at the table – would follow. And if one of THEM won a big pot, most of the table would roll over. Not only was that guy hooked but a couple others who saw the fun in getting to play trash and win big. (While the stereotypical young hotshots were pushovers, he could never win over the Grumpy Gus’s who learned poker while serving in WWII with Dick Nixon.)

Inevitably, it would carry over to the whole game. The guy who won a couple $500 pots with junk would start flat-calling raises with any two suited or connecting cards. Five or six players were playing double-raised pots. The guy AFTER the straddler would start putting in another straddle.

And Kenny, having created the monster, would just sink into the background, adapting his game and winning gigantic pots. I think the biggest pot I ever won, almost $3,000 – in a $20-$40 game – was in one of these sessions. Kenny himself one time, to my figuring, lost $2,000 and then won it back along with another $3,000.

I consider the man an artist.

After the satellite, I returned to the upstairs games in the Bellagio poker room and Matusow was still at it. He was up about $6,000, playing at the table where Andy Beal and Chip Reese played $100,000-$200,000.

Eskimo Clark walks by. I also saw him in the satellite room..

Mike is talking nonstop at the table, not even about this game. His legs are bouncing under the table, as if he’s challenging live poker to contain him.

We compare plans, and I tell him that I’m going to visit Jennifer Harman if I can reach her by phone. “I tried to call Jen too. I want to go by and see the babies.”

So I stepped away from the table and called Harman’s cell. No answer. I left the following message: “Me, some interview questions, Mike Matusow, your boys? What more could you want? Call me back.”

[As of 24 hours later, she hadn’t called back.]

In the $25-$50 game, Mike calls a raise to $200 with 6d-7d. Someone behind him makes it $1,200. After that’s called, Mike also calls. The flop is T-4-2, so he checks and folds, turning to me and saying, “Gotta’ call when they’re deep. He had $20,000 behind.”

Eskimo Clark and another player are talking with Mike about getting a mixed game going. It becomes clear after just a few minutes why a lot more talking than playing goes on during these mixed games, ESPECIALLY before the games. I had heard the untangling a kitchen drawer full of extension cords was easier than working out the details of a mixed game, and now understand.

First, Mike is complaining to Eskimo. Then Eskimo brings over the other guy. They both want to play. Mike wants $400-$800. Eskimo doesn’t say but the other guy says he’ll play $300-$600. A couple minutes later, he’s saying “$200-$400 or $300-$600.” Then it looks like Eskimo, who has a handful of $20 chips, isn’t even going to play.

The third player then explains that he doesn’t want to play HORSE. He doesn’t want to play Razz. But he wants to include deuce-to-seven triple-draw and badugi. (I don’t understand how Razz is somehow unplayable but triple-draw and badugi are.) But Mike says yes to everything. Then the guy doesn’t want to play Stud-Eight-or-Better. He wants to play it high-low without the qualifier. Fine.

Still, there’s no game taking place. The lull gives me a chance to introduce myself to Paul “Eskimo” Clark. He speaks softly, with a Louisiana accent that, in the cacophony of the poker room, could pass for a foreign language. He also doesn’t answer questions in a direct fashion, which I’m fine with. I mentioned who I was, but he doesn’t know me, so I’m pleased to get any response from some stranger I’m bothering in the Bellagio poker room. And by leading me through a maze to answer my one question, I learned some other things.

My question: Where did Badugi come from?

I can translate Eskimo’s 15 minutes on the subject pretty simply: From Paul “Eskimo” Clark.

Here is what else I learned:

*Paul will turn 60 on June 2, 2007, the first day of the World Series of Poker.

*He served in the Army during the Vietnam War.

*He developed the game of Badugi, though he says the proper spelling – he wrote it in my notebook – is p-a-d-u-g-i-e. He gives Yosh Nakano some of the credit/blame for the more common spelling.

*The word means “spotted dog” or “colors” in Korean.

*The triple-draw version of the game is only the most recent. He has compiled a book about the game, which started with a seven-stud version and includes criss-cross, big-L, and little-L versions. He started explaining the nuances of the different forms, but I was lost from the start.

I left those guys because it looked like their game was actually going to start. I wandered back past the cage to see if Doug Dalton was in. I wanted to say hello, thank him for his hospitality.

I see Doug is in a meeting – the back offices of the poker room are extremely small – and begin to back away when I am confronted face to face with his exiting guest, Amarillo Slim.

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