FULL TILT POKER BLOG

#153 – WSOP #3 – They’re Back, Part C

Posted by Editor | Filed under Amazon Room, Annie Duke, Ante Up for Africa, Nollan Dalla, Phil Gordon, WSOP 2007

It’s 10 AM and I’m not in the Amazon Room yet. Finally, at 10:20 AM, after 80 minutes, my shoes touch the carpet of the Amazon Room. So what’s it look like, compared with last year?

There’s a lot more stuff hanging from the ceiling. The room doesn’t feel as cold.

Honeywell – Official Surveillance Provider, 2007 World Series of Poker.

10:55 AM – I get to the cage. The lovely Maria waits on me. Her good humor makes the wait seem slightly less oppressive. But only slightly. I buy into the Saturday event, the event the following Saturday, and the event the Friday after that. $5,000. She counts it out, making a brief waving gesture for the cameras every thousand dollars. Still, it feels like she’s waving good-bye to my money. Couldn’t they come up with a more discrete signal?

11 AM – Now I’m waiting in line for media credentials. It’s a shorter line, but it ends at a closed door, so it’s clearly not moving. I get out of line to say hello to Richard Bitar and Roland de Wolfe.

Then I see Nolan Dalla, my friend, the media director.

This is the part of the blog where I get to say nice things about Harrah’s. First, they not only gave me a media credential – a laminated pass that may confer nothing or may give me superhuman strength – but they called my name out of line to give it to me. So I’m bought and paid for. They can treat me how ever they like. Second, the media room is big and pretty comfortable. Pastries, cold water, lots of power strips for computers. So they paid me off, bought me food, and gave me a comfortable place to work. Am I being set up for something here?

[N.B., the pass they gave me identifies my media affiliation as “worldseriesofpoker.com” rather than “Full Tilt Poker”, “FullTiltPoker.com”, “The Full Tilt Poker Blog by Michael Craig”, or even “BLUFF Magazine.” I don’t know if they didn’t want to put the dreaded/evil/illegal designation “FullTiltPoker.com” on a media pass for fear of Alberto Gonzales putting Jeffrey Pollack in irons, or if this is part of my enslavement. Time will tell.]

Second, some people at Harrah’s are apparently reading what I’m writing. This is a little uncomfortable for me but that’s part of the cost of saying negative things sometimes. It’s probably more uncomfortable for them. Nolan Dalla, the media director, is a friend. I like him a lot. I think he’s great at what he does. He’s never done anything bad to me. He welcomed me to the Series and mentioned that Gary Thompson – who I really like even though he flat-out lied to me when I asked him directly during last year’s Final Table about all the extra chips – had talked with him about what I wrote (#150 – “Media Credentials and the Thirteenth Amendment”) and wanted to mention something to me about it.

Third, I have heard on multiple occasions about Harrah’s responding to charity situations in a stand-up manner. (Two counts as “multiple,” right?) Phil Gordon is promoting Bad Beat on Cancer this year, as he has for the last few years. Apparently, Harrah’s has gone beyond anything they’ve done in the past to support and promote his cause. And Annie Duke had great things to say about the things Jeffrey Pollack and Gary Thompson have done supporting the tournament she and actor Don Cheadle are hosting.

Ante Up for Africa is a $5,000 buy-in no-limit hold ‘em event at The Rio the day before the beginning of the Main Event. The players are playing for the entire prize pool but will be asked – no obligation, no pressure beyond the social conscience of the organizers and, hopefully, the participants – to donate half their winnings to designated 501(c)3 charities to raise public awareness about and provide aid to survivors of the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. I am going to flat-out ask people to stake me in this one because it’s probably the only way I can afford to enter. (Unless I’ve won a bracelet by this time, in which case I’ll buy-in in a heartbeat.) And I’ll donate half of what I win, so after I pay my prospective backers, I’ll probably be owing money.

Fourth, I haven’t taken a close look but it appears they built a final table “stadium” in the corner that should be a huge improvement over the final table the last two years. B.J. Nemeth, who is a great photographer as well as legendary final-table reporter, told me the lighting in the room is much better, both for the players and photographers. The poker kitchen looks better this year, placed right across from the Amazon Room. Unfortunately from my perspective, the stuck it right where the Full Tilt suite used to be, so it’s hard for me to ever go into that room without imagining the lavish, free spread put out several times a day, not to mention Five Flop Omaha and all the swag I could sneak out of the building without the security guard noticing my bulging Full Tilt tote bags (themselves stolen from the back of the suite).

Okay, back to trashing Harrah’s. First, why on Earth, at 1:30 AM Saturday, does it still take several hours to buy in to the event that starts at noon? I can’t believe if they cared that they couldn’t figure out a way to (a) streamline the process and (b) get more people on the job so the cumbersome process they have could move faster.

Second, I have confirmed that they screwed up the parking. ALL the closest spaces have been given over to the valet. Therefore, in the middle of the night, when the valet is closed and hundreds and hundreds of spaces are empty, the closest space you can get to the Amazon Room is further than the furthest-out valet space.

When I showed up at 10:30 PM to visit my friend Ted C, who came in to hang out with me this weekend and play the Saturday event, at least half the valet spaces were empty. And the valet had a sign up saying “valet full.” They’ve also used a variety of gates and cones to make anyone foolish enough to park their own automobile feel like a rat hunting for cheese in a maze.

Why did they change this? The parking was one of the things that the World Series operators got right last year. I said this whenever someone criticized Harrah’s and wrote about it my previous blog during the 2006 Series. I never heard anyone say there was an issue with the valet. Yet everyone I spoke to who parked their own car recognized the great convenience accorded us by ample parking.

I don’t get any joy out of complaining. I criticize poker players for complaining too much. At last year’s Series, I waited in a registration line on Day 1 and the guy in front of me was moaning and whining about how horribly mismanaged the World Series was. We wait, total, about 20 minutes. I made fun of that guy. I don’t like people who look for fault.

The overwhelming majority of my writing about poker has been positive. I like to reveal the flaws as well as the merits but I think one of the reason I’ve maintained friendships with so many people I’ve written about is that I like to find the merit. I like to think I’m not easily fooled, but I’m a fan of poker players, and poker.

Phil Gordon and I were talking this morning about how many people would play the Main Event, and how the outside media was probably gathering to spin the story about how the poker boom has bottomed out. He was interested what I, as a writer, commentator, and personality, was going to do to keep those people honest. (He was evaluating how, as a writer, commentator, and personality, he was going to do the same.) We had a serious discussion about the REAL benchmarks of poker’s popularity, and making sure those balanced against a high-profile number that will be influenced by factors having nothing to do with poker’s popularity or future.

But that was my orientation. I am responsible and impartial and truly have a very, very small stake in poker’s continued success – much smaller than you would assume or could imagine – but it’s in my nature to look for the good, to balance the story. A few people questioned my comparing Harrah’s treatment of the media with slavery. If it looks like I want to say bad things about Harrah’s stewardship of the World Series, believe me, I wasn’t born that way.

If Harrah’s complains about their bad coverage, part of the problem is that the bad coverage is all they apparently listen do.

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