FULL TILT POKER BLOG

#195 – WSOP #44 – SHOE Salesman

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Right before the SHOE, I ate at the noodle kitchen near the sports book. My fortune cookie said, “Versatility is one of your outstanding traits.” I was willing to trust a fortune cookie, but I had second thoughts after arriving in the Goldilocks Pavilion at 5 PM on Sunday. I didn’t see one face I recognized, and couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

(I later had to reverse my assessment. By 8 PM, I think I recognized more people playing in that tent than in the $50,000 HORSE. Were they wearing disguises for the first few rounds?)

I brought the STRATEGY GUIDE with me, and made a point to read about the games a couple levels ahead. But THE FULL TILT POKER STRATEGY GUIDE – TOURNAMENT EDITION could take me only so far. Dante’s INFERNO would have been more appropriate to the task that Sunday night.

The initial dealer at our table must have arrived by means of time travel, because he was the kind of bad, timid, slow dealer that was present two years ago and the norm last year but almost completely absent in 2007. He misdealt halfway through the first hand and didn’t know how to correct it so we had to call the floor. Except he wouldn’t call out loud enough even to be heard across the table, and that was a big problem because I saw only one floorperson in the room, which has 50 to 60 tables.

The player to my left, who I learned was Cory Zeidman, was obviously a skilled player and a nice guy but he was aging about 6 months per hand as this dealer fumbled his way through the deck. First I thought Zeidman was going to kill the dealer. Then I thought he was going to kill himself. Then they kept the guy at our table for the entire first two hours.

Cory was going eye-twitching crazy over this dealer and I was busting a gut because I could see how this talented, savvy player was putting himself through nine levels of tilt. When we finally got a new dealer or, later, a new player, Cory had to tell them about how awful this dealer was (and the guy really was awful). Cory referred to him as “Helen Keller’s uncle,” which was one of the funniest things I’ve heard at a table this Series.

BLIND MAN’S BLUFF

By the last level before the first break, the combination of the dealer from the seventh circle of hell and the lucky play of a couple players, Cory (in seat 2), a player in seat 4 I’ll call Max, and a friend of mine named Robert Goldfarb who arrived late in seat 8, decided to start playing Stud EOB blind. I got into one of those pots – but I wasn’t playing blind – and moved from 2,000 starting chips to 2,550 by the first break. Zeidman and Max both talked about the juicy $400-$800 game at the Bellagio and openly discussed getting themselves broke so they could go over and play it. Cory was actually calling the high brush at the Bellagio between hands to find out about the list. (Please note that there was no collusion and nothing of this about which I disapproved. If players wanted to lose all their chips, I WANTED to know about that.)

But neither managed to bust immediately, so they were stuck there. When Max played a pot against a guy who suddenly stopped being a calling station and raised him when he had four hearts showing, Cory piped in, “Welcome to the Bellagio.”

Cory was goofing around and musing about the benefits of busting, but he was also trying to build his stack, albeit by some unconventional means. He was still in action when our table broke, but not Max. I got most of his chips, reraising with nothing when he was raising blind so I could isolate him and then controlling the pot size while I built a hand. I had more than doubled up by the time he busted, about three hours into the tournament.

I really got a kick playing next to Cory Zeidman. He’s a cynical, cynical man, and that type of person is just perfect for me to have as a table neighbor. He just glories in the awfulness of the poker world and I loved commiserating with him.

Nothing escaped his critical eye. Or nose. When Robert in seat 8 opened a bag of Bugles (which I didn’t even know they made any more, having figured the FDA would have pulled them off the market in about 1970), Cory said, “I can smell those things from over here. Are you sure they have enough artificial ingredients in them?”

I eventually grew my stack to over 5,000 by 11:30 PM. (We started at 5 PM.) Then I couldn’t get anything to happen, and spent almost 3 ½ hours between 2,000 and 2,500 chips. As the blinds and antes escalated and my stack shrunk, I watched the eliminations pile up in the short-stacked event. As we neared the 3 AM completion time, the chip average rose to nearly 10,000.

POUTY MC WHISKERS

There was one player at the table who I didn’t really play any pots with, but who grabbed my attention, and not in a good way.

This guy was clearly a good player, but was one of those disgusting players who, because he’s riding the positive end of the variance scale, has inflated his opinion of himself and made the world around him miserable for it. I played with him in the Mixed Hold ‘Em so I know he’s got skills. I could probably find out the guy’s name, and feel better when he ends up on the other end of the scale, secure in the knowledge that his attitude has left him without a safety net, but I didn’t want to wait that long. I wanted to see him dealt a blow NOW.

So what’s my problem with the guy? He can’t lose a pot without muttering something nasty about the other player. “Moron,” “idiot,” and “unbelievable” were his favorites. The guy was playing every other hand and building a giant stack, so the same kind of play that might cost him 300 chips a round was WINNING him 3,000 chips during the same period, but that wasn’t enough to take the sour expression off his face. (I didn’t even like the way this guy LOOKED and I could care less what people look like at the poker table. But he had this expression that I think he considered a Poker Scowl but it looked more like a pout. And he didn’t have enough facial hair for a mustache but kept it anyway, along with some I’m-deep-in-the-World-Series stubble. He wore earphones, which he frequently put in his mouth.)

The worst thing about Pouty was his treatment of the dealers. He wasn’t even at the table with Father Time. But he had to start in with every dealer, usually claiming the dealer was wasting his time, but making sure to spend enough time on the argument, even after the substance of the disagreement was over, to take a bunch more time. Then he would blame the dealer for THAT. Finally, he said, in as angry a little voice as he could muster, “I’m trying to do my job and I can’t because you’re wasting my time!”

He was a good player but I wanted him bad. I debated between biding my time and verbally confronting him, just to see if I could put him on tilt or test the limits of his determination to fight. But I was fighting just to stay in the tournament, so I didn’t do anything.

Brian Nadell joined the table and immediately mixed it up with Stubble Face. I don’t know Brian Nadell at all but I know he’s friends with Ted Forrest, so I’ve always thought of them as Dorian Gray (Ted) and the picture of Dorian Gray (Brian). They are both bigger and more physical than they seem in pictures or at a distance, but Ted has this peaceful, benign presence and Brian looks like he just wants to grab your shirt and push you out of your chair. They both – and this is from knowing Ted well and watching Nadell for the first 2.5 seconds at the table – radiate manic energy, but Forrest keeps his almost completely hidden. Maybe his foot is bouncing under the table, or he eats 2 meals in 10 minutes, but he maintains the outer calm. Nadell never sat still for more than a minute and I think he smoked a cigarette after each of the first 5 hands at our table until the next break.

I desperately wanted to make it to 3 AM and play Day 2. That would keep me from playing the $1,000-Rebuy event. In my mind, that was the equivalent of a $5,000 profit.

My patience was rewarded at the end of Day 1. With 2 hands to go, I doubled up and then won a small pot. Suddenly, I was at 7,000 chips when we broke at 3:10 AM. The average was 10,000 but that was far, far closer to the average than I had been for 3 hours.

I was so happy that I made one of my most important, and one of my most impulsive, decisions of the 2006 World Series of Poker.

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