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#220 – Matusow Stays in the Picture
THE MATUSOW PRE-SHOW
On Sunday, July 15, the Main Event was winding down to the final table in the Amazon Room. I decided to buck the crowds and go instead to the Bellagio, where the WPT Bellagio Cup was being decided. The shadow of the Series eclipsed the third running of the Cup, but the WPT event was still big: 548 entries, including Mike Matusow, who made the final table.
Did I need a better reason than that to watch my first-ever live WPT finale?
I called Mike on Sunday morning to congratulate him on making the final table. We hadn’t been in touch much during the World Series. I wanted to watch and root him on, but I didn’t want to give the impression of being a fair-weather friend.
Mikey’s so cool. He doesn’t think like that at all. (Maybe that’s why he has a bunch of fair-weather friends.)
As soon as he picked up, he said, “Hey, Mikey, you gonna sweat me at the final table?”
I told him I definitely would, though I was playing in the big Sunday tournaments on Full Tilt, including the first Sunday Million Dollar Guarantee. That one would start about an hour before his final table.
“Oh, the way you play, you’ll be out in plenty of time to watch me. And hey, what the hell were you doing with those jacks?”
That was a reference to my play in the Main Event, and even though it sounded like a dig, I was flattered that he noticed how I went out. I actually had two hands where I was dealt a pair of jacks and they went awry.
“I was short-stacked, I moved all-in, and the big blind woke up with aces.”
“No,” he said, “the other hand. You gotta throw the jacks away.” He was right, of course. (My mea culpa appears in entry #206 on July 10.)
As it turned out, it took me about two hours to bust out of the Million Dollar Guarantee, so Matusow wasn’t technically correct, but the wiseass wasn’t that far off. I had also entered the Mulligan, however, and lasted several hours there, long enough to make the money but not the BIG money.
During that time, I followed the WPT final table online and it seemed like Mike was hanging in, playing great from what I could tell. Incidentally, what’s this I keep hearing about the WPT final table structures being unfair? (I’ve even heard this, in the past, from Mike himself.) They must have changed the structures or something because they started six-handed at 4 PM and had eliminated only 2 players by the time I arrived at almost 9:30 PM. The last hand was completed at 11:47 PM. Sounds like a lot of play to me.
BELLGIO SERPENTINE
Serpentine. That’s the word I would use to describe the route to the Bellagio’s Tower Ballroom, where they played the final table. From the valet, I crossed the length and width of the casino, getting caught in the crossfire when the early show of “O” let out. As I passed the Bellagio Gallery of Art, I realized that it had been awhile since I’d been here. I also realized that I have a lot of history with this place.
For example, next to the Gallery is an unmarked door. Behind that door is a gorgeous set of offices for some of the top management of MGM Mirage. Has it been almost two years since I interviewed MGM Mirage CEO Terry Lanni for COLF CONNOISSEUR? I guess so.
As the crowd thinned and finally disappeared, it occurred to me that the very first thing I wrote about poker that I showed to anyone else was about the buzzing crowds of the Bellagio at night.
That was back in March 2004, almost 3 ½ years ago. It was the sample chapter for a book I was going to call THE BIG GAME. After Warner Books bought it, editor Colin Fox told me they wanted something “more literary.” We eventually came up with THE PROFESSOR, THE BANKER, AND THE SUICIDE KING.
But before all that, there was just a proposal. The writing sample was a bird’s-eye view of the setting, the Bellagio. Other than the chapter taking place in December, it was a night like this. Here is what I wrote:
***
It is Saturday night and Bellagio is pulsing with action. People are streaming in through the main entrance and the south garage and the walkway from Caesars Palace and Bally’s like the only relief from the whipping December winds is in front of a $5 slot machine. The couture shops at Via Bellagio are closing, but that doesn’t stop hordes of people from elbowing into Dior, Prada, and Armani, or at least staring inside. Some of these stores are already closed and have stripped their window displays, but some tourists still stop to look at … nothing. Inside the casino, the Petrossian bar overflows into blackjack and craps pits, as Asian men with spiky hair puff cigars while draining the bar’s supply of Louis XIII cognac at $100 per glass.
Everybody is pushing to be a part of the action. In the high-limit salon, so many men and women are making outlandish baccarat wagers that the casino has given up trying to keep crowds from forming to watch. Several of these bettors have six-figure lines of credit and entourages; spectators lined up five deep move like a wave, cheering and moaning with the outcome of each hand. Throughout the casino, the tiny electronic numbers on the displays of blackjack table limits are being turned up, from $25 to $100. The betting just intensifies.
Toward the back, or north, end of the casino, a thick line has formed for entrance to Light, Bellagio’s hip nightclub. Light is upstairs and the line spills out the door, down the stationary escalator, down a hallway, and into the casino, between the Starting Line bar and the poker room. Bouncers in red sport jackets and black turtlenecks patrol the hipsters-in-waiting. Just when it seems no more people can fit in this area, six double doors from the “O” Showroom open, spilling hundreds more into the room. No one is going upstairs to bed. Everyone is looking for some kind of action.
Beyond this mob, and the tangle of bodies in the poker room, two men and a dealer sit silently at a poker table, an island of tranquility in the maelstrom of Bellagio. Blinds are posted, cards are dealt, bets are made, cards are thrown in, chips are pushed, and the process repeats itself. But it is done with so little movement and noise that it almost appears like the cards and chips are animated and moving themselves at the fingertips of the participants.
The two men are oblivious to the bubbling cauldron around them. They have to be. They each have $5 million in front of them and intend to play until one of them has it all. And they each have another $5 million in reserve and maybe untold millions more. This is The Big Game, the highest-stakes poker game ever played.***
The chapter goes on to describe the scene inside the Bellagio poker room, concluding with profiles of the players at Table 1 and the tense game between Andy Beal and Doyle Brunson.
The funny thing as I look back at it is that it was all made up. Sure, I wrote the description of the Bellagio and its poker room from personal observation. But I made up the description of the Beal-Brunson game and the game going on at Table 1. I learned soon after I wrote this that Beal NEVER played this late at night; he always started early in the morning.
I figured I’d simply substitute an ACTUAL scene when I learned about one. The made-up specificity, though, I’m certain helped sell the publisher on the project, and it also supported my phony claim to have already learned most of the story from the participants.
Luckily, it all worked out fine. I actually DID get the story from the participants, and was able to deliver the manuscript in less than 5 months from the publisher’s acceptance of the proposal. In fact, this great description of the Bellagio and the later description in the sample chapter of the poker room didn’t even make it into the manuscript.
By the time I got to the Tower Ballroom, I almost forgot I was in the Bellagio. I walked down so many empty hallways that I felt like the members of Spinal Tap in that scene where they can’t seem to get to the stage from the dressing room.
THE WPT STAGE
This is my first time watching a WPT final table and I’m fascinated by the stage. It’s very quiet here. The lighting dominates everything.
It’s dark, but the pillars framing the stage are steel laced with blue lights. There are at least nine roving searchlights that mostly impose patterns (like stars) on surfaces they reach. I count eight on the corners of the stage – and one large one somewhere behind the audience. I can’t locate WHERE because it makes this ominous rumble and when I look for the source of the rumble, BAM!, I am blinded by it.
Jack McClelland and Linda Johnson take turns narrating the action at the table. There are several monitors from which you can watch what’s happening..
Off to the side, Mike Sexton and Vince Van Paten sit at the commentators desk, doing what appears to be … nothing. Every so often, they appear on the monitors, doing nothing.
Here is what the WPT does better than the WSOP: better monitors, no intrusive monster crane threatening to wing anyone walking in the vicinity. (I late noticed that the WPT does have such a crane but by seating the audience on just three sides of the stage, they can operate it out of harm’s way.)
Here is what the WSOP does better than the WPT:
1. The WPT doesn’t have any visible timer, so no one knows how much time is left in the round. Jack and Linda announced it periodically, but that’s not the same has having it visible.
2. WSOP doesn’t have any of that cheesy, intrusive lighting.
3. I don’t know what the deal was with the WPT audience, but something was weird. Set as we were in Siberia, I would have assumed the audience was made up of people extremely interested in the outcome. This group was very subdued, uninterested. I think the WSOP production also feels more “authentic” because the action is still technically in the Amazon Room. Even though there is some separation from the final table and the rest of the poker room, there’s a feeling that this table is the culmination of action involving hundreds or thousands of players, the type of action that’s going on just out of camera range. Not so in the WPT setting. It FEELS staged.
THE AUDIENCE
I recognize a few people in this audience. Phil Hellmuth is sitting in the front row. He shows me a medallion that says “UBT”. An hour earlier, he won an event on the Ultimate Blackjack Tour.
“This is going to be on CBS. It’s a very big thing. This is just like a bracelet,” he tells me.
Just like a bracelet? I suppose so, in the way that my college debate trophies are just like World Series of Poker bracelets. But I’m surprised that PHIL HELLMUTH, of all people – the man who has made WSOP bracelet supremacy the focus of his professional life – is proposing that any form of distinction is the equivalent of a World Series bracelet.
“But I’m here to support Mike,” he concludes, so I let the matter drop.
At least five times, they have to warn people to shut off their cell phones. Each warning follows a distinctive ringtone piercing the unnatural silence of the room.
During play, a woman in the front row has her cell phone to her ear. She isn’t talking but I can hear what sounds like hysterical screaming from the other end of the call. The person next to her is listening as well. They look at each other, shrug, and the woman ends the call and drops the phone in her purse.
A woman seated next to me asks at one point between hands, “Is tonight the night the Frontier is imploding?” I tell her I don’t know, but I want to say, “Lady, the Frontier has been imploding for decades. Maybe tonight’s just the night they finish the job.”
Some guy behind me gets out of his seat every time Kevin Saul wins a pot and screams, “Good one, cuz!” After one hand, after Saul bets the river and Matusow folds, he’s at it again, at length. Phil stands up and glares at him standing there in the aisle. “He sspiked a jack on the river. It isn’t surgery.”
THE POKER
Mike made one mistake, and it cost him more than a third of his chips. They were three-handed and Kevin Saul, on the button, raised to 183,000. Mike, in the big blind, reraised to 430,000. Saul called. After a flop of Jh-6s-Kh, Mike bet 400,000. Saul raised all-in, and Matusow had to fold.
I could see him – almost feel him – get angry with himself as he attempted to calm himself down and regroup. His knees bounced under the table. He would occasionally glance skyward, a disgusted scowl on his face.
But he calmed down. People think the “Mike Matusow blow-up” is when Mike makes a mistake or has something go wrong and then he goes on tilt. The blow-up (which, frankly, hasn’t happened in any conspicuous place in years) is about making a mistake and not retreating ON THE SPOT. It’s where Mike makes a mistake and instantly follows up, though he recognizes he made a mistake, by making another one.
He had As-5s and felt certain that Saul was weak. After Kevin moved all-in, he realized that his read was incorrect. The blow-up would have been to say to himself, “My read was wrong but I already blew 830,000 chips. I might as well call the last 1.5 million because I already blew it.”
He did NOT do that. And tilting after the hand is simply not part of Matusow’s make-up, despite what people think. He’s a real pro, and real pros regroup. That’s what makes them real pros: the ability to blot out the things that can keep them from playing their best.
Despite losing nearly a million chips, it made no difference in the outcome.
Even though Mike was, by a big margin, the short stack, things quickly changed and Danny Wong lost a giant pot to Kevin Saul.
Mike raised on his button with Kc-Js to 175,000. Danny, in the small blind, moved all-in for 950,000.
Matusow read Wong as having ace-rag. If so, he was only a very small underdog. With the 175,000 plus blinds and antes in the pot, it was an obvious call.
Wong had Ad-3d. As they got up to watch the slow and dramatic process of the dealer putting out the board, Mike was a picture of confidence. “It’s coming.”
The flop was T-5-7, rainbow.
“I’m not even worried,” he said.
The turn was the jack of hearts, putting him in the lead with top pair. The river was another ten, eliminating Danny Wong in third.
Danny was in tears. Mike gave him a hug.
They played heads-up for about 40 minutes. Saul realized, I think, that even with the big chip advantage, he wasn’t going to be able to outplay Matusow, so he was overbetting whenever he could.
At 11:45 PM, Saul, on the button, raised to 220,000. He made some comment to Matusow about someone who was coming by to watch and he was hoping the guy made it.
“I knew right then,” Mike told me later, “that he had a big hand. I had 8c-7c, so I thought I’d see if I could flop a big hand. But if the flop comes eight-high, I’m not putting another chip in the pot. I know he has a monster.”
The flop was Th-5c-6c. Mike, with the open-ended straight flush draw, looked like he wanted to bet, but he checked. Saul bet 385,000. Mike went all-in and Kevin insta-called. [Note to readers: I originally wrote in my notes, and typed in the blog, that the flop was 9h-5c-6c. That would have made Matusow a straight on the flop. My error, and thanks to reader David W. for catching it.]
Mike slapped over his 8c-7c and called out, “I’ve got fifteen outs times two. I got my money in as the favorite.” It was almost incidental that Saul turned over exactly the kind of hand Mike expected him to have: two queens.
Again, Mike told everyone that he wasn’t nervous and he knew it was coming.
But this time, it didn’t, and Kevin Saul won the WPT Bellagio Cup Championship. (Incidentally, the “Bellagio Cup” wasn’t a cup at all. It was … a BRACELET.)
Matusow had to content himself with second place, any satisfaction he could derive from terrific play, and $675,000. The latter couldn’t have brought him much pleasure, as a line of probably creditors immediately formed behind him. By the end of the journey to the Bellagio poker room, Mike had turned into a modern Pied Piper of Hamelin.
But I considered the experience a victory for Mike Matusow. He played great through a cold set of cards and rebounded from a mistake that could have cost him the tournament or at least his equilibrium. I’ve also noticed that Mike quietly – doing anything “quietly is uncharacteristic for Matusow – is keeping himself in the hunt on a pretty regular basis. He keeps knocking on the door in these WPT events and, despite failing to make a final table in the World Series for the first time in almost a decade, missed by one hand in one of the hold ‘em events and finished in the final two tables of the $50,000 HORSE.
Finally, it looks like the guy who thinks the world is against him and he has nothing but bad beats to look forward to is gone. He’s been replaced by a guy who truly believes it’s all going to go his way. THAT guy is a threat to win anytime, and I’m pleased to see him slay the sourpuss who’s seemed to ankle Matusow periodically over the last few years.
