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#221 – WSOP #68 – Viva los Muertos, Part I
Introductions are awkward in poker. Part of it, I’m sure, is my own social difficulties. But the game itself deserves some of the blame. Even though poker is, at heart, a social game, the formalities of normal social interaction don’t apply. Where else could you sit one inch from another person for ten hours, talk with them the entire time, and never learn their name? If anything, you ask their name when you leave the game, when you are likely to never lay eyes on them again.
Most of the poker players I know, I’ve met in two ways: either they introduce themselves to me, or I make someone I know introduce us. Even that is complicated because most poker players are so used to these social rules that they aren’t quick to make introductions.
Granted, this ain’t a cotillion, but I usually find myself making this speech when I want to meet a poker player: “I’ve seen you around for the last three years and we have most of the same friends, but we’ve never actually met ….”
I was in about five conversations with other players where Ty Stewart, Director of Marketing for the World Series, was present. But he never introduced himself. I never introduced myself. And no one introduced us. I finally pointed this out to him one time, and it led to us becoming friends. On the other hand, I STILL haven’t met Jeffrey Pollack.
That’s just the poker way.
Consequently, when I introduced myself to Paul “Eskimo” Clark at the Bellagio in April, a main topic of conversation was how young he looked.
SPRINGTIME FOR ESKIMO
I truly enjoy meeting the “old school” pros, the guys who remind us of what poker was like before it was broadcast in prime time. Guys like Mike Laing, Archie Karas, Paul Clark, and Sam Grizzle. Because I never have an actual purpose for meeting these players, I’ve relied on serendipity. I saw Mike Laing using the phone at the edge of the Mirage poker room one day and I introduced myself. It turned out that he played an important role in Andy Beal’s first day in the Bellagio poker room back in 2001. Sam Grizzle was camped out on Mike Matusow’s couch, and I had to be his driver for the night as a quid pro quo for getting Matusow to finish his chapter in the STRATEGY GUIDE. I still haven’t met Archie Karas, though I’d like to.
I was at the Bellagio for its spring tournament and talking to Mike Matusow, who was playing $25-$50 No-Limit but trying to get together players for a black-chip mixed game. Clark was one of the interested players so I used the occasion as an excuse to introduce myself. (I wrote about this when it happened, #104 – “Prisoner of the Bellagio, Part IV – Las Vegas is a Very Small Town.”)
What I really wanted to do was ask Paul about Badugi, which he was reputed to have invented. He confirmed this and I believe him but it really doesn’t matter. One of the great things about the old schoolers is that their lives are so outrageous, so foreign to 99% of the rest of the world, that no story is too weird to believe.
For example, how did Paul Clark get the nickname “Eskimo”? According to Wikipedia, he got the nickname “because he looks like the Alaska Airlines logo.” Next to that statement is the footnote “citation needed.”
Good luck, Wikipedia. Sure, I was curious but I’m not going to ruin the mystery surrounding a guy like Eskimo Clark. The Wikipedia entry also said “Outside of poker, Clark’s hobbies include baseball.” Really? Playing it? Betting on it?
I’m happy to leave all that undocumented. I was hoping to hear some Badugi stories. Clark told me he brought the game back from Vietnam, where he served in the military. While describing this part of his poker career, he mentioned that his next birthday would be at the beginning of the 2007 World Series of Poker, on June 2.
That would be his SIXTIETH birthday. Such is the legend of Eskimo Clark that some web sites say he is FORTY-EIGHT. Those sites obviously don’t believe he served in Vietnam, then, because I’M 48 and for me to have served in Vietnam would have required postponing my bar mitzvah.
At this point, our conversation lagged so I told him that I was surprised he was going to be 60. “You sure look young for someone who’s 59.”
For me, that line hangs in the air as a great irony, because two months later, I saw Paul “Eskimo” Clark almost die at a poker table.
A PERFECT TIME FOR RAZZ
I will regret to my dying day that I did not play the razz event at the 2007 World Series of Poker. I was in a terrible mood, away from my family, rushing around the clock to finish an article for a magazine I would quit a month later. All that put me in a perfect mood to play razz.
Razz was made for misery.
For the uninitiated, razz is a form of seven-card stud. In common with stud, players are initially dealt two cards face down and one face up. There is a round of betting, followed by additional rounds of betting after players are dealt each of the next four cards. Fourth, fifth, and sixth street are dealt face up and the last card is dealt face down. There are antes and betting limits similar to seven-card stud.
Where razz differs is that it is a form of LOW poker. The goal is to make the lowest hand possible. Straights and flushes don’t count, so the best hand in razz is 5-4-3-2-A.
So what makes razz the most frustrating game? Better to ask, what DOESN’T? Every hand needs to catch at least two cards to be playable. The best hands can become unplayable from the start based on the other exposed cards. A hand can become serendipitously worse, but rarely serendipitously better.
It’s impossible, it seems, to play the game for more than a few hands without getting something like (A-2)-3, picking up a perfect 4 on the next street, and then having it turn to crap with an A-2-(K) finish. Good players are playing their (and opponents’) visible cards, so this hand looks like X-X-3-4-A-2-X. No one wants to throw away a hand like that, not just because it could be the best hand all the way until after the king on seventh street, but because it should LOOK good to opponents. At the same time, however, a good player is probably going to deduce, from his own cards, the other exposed cards, and the opponent’s early show of strength, that the ace and deuce on fifth and sixth streets may not have helped. And a bad player, with an 8-low made, is playing only his own cards, thinking, “I made my hand. I guess I have to call it down.”
There was once a time when razz was an integral part of high-stakes poker. While working on the razz chapter of the STRATEGY GUIDE, Ted Forrest told me there used to be a $400-$800 or $500-$1,000 razz game at the Mirage or the Bicycle Club. He had earlier told me the day he “became” a high-stakes poker player occurred during a $400-$800 razz game at the Bike in 1991. The game was so wild that he quickly dropped $40,000 and the only other player in the game who he thought was any good was stuck $100,000. He rebounded to win that night/day/night and never looked back, but the point was that the phrase “juicy $400-$800 razz game” was not an alien concept.
When Forrest and Huck Seed were sharing a history of razz with me over Ted’s girlfriend Roxanna’s kitchen table in 2006, they both used the expression “back in the day” when talking about their cash-game experiences in razz. I asked Ted whether a new razz player had a chance of succeeding at the World Series and was surprised that he said yes. “Most of the good razz players are dead.
Razz has a long history at the World Series of Poker, longer than any game other than hold ‘em and seven-card stud. At the fourth World Series in 1973 – the 1972 Series featured a TOTAL of two events – razz appeared as one of the seven events. It was absent from the 1976 Series, but appeared TWICE in 1977, as if to make up for the oversight. That year was the highlight for lowball, with seven of the thirteen bracelet events consisting of low or high-low poker.
In 1982, a number of names familiar to poker fans twenty-five years later made the razz final table: Mickey Appleman, Dewey Tomko, Tom McEvoy, and Puggy Pearson. In 1989, Eskimo Clark made his first razz final table. Men “the Master” Nguyen and Appleman made the final table in 1992. In 1993, Ted Forrest won the event after a final table including Tom McEvoy and Eskimo Clark.
In both 1995 and 1996, the World Series of Poker featured TWO Chinese Poker events. Razz remained in the rotation, however, and the 1995 final table included Chris Ferguson (his first World Series final table), Mike Sexton, and Men the Master. Doyle Brunson won his eighth bracelet in the 1998 razz event. Eskimo Clark won it in 1999, Huckleberry Seed in 2000.
In 2003, razz was turned into a big-buy-in/pros-only event. They increased the buy-in to $5,000, and only thirty-six players entered. But what a field: the top four were Seed, Phil Ivey, Forrest, and John Juanda. Chris Ferguson also played at that final table.
For 2004, the World Series returned razz as a $1,500 event, and ESPN even televised it. They won’t make THAT mistake again. The year before, this audience of millions of new poker fans was unexpectedly dazzled by scenes of a pudgy kid pulling a million dollar bluff on Humphrey Bogart. In this episode, they got T.J. Cloutier drawling, “God, I hate razz,” and Howard Lederer, disgusted, telling T.J., “Yes, T.J., I KNOW we had the same hand” after his sixth and seventh-street cards paired up, costing him a huge pot.
It was a brilliant display of what razz – and, indeed, poker – is all about. Therefore, it was completely inappropriate for what viewers expected of TV poker.
The 2005 razz final table would have made even worse TV, meaning it was even more interesting. Razz was supposed to be a one-day event in 2005 but they didn’t count on almost 300 players or the feints, dodges, and patience of a canny razz player. They didn’t play down to the final table until 11 PM on day TWO. With the TV cameras disengaged, just about the only person watching an event that had overstayed its welcome was Amy Calistri, covering the Series for Pokerpages.com.
According to Amy, the chip leader, O’Neil Longson, a legendary World Series competitor who already had a pair of bracelets, looked like he wouldn’t make it through the night. He was the oldest player at the table, looked twice as old as his age, and was sleeping between hands. He would wake up long enough only to play an occasional hand or argue unsuccessfully for an overnight break or for the limits to be raised. But like a vampire, he got stronger as it got later. When it was five handed, Amy sat right at the table, joining a fascinating, eclectic quintet of survivors: Longson, Bruno Fitoussi, Al Barbieri, Archie Karas, and Mike Wattel. It was morning by the time Longson dispatched Fitoussi, the debonair operator of the Aviation Club in Paris, to win his third bracelet. Rather than crawl back into a coffin, O’Neil looked like he was ready to go dancing.
LOW EBB
Monday, June 17, was my low ebb for the World Series of Poker. I wasn’t even supposed to be in Las Vegas. I was going to spend that weekend, which included Father’s Day, back in Scottsdale with my family.
But no, not me. When a magazine asked me to write a cover profile on Phil Hellmuth, I agreed even though every poker magazine was doing a cover profile on Phil, the deadline for the issue had already passed so it had to be written super-fast, and Hellmuth was playing daily in the Series so his availability was somewhere between unpredictable and nonexistent. They couldn’t pay me more than my regular rate but they agreed to my one condition: they would put my name on the cover.
It was a Faustian bargain and I should have smelled that from the start. I honestly wanted my name on the cover for professional reasons, but I was trading my scarce family time for what probably looked like an ego trip. (As if to drive the point home karmically, the magazine reneged on its promise. On the other hand, the published piece, my last for that magazine, is one of my best.)
I originally thought Father’s Day Sunday was rock bottom. I wrote about my sorry state in #178 – WSOP #27 – “Friends and Enemies, Lovers and Fighters, Part I.” I didn’t play the two Series events that day, NLHE and razz. Instead, I entered the 100-Seat Guarantee on Full Tilt, but played horrible, uninspired poker, and busted just a little too late to play the razz.
Phil Hellmuth made it to Day 2 in the NLHE, which was both good and bad news. It gave me more potential material and I could watch him play and write about that, but it left him unavailable to talk.
I didn’t think I’d get much out of watching Hellmuth when there were 60-90 players left so I decided, as a Father’s Day gift to myself, I would play the Monday event, $2,500 NLHE, 6 handed. How’s this for a starting table: Joe Pelton (who won a WPT event), J.J. Liu (who just finished second in one), and Lynette Chan. Then I lost half my chips with pocket aces on the sixth hand.
But I rebounded. I won back a bunch of chips from Joe and he busted. I won a bunch of chips from J.J. Liu and she busted. I busted Lynette Chan. When Pelton’s seat was taken by Erick Lindgren, I won some chips from Erick. By 3:30 PM, I had 23,000 chips.
By 5:30, I had zero.
Low ebb.
Annie Duke made it a little better when she treated me to a theatrical performance of “I fucking hate fucking razz” after she busted out. After she finished venting – that was all she wanted to do, a sentiment shared by approximately 100% of the players who bust out of razz events – I gave her a hug.
“What’s that for?” she asked, already calming down.
“For making me feel better about busting out of the 6-handed event after building up over 20,000 chips – ”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, but I interrupted her.
“- and because you bought five percent of my action, you owe me $125.”
She told me I sucked and paid me in chips from the Palms, which looked so cheesy that I was afraid to cash them at the Rio. They stayed in my pocket until the colors started to fade and someone told me I owed THEM money.
Annie’s bust-out was the first news I heard Monday about the razz. I wanted to check out the status of many players I knew who were still playing but I was several hours from learning the REAL story about razz. When I heard Phil Hellmuth was card dead but still hanging on in no-limit hold ‘em, I knew it was time to get back to work.
