FULL TILT POKER BLOG

#388 – WPT Final Table, or Foxwoods via Afghanistan

Posted by Editor | Filed under Poker in the Military, WPT

Every so often, I get an e-mail from Colin, my friend in the Marines who was scheming to hook up Full Tilt for himself and his similarly-poker-crazed buddies. Unfortunately, it appears his efforts have been in vain. He told me that even the Full Tilt’s website – not the client, on which you actually play, but the site (which has rules, news, this blog, and of course the link to download the client) – was off limits.

Colin unleashed a few expletives at the unfairness of it all in an e-mail to me. When I responded, those cut-and-pasted expletives caused the e-mail to be returned as undeliverable. This military of ours is pretty serious.

So Colin, I fear, is in withdrawal.

His Dad attended the final table at Foxwoods on Wednesday – they live in that area – in his son’s stead and sent him a description of what it was like. Colin, in turn, forwarded it to me.

I enjoyed it so much that I asked if I could print it in the blog, and father and son approved. I like how it explains the atmosphere and pace of watching a final table, and the huge differences between watching it live and on TV. I try to explain this in my writing about televised poker events but it’s refreshing to read the perspective of someone who hasn’t ceased noticing these some of these things. What Colin’s Dad is noticing is a lot more like what you’d notice than perhaps what I’d notice.

I also like that he refers to one of the players as “that internet punk.” Far from making an apology on his behalf, I do want to mention that he’s transmitting to his son his present-sense impressions about what was going on: what he thinks of the set, the pace, the pretty girls, the cookies, the announcers, and then the players. As you would expect when you watch a live competition, you develop opinions, favorites, villains.

Finally, it’s wonderful that Colin’s Dad understands his son’s interest in poker sufficiently to haul over to this thing and devote an evening to watching something that even a hard-core poker fan might not be able to justify. (I never heard of someone attending one of these final-table tapings and wanting to see another one, unless they owned a piece of one of the players or were a friend or family member.) And then to write it up in vivid detail. To me, that’s a definition of love. Not the only definition of course. Not like an embrace or a tearful reunion or the worry a father has for his son in a war zone on the other side of the world. But it’s a very unselfconscious way of saying “Your welfare is the core of my happiness.”

So here is the view of the final table from Colin’s Dad, unedited:

Hi Colin –

Well, I went to the filming of the Final Table of the Foxwoods Poker Classic WPT tournament yesterday. It was pretty interesting … something that’s neat to be able to say you did.

Doors opened at 3:00pm, seating started at 4:00pm, filming started at 5:00pm. I got there at around 2:45. There were about 20-30 people in line, and the line gradually got longer behind me. A little before 3:00, they started passing out numbered WPT Poker Chips. The chip, and your number, were your admission ticket. We were told to come back at 4:00.

The whole event took place in the Grand Ballroom at Foxwoods. The ballroom was divided into three sections … the TV studio, a production/staging room, and a waiting room. When I went back at 4:00 I was told to go to the waiting room. The waiting room was about the size of the BHS A gym. It had huge video screens setup at one end, tables and chairs setup throughout the room, a cash bar, and a row of tables with free soda, water, coffee, tea, cookies, chips, nuts, etc. You could help yourself (and stuff your pockets!) until they told you what to do next.

At about 4:15 they called anyone who had a reserved ticket, and they led them into the studio. Each player had a certain amount of reserved tickets, and Foxwoods and the WPT must have given some out also. Probably about 50-60 in total. Once the people with the tickets were seated they started calling for ranges of numbers on the chips they handed out. The first call was for chips 1-10. I had number 9, so I was in the first group led in. (As it turns out, many of the people in front of me in the original line were there to pick up their reserved tickets, not to get a chip.)

The TV studio was a decent size. The table was in the middle with a pretty fancy set built around it. On either end, and on one side of the table, there were sets of bleachers. On the other side of the table (behind the dealer) was the small set where the two hosts sat. It was odd. The two of them were only about 30 feet away from the table. They talked through the whole thing, like the commentary that you hear on TV, but you couldn’t (and the players couldn’t) hear anything they said (unless the studio sound was turned on). I figured they’d be off in a different room somewhere. There were three remote-controlled cameras right next to the table, one over the table, one boom camera, and two people walking around with handheld cameras. (Plus the cameras in the table that look at the players hole cards … but we never saw that.) And there were large video screens in front of each section and hanging from the top of the set showing you what the cameras saw.

Each set of bleachers was only four rows high and only held 50-60 people. In total, there were less than 200 people in the audience. When they filled up the available seats, everyone that was left had to stay in the waiting room, eating cookies, and watching the video screens. There were people who monitored the bleachers to try to make sure that every seat was filled at all times (to look good on TV). So whenever someone left, someone else would be brought in from the waiting room to fill the empty seat. There wasn’t a huge crowd. They only gave out about 350 chips. One guy was telling me that he came to the tournament at Foxwoods last fall and he was something like 1,100.

I had a good seat. I was in one of the end sets of bleachers (to the right of the dealer), at the end of the row (closest to the TV hosts). From my angle I could see most of the players faces without looking at a monitor, and I could watch the TV guys. From many other seats, you were looking at player’s backs and the TV guys were blocked from view because of the way the set was built.

You would have liked some of the other views from my seat, but I’m not sure how much poker you would have watched! Right behind me were the “spokes-model babes” … the girls who do the TV cut-ins and intros (“Don’t go away, there’s more to come …”, “Welcome back to Foxwoods …”, “his chip stack may be short, but my dress is even shorter …”) They spent most of the night taping their lines … at least 10 times for each line. And then right to my left were the girls that do the money presentation when it gets down to the final two players. There were 5 or 6 of them, sitting there looking VERY bored! I guess they have to get there early just in case they get down to the final two very quickly. (They didn’t. More in a minute.)

So anyway, a little after 5:00 they actually started to play poker. I guess it’s like any other sporting event. Although it’s cool to be there, there are many reasons why you’re better off watching from your living room. You don’t know what cards the players are holding (they don’t show that camera view, for obvious reasons). You can’t hear what the TV guys are saying and their analysis. You don’t see the odds of the various hands like you do on TV. And you don’t know what the chip counts are. You can guess which players are doing well and which ones aren’t doing as well, but with different denominations for each color of chip, you can’t just go by who has the most chips in front of him.

On TV you see someone by the table talking into a microphone. That person is announcing to the audience who bet what (because, for the most part, you can’t hear what the players are saying) and what cards are turned over. Every once in a while (like every 1 1/2-2 hours) he would give an estimate of everyone’s chip counts.

Play was slow. On TV, someone gets knocked out about every 20 minutes. Last night, it took 3 hours for the first person to get knocked out. I left after 5 hours … there were still four players left. For many hands, you never even saw the flop. A lot of folding. There were very few “exciting” hands while I was there.

There were the two big names (Ted Forrest and Erik Seidel), there was one online punk who got into the tournament by winning a satellite (I just didn’t like the way he looked or acted), and the crowd favorite was a guy named Frank who’s a funeral director in Yonkers, NY. He had a big group of followers there. VanPatten kept talking about how Frank wanted to “bury the competition!”

At the beginning of the night, Forrest and Seidel were the chip leaders with about 2.3 million each. Frank was the short stack with about 400,000. Three hours later, surprisingly enough, Ted Forrest was the first player knocked out! He was short stacked and went “all in” with pocket Jacks. He got knocked out by someone with pocket Aces. He was interesting to watch … always grimacing or making faces when someone raised him or went all in against him. He seemed nice enough though. Every 90 minutes they take a 10 minute break to change the tapes … and so people could go to the bathroom and get more cookies! We happened to walk into the men’s room together. People were coming up to him and talking to him, and he was very gracious.

After 4 hours, the online punk got knocked out when he went all in. The same guy who knocked out Forrest caught a card on the river to win the hand. After 5 hours, I left. And Frank, who started as the short stack, had about 2.9 million in chips.

I saw this morning that Frank was the third player knocked out. Then they played 3 handed … FOR SIX HOURS!!! When it got down to the final two players (I don’t know if the girls were still there … or awake!), the game only went for one more hand … and Erik Seidel won his first WPT championship. The final table lasted 12 hours … the longest in WPT history … ending after 5:00 this morning.

Well, this email ended up being MUCH longer than I had intended (I feel like I just wrote a BLOG), but I hope you got a good picture of what it was like. I’ll talk to you soon. Be safe!

Love,

Dad

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