28
#394 – Congratulations to David Chiu – WPT Champion
David Chiu waited patiently while his competitors raced to cripple and then bust each other, setting up an anticipated showdown with Gus Hansen. Overcoming a 5-to-1 chip advantage by Hansen, David took down the championship with smart heads-up play and some very timely luck.
It was a day of congratulations all around:
To David Chiu - I met David for the first time at the Lederer/Steve Z party before the Main Event last summer. He struck me – from talking with him and what I’d seen at TV final tables – as a gentleman and a true professional. David is low-key and modest, attributes that served a professional well in an era where attracting new (and less skilled) players was important. I remember watching the broadcast of a limit hold ‘em WSOP final table where he and John Hennigan (another consummate pro) good-naturedly tolerated the antics of Patti Gallagher and Ellix Powers. I’ve never gotten the impression that David Chiu wants the spotlight, but now he’s going to get it, and the respect that’s long been due.
To the WPT – Maybe because the plaintiffs in the antitrust case are all friends, I feel like the settlement turns a corner for the WPT. The season ended with a couple of great final tables and another big name taking the WPT Championship. They were also blessed with what could be the easiest final table they’ve ever had to edit. No need to jimmy the structure to create fast action; it took just 22 hands to get Hansen and Chiu heads up. Most of the big hands seemed “TV ready”, meaning they involved getting the chips in before a card came to change the winner. (Poker purists would call those “luck hands” but the fact is that it makes better TV to see someone spike the winner on the river than to see one player expertly outplay another in subtle ways over a long series of hands.)
To CardPlayer.com – I was unable to watch the final table or even look for updates on the internet. (I was participating in the “Relay for Life” cancer event in Scottsdale, which involved walking laps around a track half the night and sleeping in the dirt the other half, though it was great fun for a good cause.) From reading through CardPlayer.com’s updates, I felt like I was there. In fact, based on how the final table went, a dishonest journalist could conceivably have written a gripping account simply by cribbing CardPlayer’s updates. I want to commend Card Player because I’m usually quick to criticize it. (I don’t know Barry Shulman but I like Jeff and I’ve liked almost all the staffers I’ve ever met. I couldn’t, however, always say the same for the product.) Other than extreme overuse of the phrase “went into the tank”, I think the web site’s tournament updates have been quite good lately. I hope it keeps up during the World Series.
To Jeff King, Tommy Le, John Roveto, and Cory Carroll - well played gents. All four players have reason to look at the upcoming tournament schedule with excitement. For Jeff, it’s a return to the spotlight after winning a WSOP-Circuit Main Event in 2006 and making the final table of the U.S. Poker Championship. For Tommy, it’s another fine finish (he was 79th in the 2007 WSOP Main Event and was runner-up in a hold ‘em event at the Legends of Poker last summer) to join brother Nam and friends J.C. Tran, Steve Sung, Tuan Le, Danny Wong, and Quinn Do among elite tournament pros. For John, it’s a third great result already this year (after finishing 11th in the WPT Borgata and 3rd in the Bellagio Five-Star Senior Championship). For Cory, it has to be disappointing after spending so much of the tournament around the top of the leaderboard. But it’s still a great finish after winning a WSOP-Circuit Main Event and finishing runner-up at the WPT Mirage Showdown in 2007. He’s showing up at the end of some big events. After finishing 91st in last year’s WSOP Main Evnet, that’s got to be encouraging.
To Gus Hansen – Gus ran real well in the Championship but in a lot of instances, his luck followed good aggressive play. (I’m reminded of Branch Rickey’s famous quote: “Luck is the residue of design.”) For instance, here is how the hand played out in which he busted Cory Carroll in 4th place:
It was the 16th hand. Two players had already been eliminated, including Tommy Le on the previous hand. Cory was in the BB; there was no small blind. Gus (holding 7d-5d) raised to 480k in the cut-off (blinds were 80k-160k, 15k ante). At the start of the hand, Hansen had 11.7M chips, Carroll was second with 8.5M. (Chiu had 4.7M, Roveto 2.7M.) Cory (holding Ad-Js) reraised to $1.65M. Gus thought it over and called. There was about 3.3M in the pot.
The flop came Qc-Jd-6d. Cory had second pair with the jack and Gus had the diamond flush draw.
Cory checked. Gus thought it over for about 2 minutes and moved all-in. Cory thought about it for a very long time – he could have folded second pair and still had over 6M, solidly in second, giving up just the 1.5M reraise – and then called.
The turn was the Qh and the river was the 3d, making Hansen the flush and eliminating Cory Carroll in fourth place.
So Gus got lucky, right? Sure, but you could easily argue that Cory was the one who made the mistake and Gus played it exactly right. If Gus sensed any weakness from Cory after the flop, he made a very smart semi-bluff. If he misread the situation, he still had 8 or 9 outs against anything Carroll has. But if he read correctly (and it would seem he had), he can get Cory to lay down nearly anything but AA, KK, QQ, JJ, 66, or AQ.
AJ is a tough hand to call with there, putting the whole tournament on the line with so much poker conceivably left to play. Granted, Carroll could have thought the all-in move was a clear semi-bluff and Gus would have been much more coy with a hand better than second pair (though the time Cory spent thinking it over suggests he didn’t have Gus read so easily). Or he could have thought folding this strong a hand – AJ is a great hand 4-handed and he hit pretty decent on the flop with the jack (and the ace of diamonds with two diamonds on the board) – would make him Gus’s bitch for the rest of the day and he was doomed to get outplayed if he required top pair or better to call Gus’s bets.
Then Gus got some bad luck heads-up against David Chiu, including on the last hand when they got all the chips in with Gus in the lead with one card to come and David hit one of his (admittedly large number – 16) outs to end the championship.
Gus Hansen has a book coming out soon – May? – in which he goes through every hand of his Aussie Millions win from January 2007 so you can see how a player of his caliber thinks his way through a tournament. Most people don’t know this but Gus has been recording his tournament hands into a voice recorder over the past few years, using them as a tool to learn about his game. What’s actually going on in Gus’s head is entirely different than the picture painted by his popular image, that of a swashbuckling gambler who throws around chips to run over the table and wins when he gets lucky. Analytically, Hansen is top, top notch, even when he is going in a different direction than the crowd. (Perhaps especially then.) In putting together the chapter of the Strategy Guide about the concept Howard Lederer referred to as “leverage,” he made it clear to me that the concept was expertly practiced by Hansen. “Gus is always betting at pots – small bets, but always betting. He wins a lot of small pots this way and he’ll lose some medium-sized pots. But he’s also going to win some giant pots because with all those small bets, he’s not risking a lot on each bet. But whoever plays back at him has to do it by putting all their chips at risk.”
