15
#468 – WSOP Notebook #41 – Lost in Translation, or Nog, All Nog
Maybe the World Series of Poker was just one big misunderstanding. That would explain a lot of what happened.
Five minutes into my first event, players at the table are talking about someone named Chad. The woman in Seat 1 says, “Do you know Chad?”
The guy in Seat 6 says, “Chad’s practically my best friend.”
Woman in Seat 1: “Really? I’m Chad’s fiance.”
Then in the first few minutes of my last event, Devilfish asked me how I knew Des Wilson, his biographer, who had come by and wished me luck. When I mentioned, very clearly, we were introduced by a mutual acquaintance (of mine, Wilson’s, and David Ulliott’s) named Tony Holden, he said, “Joanie Bolden?”
It’s the like whole Series would have benefited from closed captioning, even when everyone was speaking English.
People who thought I was a writer saw me playing, not writing. People who thought I was a player continually asked me what I was writing in a notebook. (For some bizarre reason, most guessed that I was writing down their tells.)
I have no idea what Full Tilt expected when they asked me to blog the World Series of Poker. I don’t think they knew either. And damned if I knew.
What did I see there in that month and a half of my life that I gave up to this enterprise?
I saw lots of success. Erick Lindgren won his first bracelet and displayed boundless amounts of heart. Mike Matusow won his third bracelet and, likewise, fought like a gladiator. David Singer and David Benyamine made overdue trips to the winner’s circle, and pros like Barry Greenstein, Layne Flack, and Daniel Negreanu returned there.
But poker – especially tournament poker – is not about success. I was thrilled for the most part with the quality of my play, but I cashed just once. To mark the Series as only a moderate loss, I have to include all my satellite successes, including the online satellite that won me a seat in the Main Event. I can tell you that I never played better than in the HORSE event at the end of the Series, but finishing one short of the bubble does not impress people.
No, you don’t spend seven weeks in tournament poker and remember the great successes, the players who looked smart sticking their hole cards into a gigantic pile of cash with all the cameras and reporters around.
It’s about failure. About striving and getting no satisfaction other than feeling you played your best in a hazardous environment while the rest of the world notices your results weren’t as good as they were sometime in the past or compared with someone else’s.
I watched Howard Lederer very closely during this World Series and was thrilled with what I saw. He finished 6th in the $5,000 Mixed Hold ‘Em, 12th in the Mixed Pot Limit, and 9th (just missing the final table) in the Stud Eight-or-Better Championship.
Those three finishes were worth about $120,000 but I doubt Howard made a profit this Series. He played the $50k HORSE, and somewhere between many and all of the $10k Championship events and the big Rebuy events (like No-Limit Deuce-to-Seven).
And there was also the opportunity cost. Howard Lederer could do a lot of things other hang around the Amazon Room in the middle of the night for most of seven weeks to just miss doing great. He collects wines and spirits, reads voraciously, travels the world, and spends time with lawyers, professors, economists, lobbyists, and legislators trying to explain why poker is a game of skill and should remain legal.
I don’t know anyone who needs poker less than Howard Lederer, yet he showed up at the Amazon Room day-after-day as if they were dispensing a drug he couldn’t live without. And when I asked him when we were seated together at an event how he liked going from playing almost no poker to playing every night, he said he preferred the immersion of the World Series.
Why? He looked at me as if I asked him why breathed air. “Because it’s going to say ‘Poker Player’ on my tombstone.”
Yeah, Lederer won a big event in Australia in January, but so what? Far more meaningful to me, and indicative of the life he wants, is his showing up at the Amazon Room into the middle of the night to almost succeed – and, therefore, to fail – night after night.
In answering Hamlet’s question whether “to be or not to be”, it’s easy after you’ve had a Series like Matusow or Lindgren or Scotty Nguyen to understand why they put up with it. But that Howard did and will, without tasting that success – in fact, even more bitter tasting was coming close (not even close to winning but close to having a chance to win) – suggests that he will “brave the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”
Believe me, he could do a lot of other things with his life, yet this is what he wants. If striving – failing – can be so satisfying, maybe there is hope for all of us in poker.
