#567 - London 2008 #74 - Postscript - Juanda = Champ, Craig = Chump

Congratulations to John Juanda, 2008 World Series of Poker European Champion. Like nearly everyone else, I was following the marathon final table from home, thanks to outstanding daily reports from media director Nolan Dalla and superb table-reporting by Pokernews.com.

It was an incredible final table: Juanda came in with three bracelets. Negreanu made it and he has four. Scott Fischman was there and he has a pair. And Ivan Demidov made it, after making the Final Nine at the Main Event this year in Vegas. You’d have to go back at least to 2003 to find a WSOP Main Event final table so stacked, and probably further.

And they played. The final table took over 19 hours, exceeding the record 16-hour final table for the $1,500 Razz in 2005. They played 484 hands, 130 more than the legendary 2006 $50,000 HORSE final table.

Juanda seems an utterly unflappable player to me and I would have predicted the longer they played, the greater his chance of winning. Over though John’s previous World Series bracelet was in 2003, I saw him day-in and day-out in 2006, 2007, and 2008 and I don’t ever remember seeing him anything other than cool and looking forward to the next hand of poker. The man’s cool is almost off-putting.

It’s a great achievement for John to add to his list of many, and a great achievement for the World Series of Poker. As a player and a spectator (up-close and afar), those European World Series of Poker events are the real deal: great structures, fearsome competition, surroundings that are both relaxed and intense, and operators who are working hard at striking a balance between poker’s democratic anyone-can-win possibility with the offer to superb poker for the top-level enthusiast.

Congratulations to John Juanda and to Harrah’s - who everyone seems to keep calling Harrah’s even though the parent company is changing its name to Caesars, including the people from Har-sars, so I’ll call them Harrah’s awhile more too.

Of course, I was unable to be there in person for the wild finish, as I explained in this space [link], having been sent home - chastened, unsatisfied, unappreciated (yet, oddly, sought after), and indentured.

So before I wrap up Full Tilt’s coverage of what turned out to be an incredible Main Event, let me address doubters and skeptics among my readers.

Some of you have poked fun at my tale of woe. Others have expressed disbelief. Still others have poked fun as a means of expressing disbelief; another group has expressed disbelief as a way of poking fun. Perhaps a representative comment was that of a regular reader named Norman:

As a big fan of your writing, I’m sitting here with bated breath to find out if your last column on FullTilt was a description of real life or something else. If it was real, it was frigging scary. If it was fiction, it was frigging scary.
 
Either way, I’m in your corner. Tell me who to fight!

When these have appeared as comments to the Blog, I have allowed them to appear, even though I have the option of deleting them. That, itself, should demonstrate that I don’t fear people who doubt I speak The Truth. In fact, I’ll even reprint the most critical comment, which appeared following my description of a disastrous meeting with Swiss bankers . Peter wrote:

Have you lost your mind?

At one point I thought this was a joke. I mean, you’re talking about never comingback to the US and you don’t run this by your wife, and when you do spring it on her from a foreign country, you appear mostly indifferent to whether she even joins you in your exile.

And its gotta be a joke right? You don’t appear to have any idea how a payment processor actually works, any thoughts on forming a business entity, any idea about the capital requirements involved, any investors lined up or significant capital of your own, any ideas on getting permanent resident status in the country of exile of your choice or any thoughts on office space and equipment rentals.

But you keep going on about it, so who knows, maybe you’re serious.

But the (apparent) complete lack of actual planning, combined with the “is-he-trying-to-get-fulltilt-to-fire-him” behavior at the hotel, leads me back to my original question. Have you completely lost your mind?

I want to deal with this issue once and head-on.

1. Thanks for reading and for commenting.

2. I write The Truth. There will be instances where, in giving my perspective, I have to resort to my perceptions, which are necessarily subjective. I even try to signal you when my bias could be influencing my descriptions. The point is that I don’t have a hidden agenda. I’ll make my shortcomings and biases available whenever appropriate, and I’m not shy about doing it.

Certain matters, for economy in storytelling, get presented in certain ways that are, though not false, capable of misinterpretation. Let me give you a key example to this story that makes clear that even though “the facts” and The Truth may appear to be at odds, no liberties were actually taken. I drew a lot of comments and criticism about my decision to embark on this plan of starting an online payment processor without my wife’s consent, agreement, cooperation, understanding, etc.

I’m touched that so many people were concerned for me and my wife in this way.  It shows that we’ve really connected. If you had witnessed all my interactions with Jo Anne on the subject, you’d see that neither did I describe the situation with documentary accuracy nor did I misrepresent its essential nature. A few weeks before leaving for London, I woke Jo Anne on a Saturday morning by asking her, “For $20 million, would you leave the United States and never return?” I explained the opportunity in some detail and she was skeptical. I let the matter drop.

The next I told her about it was when I was in London. The subject didn’t totally surprise her, as evidenced by her bringing up that knotty extradition issue that had me contemplating moving to Kosovo or Cambodia.

So is that accurate, inaccurate - what? If I gave you the idea I didn’t care what she thought or whether she joined me, it was unintentionally inaccurate. But not consequentially so and the larger point was unexaggerated: she didn’t know I was planning on becoming an expatriate when I left for London on September 12. (And, in retrospect, based on my planning and packing, neither did I.)

So it wasn’t like I didn’t care about her feelings or didn’t want her along. I took her temperature before I left, assessed where she would end up, and proceeded. At the same time, I truthfully pointed out that she wasn’t specifically aware that I was going to pursue this, and that she was skeptical and ambivalent. I also pointed out truthfully that Andy Bloch schooled me on the finer points of extradition law.

3. Why would I create a lot of extra unappreciated work for myself by making this up when Full Tilt was already working me like a Tijuana crack whore? Didn’t I already have my hands more than full in London? I posted fifteen times in two days during the Million Pound Challenge. Then I posted FORTY times in two days during the Million Dollar Cash Game. Then I played two WSOP-E events, visited with legendary authors Anthony Holden and Al Alvarez, and watched a long, ultimately frustrating final table in which Howard Lederer should have won his third bracelet. Then I returned to my hotel, after 3 AM, and spent the next 20 or so hours writing an eight-part profile on Lederer that drew together all the knowledge and insight I’ve been gathering on the man for four years.

Does it sound like I had time to make shit up?

4. Anybody who has felt the undisguised wrath of the real-life Uncle Tilty would not accuse me of inventing those feelings.

I hope that puts this matter to rest. If you don’t believe me - or, worse, don’t believe IN me - that’s your prerogative. But you’re missing one helluva ride if you take that position. I’ve seen and heard a lot of unbelievable things in my four years in poker and they’ve led to some of my best writing:

* Andy Beal interrupting pulling in a million-dollar pot against Todd Brunson to make sure his friend put in for a frequent-flier upgrade on the flight on which he was leaving Vegas in ninety minutes;

* Hamid Dastmalchi selling Ted Forrest his World Championship bracelet for $1,500 during a 100-hour poker marathon at the Mirage, at the end of which Dastmalchi was removed from the property on a stretcher;

* Forrest and Beal playing a poker game in which there were TWO eight-million-dollar swings in one day;

* Mike Matusow losing his internet connection after an opponent check-raised him $50,000 when Mike was holding the nuts;

* Phil Hellmuth taking fifth place in a World Series event, winning $75,000 but losing $105,000 in “insurance bets” to Phil Ivey, who was watching as the guest of the husband of another player.

These things were all unbelievable to me, yet I witnessed all but one of them myself and was offered physical evidence supporting the other. It’s a strange world we live in - thank god! If you don’t believe me, at least consider suspending judgment. The unbelievable stuff makes the best reading and writing, and often turns out to more accurate - if not also more True - than the most believable fiction.