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#597 – World Series Final Table #10 – Take a Deep Breath
It’s now 7:25 PM, ten minutes past when Harrah’s was supposed to do the Hall of Fame ceremony. We went on break at 6 PM. Between all my observations and ideas about the final table and all I could say about the Hall of Fame, I probably won’t get everything I want into this blog before (a) they restart the action, with 1 1/2 hours left in level 36, and (b) I leave the action at 8 PM for an hour or so to have dinner with a group of friends including Andy Bloch and Allen Cunningham, where I hope to get a couple opinions from them about what’s going on today.
For now, I have time for just one item, and it’s an important one.
The Ride of Dennis Phillips’s Life
I’ve never met Dennis Phillips and don’t even know much about him. It’s not because “he’s Stars” and “I’m Tilt.” I just didn’t get very deep on the non-Tilt final tablers because I had to do a lot with Full Tilt’s trio.
It says in Dennis’s bio that he’s 53 years old. He’s ruddy-faced and has a salt-and-pepper beard, but he looks 5-10 years younger, especially if you imagine him without the beard. I was inclined to think of Dennis Phillips as an amateur in a final table of professionals, with a chance to win solely because of his chip position and the posibility of some Jerry Yang/Jamie Gold-type breaks.
The gigantic and vociferous rooting section did little to dispel my latent negative view of Phillips. Then I thought he made a couple mistakes early. We’ll know better how he played the pair of hands on which he made ruinously expensive laydowns early on, but he had to have made mistakes someplace.
This is a final table loaded with skilled players and everyone (including, of course, Dennis) had four months to acclimate themselves to the situation they were about to enter. He couldn’t count on anyone else making a mistake and easing his route a little. Finally, there was a serious conflict between his position as the least experienced player and the biggest chip stack.
If Phillips, like Jerry Yang last year, had started with a small stack, he could control his portion of the action by concentrating on making the game expensive pre-flop and avoiding getting into tough post-flop situations with more experienced opponents. But the big stack’s interests are the opposite: keep pots small, push people around with small bets, especially as everyone waits for the shortest stack or stacks to bust.
Phillips played very little in the first couple rounds, when everyone was clearly playing very tight. But then – mostly likely with very strong hands – he got deeply involved in a pair of hands, got stuck with super-difficult post-flop decisions and (probably correctly) had to fold.
So he goes from 26 milion to about 6 or 7 million, and there are still nine players left. I’m sure some nasty little part of me inside said, “Good. He’s out of his league.”
I suspect the reason Dennis Phillips looks younger than 53 is because he has an amazingly strong heart. He successfully marshalled his short-stack (which probably proves rather than refutes some of my opinions) and then pulled off a STUNNER before the break to get within grasping distance of the chip lead. And he did it with super-canny post-flop play.
In a hand with Ivan Demidov, the chip leader (by a big margin), Dennis raised to 1.3 million preflop and Demidov called. After a flop of Kd-3c-3h, Phillips bet 2.55 million – again, a pretty big amount – and Demidov called. They both checked the turn. The river was the king of spades. Demidov checked and Phillips bet 5 million.
Demidov thought about it for a long, long time, several minutes it seemed. Filled with doubt, he called. Dennis Phillips showed K-Q for the top full house. Ivan mucked.
Naturally, there was some luck involved there. And who knows what Demidov had (though unless he had a three or pocket aces, he was behind all the way). But it was an awfully ballsy play, and signaled a return all the way back to 26 million.
Phillips showed us all something there. Maybe I’ve just been ignorant of his talents but he had to reach deep to come back from the hole he dug himself into after losing 20 million chips. He apparently had something down there to grab, because he’s back.
And he brought his 300 noisy friends and family with him.
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