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#688 – NBC Heads-Up Championship #9 – Pairings Party, Part E, Conclusion – When Ted Forrest Says Weird Things are Happening
So this is the conversation I overheard between Ted Forrest and Greg Raymer, before butting in.
Ted: Who do you play in the first round?
Greg: Jennifer Harman.
Ted: I think you can take her pretty easily.
Greg: I think I can beat her.
Ted: At wrestling.
Greg: Well, I outweigh her by at least 200 pounds.
Ted: 200 pounds? I’d say that’s very much on the conservative side.
Ted Forrest does not take weight matters lightly. This started a discussion in which Greg Raymer receded, then disappeared. It was just Ted and me and Ted’s friend Tibor. Tibor is a subject of one of my favorite posts, about a ridiculous impromptu walking craps tour we took in London in 2007 after Ted ingested possibly uncooked chicken.
Ted told he he has a small bet – $1,000 with him getting 20-to-1 odds – that Daniel Negreanu will at some point in his life weigh over 170 pounds. Ted told me he was feeling good about that. Daniel is working with weights now, and Forrest guesses (which I’d take to the bank) that Negreanu is up to 162.
He also has some much larger weight bets with Phil Ivey. One bet is for $400,000 and it sounded like Ted expected to lose it. Ivey has to get down to 170 – I think it was 170, it could have been 175; for that matter, I’m not 100% sure on the amount of the wager because I THOUGHT that’s what Ted said – by April 1.
“How did Phil look when you saw him tonight Michael?” I’m hardly an insider on this. I saw Phil once, from a distance, and he looked either 30 pounds heavier or lighter than the last time I saw him, or exactly the same. But Ted didn’t get a good look at him, and he gave the impression that Phil’s been ducking him to keep things “under wraps,” so he asked me again and again to classify Ivey’s appearance and try to get it down to a number.
The second bet, which is supposed to be much bigger, involves whether Ivey gets his weight lower than Forrest’s sometime over the next 18 months. (Ted owned up to 168-170 – he looks to be in great shape – but if he thinks Ivey can win the first bet, I’m surprised he’s not more concerned about the second.)
Then I revealed to Ted my secret mission of the weekend. A few years ago, he played some heads-up poker games (and a friend of his played some backgammon) with a character known as “the Mangler.” Because the stories were so strange, and this was a then-current opponent with a bunch of bucks, it was pretty well understood that I couldn’t write any of this. I figured, if he and the Mangler were done playing, Ted might retell the stories so I could share them.
All I found out from Ted was that he played one hand of poker against the Mangler in Atlantic City several weeks ago. But Ted said, “If you want some strange stories, you should come with me and Tibor to Atlantic City sometime. We’ve been going a couple times a month and something unbelievable happens every time.”
“Ted,” I told him, “you had me at ‘if you want some strange stories’.”
He and Tibor proceeded to tell me about the weirdness of Atlantic City. One story involved some guy diving hands-first full-body onto a craps table. A second was about when they were taking a cab from one casino to their hotel. They were tight on time and had to catch a plane from Philadelphia, but the cab driver took the highway and it was at a standstill.
So they decided to get out and try walking. But this was on the expressway. (If you read my prior Ted-Tibor story from London, this won’t be a surprise.) A couple cops came up to them and said, “You can’t walk on the expressway. What are you doing here?”
They explained what happened with the cab and the cops told them to get back to the cab. But then traffic started moving and the cab driver wouldn’t let them back in. He drove on so they kept walking toward the Borgata. Then a second set of cops told them they had to get off the road and walk back to where their cab used to be, which was also where the first set of cops were.
Apparently, it was 17 degrees F, windy, and there were knee-deep snow banks on the side of the road. This second set of cops relented and let them walk on, but they had to walk along the shoulder, through the snow drifts.
But Ted tells me so much crazy stuff happens on these trips that he and Tibor are thinking of starting a web site devoted to the stories called “Craps Life.” I was succinct: “Ted, I want in. I don’t care how much it costs. I don’t care if I can get paid or how much. I don’t care when or how much notice. I’m in.”
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