FULL TILT POKER BLOG

#807 – 2009 WSOP #65 – Vegas on $2,000 a Day #11 – Everything But the Money, Part I

Posted by Editor | Filed under Uncategorized

I’ve played eleven events at the 2009 World Series of Poker. In one of them, I made over $116,000. In the other ten, I received nothing in exchange for my buy-in but heartache and a sentence to a poker table for 10-12 hours a day. When friends and family try to be nice after hearing things aren’t going well, I tell them, “Tournament poker is about failure. If I can’t deal with that reality, I deserve whatever happens.”

So except from the Razz, all I have are hundreds of pages of notes I take at the table. Fortunately, some of them document interesting stories, humorous situations, and unique characters. And I do, after all, get paid for writing about such things.

MIKE GRACZ: BREAK CHIPS

A couple hours into the Economic Stimulus event, I was moved to a table where Full Tilt pro Mike Gracz was sitting two to my right. Unfortunately for him, just as I was sitting down, he lost an enormous pot and was left with just 200 chips. Several friends of his were standing at the rail with beers in their hands, ragging on him for being so short stacked.

Mike, a naturally aggressive player, wasn’t going to let those 200 chips gather any dust. He was all-in on four of the next five hands and after getting a small double-up managed to get the blinds on several occasions. After he doubled up, I said, “You almost have Dinner Break chips, Mike.” (It was still about 3:30 in the afternoon.)

Gracz’s aggressiveness and luck continued to serve him and he doubled up once again. This time he asked me, “Does this mean I almost have Day Two chips now?”

“Wow,” I cautioned, “Don’t jump the gun. You don’t go from Dinner Break chips to Day Two all at once. Next step up is Bad Beat chips. That’s when you have enough chips that someone might consider listening to you if you bust on a bad beat. That’s what you get for the next double up. It’s the double-up after that that gives you the possibility of Day Two chips.”

Unfortunately, he never got any of those chips and soon lost the ones he had. It wasn’t that bad for him, though. He had a lot of friends on the rail ready to take him out for a drink.

DOYLE BRUNSON: NEVER SLEEP A WAKING GIANT

My first 5 PM event this year was the $3,000 HORSE. Doyle Brunson signed up late and was assigned to my table as we came out of the first break. I had played with Doyle a couple of years ago, but this was an opportunity to watch him at work for about seven hours. Even though almost everyone at the table was just handing their chips over to him, it seemed like Doyle was in a bit of a cranky mood.

For instance, because he didn’t start until after the first break, he complained about having to take an hour off for dinner after just two hours of play. After we returned from dinner, he started complaining that he was tired. By 11 PM, he had repeated it several times and was yawning after almost every hand.

I thought, “Geez, Brunson must have really lost it. This guy used to be able to play for a week straight, and now he shows up at a 5 PM event at 7, and it’s like he can’t keep his eyes open until midnight.”

But after a little while, I noticed a couple other things. First, all the other players at his end of his table were now yawning too – like it was contagious. Second, once his end of the table seemed destined for narcolepsy, Doyle almost magically perked up. He didn’t say anything about being tired and I didn’t see him yawn again the rest of the night. Our table broke with a couple hours left to play but I noticed he chipped up pretty well late in the evening. I don’t know if all this was a coincidence but Doyle was just crafty enough to have planned it this way.

JENNIFER HARMAN: THE GIRL WHO JUST WON’T DIE

On Day 2 of the $2,500 OEOB/SEOB, I was moved to a table next to Jennifer Harman. Jennifer was very short on chips – so short that she had taken out her Amazon Kindle and was reading from a novel. With so few chips she would be pot committed as soon as she entered a hand so the only thing that mattered to her was having a good enough starting cards.

I’ve watched Jennifer Harmon in several limit-poker tournaments and she is a phenomenal short-stack player. She has incredible patience and tenacity. Here, I got to see it up close, as she continually found the right situations in which to get her chips and survive. Over a course of a half-hour, she played about five hand, was all-in each time, and survived. Each time, she shrugged and went back to her Kindle. Finally, she doubled up on several successive hands, increasing her chip stack from 2,000 to 39,000, which was about average.

She had enough chips for some real play and put away her Kindle, though she seemed a little disgusted as she did. “I am reading this story about this girl that is supposed to die, and she just won’t die. Now I am going to have to wait until later to find out how it ends.”

I felt the same way. She didn’t notice the irony of that statement, though I did, even more so when our table broke and I busted eight places short of the money, with Harman still slugging it out.

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