#835 – 2009 WSOP #93 – Seen & Heard #28 – All Hell is Breaking Loose in the Amazon Room

Posted by mcraig | Filed under Uncategorized

The Amazon Room is a bizarre looking place today. Since noon, one corner of the room has been brightly lit with action at just three – then two, and now one – tables. Even in that corner, everything else has been removed, including the lights. In the adjacent corner, far from the action, is Press Row, also brightly lit. That’s where I’ve been working from, though there really isn’t anything to see, do, hear, or report upon from this vantage point. The other two quadrants of the room have been empty and dark. Tables, gone. Lights, gone. I left the room when they went from 19 players to 18. Not only did they disburse the players from the third table to the other three, but the table itself vanished.

It’s just after 10 PM and there are just ten players left. The screams, cheers, and exhortations, which earlier today sounded like distant echoes, now have the cadence of carpet bombing. Press row is still the worst place from which to view the action, but, wow, is there ever action!

In my internal replay of the action, the earthquake started at about 9:55, when the saddest hand of the day played out at the secondary feature table. Both tables were six-handed. Billy Kopp, starting the hand with over 20 million in chips, raised to 600k. Darvin Moon, who had about 25M, called in the small blind. The flop was three diamonds: king, nine, deuce. Moon checked, Kopp bet 700k, Moon called. After another deuce hit on the turn, Moon checked again. Kopp bet 2M, Moon raised to 6M, and Kopp reraised all-in for about 20 million.

Moon called.

Kopp was drawing dead. Kopp had a flush, holding 5d-3d. But Moon had a higher flush, holding Qd-Jd. Kopp’s 20 million in chips just disappeared and he was out in 12th place.

Just a couple minutes later, they were redrawing for seats because there were just ten players left. At the other table, Jamie Robbins, the shortest stack, moved all-in for 2.5 million. Phil Ivey called. (By the way, thanks to PokerNews.com for their coverage. There isn’t anyplace I can go in the Amazon Room to get the details of these hands except to my computer and their excellent coverage.)

Now I have to tell you that very little has gone Phil Ivey’s way today. He hasn’t played the way I thought he’d play, and the hands he’s played have almost always gone bad. Phil has been pretty conservative, never really trying to take control of the table – though after doubling up the first of several short-stacked opponents, his stack size has made that a more difficult-to-execute strategy. Almost all his decisive hands have involved him calling a shorter stack’s all-in bet, either running into a better hand or losing a coin flip or getting outdrawn. He has been one of the shortest stacks for the past several hours.

He called Jamie Robbins with Ah-Th. Robbins had K-Qo and Phil’s ace-high won the pot, boosting him to over 9 million chips – still the second shortest stack and necessitating a redraw for the ten-handed sorta-final table.

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