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#893 – WSOP Final Table Update #1 – Wake-Up Call
It’s 11:25 AM on Saturday as I start this post. I’m in the Penn & Teller Theatre, thanks to the personal exhortation of Penn Jillette himself. Cards are supposed to be in the air for the Final Table of the Main Event of the 2009 World Series of Poker in exactly 58 minutes, so I’ll try to cram as many introductory notes and details into this post as I can before play starts.
THE PENN & I
I woke up at 8:02 AM when the phone rang. It was my wake-up call. To my surprise, the wake-up recording was Penn Jillette yelling at me to get downstairs to the Penn & Teller Theatre.
Am I sure it was a recording? Because that’s exactly why I got the wake-up call, to get downstairs to the P&T in time to make press registration and stake out my seat for final table day.
But that doesn’t stop me from being pissed at having to wake up early on a Saturday. “God damn you, Penn Jillette! I pray that you rot in Hell!” This made me feel a little better without offending Penn – and not just because I was yelling at a recording.
HURRY UP AND WAIT
I’m not sure why I was in such a hurry. I spent most of my time between that wake-up call and Media Registration at 10 AM playing Scramble on Facebook. And once Shauna and I got our credentials, I found out we weren’t allowed into the Theatre until 11 AM.
It gave me a chance to meet up with a lot of the people I haven’t seen since the summer, which was nice. I had my longest conversation in a couple of years with Linda Geenen, the former Bellagio dealer who started Pokerworks, hired me to write my first blog, and still writes Table Tango, which was a blog before the term was even in common use. During my first several months in poker – before I had ever met or spoken with Ted Forrest, Howard Lederer, Todd Brunson, Barry Greenstein, Jennifer Harman, and the other remarkable pros that have filled my life these last five years – Linda gave me an incredible education. Probably twenty times, I called her in the middle of the night, after her shift at the Bellagio, with some question about high-stakes poker, which would always devolve into a conversation of an hour or more.
We followed no triptych and never stopped until one of us said, “I gotta go to bed” (usually Linda) or “I gotta wake the kids up for school” (me). Just as I’m typing this, I remember one night asking her about Archie Karas. Archie, known as “the Greek”, in the early Nineties took some high-stakes pros and Binion’s Horseshoe – mostly Binion’s – for $30 million during this incredible run … before losing it all back, with no regrets. She told me this great story about how, in the course of one night, Archie woke up a friend/backer/creditor THREE times from a sound sleep: first, to borrow $10,000 to get into a game; second, to pay him back after he beat up the game for $60,000; and third, to borrow $10,000 to get into a game.
I have to find Linda because I never told her that I met Archie this summer. When I asked for his address to send him a copy of SUICIDE KING, in which he is mentioned, he had to look at his driver’s license for the house number and zip code. And then, when I sent him the book after the World Series, it was returned because no one was living at that address.
I got to meet James Akenhead for 45 seconds (not his fault of course). I didn’t get a picture of him, but I got to TAKE a picture of him as someone shoved me their cell phone. But I got the last laugh – I’m a terrible photographer.
It’s now 11:53. The seats are filing in and a lot of people are standing around the stage. This is how I’d describe it.
CENTER STAGE
The table is in the center of the stage. Around three sides of the table – other than the side facing us in the audience – are about 100 chairs, arranged in two rows. The familiar multi-colored lighting rig is overhead and a series of cables, tracks, and low camera set-ups surround the table.
When I got into the room before almost anyone else, I walked to the front row of the audience, just below the stage. In front of each of the nine seats each player’s plastic chip bag. The bags looked old, dull, and rumpled. I imagine they have spent the last three months stashed in a safe on the property, jammed together and not moving.
In just a little while, they are going to get some air and move around. A lot and with great consequence.
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