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Harrah’s better watch what it wishes for. It tried to make the Final Table of the 2009 World Series of Poker into a spectator sport and tournament director Jack Effel encouraged the audience to behave like spectators. Unfortunately, they did exactly that.

Although nothing bad happened, no one at Harrah’s seemed to understand that you can’t ask people to be spontaneous and loud and then expect them to listen when you ask them to stop. I’m sure when Jeffrey Pollack and his staff conceived of the November Final Table, they realized they would have to fill the Penn & Teller Theatre. Last year, they did but the entire lower portion was for media and technical crews and … just dead space. Now the media has just a couple of rows (plus a press box over the higher level of the Theatre) and every seat in every tier is occupied, mostly by partisans.

The Rio filled them with beer and the WSOP officials implored them to provide fan behavior appropriate for an ESPN production. For Joe Cada’s friends, they didn’t need to ask twice. Or once. Or bother asking them to STOP that behavior, because it fell on deaf – drunk? – ears.

I know this post exposes the chasm between me and men and women of Joe Cada’s age, my kids’ ages, the ages of most of Full Tilt’s online players. But just because you guys act like Dennis the Menace, that doesn’t mean when I complain that makes me Mr. Wilson, right? (Geez, will anyone under forty even get that reference? Maybe I should just give up.)

I’m pretty flexible and open-minded. I recognize that Joe Cada is twenty-one years-old and most of his supporters are college kids (or college-aged kids). They are University of Michigan students (or pretending to be University of Michigan students and dressing like University of Michigan students).

Guess what? A hundred 21-year-olds in Las Vegas can be wild, loud, and drunk. You can tell them to make a lot of noise and they will comply. But it’s a stretch to believe they will also comply if you tell them to stop.

The Michigan contingent was over the line from the outset. WSOP commissioner Jeffrey Pollack took the microphone at 10:23pm. At 10:24pm, while making his opening remarks, at least one of Cada’s maize-and-blue supporters yelled at the top of his lungs, “SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!”

Whenever his cheering section jumped to their feet – every hand or two – I could hear the sound of bottles tipping over and rolling under their seats. How could they drink that much that fast?

I was at the Final Table in 2005. [Spoiler Alert: this is my generation’s poker version of “I was at Woodstock, damn it!”] It was the last year at Binion’s and, at the time, the record holder as the longest Final Table. They shut us in an airless shuttered bingo parlor for fifteen hours with no food or drink service except for liquor. The winner was an Australian guy who had all his buddies with him. Naturally, by the wee hours of the morning the place reeked of beer and you couldn’t walk without stepping on a bottle or a fallen body.

But Cada’s crowd was staggering and knocking over bottles during the INTRODUCTIONS. The heads-up hadn’t started yet. These people had been in the room for fifteen minutes.

It was the kind of behavior that makes me reluctant to admit that I was born in Detroit. When people ask me about the boyhood geography Joe Cada and I shared, I say, “Southeastern Michigan? It’s a good place to come FROM.” Every time Joe Cada won a hand, his supporters would be so over-the-top enthusiastic that Shauna once remarked to me, “This is such an alpha-male thing; pretty soon they will be peeing on each other.”

Less than a half-hour into the heads-up match, a quartet of Joe’s friends (including one girl) yanked off their shirts to reveal they had painted their upper bodies yellow and spelled out C-A-D-A in blue on their stomachs.

Wasn’t this exactly what Harrah’s wanted? Jeffrey Pollack even repeated Doyle Brunson’s comment from two days earlier about how the atmosphere was like the Super Bowl. What could be more authentic in spectator sports than crazed fans painting their bodies in team colors and stripping off their clothes to show their devotion?

It took exactly five minutes for security to make them put their shirts back on. Frankly, I am surprised it took that long. (In the olden days, security guards at the World Series of Poker would have done a lot more than making them put on shirts.)

One of the Shirtless Four yelled, as he was forced to cover his torso, “No fun allowed!” He may have even had a point.  He was simply behaving the way Harrah’s (naively) encouraged him to behave. But, in a move that resonates so clearly that the kid could have been a genetic clone of a dozen kids I went to school with at Royal Oak Kimball, he slowly lifted his shirt, a couple of inches every few hands. Just nine minutes later that shirt was pulled up above the nipples, bunched up underneath his armpits, where it stayed for the next two hours, and probably still resides today.

Naturally, when that group lifted their shirts, photographers raced to the scene. Even though I am a member of the media, I would never so something like that; I made Shauna get the picture. As photographers gathered around snapping photos, one of the guys yelled, “You want a picture too? It’s history, baby! Remember it!”

Once again, the kid seemed like a rude, immature, jack-ass who made me feel like an old geyser for complaining. But I again had to admit that there is wisdom in youth. The kid had it exactly right.

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3 Responses to “#912 – The Kids are All Right”

1. brittany Says:
   November 18th, 2009 at 7:30 pm

   youre an idiot, they were having fun and youre just a pesstimistic ass hole who no one should lsiten to… oh and by the way they ALL ARE COLLEG STUDENTS

2. mcraig Says:
   November 18th, 2009 at 8:49 pm

   Colleg students? I stand corrected brittany.

3. Christopher Says:
   December 8th, 2009 at 8:23 pm

   Yeah, Detroit’s a good place to be (read: get away) from. Kimball, eh? Were you a debater?

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