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Annie Duke’s charity tournament started at 8pm and the schedule called for a presentation at 11pm, so the tournament structure was, to put it gently, ACCELERATED. The buy-in was $330 with $100 re-buys during the first hour. We ended up raising more than $70,000 for DEF. And nobody can say I didn’t do my part.
I usually fire away in charity re-buy tournaments. I’m not sure if it’s my charitable nature or I just suck at re-buys, but there’s usually a lot of action at my table. That was certainly the ethic at the nearby tables. At the table next to mine (which seated Howard Lederer, Andy Bloch, Jen Creason, and Joe Sebok), the entire table moved all-in on the first hand and Howard and Andy apparently did that on every subsequent hand. It wasn’t unusual for the players at that table to re-buy fifteen times in the first hour.
Meanwhile, at my table, they were guarding their initial buy-ins like cavemen huddled over the first fire. I’m pretty sure I re-bought more than the rest of the table combined – five times, plus the add-on. After a half hour, the empty seat to my right was taken by 2007 World Champion Jerry Yang.
Jerry was a nice guy, very friendly, and he let me take a picture of his bracelets. In addition to the white-gold Corum bracelet he received for winning the Main Event, another casino gave him its own gold bracelet for the same accomplishment. Just because, I guess.
Nice guy or not, I found Jerry Yang a bit of a nit. He mentioned that he wouldn’t stay at the hotel next to the Commerce because it was $135 a night and he found something cheaper up the street. (In that neighborhood, maybe you could find an entire house for sale for $135, but that doesn’t mean I’d want to stay there.)
So Jerry is tight with money: that’s a good quality, certainly with the kinds of tricks winning the Main Event can play on a man’s ambitions. But Yang, despite playing almost every hand, rebought just once. When he busted on the hand before the break, he neither added-on nor rebought. He said he was leaving to play a single-table satellite into the Commerce’s tournament for the next day.
After the re-buy period ended, Annie Duke got moved to my table. It was nice to see a familiar face, especially after it seemed that Jerry Yang couldn’t wait to get the hell off the table. Annie’s presence was predictably amusing.
We were seated at opposite ends of the table and she was to the right of a friendly player I’ll call Cal. Cal had asked me for a Full Tilt patch, for the simple reason that he played on Full Tilt, liked Full Tilt, and thought the patches were cool. Naturally, I gave him one, which he duly affixed to his shirt. When Annie sat down next to him, he gave her exactly the same story and she gave him an Ultimate Bet patch, which he put directly on top of my Full Tilt patch. (It actually was MY Full Tilt patch. I brought several, but a number of red pros came without, so I had given Cal the patch off my own shirt.)
Then Annie busted him with quads. Cal raised in the small blind and Annie called in the big blind. The both checked the flop and the turn, and by the river, the board was A-A-10-A-10. Cal laughed at the board and said, “I’d love to be able to tell people that I was all-in against Annie Duke. So let’s go all-in.” Annie instantly said, “Okay,” and turned over A-2. Cal was miserable, thinking that he had angled Annie into calling for a split of the pot. Even funnier, he had pocket jacks and was trying to cajole her into calling for a split when he actually could beat the board.
Which do you think is the strangest: (a) That he was trying to get Annie all-in “as a favor” or “for fun”? (b) He was actually trying to con Annie? or (c) Annie had the nuts and busted him from the tournament?
The answer is “none of the above.” The TRULY strange thing is that Cal was offended. He wouldn’t get up from his seat and I think he wanted Annie to give him back his chips. It took a long time before Cal vacated his seat, but at least I get him to move Annie’s patch off of mine; he stuck Ultimate Bet under his armpit.
Then, as if on cue, Annie busted me. Annie Duke is a very competitive person and that always brings out my own competitive instincts. A couple of years ago at Phil Gordon’s Fourth of July party, Annie and I played a game of Scrabble. It is one of my proudest achievements to have won that match, coming as it did against a brilliant woman, a Ph.D. candidate in psycholinguistics at an Ivey League college, and the daughter of one of America’s leading linguists.
To this day, I have preserved my winning score sheet, which Annie graciously signed, “Fuck you, you luckbox, xo Annie Duke.”
Annie raised my blind and, because I had A-9 and was short-stacked, I re-raised all in. She called and showed Ad-8d. I lost when Annie made a flush on the river. I brought a copy of SUICIDE KING to inscribe to player that busted me and Annie correctly guessed how I would sign it: “Fuck you Luck Box, Michael Craig.”
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Loading ...2 Responses to “#928 – Friends in High Places, Part 4 – Charity Tournament Train Wreck”
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Josh Says:
December 8th, 2009 at 11:57 amExcellent, funny blog Mr. C!
MOAR!
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Tony Says:
December 11th, 2009 at 7:43 pmVery funny blog. Maybe Cal couldn’t get up becausehe was paralyzed from the waist down (temporarily) from Annie’s sledgehammer, and was having trouble breathing because of the gigantic foot sticking out of mouth.
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