FULL TILT POKER BLOG

#984 – 2010 NBC Heads-Up Championship #7 – Take These Broken Wingmen and Learn to Fly, Part I

Posted by Editor | Filed under 2010 NBC Heads-Up Championship, Andy Bloch, Annie Duke, Heads-Up, Joe Reitman

[The issue of the Blog spacing have been fixed, and you'll be pleased to know I have a healthy backlog of high-quality posts. Therefore, I continue with my coverage of the NBC Heads-Up Championship.]

There is an old expression that goes, “Where you stand depends on where you sit.” I never knew what this meant but always assumed it was true, if only because it could mean almost anything. During the first round of the NBC National Heads-Up Championship on March 5, however, I discovered it was not only true but full of wisdom.

It makes sense that where you sit in poker SHOULD matter. In virtually all poker games, position matters. In hold ‘em, where position remains the same through the hand, it dictates strategy more than almost any other factor. Increasingly, it has been clear to me that this applies to writing about poker as well as playing it.

First, there is almost no place you can sit and properly watch live poker. A running theme through my three years of covering poker for Full Tilt has been “I’m in the worst seat in the house.” It used to be something that made me paranoid, but after Friday’s matches I realized it was all but inevitable.

In the Diamonds bracket, I wanted to sit close to watch the match between Andy Bloch and Annie Duke. I asked both of them to save me a seat and Annie specifically arranged the spectators sitting behind her so I could have a seat at her side, next to her boyfriend Joe Reitman. It was ALMOST the same seat I had for the best HUC match I had ever seen, Ted Forrest v. Sam Farha in 2007. I consider my coverage of that match – the hands, the table talk, the styles and looks of the combatants – to be among my best work. I’m especially proud of it because, as it was not the featured table or secondary-featured table, there were no hole-card cameras and no player-microphones, so I was the only witness to report what happened.

Duke and Bloch obliged with, if anything, a better match and Forrest and Farha. But you will have to take my word for it because I can describe practically nothing that happened. They saw a lot of flops, turns, and rivers. There were many hands where there was betting on every street. There were several showdowns, one of which Andy Bloch gasped, “Wowww,” like the air escaping a beach ball.

I was only eight feet away but I still had the worst seat in the house. Based on my angle, I couldn’t see any of Andy’s action. The dealer’s back was blocking my view. Similarly, I could see only the turn and river cards. Because Andy and Annie were speaking to each other in low voices – no microphones, no audience to listen – I found that I rely a lot on SEEING a person speak to HEAR them. Because I couldn’t see Bloch talk, I couldn’t hear him. And because I could catch only Duke’s side of the conversation, it seemed out of context and, consequently, meaningless or confusing.

Because of a seating difference of, tops, two feet, I went from a position of being able to report the classic Forrest-Farha 2007 match to knowing just enough to know I missed another classic in Bloch-Duke 2010.

With little chance to get a broadcaster-quality vantage point, that increases the importance of the people around you. When I can’t see the action – which always seems to be the case at these things – I rely more on the reactions of others. The best example of this occurred in 2008, when I found myself sitting in a bathroom stall next to a guy giving a nuanced, detailed cell-phone account of the matches to his girlfriend, while periodically describing, in equal detail, the cause of his abdominal distress. I shudder to think where I’d have been without that Cosell of the commode, that Costas of the crapper.

On Friday, I periodically changed my seat, and the circumstances changed the identities of my seatmates. Like a revolving rooftop restaurant, if I didn’t like the view, I could expect that it would soon change.

My habit in 2007, 2008, and 2009 was to sit in the far left corner of the room.

Even though it sometimes felt like prison, once I got over the claustrophobia, at least it was uniquely MY prison. I picked the opposite site of the room on Friday, just to see if things looked different from there.

During the Clubs bracket, I didn’t give much thought to the switch. I had taken an end-seat in press row, but it was the end adjacent to audience members, so the person to my left was just some guy who waited in line to sit in the audience and watch the match. We didn’t talk much, but he did say, craning his neck around me to watch the fourth hand of the Dario Minieri-Jamie Gold match, “I’m kinda’ surprised that one’s not over yet.”

For the second set of matches, the Diamonds bracket, I sat next to Joe Reitman. For some reason, I like Joe. I say “for some reason” because, though I think Joe likes me, he sure doesn’t go out of his way to show it. He is quick-witted and acerbic, and in our conversations he likes to pick on me. I’m fine with it because (a) I appreciate his intellect, and his demonstration of it, and (b) he is pretty good-natured about my infatuation with his girlfriend. (On the first or second time we met, he walked into his bedroom to find me sitting on a bed with Annie, watching internet porn.)

But there is some other reason I like Joe and I wasn’t able to put my finger on it until I sat to his left for an hour watching Annie and Andy play heads-up.

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