I caught up with Erik so I could get his toughts on the 2006 WSOP.

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There have been no shortage of problems at this year’s WSOP. Most difficulties stemmed from poor planning; other cropped up because the staff had little experience. But in the Main Event, the tournament organizers put their heads together and came up with an incredibly stupid idea: The All In Chip.

I guess it was conceived as a time-saving device. Rather than take the four seconds that’s required to push a stack toward the pot, a player can simply flip out the All In Chip. This chip is the same shape and size as any other poker chip. The only difference is that it’s blue, which doesn’t match the shade of any of the other chips.

You see the potential problem? I thought you might.

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I witnessed a hand yesterday in which one player, a young women who seemed to be a very good player, took a long time to consider whether or not she wanted to call a river bet. Given the action, I was pretty sure she had a Kings or Aces, but she was pretty sure the hand was no good. Finally, she made the crying call.

Her opponent showed down two-pair, and the young woman nodded and tapped the table in a show of sportsmanship. Then a player not involved in the hand asked to see her cards.

“You want to see my cards?” she snapped. Then she flung her cards at the muck.

Yet another player chimed in, offering,”it’s bad etiquette to ask someone to show their hand after they’ve lost and mucked.”

“This is poker! There’s no such thing as etiquette,” the man shot back.

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Mark Vos finished Day 1 of the World Series of Poker Main Event with over 70,000 in chips. He is among the chip leaders. I chatted with Mark about his Day 1 experiences and his strategies for the coming days of play.

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The early stages of these opening days are pretty uneventful, especially for the pros. There are so many players who are willing to commit far too much money on second-tier hands that most of the better players are choosing their spots carefully.

After witnessing some of the play yesterday Phil Gordon commented, “I’m not playing a hand until the antes kick in.”

In one corner of the room, Chris Ferguson, at Table 88, watched as two of his tablemates engaged in a bizarre confrontation. An early position player open-raised and was called by the big blind. On a 9-high flop, the big blind check-raised and was called. There was a check-raise on the turn, and then no bets went in on the river, as the players showed their hands down. What did they hold?

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I played for a while last night in a cash game, and two seats to my left was a man in his early thirties who wore a muscle shirt and an OSU baseball cap. While we played he talked about an early WSOP event, where he was seated at the same table as Gavin Smith.

He recounted some of the hands that Smith had won. Smith raised up front with some garbage hand – 8-6 was the culprit, I think – and ended up winning a huge pot with trips.

I noted that playing with Smith looks like an unholy nightmare.

The man shot back, “I don’t care who you are, you can’t be raising out of position with that crap.”

I didn’t want to lecture this guy, but a response came immediately to my mind. It went something like this:

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I came down to the poker room today even though I don’t start till tomorrow. I wanted to get a look at how people were playing. I saw a hand that was just amazing.

On the fourth hand of the tournament, an early position player raised to 500 (10x the big blind) and he was called by the button and the small blind.

The flop came Q-2-3, with two heart. The big blind bet 1,500, the preflop raiser made it 4,000 and the button moved in. They showed 2-2, A-Q and 4h-5h. Completely sick. On the fourth hand of the Main Event of the World Series of Poker, one guy tripled up, and two people were eliminated.

Sick.

This afternoon, Full Tilt had a party for their 400-plus online qualifiers. It was a chance for these online players to mingle and chat with the pros. Rafe Furst, a recent bracelet winner chatted with a number of people, Erik Seidel signed autographs, and Chris Furgeson answered questions and posed for photographs.

What’s amazing is that most of the people here talk of qualifying for trivial sums of money — $6, $52, $0. With a combination of skill and luck, they made it through the qualifying tournaments and now, with almost nothing invested, they’ll have a chance at $20 Million (the $10 Million first prize, plus the $10 Million bonus for qualifying through Full Tilt).

Who are these players? They represent a wide variety of age groups and geographic regions. But looking around the room, one can’t help but be struck by the predominance of youth. To my 38-year-old eyes, they look like a bunch of kids.

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My table’s shaping up pretty well. There are a couple of people that are in every pot, and a few others that are tight. I managed to add 5,000 in chips to my stack, which is nice. I picked up most of those chips in hand where I flopped top pair with A-J and a guy tried to bluff me off the hand on the flop and turn. If he bet on the river, I don’t think I could have called, because it seemed any draw got there. But he checked and I was able to showdown the winner.

Seeing play like that, I feel I can forgo looser calls against the tight players and wait for opportunities to play against the players who are going to bluff off a lot of chips.

Back to the table.

It was just announced that the first prize will be “well over $10 Million.” The dreams of fame and riches are clearly alive and well. But as I walk the floor of the Rio in these early levels, one thing is abundantly clear: a vast number of the hopefuls are woefully unprepared.

Many of the people who won their way in online are, I think, accustomed to playing in tournaments where there’s never a whole lot of post-flop play. In the Main Event, the stacks start pretty deep – 10,000, with blinds of 25 and 50 – so there’s plenty of room to maneuver after the flop. When stacks are deep, certain hands lose a lot of value. Ask any pro, and you’ll hear of a great reluctance to commit a lot of chips early on with something like top-pair top kicker or even an overpair. Yet in the first half hour of play, I saw a number of people go broke with these types of hands when it should have been very clear that a single pair could not take the pot. (Note: on a board of 9h Th-Jc-7h-5c, a pair of Aces is not a very good hand.)

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