Players to Watch

Brunson

Lisandro

Rouhani

Smith

Schneider

Vahedi

Brunson Bracelet Countdown

In the $10k 7CS-HL (or “Split” as @TexDolly calls it) Doyle Brunson is going for his Hellmuth-tying 11th bracelet, while Jeff Lisandro looks for his second of 2009 while making a surge up the Player of the Year leaderboard. Below’s who’s left. No plans yet (as far as we know) for Bluff or ESPN360 to be carrying this live — though we wouldn’t be surprised if that changed should Brunson and/or Scotty Nguyen make the final table.

Abe Mosseri 950,000
Jeff Lisandro 786,000
Doyle Brunson 525,000
Farzad Rouhani 494,000
Yan Chen 476,000
Perry Friedman 378,000
Lyle Berman 333,000
Scotty Nguyen 298,000
Frank Mariani 267,000
Justin ‘Boosted J’ Smith 237,000
Mike Wattel 96,000
Anthony Rivera 92,000

Rouhani, btw, is Iranian. In case you poker-only degens weren’t aware, there’s some big shit going down in his homeland right now — and to some extent (especially after Iran’s protesty soccer team got eliminated from World Cup contention this week) isn’t a 7-Stud Hi-Lo World Championship exactly what that country needs?

Advanced Beginners

In $2,000 NLH, 17 (out of 1,695) players remain — competing for prizes ranging from $21k to $586k. You may not recognize many of the remaining players in this one, but most have found success in smaller tourneys, circuit events, and, of course, online. Spread around the final two tables, there are zero bracelets in the mix, 49 WSOP cashes, and six WSOP Circuit money finishes. The favorite is probably Jordan Smith (from Texas!). Click here to follow throughout the day and see who’s really ready to step up on a bigger stage.

Oh Brother, Who Art Thou?

In the $2,000 Limit Hold’em event, 107 out of 446 players remain. David Baker is the chip leader, while some known names still alive in the field waiting to get eliminated include Scott Lazar, Rafe Furst, Diego Cordovez, Phil Hellmuth, Greg “FBT” Mueller, John Monnete, Marcel Luske, Maria Ho, Daniel Negreanu, Mike Schneider (part of some strange Minnesota Limit Posse), Shannon Shorr, and Abdol Vahedi — who for the moment we are presuming is Amir Vahedi’s brother or at least cousin, as both Iranians hail from Sherman Oaks, CA. Day 2 gets underway at 2 pm pacific — click here to see who else is left in the field and where they’re sitting.

So there you have it. Hopefully KevMath will be back next week, or otherwise you may never have it again.

Yours truly, meanwhile, got a call from some of his old homies and will be playing (poker, not basketball) in an NBA charity event later today.

Interesting article out of Minnesota about how the proposed Berlin Firewall legislation to stop online gambling would force a group of nice young, responsible internet pros (Mike Schneider is the name I recognized) out of their home state. I had heard from our friends at Minnesota Poker Magazine that Minnesota was a mini poker hotspot right now, following in the footsteps of Florida, Oklahoma, and other states that have recently embraced the game.

What I didn’t know before reading the above article is that Minnesotan’s are particularly deft at limit hold’em, apparently because they don’t have no-limit there (yet). Makes sense … when I first met Schneider, it was at the PartyPoker Million, where he won $1 million in what was at the time (2006) one of the biggest live limit tournaments in the world. And semi-verifying this claim … if you look at all the results for the 2008 WSOP, Minnesotans made two final tables, and ideed, one of them was in a limit shootout event.

So duly noted … Minnesota is a limit state. FYI to everyone else.

Thus far, bits of poker history have been made – the first set of siblings to each win a bracelet in the same year and only the second set of brothers to every accomplish the feat, and the fourth largest poker tournament ever held (Event #2). Professional poker players have absolutely dominated the Series, with numerous players like Lindgren and Singer finally taking home the gold. And through the end of the day June 17th, the totals were as follows:

30 WSOP bracelets awarded
28,223 players registered in tournaments
2,705 players finished in the money
$66,514,615 prize pools combined

There is also an interesting and notable change that takes place at the WSOP near the halfway mark.

It is a lull, certainly not in the action but in the energy and excitement of the bodies circulating through the halls of the Rio Convention Center. It is human nature to become exhausted after two or more weeks of long hours, but add in irregular meals, limited sleep, anxieties, financial ups and downs, emotions, and pressure, and it becomes a recipe for burnout.

Tell-tale signs of the stress are obvious in the faces of the players, staff, and media. The eyes are weary, and some of the smiles have faded.

Players who are running bad are getting concerned about the toll it’s taking on finances and relationships. Players whose bankrolls are suffering frantically play satellites, and those with backers are calculating what they owe in makeup and how much they have to win to get ahead again. In some cases, sleep and exercise are put on the back burner in order to keep up momentum, while energy drinks and sometimes energy-inducing drugs come into play. Spouses and significant others feel the intensity that often reflects back on them, and some of those relationships become strained.

Those who are doing well are focused on continuing the good run. Pros like David Singer and Scott Clements are up for the challenge and have had phenomenal years, not to mention a great WSOP thus far. (They are two examples of pros who are also very happy with their personal lives, though, and that makes a difference as well.) There are players like Tom Schneider who are somewhere in the middle; though he has five cashes thus far, falling short of his goal to win a bracelet and possibly another Player of the Year nod is disheartening. What he – and others in his position – do over the next few weeks remains to be seen.

Members of the media start to feel the pain as well. Not only do they pick up on the tension among players, but the ability to stay fresh is challenged. Finding new ways to write about aces cracked, large fields, lengthy hand-for-hand or bubble situations, players eliminated, and amateurs at the final table about whom little is known become difficult tasks as the days wear on. Writers and reporters also see the darker sides of the players – poor attitudes, nasty exchanges with dealers, detrimental vices – that become a struggle of integrity and ethics. Trying to decide what is fair game and what the publication or website will allow tests the strengths and weaknesses of everyone. And depending upon the hours they are required to keep for their jobs, many media members also suffer from exhaustion and poor health choices.

Those who are responsible for product booths in the Rio hallways also become weary. The CardRunners booth that boasted of names like Taylor Caby and Mike Schneider during Week 1 now typically sits empty with only the CardRunners videos running on a loop on the plasma screens. Fans take the sometimes-provided fortune cookies left out for fans and use the idle chairs to rest for a few minutes. The Sapphire strip club girls even look to be over it. They see our same faces each day and know that we’re not going to take their free pool passes, and those who do accept their offers, usually male tourists, are looking for a “date” or a pass to the strip club for a lap dance. No one has been at the Gamma-O testosterone booth for weeks, though someone does show up each day to turn on the plasmas to an all-music video channel. The only crew that doesn’t seem to be exhausted is the All In Energy drink folks who, strangely enough, always seem to have some energy to promote their products…

This is a tough time when the glass often seems half empty, but it is possible to see it as half full. Technically, there are only about 20 more events after today before the main event, one of which is the $50K H.O.R.S.E. that many feel is the truest world championship tournament of them all. And the $10K NLHE main event begins on July 3rd, and along with a new influx of players and media, the excitement returns. The end of the summer of tournament madness nears when media members can count the days until they return home to families and reasonable schedules and players can take some time off to soak in the results of the 2008 WSOP.

Despite the dark tone of this post, it is only meant to give readers and those far away from the Rio a glimpse into the reality of living this WSOP life for nearly seven weeks in the mad hot summer of Sin City. And it’s not to say that most of the players and media would choose to do anything else. Most of us look forward to it each year and miss it at least a little when it’s over. There is nothing like it in poker, and for those with a passion for the game, nothing beats it. In most cases, the good outweighs the bad over the course of the summer, and the experience itself is a valuable one.

Now, I return you to your regularly scheduled WSOP coverage.