(Way) Outside the WSOP – Day 37
Starting with today’s lone tournament starting, one with a very worthy cause:
Ante Up for Africa
The big charity event of the WSOP is this afternoon’s Ante Up for Africa, a star-studded affair with a $5,000 buy-in, with a request that those who make the money donate 50% of their proceeds to Refugees International and The Enough Project to attempt to end the crisis in Darfur. It’s also the shortest tournament of the WSOP, with it’s 20-minute blind levels in the first hour followed by increases every 15 minutes, the tournament is projected to finish in just five hours. ESPN’s cameras will be following the action as it’s scheduled to dedicate two hours of their WSOP coverage to this event.
Finishing up the Wednesday night tournaments:
Veckey Victorius in $1,500 NL
Tony Veckey makes his first career cash a WSOP bracelet in the $1,500 NL Holdem, good for $673,276 defeating Jason Wheeler heads-up. Nolan Dalla’s tournament report notes that Veckey is a software engineer with Motorola and a graduate of the DeVry Institute. He was hoping to play in Saturday’s $1,500 NL Holdem event, but it was sold out, leaving him to make this his first WSOP tournament. He’s returning back to work and has decided not to parlay this success into this year’s Main Event, choosing to wait until 2010’s Main Event.
Abe’s Awesome in Triple Draw
As noted in the post below, Julie Schneider finished 3rd in the $2,500 2-7 Triple Draw Lowball with high stakes veteran Abe Mosseri picking up his first career WSOP bracelet, along with $165,513. Masayoshi Tanaka finished in second, denied Japan’s first WSOP bracelet, picking up $102,313.
Sweet Sixteen Survive in Six-Max
Sixteen players remain in the final preliminary event of the WSOP $5,000 NL Holdem 6-Handed . They resume this afternoon at 1pm to play down to a winner and this is how they will be seated when play resumes:
(Table 58)
Seat 1: Peter Feldman – 1328000
Seat 2: Aurelien Guiglini – 549000
Seat 3: Josh Brikis – 294000
Seat 4: Thorsten Schaefer – 1094000
Seat 5: Matthew Waxman – 1132000
Seat 6: Alex Venovski – 684000
(Table 59)
Seat 1: James St Hilaire – 876000
Seat 2: John Conkright – 749000
Seat 4: Rory Mathews – 1358000
Seat 5: Jonas Wexler – 848000
Seat 6: Eugene Katchalov – 356000
(Table 60)
Seat 1: Robert Kay – 1213000
Seat 3: Frank Calo – 569000
Seat 4: Sean Keeton – 641000
Seat 5: Matt Hawrilenko – 1327000
Seat 6: Faraz Jaka – 778000
Phil Hellmuth finished in 24th place, if he remained it probably would have given ESPN’s production team quite the difficulty in covering his run for bracelet number twelve and the Ante Up for Africa event.
Follow the updates of today’s activity at www.wsop.com and Pokerati will surely be there covering all the high-profile celebrities in action.
Scott says:
July 2nd, 2009 at 1:52pm
How about Ante Up for AMERICA. There are plenty of problems in your own country that could use funds.
BJ Nemeth says:
July 2nd, 2009 at 6:31pm
That’s an argument you hear a lot, but it’s extremely narrow-minded.
Why put money toward the space program if people are starving in Africa? Why give money to people in Africa if people are starving in America? How can you buy a $60,000 car when some people can barely afford to clothe their children?
Why play poker when that time could be better spent volunteering at a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter?
It’s bad news for America if other parts of the world are in total chaos and suffering from genocide. No, it doesn’t directly affect most Americans the same way as the price of gas or the mortgage crisis, but the effects are real nonetheless.
Aaron A. says:
July 2nd, 2009 at 8:38pm
Ok ill lighten this up a bit… Hey Dan and Jen! Get some pictures of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck will ya!
DanM says:
July 3rd, 2009 at 3:58am
let’s face it, too … no matter what the charity, people tend to give to ones that have in some way personally touched them. You or a family member gets cancer, you start giving to cancer causes. Don Cheadle, who happened to be enlightened about and affected by the horrors of African genocide while filming Hotel Rwanda, decided to focus his energies (and the money raised) toward Refugees International.
Anyone who wants to see a more
protectionistAmeri-centric charity poker tournament … awesome, do it! Because if you’re not gonna, you don’t really have much ground to stand on criticizing someone else dedicating their efforts to humans who don’t happen to live in the grand ole U.S. of A.(This is the WORLD Series of Poker, after all.)
Aaron, I agree … it’s really more about pictures of people you see in movies playing poker.
DanM says:
July 3rd, 2009 at 4:10am
Oops, my bad … the AUFA money isn’t going to Refugees International — it’s going to http://www.enoughproject.org, which is a project of the Center for American Progress.
http://www.AmericanProgress.org/
DanM says:
July 3rd, 2009 at 6:42am
kevin, you list refugees international. i thought that, too … but i’m pretty sure (and you know hesitant to question your facts) that they are not the other charity. perhaps you are confusing them with http://theirc.org?
Kevin Mathers says:
July 3rd, 2009 at 6:47am
I believe Refugees International was Annie Duke’s charity on Celebrity Apprentice. Also, the front page of the AUFA website lists only the Enough Project and Refugees International. Why the International Rescue Committee isn’t mentioned on that site, don’t know.