2011 WSOP – Episode 16: Brickless Cash Games Reprise (3:22) – Dan and Pauly recorded a quick follow-up to their previous episode while they hang out on the rail of the high-stakes cash games. They spot Eskimo Clark, “Cowboy”, and other broke dicks lingering around seeking handouts from the high rollers.
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Please forgive any apparent smugness of prescience … I didn’t know about the appeals court ruling when Pauly and I recorded an episode two days ago, where we addressed certain ironies about neither Clonie Gowen nor the people who may or may not have wanted to squash her being at the WSOP.
Pauly published yesterday, and even though we’ve got a fancy autofeeder here at Pokerati, I did not … but LOL(ish) … this episode was next in the queue:
Dan and Dr. Pauly hang out in the hallway and try to figure out what the 2011 WSOP is missing…
2011 WSOP – Episode 8: Eskimo Yes, Jesus No (4:22) – Dan and Pauly try to pinpoint which pros are noticeably absent (Clonie, Jesus, Howard Lederer), while Eskimo Clark sightings have been rampant. They also try to figure out where the old Bat Beat Bar and Lounge went and why its been replaced by a oxygen bar.
[audio: https://pokerati.com/podcast/tao/TOP_W11_08_EskimoYes_JesusNo.mp3]
For more episodes, visit the Tao of Pokerati archives.
I’m back in action because I thought I was going to be up this morning spending my Pokerati paycheck on an Eskimo Clark bracelet — there’s one for sale on Ebay right now, in an auction that closes in about an hour. But holy meltdown, they’re up to 15 bids already, from six different bidders, and $4,050! That’s already more than TJ Cloutier got for his pawned-off WSOP hardware nearly a year ago, and puts Eskimo’s jewels way out of my league unless someone wants to give me a raise by infinity. Can you say, “Going once, going twice … going in your pants at the table?â€
The auction closes today at 10 am PT.Get in before this “pre-owned†1999 $1,500 Razz beauty is gone. (Replace the word Razz with “Dodge Neon” and that’s what my last boyfriend used to say to initiate foreplay.)
I knew I had no chance of scoring Peter Eastgate’s bracelet on eBay last week. His newer model fetched a whopping $147,500 after Interpoker got into a bidding war with Tony G, who made a play for the limelight by blog-bragging about plans to buy it for a collar for his dog. Inter stepped in to thwart him from making a “mockery†of the WSOP, but I’m not sure which is worse – seeing a WSOP bracelet on a dog or seeing it on eBay. But with the prize going to anonymous bidder “7***l”, it did raise a lot of money for UNICEF.
And check it out, Eastgate’s not done hawking his WSOP main event booty yet. Little Petey’s now got his “2008 WSOP Final Table Corum timepiece†for sale. The seller is “petereastgate†himself, making his first ever eBay posting. Asking price: $7,000. Money from that auction will go to UNICEF, too, but so far it has 0 bidders and closes on Friday.
Maybe I’ll use what I thought I’d spend on Eskimo to buy a couple Peter Eastgate 8x10s.
Here’s a story I heard the other night … like much of what we report here, I have no idea whether or not it’s true. My source on this is generally reliable, and he heard it once-removed from some “online pro” who was in a bathroom stall at the Rio to overhear the following …
(And even if it’s totally made up, I’m sure there’s a funny joke in here somewhere … and Sam and Eskimo can consider it a public service graciously provided by Pokerati to let them know what kinda trash people may or may not be saying.)
So supposedly, just a few days ago, Sam Grizzle and Eskimo Clark were in the indoor bathroom outside the Amazon Room taking a leak during a break. Eskimo apparently asked Sam how he was doing, and vice versa … both grunted.
Then Eskimo asked, “You wanna trade 10 percent in this event?” (I believe it was a $1,500 NL) and Sam apparently agreed, saying, “Sure, why not?”
Sam then washed his hands and left, at which point another player said to Eskimo, “Hey Paul, did you just swap with Sam on the $1,500? He just busted out 10 minutes ago!”
At which point Eskimo responded, “That’s OK. I never even registered.”
[Rimshot!]
New show coming soon … “The Champions of Poker Commentary” — essentially a Best Damn Sports Show knock-off, but using poker pros not affiliated with online sites to shoot the real shit about the poker world for people who may or may not think poker hasn’t changed since that most recent rerun of WSOP 2003.
You know me, I want to lambast and ridicule any Tom Schneider endeavor — because that’s how we show our friends we care — but gotta say, this is pretty damn good. Very different:
According to Eric Ulis, the host of this in-development show, the current poker-on-TV offerings are a bit “stuffy” … and that’s where they supposedly come in — to talk about the poker news of the day in a different way. It’s all part of a derivative of Ulis’ Continental Poker Championship, and the plan is to film it regularly with this crew of Arizona high stakes pros — Tom Schneider, Hooman Nikzad, and Jesse McGinty — at the Gila River Casino Wild Horse Pass, just outside of Phoenix.
Considering that Texas poker players helped build the third-largest friggin’ casino in the world (literally under a tent in Thackerville, OK) we can take some pleasure in knowing a bunch of Texans kicked butt in The River tourney this weekend and will be sending back home some riches made in El Norte.
WinStar reportedly threw in a $580,000 overlay to make their $3 million guarantee. Not sure about the buy-in details — I think they upped it to $2k? — nor overall results. The best “coverage” has come via 2+2 here, mixed in with some Facebook, Twitter, and direct txt msg buzz. (Thanks KevMath and Harris, as always, for the info!)
1,210 players overall.
The winner: Bobby Hempkins, aka “Shooter” in the Dallas poker boom days. (And now your source for residential real estate in the North Texas area.) $710k win. Nice!
5th place finisher Brian @ZBTHorton provided regular updates from the final table, such as:
8 left, these people suck (4pm)
Apparently tax issues may or may not have complicated chop discussions — though sounds to me that the Chickasaw nation is under similar corporate-legal restrictions as the WSOP.
7th place reportedly went to a guy named Lance. Paid $95k. Sounds like a nice prize distribution (at the final table, at least). Not too flat, not too steep.
Blind structure was supposedly relatively fast, however.
Pros who made the trek for this event included: Clonie Gowen, TJ Cloutier, Michael Mizrachi, Eric Mizrachi, Kido Pham, Terrence Chan, Michael Binger, Men the Master, Allen Kessler, and Dmitri Nobles. The real @EskimoClark was also supposedly milling around.
Not everyone is winning this year … and we’re getting near that point where you either gotta make something happen to turn it around or be left, perhaps literally, in the main event going for broke.
Mike Matusow getting ready to lose it (via Annie Duke):
And of course we know how our buddy Tom is doing (0-for-14) … so he decided to booze it up for the $2,500 Razz. “It can’t really make me do worse,” he said, before giving most of his stack to Eskimo Clark en route to going bust:
I feel kinda bad (not really) for crushing Tom’s soul. But I was hearing the same story from him as I’ve heard from at least a half-a-dozen other pros finding similar results: “I’m playing great! I’m making sick laydowns! My mental state is good! Just running bad. Cold cold cold. It’s getting frustrating. But I’m playing some of the best poker of my life! Jesus, [everyone else] is just getting lucky!”
Yeah. Uh-huh. That’s gotta be what it is … it’s clearly not possible that the deadest money on the table is someone who thinks they’re playing their A-game but isn’t compared to everyone else. In an effort to get a semi-retired Pokerati blogger and my best pro pal to consider shifting gears, I sent him the net-results rankings for everyone who has played in the 2009 WSOP under the Team Pokerati banner:
1. Gregg Merkow
2. Cliff Fisher
3. Robert Goldfarb
4. John Harris
5. Julie Schneider
6. Pat Poels
7. Shoegal
8. Tom Schneider
I then reminded him that the guy who picked him to be on his ESPN Fantasy Team (Gary Wise) is in dead last place. (Ha ha.)
You get the gist. The numbers don’t lie repeatedly. So while “playing some of the best poker of my life!” … not only is the DonkeyBomber something like 0-for-13 in cashing in tournaments, but also he hasn’t even made a Day 2. So before he finds himself trying to trade jewelry with Eskimo Clark for a satellite buy-in, he has decided to change his game says he will no longer be twittering until he bags chips for the first time in the 2009 WSOP. Good gameplan.
Click here to see the beginnings of a first-half WSOP fail regaled in increments of 140 characters or less. We’ll see if Tom returns with a vengeance or if his twitter account, along with his poker career, fades into oblivion.
Sure, this is a cheap hedline we really could run daily — at least until it’s no longer true — but there were some very specific rumors circulating around the internet and the Wynn that Paul ‘Eskimo’ Clark had been robbed and killed. While death is never seldom a laughing matter, at least one cold, heartless journo may or may not have gotten juiced up about the conspiracy theory possibilities It had to be Vinnie Vinh! Or Russ Hamilton! Where’s Layne Flack!?! and abandoned a night at the tables before it really even started to investigate.
We found little … other than that he is still alive and kickin’ hustlin’ for backers in Reno.
Yeah yeah, I know … this is really Episode 13. But Pauly and I figured this edition about hallway backing deals was a little more timely — we get ahead of ourselves sometimes — and I’m a faster typer than I am a click-and-dragger, so it’s easier for me to explain why the numbers don’t line up than it is to go in and actually change a couple file names, re-upload, click OK a few times … actually, huh, that probably wouldn’t have been too hard, but hey, I’m a busy guy … and we’re no PokerRoad.
Anyhow, a couple days ago, your ToP hosts camped out in the hallway between the Amazon Room, the Satellite Room, and the Payout Cage to discuss some hallway wheelin’ and dealin’, and end up in our own negotiation over a sliver of the action in $50k HORSE; the fine line between Layne Flack’s life coach and Eskimo Clark’s backer, too. Yep, Tao of Pokerati serves up lots for you to chew on in three minutes … but hopefully is giving you a good taste of the real WSOP.
[audio:TOP-Episode14.mp3]
They are so near the bubble in the $2k NL event — 102 players left. Tulsa is sitting comfortably below average with about 32k in chips (avg. is 50something). He’s playing so tight it’s sick. Little veins quietly pulsating on his bald dome.
I just got chased out of the playing area for the first time — something about that 13-table rule. Though I question its validity, I chose not to make a stink of it at this time and retreated. Will leave the shooting-your-face-to-spite-your-nose to Gonz.
Meanwhile Troy (Darling) is playing $10/$25 PLO at the Rio with Eskimo Clark. Batface is currently up more than $10k. Latest text: “quads again.”
UPDATE: The bubble has burst, and Eric Celeste (Tulsa) has survived. So has Brasilian media sweetheart Miradu … who was down to 1.5 big blinds.
UPDATE: They’re on break. Tulsa’s got 33k in chips … makes him pretty close to a short stack, but not terribly desperately so. We’ll try to keep you posted via Citizen Stack Reporter (beta), but are running into some Blackberry proper
Meanwhile, Darling has very few chips left on the 10/25 PLO cash table … not because he is losing, but because he has pretty much only stacks of 100s in front of him. 30ish k, it seems.
UPDATE: Tulsa has pooed and feels much better. He’s guaranteed a net +$3,381. Final table would be about $45k, and the winner will bank half a mil.
Happenings from yesterday with a preview of today’s action::
The two final tables yesterday have been covered enough here so on to the day 2 action. The $5,000 NL Holdem final table is now set for this afternoon under the ESPN360 cameras shortly after 2pm.
Seat 1: Anders Henriksson 311,000
Seat 2: Jacobo Fernandez 848,000
Seat 3: Rajesh Vohra 1,040,000
Seat 4: Ben Sprengers 441,000
Seat 5: Adam Geyer 645,000
Seat 6: Scott Freeman 423,000
Seat 7: Scott Seiver 2,512,000
Seat 8: Chuck Sklar 439,000
Seat 9: Dave Seidman 653,000
More after the jump:
Tom is was the chip leader in the $2k Omaha Hi-Lo. That’s pretty cool.
UPDATE: Tom is out. Not cool.
And that limit event he busted out of yesterday … Erick Lindgren just missed the final table, which is now set with some interesting players, including Teddy Munroe, Ali Eslami, and Vinny Vinh. (Teddy and I go way back — last year I’d be typing outside and “The Iceman” would fill me in on the $100-$200 cash action while taking a piss on the tournament tent air conditioners. “Makin’ money, baby!” he’d say before shaking himself dry and heading back to the table.)
Even the $10k 7-Stud World Championship is getting interesting … with Doyle still alive and both Bob and Maureen Feduniak with the potential to become the first ever husband-wife presumably non-collusive team at the final table. Never mind. Since typing this, all the above-mentioned have been eliminated.
I learned about this 7-Stud shape-up from the a WSOP-TV vid. And though I tend to detest any lack of imbeddability, I gotta say I like a lot of what this ESPN/WSOP/Bluff (?) crew has got going here. For example, Harmonie Krieger does a basic feature video interview set on the different jobs people come to the WSOP from. Nice enough, right? — but very real when one of the guys she talks with is Jay Columbo, who ran the legendary Mayfair and Playstation poker clubs in New York City, legally questionable status notwithstanding.
And then, perhaps most shocking to me, I enjoyed Jean-Robert Bellande’s “Surviving the WSOP” — where the young, aspiring Eskimo Clark chronicles his ups and downs at the World Series while his video-podcast editors comment Pop-up Video-style — follow along as he hustles high-rollers for buy-ins.
Even learned something from Phil Ivey’s less exciting V-log … and that is that he’s playing so many big-field, low-buy-in donkfests because he has a lot of side action pending on whether or not he’ll win a bracelet this year. We’ll see if we can’t find out more about this.
Speaking of donkfests, the Ladies Event has already lost 2/3 of its starting field, and of those still remaining, at least three of them are Pokerati MySpace friends: Lacey Jones, Kathy Liebert, and Mandy Baker are looking strong and pretty much representing the spectrum of all that is good about women. Go girls! I mean chicks … er babes .. uh bitches?
UPDATE: Lacey is nursing a short stack. Poker Roadie Amanda Leatherman has come on strong, however, and picked up the aggressive pace. Michele Lewis, Tiffany Michele, and PokerNews editrix Haley Hintze are all out.
In the meantime, primarily because it is awesomely embeddable, check out the debut episode of The Degenerate Report, from Neverwin Poker:
I came across a certain post from the PokerNews Live Reporting log for Event #10 – Omaha/Seven Card Stud Hi-Lo 8-or-Better that sent me right back to 2007.
Eskimo Freezes
Paul “Eskimo” Clark was feeling pretty good about his hand on an Omaha board reading {K-?} {5-?} {6-?} {Q-?} — he was holding {A-?} {2-?} {7-?} {8-?} for the nut low draw and an up-and-down straight draw. But a cruel deuce on the river counterfeited his low, made him absolutely no straights, and his opponent scooped the pot. Horrified, Eskimo stared down at his cards for a while, unable to speak or move. This can be a harsh game sometimes.
Remind anyone of the mini-strokes he had last year? The time he collapsed at the table? The time paramedics had to come to the floor of the Amazon Room to check on Eskimo, but he refused to be taken out of the tournament?
When someone reports that the guy is unable to move or speak, ya gotta wonder if this is a bad sign. I’m sure Harrah’s has the paramedics on speed dial about now.
Take a little gander at Pauly’s Day 6 post called 2008 WSOP Day 6: Melting Eskimo’s Igloo and Erick Lindgren Wins First Bracelet. (The part about Lindgren’s bracelet is cool, but the Eskimo part is pertinent to this post. Focus, people.)
Took a little trip over to the Rio today to check out the set up. Good things so far.
The Amazon Room was empty except for the ESPN crew setting up the stage, Harrah’s employees finalizing the set-up of the room, and a few cash game players wandering in. The Rio seemed to be trying to get the cash game players to the Amazon Room before they close the casino poker room for the WSOP.
The satellites were getting going around noon in their separate room (where the poker kitchen and media room were in 2007), and a handful of players were sauntering in. Greg Raymer was roaming around the hallways, already being stopped by the few tourists who walked down to see if the WSOP had begun.
While the poker kitchen itself wasn’t open for business, I could see that it is in a building where the poker tent was in 2007. It seems like a much sturdier structure than that tent – more like a shed, a really large shed. Don’t know what’s on the menu, though, since it was closed. BUT, there are numerous other food options set up at different points in the hallways. Besides the full bar (yum!), there was a Pizza Hut stand that offered its signature pizzas, along with salads, sandwiches, and fruit bowls. Directly across was a Java Coast coffee stand with a Krispy Kreme donut oven ($2 per donut!).
Best of all, there was a huge sign for a sushi and noodle kitchen! Set-up is not complete, but the thought of having some great sushi available makes this Cali girl quite happy.
It seems that the Harrah’s/WSOP folks have listened to space and food complaints and made some very positive steps in the right direction. Good times and food ahead!
(On the way to the car, Eskimo Clark was on his way in – alive and kickin’ and presumably lookin’ for backers! Some things never change…)
