Andrew Feldman of ESPN Poker has a Final Table Blog/Chat going on where you can chat and ask him questions as he live blogs the Final table. The live chat also has the twitter feed for all the players on the table along with some other pros, so should be a fun feed to follow throughout the day (ESPN Poker Live Blog).
Bluff gives the low down on the patches. With FTP coming into the day with 7 sponsored players and only 3 allowed to wear the FTP logo everyone was speculating what they would do. They definitely came up with a creative answer (Bluff Magazine).
Pauly over at Tao of Poker lets you know what happens during the break at the Main Event final table in his Semi-Live Blog (Tao of Poker).
Now in some non-November 9 News but definitely a good read:
Amy Calistri and Tim Lavalli took a deeper look back in 2006 into where 2 million extra chips came after they noticed a discrepancy at the end of Day Seven of the Main Event. They take a look at possible staff error to even the possibility of cheating between staff and players. (AimlesslyChasingAmy)
I’m sure this has absolutely nothing to do with anything, obv … but was going through some old pics and came across this screen-grab from July 2006 (some two months before the UIGEA)… when I hadn’t yet discovered the purpose of labeling images more descriptively than just wsop28.jpg, and the Feds apparently hadn’t yet figured out how to hide an IP address when emailing a link to a small-time poker blogger’s suggestive tag.
At the time, Phil Hellmuth had just won his 10th bracelet, no one thought twice about playing on Ultimate Bet, everyone in poker still had money, and Jamie Gold (of all people) seemed to represent the very worst poker had to offer. Ahh, the good ole days … even Russ Hamilton was presumed innocent then.
Though I hardly recall why specifically, something about this visitor seemed peculiar enough for me to wanna preserve the moment. With the benefit of hindsight, I’m sure I was just kidding.
Party Player Profile: The Foot
By: Dan Michalski – August 04, 2006
Mike Wilson from Canada did not make it to Day 3, but he considers his first WSOP a success regardless. As a competitive bridge player, he’s no stranger to big national tourneys. But Texas Hold’em is relatively new to “The Foot.”
He started playing online after leaving a local casino “ticked off” — not just because they wouldn’t accomodate his special needs, but because, he says, they were jerks about it in the process. So he signed up with PartyPoker because he just wanted to play the game like everyone else. After playing online for less than a week, he won a 3,500-player Party freeroll and a seat in the main event at the WSOP.
(Harrah’s, by the way, was accommodating, allowing him to have a friend sit nearby simply to help him push in big stacks of chips when necessary, and restack them when he won a pot.)
As mentioned, Wilson’s been eliminated. But he’s still in Vegas and can likely be found rolling the dice at a nearby craps table.
LAS VEGAS–By the way, one of the things I suspect they’ll rethink for next year … they got rid of the $1,000 bracelet events being held after the main event started. While a good idea not to cheapen the bracelets, it really has sent all the action to Bellagio … and has turned the Amazon Room into 3/4 of a ghost town at what is essentially the most exciting poker being played yet.
LAS VEGAS–If you had the over in any main-event field-size over-under bet … you almost certainly won. Considering the hit poker took as a whole since last year’s WSOP, everybody seems pretty happy about the numbers for 2007. Small dip … Clearly the 2017 WSOP will feature between 25,000 and 250,000 players.
For 2007:
6,358 players
621 spots paid
621st place — $20,320
1st place — $8.26 million
LAS VEGAS–There are four people left in the media room this hour — yours truly, a guy from Gutshot, the very-short uneducated gent who picks up trash off the floor and re-velcro’s the table skirts, and a former CardPlayer intern who’s been promoted to cub reporter.
While lamenting the long hours and empathizing with PokerNews for their struggles with chip-counts and hand recall, CardPlayer guy says:
“I definitely made up suits of cards. All the time.”
A few more fun WSOP graphs for your geometric contemplation:
The question I am asked more so than any other in recent weeks is an estimate on the size of the main event field. Pokerati is sticking to its over/under of 4,001 — though we acknowledge that there are all sorts of mitigating factors that could come into play and seriously alter the differential between projection and reality, one way or the other.
This first one shows the growth of the main event over the decades, with the blue orbs representing the size of the prize pool.
The Main Event: Bubble Fixin’ to Burst?
This next one shows the amount Harrah’s took out of the prize pools in 2006. I’ll be honest, I expected this to be more troublesome, and to be showing a disturbing trend since the casino behemoth took over the WSOP. But that’s simply hasn’t been the case. The following graph is posted on a logarithmic axis … not sure what that really means, but it makes things fit a little better … so take that into account when assessing what that main-event spike really represents.
Anyone who’s covered the entirety of any World Series in the poker-boom era knows that the Main Event is pretty much an altogether separate entity than the dozens of events leading up to it. The security is different, media is different, and even the fans are different. I think this funky little graph of the 2006 WSOP — where the bubbles represent the size of the prize pools in each event — illustrates the concept pretty well. Click the image below to enlarge:
x axis = event number
y axis = number of players
bubble = prize pool
What’s interesting is that, obviously, the number of online qualifiers has everything to do with the size of the ME. Last year, they represented 6,600 of the 8,800 entrants. But with the preliminary events, there were relatively very few getting in via online satellite. So I can’t imagine these lesser planets will change much at all this go-round.
For comparison’s sake, below is the same data charted for 1985 and 1975.
We’re hearing some interesting rumors from reliable sources about a fundraising poker tournament that didn’t happen in San Antonio this weekend. The purpose was reportedly to raise money for the American Legion there — with top prize being a WSOP main event seat. Either that prize was donated by none other than Richard Lee … or Lee had something to do with the organization of it. But apparently the cops shut it down before it happened.
Ahh, remember the good-ole-days when the police could just look the other way?
For those of you who may not recall, Lee was the well-connected, family-lovin’ San Antonio bookie businessman who finished 6th in last year’s WSOP main event (winning a cool $2.8 million) … only to have his hometown police rain on his welcome-back parade by busting into his house to confiscate cash and cars on allegations that he was running an online gambling ring. His case is still pending.
Just when Bob Daily thought his resignation from Harrahs was final, DG Holdings Ltd (United Kingdom) and their online gaming division pulled him back in.
Robert Daily stated:
“After my resignation, DGH approached me to join their group as a board member to provide leadership to their online gaming platform – especially poker – and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. I have made many great friends within the poker industry and I look forward to working with them in the future from a different perspective.â€Â
Bob was appointed as the 2006 WSOP Tournament Director and again for 2007.
I was setting up Pokerati on Myspace today (helping Dan out with his pink shirt to-do list) and I came across these fun videos that may put you in the mood for the upcoming 2007 World Series of Poker! – Dan, insert the stupid cheerleader pix.
Wow, I don’t even know where to begin on this WSOP press release. So does this mean it’s true that in the World Series you can lie about your hand, but not tell the truth?
Reigning World Series Of Poker® Champion Jamie Gold
Won’t Face Retroactive Penalty For Rules Infractions
LAS VEGAS – March 28, 2007 – The World Series of Poker will not penalize reigning WSOP World Champion Jamie Gold for two rules infractions that occurred during the 2006 WSOP Main Event.
In a recent interview with The New York Times, Gold said that in one incident he exposed a hole card to an opponent. He said that in the other incident he told an opponent he held top pair and top kicker after the opponent had bet. While common in cash games, such actions are violations of WSOP tournament rules.
Under the 2006 WSOP rules, Gold would have been subject to a penalty requiring him to sit out 10 minutes of play – if WSOP floor persons had seen either of those incidents when they occurred. The rules for the 2007 WSOP call for a 10-hand rather than 10-minute penalty.
I was just working up a new poll … something for the non-Texans maybe? … and had a look at the very first poll we ever ran on this site. Interesting (in hindsight):
The first year we’ll see a decline in the number of entries to the main event of the WSOP is:
Started: June 18, 2006 Total Votes: 27
2008-2010: 56% (15)
Go Batfaces!!!1: 19% (5)
none of the above1: 11% (3)
2006: 7% (2)
2007: 4% (1)
2011-2020: 4% (1)
1 = Added by a guest
Hmm, suspect we’d get different results if we ran it twice.
Like way more … and hence the power of a net-savvy poker media willing to “upset” a poker player. Seriously, maddest props to RawVegas.tv as they continue to kick some technological, pseudojournalistic ass …
In this video, Jamie Gold finally gets real — or at least semi-real — acknowledging that he is not a “great” player, he definitely got lucky, and making himself subject to the Crispin Leyser lawsuit may have been bad form.
“I really screwed some things up,” Gold says. “There [were] several times where as the guys from Wicked Chops so aptly put it, that I basically monkey-fucked a football when it came to handling my success.”
Awesome. Jamie Gold is my new best friend. Now all he has to do is say about 1 million Hail Marys and he can go on to being a real ambassador for the game.
It’s snowing outside. If you don’t mind, please bear with me as we shut down about 30 open Firefox tabs that Pokerati has accumulated over the past few days.
First off, happy February 14. If you do a Yahoo! or Google image search for “valentine poker” (quotes excluded) here’s the first thing you see:
JOHNNY CHAN has plans to eventually open shop in Macau (and elsewhere) — has partnered with the makers of The Block to create “the world’s first poker hotel.” Tourney director extraordinaire MATT SAVAGE is part of his team — we can only hope this doesn’t mean all of China will be taught to do the flop one card at a time.
This valentine from PKR.com suggests that while a man’s hand may seem stronger than a woman’s … it’s still possible that she’s holding the nuts:
UPDATE: Just re-watched the vid, and the lady actually would need some help on the turn to make her straight-flush.
Did you know the proportion of WOMEN PLAYING POKER continues to grow? The XX-chromosome set reportedly represents 30 percent of online players now.
BRANDI HAWBAKER, cute-as-pie poker girl and Full Tilt nipple-cover model, has reportedly found a new way to fund her bankroll by stripping at SPEARMINT RHINO. (Congrats on the new sponsorship deal!)
Party Player Profile: The Foot
