Why Is This Man Holding a Monkey?

People take their poker very seriously. Well, why wouldn't they? With so much money on the line, and so much focus being fixed, if you don't take it seriously you probably won't go too far in a tournament like this. Then again, there's nothing wrong with a little lightness of spirit, which may be why Wil Wheaton (of STAND BY ME and STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION) brings a stuffed monkey with him to the table.



Or... there may be another reason, one which Wil was gracious enough to share with me. Seems he runs a blog (shameless plug: wilwheaton.net) where the motto and controlling idea is: 50,000 monkeys at 50,000 typewriters can't be wrong. Apparently, when his fans (or poker fans) want to wish him good luck, they thus send him "monkey mojo," and the particular dose of monkey mojo you see here -- "the best monkey mojo of all " -- was a gift from his stepson, Ryan. So that's that with that. Wil finished play today with 37K in chips. Not a mountain, but not nothing, either... especially when you've got monkey mojo on your side. Good luck tomorrow to Wil Wheaton, official adopted celebrity of the UB blog.

Okay, we've reached the close of play for the first day of flight 2. There remain a total of 344 competitors from both flights, and they'll be hard at it again tomorrow at noon. Scotty Nguyen continues to lead the field with some 230K in chips. Strong finishers from today's flight include Sammy Farha and Blair Rodman, both with 150K, plus or minus, and Hassan Habib on 111K.

Among the surprisingly imperiled: Johnny Chan. He finishes play today with less than 4,000 in chips. He lost most of his stack when he called a 40,000 bet holding an open-ended straight flush draw -- and the draw didn't arrive. Uh, repeat after me, class: "Draws are death in no-limit." Yet how could he not call? He clearly had favorable odds... there was well over 50,000 in the pot before his foe chipped in another 40K, and he had all...those...outs. That's the thing of poker, I guess. It's been said (well, I've said it, anyhow) that poker = chess + luck -- but boy, don't you just wish you could subtract the luck from the math sometimes?

Meanwhile, our three remaining UB Warriors from this flight all made it through to the second day: Jon Regashus at 19K; Kevin Newman at 22.5K; and Sam Murphy (shown here with his daughter Nicole (left) and wife Holly) at 34K.



Yeah, none of our UB Warriors is in terrific shape, but none of them has joined the likes of, say, Mike Matusow, on the rail -- Matusow also having discovered that a draw, even a fat one, doesn't guarantee a win, not when his opponent Avery Cardoza holds pocket kings and Mike's combination flush/overcard/gutshot straight draw failed to come through. Draws are death in...

Robert Williamson III continues to flirt with disaster. He was down to as little as 2200, but finishes play today on 23K. Quite a comeback, and it portends well for Robert's tomorrow. After all, if he can survive the kind of adversity he encountered today, he can probably tough it through anything.

Among the others looking forward to reconvening tomorrow at noon:

ALEX BRENES -- 67K
DAVID LEVY -- 21K
TED FORREST -- 30K
DAVID ULLIOTT -- 93K
ANTONIO ESFANDIARI -- 80K
MEN NGUYEN -- 17K
JENNIFER HARMON -- 60K
HUMBERTO BRENES -- 37K
TOM McEVOY -- 60K
JUHA HELPPI -- 95K
DANIEL NEGREANU -- 78K
PHIL GORDON -- 56K
TOBEY MAGUIRE -- 65K
PAUL DARDEN -- 21K

And by the way, folks, these numbers are NOT official, and not guaranteed to be entirely correct. We do the best we can here at blog central, but accidents do happen. For instance, earlier today I reported that Jon Regashus was down to 6000 in chips, and I was only off by a factor of, oh, ten or so. What can I tell you? "Accuracy is the first casualty of chaos."

And that's an expression I just made up. I thoughtit if I put it in quotes it would seem more authoritative.

Authoritative numbers will be up after midnight, and I'll be back in the morning with the highlights and lowlights of those. In the meantime, if you're not doing much of anything right now, why don't you go enter an online tournament -- it doesn't have to be a big one -- and try to play not according to your own typical style but according to the style of one of the stars you admire? Get out of your skin. Inhabit a Hellmuth or Negreanu. Shake off your habits and patterns of tournament play. Try something new. The worst you can do is lose, but the best you can do is learn.

More later, -jv

Someone's Going to Emergency...

How can you almost lose half an $80K pot when you are tied for the best hand at the showdown? Be like Alan Schein in the following situation:

Schein was in a pot against Spencer Sun. 88 for Schein, QQ for Sun and $80K in the pot. When the river brought a deuce to complete a six-high straight, Spencer flipped over his queens. Schein then said, "I'll play the board"... and tossed his cards face down in the muck!

Well, you can imagine that there was a bit of an uproar, and of course the floorman was called. The floorman in this case was legendary Jack McClelland, shown here with Marcel Luske --



-- who unfortunately couldn't parlay his short-stack into a battle back from the brink today after all. Jack came over, listened to everyone's heated arguments and ruled that since Schein had verbally declared that he was playing the board, his hand was not dead and he was entitled to half the pot.

It was the right decision, a sound decision based on the situation and the players' intents, but to me Alan dodged a $40,000 bullet. For the price of flipping his cards face up, he need not have put himself in so precarious a place. After all, it wouldn't take much for a floorman to rule -- sensibly, in the context -- that a hand that hits the muck is dead. It's a cautionary tale, campers: when it doubt, always act in a manner that's beyond reproach. You'd hate for your tournament life to be imperiled by a stupid procedural mistake.

In any case, as of this writing both Schein and Sun battle on.

The same cannot be said for the likes of Scott Fischman and Team UB's Russ Hamilton, both of whom have been retired from the field as we start the fourth round of today's play, where Sammy Farha and Nikolas Frangos have the big stacks, with $150K and $130K, respectively.

Other numbers of note:

JUHA HELPPI -- 61K
BLAIR RODMAN -- 100K
DEVILFISH ULLIOTT -- 95K
MIKE MATUSOW -- 25K
JOHNNY CHAN -- 90K
ROBERT WILLIAMSON III -- 12K
HASSAN HABIB -- 66K
ANTONIO ESFANDIARI -- 45K
DAVID WILLIAMS -- 75K
HUMBERTO BRENES -- 50K
PAUL DARDEN -- 33K
PHIL GORDON -- 65K
TOBEY MAGUIRE -- 32K
TOM McEVOY -- 63K
DANIEL NEGREANU -- 64K
AMIR VAHEDI - 51K
ALEX BRENES -- 65K
JENNIFER HARMON -- 32K

And I'm happy to report that three of our UB Warriors are still in the hunt: Sam Murphy, John Regashus, and Kevin Newman.

Here's a shot of Kevin with his lovely wife Susan, shouting out to all their friends back home in Jamestown, New York. In addition to being a strong poker player who parlayed just $10 into a ticket to the show, Kevin is a Yankee fan.

Oh well, nobody's perfect.



I don't know the fan affiliations of Jon Regashus (shown here) but I do know that with just 6K in chips and Johnny Chan sitting three seats to his left, he's got his work cut out for him.



Kevin (DJKEVIN1) is on 42.5K and Sam Murphy (ALL GOLF) is at 56K, so they're in slightly better shape.

On the subject of shape, good, I chatted with Mike Matusow before the start of play today, and he confirmed what Annie Duke and other wise voices said yesterday: If you come out of today's play with even the 50K you started with, you're in fine shape. Anything more is gravy.

On the subject of shape, bad, I watched Scott Fischman put his last 800 dollars in before the flop with a suited king and sweat a club draw that didn't get there. I wanted to ask him how he came to be so imperiled, but in the wake of his bustout, I just didn't have the heart. Call me a cowardly reporter, but it seems to me that talking to a poker player about how he busted out of the tournament is a little like asking the bereaved to tell you how the loved one died. Yeah, you want to know, but it feels too grim to ask.

But like I said earlier, tournament poker is an unforgiving beast. It devours almost everyone, relentlessly and remorselessly as the blinds rise and the pressure grows. Last year at this tournament, Gus Hanson told me about something called "the hour of the outburst," that time in the tournament where people all over the tournament floor are letting out cries of relief or despair. We haven't reached the hour of the outburst yet... It'll be tomorrow before the field really starts shaking itself out... but that will be small consolation to the ten or twenty or thirty players who don't make it past the last two rounds of play today. I'll be back after 9pm with some survival figures and, no doubt, the odd story of relief or despair.

Like the man said, "Someone's going to emergency, someone's going to jail."

More later, -jv

A Precipitous Fall from a High Place

I went skydiving once. Apart from the paralytic fear (and shocking stupidity) of voluntarily leaving the safety of a perfectly good airplane and plummeting earthward at 32 feet per second per second, the thing that struck me about the experience was that, what with all the classroom prep and study, learning how to absorb the impact of landing without snapping one's legs like twigs, sitting around the airfield until the plane was ready to go, climbing to altitude and so on, skydiving turned out to be an awfully long wait for an awfully short ride.

Monumentally stupid, too, but let's let that go for now.

I was mindful of my skydiving experience this afternoon as I watched UB Warrior Cliff Josephy's precipitous fall from a high place. Here's a picture of Cliff, screen name Johnnybax, and then a picture of Johnny Chan, his nemesis in the tale to come.




Cliff had pocket kings, a perfectly good hand to get involved with, especially when his preflop reraise of Johnny's raise got the two of them heads up. The flop came 9-5-3 rainbow, and Cliff check-called Johnny's $2K bet. The turn brought a 3. Now here's where it gets interesting. Cliff checked. Staring at the 9 high board, Johnny fumbled with his chips, and tried to declare a $5K bet. But Cliff had noticed that more of Johnny's chips had crossed the yellow betting stripe and therefore his bet should be $13K. Johnny complied with the floorman's decision and made it $13K to go. Cliff raised all-in. Johnny called -- with pocket aces. No miracle king came on the river, and Cliff Josephy's tournament day ended less than half an hour after it started.

An awfully long wait for an awfully short ride indeed.

I talked to Cliff afterward and he told me he wasn't unhappy with the way he played the hand, that he considered the possibility of Chan having pocket aces, and expected him to lay down even that hand in this situation, so early in the tournament in so long a tournament.

There's another way of looking at it... or rather speculating about it. Was Chan's fumbled attempt to bet $5K a genuine fumble, or a bit of "active sonar" designed to ping his opponent and find out where he stood in the hand? More to the point, was Johnny's apparent show of weakeness intended to draw an overbet by something like A-9 or a big pocket pair? Honestly, I have no idea. Only Johnny knows, and Johnny ain't sayin'.

But let's all go to school on it, shall we? Remember that what looks like a mistake may, in fact, be a nuanced move. The more I watch these top pros work their magic, the more I'm reminded of Shakespeare's words, via Hamlet: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Anyway, kudos and encomia to Cliff Josephy for having won his way into this event in the first place; he actually won UB's first $300 buy-in online satellite, so maybe it's fitting (or maybe just ironic) that he's the first UB Warrior overboard. Others still in the hunt include Sam Murphy, Jon Regashus, and Kevin Newman, plus yeterday's competitor, Nathaniel Fox, who finished the day at about 50 grand.

Meanwhile... pocket aces giveth, and pocket aces taketh away. One of poker's truly good guys, a showman and a class act if ever there was one, Marcel "The Flying Dutchman" Luske now finds himself with his back to the wall and his chip count down to around 6K, thanks to the fact of his aces getting cracked by Paul Darpino's pocket kings when the board came K-x-x, and no ace came to save the day.

Here's a shot of Marcel wearing his trademark upside-down sunglasses. It will be interesting to see how Marcel battles back from the adversity of the short stack. We know that he will battle; there's no give-up in the guy at all.



Thinking about these confrontations, these perfectly-played clashes between quality hands that inevitably send someone to the rail, or at least reeling, it occurs to me yet again how heartless tournament poker can be. People play so well. They make moves that they know to be correct, and find themselves outmanuevered or just out-lucked by others. "Bad things happen to good people." In tournament poker it happens every day. It will happen again today, many times, before we close up shop at nine pm.

I am reminded of a joke: A man is falling from the top of a high building. As he passes a middle floor, someone shouts out to him, "How's it going?" His answer? "So far, so good."

When you jump out of an airplane, the ground rushes up at 32 feet per second per second. In tournament poker, the end can happen that fast, too.

More later, -jv

Hello Ruby Tuesday

Hello campers, and welcome to Tuesday, or may I say twosday, the second day of the Bellagio 5Star World Poker Classic. Day two will look very much like day one, with some 225 tournament entrants taking flight. As yesterday, blinds start at $50 and $100, with 90 minute rounds, giving players lots of play with their $50K in starting chips. As yesterday, we'll play five levels (including three with antes) and finish play for the day at the very civilized, let's-all-grab-a-late-bite-and-then-hit-Light hour of 9pm.

Not quite as yesterday, today we know what the total prize purse is and how deep the money goes. 459 players got together to blow away my over/under line of 437 and create a prize pool of… uhm, let's see… $25,000 times 459 is… oh, hell, you do the math. I was up late last night and the coffee hasn't kicked in.

Anyway, campers, if you're like me, you'd be a happy camper to pull down the prize money associated with any one of these finishes:

1st place $2,856,150

2nd $1,698,390

3rd $896,375

4th $518,920

5th $377,420

6th $264,195

7th $188,710

8th $150,970

9th $132,095

10th $113,225

11-15th $94,355

16-20th $75,485

21-30th $56,615

31-40th $47,180

41-50th $37,740

51-100th $30,000

Something else today's starters know that yesterday's field did not: What will it take to be chip leader? Official numbers for the top five spots from day one are:

SCOTTY NGUYEN -- 233,750

ERIC WEINER -- 231,450

ROBERT ALEXANDER -- 180,725

JOHN ESPOSITO -- 173,600

GREG RAYMER -- 153,635

And by the way, if you woke up wondering this morning where the phrase "happy camper" comes from, it was popularized (stigmatized?) by former Vice President Dan Quayle -- he of the tiny brain pan and the inability to spell potato -- who used it in greeting to a group of American Samoans, saying, "You all look like happy campers to me. Happy campers you are, happy campers you have been, and, as far as I am concerned, happy campers you will always be." (He then went on, by the way, to pronounce their capital of Pago Pago as "Pogo Pogo." Good times.)

Have a good day, campers, wherever in the world, even American Samoa, you might be. As Bill and Ted once so staunchly suggested, "Be excellent to each other." I'll be back in a few hours with the preliminary, largely irrelevant, but somehow deliciously interesting, first returns.

More later, -jv