ARTICLES BY: JOE STAPLETON AND SCOTT HUFF
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published over 3 years ago in
Card Player College Magazine Volume 1, Number 4
Card Player College Magazine Volume 1, Number 4
High-Low Split: Dueling Perspectives on 40 Days at the WSOP - Part IV: "On the Side"
SCOTT: The 2005 World Series of Poker was a circus. A media circus, a circus of the outré; a circus in which the Card Player live update team took large part. Like a circus, oftentimes the side action at poker tournaments is as interesting as what's going on at the main stage. Because, while it's entertaining to see the elephants flop around, dropping 50-pound turds on the floor under the big top, most of the time it's more fun to watch Ula "The Painproof Rubber Girl" drive a 12-inch metal spike into her face.
JOE: I think we all know what it's like to be sitting at home, bored, unable to masturbate until the friction burns you've incurred during your roommate's last weekend at home have healed, so you decide you're going to play a $5 tournament online. You log in to your favorite poker site and realize you haven't won a tournament in a while, and your bankroll is looking a little bleak: $3.25, to be exact. You can't deposit any more money, because your debit charges haven't gone through from the weekend yet, and you can't exactly remember if you ordered two "Redheaded Sluts," or if you completely bankrolled two actual redheaded sluts. Regardless, you're going to need to almost double what you've got in order to buy into the tournament, so you decide to go into a 25¢-50¢ table and raise the shit out of every pot until you get your three bucks. Well, that's pretty much exactly what was going down at every cash game at the Rio. Except multiply it by a hundred. Or a thousand.
When the World Series of Poker is in town, it's like all of Vegas is on tilt. Everyone wants to get in on the game, and the Rio easily facilitated that. With the added space of a room the size of two football fields, they spread games as low as $1-$2 blinds no-limit hold'em all the way up to Maserati-Porsche blinds triple-draw with a Cadillac ante. In an atmosphere in which it was so easy to pick your poison, every cross section of the poker world was on hand. There were pros and amateurs, low rollers and high rollers, tourists and locals, fish and sharks, tournament players and cash game players - bankrolled and broke - and true playas and hustlers. Life at the 2005 World Series of Poker really was like a box of chocolates - a desperate box of chocolates that would steal the pennies from a dead man's eyes.
For those of you who believe in reincarnation, and in Greek mythology (anyone will tell you I'm a fervent subscriber to both - as well as Card Player and all of its wonderful advertisers' products), you will understand what I mean when I say that the two girls working the board at the WSOP cash games were direct descendants of the Sirens themselves. Hot little Latina Sirens. It's impossible to recreate the melodious nature of their Hillary-and-Hayley-Duff-on-helium-but-with-a-slight-Hispanic-accent voices, but I could swear I heard these two sweet vixens calling my name at least 10 to 20 times a day. Let's just say that as a result of these two "Sirenitas," on more than one occasion Scott had to keep my ship from crashing onto the reefs of $25-$50 pot-limit Omaha.
Late night during the early stages of the tournament, I saw a $50-$100 blinds no-limit game going. Haralabos Voulgaris, Michael "The Grinder" Mizrachi, and Gabe Thaler were the only three players at the table that I recognized. Not coincidently, two out of the three of them, and I won't say which two, were sitting on a couple of nice stacks. There were piles of $100 chips in the middle of the table with the edges of $100 bills fighting to be seen through the black clay mass. The action made my palms sweat, and I was clearly just a railbird. I watched "The Grinder" go into the tank for five minutes over a $10,000 call, and eventually give up a pot that most assuredly could have bought him another H2. What is perhaps not evident to people who just catch poker on TV is that for some of the pros, for example Barry Greenstein, Doyle Brunson, and Chip Reese, the buy-in to major tournaments - even the main event of the World Series of Poker - oftentimes doesn't even cost them as much as a round of blinds in their regular cash games.
I had to explain to Scott what liar's poker is. I'll assume some of you don't know it either. Liar's poker is a game in which you take a dollar bill and, by using the letters and numbers on the bill, announce a poker hand that you've got. "I've got a pair of threes." Your opponent is then able to use his own serial numbers as well as yours in order to make a better hand. "I've got three threes." The trick is that either person can lie at any time. If you don't think you can beat three threes then you're forced either to give up your bill, or call the other person. If the other person wasn't lying, you lose. If he was, you win. It's a simple and horrible game. The day I learned how to play I "taught" the game to my dad. He promptly won my money. Being that I was 8, you would think he wouldn't take the $5 bill I had just received from the tooth fairy. He took both it and the other $5 I had left over from a birthday card in order to "teach me not to gamble." He proceeded to use the money to buy a pack of Marlboro Reds and some scratch-off tickets. You can only imagine the years of therapy that went down the toilet when I noticed Phil Laak and several other degenerates playing this game with $100 bills.
Half the time it seemed like the big-name pros would have preferred to be in on the side action. They would stand up and peek across the room into quadrant four, checking to see if anything more worthy of their attention was going on. Is there a donkey at the table? These guys were sitting in a tournament guaranteeing half a million dollars, and were in a way weighing their opportunity cost. "Hey, that guy in the 'high roller' t-shirt with the green plastic 'Las Vegas' visor is an easy mark, and Antonio is going to fleece him before I get lucky enough to bust out of this tournament. Damn it!"
On the day of the first $1,000 rebuy event, Scott and I actually witnessed a man push all in several times in a row lamenting "Please! Send me to a live game!" And why wouldn't he? The fourth quadrant of the Amazon Room at the Rio was just stuffed to the gills (note the fish metaphor) with such characters as Rocky Rockford. If you saw the incredibly handsome yet still very intelligent Richard Belsky's interview with Rocky on CardPlayer.com, you will remember that Rocky, and his incredibly fake-sounding but actual name, left his job in Colorado as a ski instructor to attempt to become a professional poker player at this year's World Series. There, however, exists no video footage of two days later when Rocky lost the last $200 of his bankroll playing $1-$2 no-limit with Scott and me at the Gold Coast. I'm pretty sure that while he swam his way out the door, Rocky managed to let us know he was heading back for dry land, having chummed away something in the ballpark of $40,000.
This is to say nothing of the satellite action going on. Satellites are the poker equivalent of waiting in line for concert tickets, except with the added pressure that you could get to the ticket window, find out the George Michael concert is sold out, and still have to pay the cashier. Instead of freezing to death outside, you might get cold-decked. Either way, you're guaranteed to be stuck in line, with no assurance that you won't be next to Sam Grizzle for a couple hours. The Rio ran satellites from $50 to $1,050. You might be up against a group of frat guys in town for a buddy's bachelor party, planning to extend their trip if they could win a seat in the big one, and who also just happen to love the words "all in." You might also be up against Greg Raymer. That's the beauty of poker.
I like the concert ticket metaphor, but my experience was more like this: "Oh boy oh boy, I sure do hope there's gonna be some Barenaked Ladies tickets left by the time I get up to that there window, a-hyuk!" There are only two people in line ahead of me, so I'm thinking I'm in pretty good shape. Then I find out that the first guy is buying 49,999 tickets and the other guy is Mel Judah.
The frenzy of Chinese poker is by far the most hilarious to watch. If I were the Travel Channel, I would immediately develop and start airing The World Chinese Poker Tour (WCPT). In Chinese poker, players show down 13 cards, and then fire money back and forth like it's infected with smallpox. Someone ships $1,000 to the guy in seat No. 3, the guy in seat No. 3 then ships back $300 to that same someone, then someone reaches behind his cards, snaps the paper band from a stack of $10,000, and ships half of it to a guy on the rail wearing cutoff jeans and an Usher concert T-shirt. To the casual observer it makes about as much sense as the plot of "O," although enough money changes hands to draw enormous crowds to the rail, even at 4 in the morning. The players seem to have a pretty good grasp of what's going on. I think.
I really couldn't follow what in the H was going on with Chinese poker. I would assume it's so popular because no matter how much you play it, you always want to play it again an hour later.
The action around town was still good, but the Rio had most of it locked up. The Palms tried to get together a tournament summer series, figuring they could get the overflow and bustouts from the WSOP, or the players too undercapitalized to play. But the gigantic function hall they had converted into a poker room ended up looking more like an undersold real estate seminar for owners of those soggy plots of Florida swampland that Erik Estrada sells when stations go into paid programming for the night. However, I don't think I played one side game at the Rio for the first four weeks I was in Vegas. Not to dog the Rio, they did an excellent job, but imagine working 15 hours as day as a photographer for Playboy, and then going out to the strip club for fun. By the time work was over, I would rather have gotten my gambling fix playing dominoes with three meth addicts in a back alley behind the New Frontier. In fact, I can't remember if I just made that up, or if it actually happened.
I think the amount of blood in the water at the Rio can be summed up by the first and last conversation I had with a no-limit dealer at a $1-$2 table. "Excuse me sir, what's the max buy-in?" "One-twenty." But as I looked around at various stacks seated at the table, I noticed that I'd be the only one with less than $400 in front of me. These guys were literally licking their chops at the thought of me and my $120 in white chips, and I couldn't help but feel like I was about to be raped worse than Pauly Shore doing a guest spot on Oz. I had to get out of there. So I bluffed. "Huh. Only $120? Well in that case, are you guys spreading anything bigger?" "Why don't you go talk to the floorman, Guppy." Holy shit. Did I reek of fish? Was this entire place filled with sharks to the point where even the dealer knew enough to call me a guppy? Well, turns out I misheard the dealer. The floorman's name actually was Guppy - but the scare was enough to keep me from ever sitting down at a table at the Rio.
This isn't to say that I never participated in any side action at all. There was an "Enchanted Unicorn" slot machine I was particularly fond of, and there was of course the genius game our roommate Milo invented entitled "Wife, Daughter, or Hooker?" Eventually we decided that if the aforementioned Gold Coast Casino was good enough for depressed and dejected ex-WSOP hopefuls, it was good enough for us, and is good enough for an article in itself. Where else can you find a game with $2-$4 pots that consistently crack the $200 mark and sweet old ladies who rake pots while saying "I'm going to stab you in the throat."
Venturing outside the Rio for action would have its highs and lows like the rest of the trip, far too plentiful to be described in a single paragraph. Let's just put it this way. The only thing that didn't happen was us getting shot.
Joe might have been grazed actually …
JOE: I think we all know what it's like to be sitting at home, bored, unable to masturbate until the friction burns you've incurred during your roommate's last weekend at home have healed, so you decide you're going to play a $5 tournament online. You log in to your favorite poker site and realize you haven't won a tournament in a while, and your bankroll is looking a little bleak: $3.25, to be exact. You can't deposit any more money, because your debit charges haven't gone through from the weekend yet, and you can't exactly remember if you ordered two "Redheaded Sluts," or if you completely bankrolled two actual redheaded sluts. Regardless, you're going to need to almost double what you've got in order to buy into the tournament, so you decide to go into a 25¢-50¢ table and raise the shit out of every pot until you get your three bucks. Well, that's pretty much exactly what was going down at every cash game at the Rio. Except multiply it by a hundred. Or a thousand.
When the World Series of Poker is in town, it's like all of Vegas is on tilt. Everyone wants to get in on the game, and the Rio easily facilitated that. With the added space of a room the size of two football fields, they spread games as low as $1-$2 blinds no-limit hold'em all the way up to Maserati-Porsche blinds triple-draw with a Cadillac ante. In an atmosphere in which it was so easy to pick your poison, every cross section of the poker world was on hand. There were pros and amateurs, low rollers and high rollers, tourists and locals, fish and sharks, tournament players and cash game players - bankrolled and broke - and true playas and hustlers. Life at the 2005 World Series of Poker really was like a box of chocolates - a desperate box of chocolates that would steal the pennies from a dead man's eyes.
For those of you who believe in reincarnation, and in Greek mythology (anyone will tell you I'm a fervent subscriber to both - as well as Card Player and all of its wonderful advertisers' products), you will understand what I mean when I say that the two girls working the board at the WSOP cash games were direct descendants of the Sirens themselves. Hot little Latina Sirens. It's impossible to recreate the melodious nature of their Hillary-and-Hayley-Duff-on-helium-but-with-a-slight-Hispanic-accent voices, but I could swear I heard these two sweet vixens calling my name at least 10 to 20 times a day. Let's just say that as a result of these two "Sirenitas," on more than one occasion Scott had to keep my ship from crashing onto the reefs of $25-$50 pot-limit Omaha.
Late night during the early stages of the tournament, I saw a $50-$100 blinds no-limit game going. Haralabos Voulgaris, Michael "The Grinder" Mizrachi, and Gabe Thaler were the only three players at the table that I recognized. Not coincidently, two out of the three of them, and I won't say which two, were sitting on a couple of nice stacks. There were piles of $100 chips in the middle of the table with the edges of $100 bills fighting to be seen through the black clay mass. The action made my palms sweat, and I was clearly just a railbird. I watched "The Grinder" go into the tank for five minutes over a $10,000 call, and eventually give up a pot that most assuredly could have bought him another H2. What is perhaps not evident to people who just catch poker on TV is that for some of the pros, for example Barry Greenstein, Doyle Brunson, and Chip Reese, the buy-in to major tournaments - even the main event of the World Series of Poker - oftentimes doesn't even cost them as much as a round of blinds in their regular cash games.
I had to explain to Scott what liar's poker is. I'll assume some of you don't know it either. Liar's poker is a game in which you take a dollar bill and, by using the letters and numbers on the bill, announce a poker hand that you've got. "I've got a pair of threes." Your opponent is then able to use his own serial numbers as well as yours in order to make a better hand. "I've got three threes." The trick is that either person can lie at any time. If you don't think you can beat three threes then you're forced either to give up your bill, or call the other person. If the other person wasn't lying, you lose. If he was, you win. It's a simple and horrible game. The day I learned how to play I "taught" the game to my dad. He promptly won my money. Being that I was 8, you would think he wouldn't take the $5 bill I had just received from the tooth fairy. He took both it and the other $5 I had left over from a birthday card in order to "teach me not to gamble." He proceeded to use the money to buy a pack of Marlboro Reds and some scratch-off tickets. You can only imagine the years of therapy that went down the toilet when I noticed Phil Laak and several other degenerates playing this game with $100 bills.
Half the time it seemed like the big-name pros would have preferred to be in on the side action. They would stand up and peek across the room into quadrant four, checking to see if anything more worthy of their attention was going on. Is there a donkey at the table? These guys were sitting in a tournament guaranteeing half a million dollars, and were in a way weighing their opportunity cost. "Hey, that guy in the 'high roller' t-shirt with the green plastic 'Las Vegas' visor is an easy mark, and Antonio is going to fleece him before I get lucky enough to bust out of this tournament. Damn it!"
On the day of the first $1,000 rebuy event, Scott and I actually witnessed a man push all in several times in a row lamenting "Please! Send me to a live game!" And why wouldn't he? The fourth quadrant of the Amazon Room at the Rio was just stuffed to the gills (note the fish metaphor) with such characters as Rocky Rockford. If you saw the incredibly handsome yet still very intelligent Richard Belsky's interview with Rocky on CardPlayer.com, you will remember that Rocky, and his incredibly fake-sounding but actual name, left his job in Colorado as a ski instructor to attempt to become a professional poker player at this year's World Series. There, however, exists no video footage of two days later when Rocky lost the last $200 of his bankroll playing $1-$2 no-limit with Scott and me at the Gold Coast. I'm pretty sure that while he swam his way out the door, Rocky managed to let us know he was heading back for dry land, having chummed away something in the ballpark of $40,000.
This is to say nothing of the satellite action going on. Satellites are the poker equivalent of waiting in line for concert tickets, except with the added pressure that you could get to the ticket window, find out the George Michael concert is sold out, and still have to pay the cashier. Instead of freezing to death outside, you might get cold-decked. Either way, you're guaranteed to be stuck in line, with no assurance that you won't be next to Sam Grizzle for a couple hours. The Rio ran satellites from $50 to $1,050. You might be up against a group of frat guys in town for a buddy's bachelor party, planning to extend their trip if they could win a seat in the big one, and who also just happen to love the words "all in." You might also be up against Greg Raymer. That's the beauty of poker.
I like the concert ticket metaphor, but my experience was more like this: "Oh boy oh boy, I sure do hope there's gonna be some Barenaked Ladies tickets left by the time I get up to that there window, a-hyuk!" There are only two people in line ahead of me, so I'm thinking I'm in pretty good shape. Then I find out that the first guy is buying 49,999 tickets and the other guy is Mel Judah.
The frenzy of Chinese poker is by far the most hilarious to watch. If I were the Travel Channel, I would immediately develop and start airing The World Chinese Poker Tour (WCPT). In Chinese poker, players show down 13 cards, and then fire money back and forth like it's infected with smallpox. Someone ships $1,000 to the guy in seat No. 3, the guy in seat No. 3 then ships back $300 to that same someone, then someone reaches behind his cards, snaps the paper band from a stack of $10,000, and ships half of it to a guy on the rail wearing cutoff jeans and an Usher concert T-shirt. To the casual observer it makes about as much sense as the plot of "O," although enough money changes hands to draw enormous crowds to the rail, even at 4 in the morning. The players seem to have a pretty good grasp of what's going on. I think.
I really couldn't follow what in the H was going on with Chinese poker. I would assume it's so popular because no matter how much you play it, you always want to play it again an hour later.
The action around town was still good, but the Rio had most of it locked up. The Palms tried to get together a tournament summer series, figuring they could get the overflow and bustouts from the WSOP, or the players too undercapitalized to play. But the gigantic function hall they had converted into a poker room ended up looking more like an undersold real estate seminar for owners of those soggy plots of Florida swampland that Erik Estrada sells when stations go into paid programming for the night. However, I don't think I played one side game at the Rio for the first four weeks I was in Vegas. Not to dog the Rio, they did an excellent job, but imagine working 15 hours as day as a photographer for Playboy, and then going out to the strip club for fun. By the time work was over, I would rather have gotten my gambling fix playing dominoes with three meth addicts in a back alley behind the New Frontier. In fact, I can't remember if I just made that up, or if it actually happened.
I think the amount of blood in the water at the Rio can be summed up by the first and last conversation I had with a no-limit dealer at a $1-$2 table. "Excuse me sir, what's the max buy-in?" "One-twenty." But as I looked around at various stacks seated at the table, I noticed that I'd be the only one with less than $400 in front of me. These guys were literally licking their chops at the thought of me and my $120 in white chips, and I couldn't help but feel like I was about to be raped worse than Pauly Shore doing a guest spot on Oz. I had to get out of there. So I bluffed. "Huh. Only $120? Well in that case, are you guys spreading anything bigger?" "Why don't you go talk to the floorman, Guppy." Holy shit. Did I reek of fish? Was this entire place filled with sharks to the point where even the dealer knew enough to call me a guppy? Well, turns out I misheard the dealer. The floorman's name actually was Guppy - but the scare was enough to keep me from ever sitting down at a table at the Rio.
This isn't to say that I never participated in any side action at all. There was an "Enchanted Unicorn" slot machine I was particularly fond of, and there was of course the genius game our roommate Milo invented entitled "Wife, Daughter, or Hooker?" Eventually we decided that if the aforementioned Gold Coast Casino was good enough for depressed and dejected ex-WSOP hopefuls, it was good enough for us, and is good enough for an article in itself. Where else can you find a game with $2-$4 pots that consistently crack the $200 mark and sweet old ladies who rake pots while saying "I'm going to stab you in the throat."
Venturing outside the Rio for action would have its highs and lows like the rest of the trip, far too plentiful to be described in a single paragraph. Let's just put it this way. The only thing that didn't happen was us getting shot.
Joe might have been grazed actually …
