Standards, Standers and Survivors

Today saw my first unsure moment at this year's World Series. A player near our media table, a highly visible pro who had been drinking *something* all day, was hammered to the point that it was disrupting play. The question became, "Should I report this? If so, how do I report it?"

As Joe Friday would say, "Just the facts, ma'am." After getting the approval from the people in charge at PokerNews and with an assist from Pauly, I took an extremely neutral approach to reporting this tidbit and made sure that only completely substantiated facts appeared in my post. Everyone who read the post agreed that I had reported the behavior in an appropriate manner, but I see how easy it is to inject the reporter's own interpretations of facts into the reporting of those facts.

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Today's annoyance at the Rio: three large flat-panel televisions hang over the long hallway that leads to the Amazon Room. Although I haven't spent enough time beneath them to be sure, it appears that they are showing the ESPN broadcast of each of the last hands of the Main Event from 2003 through 2007 on an endless loop. That doesn't bother me much. It's the knot of people that this causes in the hallway. Seriously, haven't you people seen these same exact hands play out over a thousand times on ESPN?

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Tomorrow is looking to be a killer day. We ended play on Day 1b of Event #2 with 224 players. Combined with the 224 from yesterday, that makes a Day 2 field of 448 that has to play all the way down to 9. Oy. One of the floor people told us, "Never underestimate how badly these people play." After watching people repeatedly stack off with top-top the last two days, I can see his point. I don't take much solace in it though. Time to bust out the greenies...