Odds and Ends, Monday Edition

At this time last year, I was in Sydney preparing to cover the APPT Grand Final. Despite covering two of the three APPT tournaments held this year, I wasn't able to make it down to Sydney for the Grand Final that starts tomorrow. It's a shame but I'm sure the three Americans that are there will get on famously without me.

In the meantime... I'm starting to look forward to the arrival of a large group of clowns next week -- and I don't mean the ones associated with the National Finals of Rodeo. I've done a minimal amount of legwork at the request of true mastermind April to get the Saturday tournament set up at Caesar's. Start time is 1pm, buy-in is $100, the rest of the details are available on April's site. I promised the TD at Caesar's one thing, so here it is:

A few months ago, Caesar's started offering a bad-beat jackpot. It works the same way the jackpot at the Station casinos works: it starts at something high (quad 8s?) and then each week that it hasn't been hit the qualifier is lowered. When I was in the room a few weeks ago to work out the tourney details it hadn't been hit in a while. I have no idea if it's been hit since then. Anyway, there will be plenty of side-game action (I imagine). If something like a BBJ is a sweetener for you, you might consider offering Caesar's some of your play.

Lastly, City Center is opening in phases starting today. Unfortunately Aria -- the new gambling property in City Center with what is supposed to become the main MGM poker room on the Strip -- does not officially open until December 16. All you WPBTers that were hoping to get a fresh look at a new room will just have to come back to Vegas another time.

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Table Image

If people at the table ask, I tell them I'm a lawyer from New York City. Both statements are true. I am a lawyer. I am from NYC.

As I wrote a few weeks ago about ditching the iPod and trying to engage people in lively banter, I've realized that part of my "job" when I'm playing poker is to make the people around me relax and feel comfortable. Tourists playing for the first time in a casino (or on their annual trip to a casino) get very edgy when playing at a table full of locals. On the other hand, if they feel that you're "one of them" they relax more and don't worry about tangling with you as much.

It's not a stretch for me to make those statements about myself. I am still a licensed lawyer. I consider myself from New York City since I lived there for almost 15 years. The facts that I now live in Las Vegas and work in poker are carefully and conveniently omitted. (You'd think I'd have a problem if they asked where I was staying, but they almost never do.) And I am perfectly happy to carry on any discussion about NYC or about my old line of work in order to further the image.

I doubt that these lies will bring a chorus of detractors upon me the way PokerGrump's recent post about H1N1 did -- because mine are not a matter of life and death. They're about separating someone who has made a conscious decision to gamble some money from that money. But the thrust of it is similar. Lying is one of the first life skills that young children learn. Many things in life boil down to asking the right questions and believing the responses you get.

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The Experiment Continues

I had a great idea for a post the other day but I didn't write it down. The idea has since vanished into the ether. You would think that, as a writer, I'd have learned by now to write down my ideas.

One idea that I had a month ago that I didn't need to write down was to tinker with playing NLHE cash games instead of LHE cash games. CK has had more success here in Vegas with NLHE than I've had with LHE, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to find LHE games bigger than $4-$8 in Vegas (Venetian promotion notwithstanding) that have a favorable balance of decent-to-bad players.

Years ago Vegas turned over from a LHE town into a NLHE town. The range of games and the juicy action of L.A.- or A.C.-style LHE doesn't exist here. For a long time I stubbornly tried to fight it but early indications of my NLHE experiment suggest that I was an idiot to do so.

Am I running good right now? Maybe a little. Two nights ago a decent portion of my profit came by turning a two-outer against two players who both slow-played flopped trips against my top pair+board pair and then couldn't get away when I made a bigger full house on the turn. Last night I flopped quads and managed to stack a guy for $200.

But I also feel that in NLHE I do not find myself in marginal spots as frequently as in LHE. I can control my variance much more easily and, because of the player caliber and the betting structure, am more easily able to narrow an opponent's range. It also doesn't hurt that many NLHE players will happily stack off with one pair.

That's easy money.

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The Airplane Talker

CK posted something to Twitter this morning about airplane tilt. It reminded me about the last leg of my flight home from Cebu -- the LAX to LAS leg.

First of all, I had a middle seat. Unless I'm traveling with friends, I normally go for a window because I want the ability to curl up in a ball and fall asleep without having people clambering over me. For the 11-hour flight from Taipei to LA I didn't get out of my seat once. That's the way I like it. Toss and turn a bit, sure, but sleep as much as I can. It makes the flight pass much more quickly.

I didn't bother to change my middle seat for the flight from LAX to LAS because it's a 45-minute flight. I can handle a middle seat for 45 minutes. But then this guy sat down on my right.

It's been my experience that "talkers" on airplanes are slightly-older-than-middle-aged, unmarried and usually men. My neighbor was all of those things. And it's not to say that he wasn't a pleasant individual. But my terse responses to his remarks and questions didn't serve as the indication that I wasn't interested in a conversation that I had hoped they would. Instead they encouraged him. (And for the record, when I noticed no wedding band, I couldn't resist sating my curiosity and asked if he was married. In fact, he was not.)

On the one hand, I don't want to be a dick to someone who's being friendly, right? These "talkers" are just lonely people who don't get to have much other interaction with new people in their daily lives. On the other hand, I had a book I wanted to read or a nap I wanted to take. It's not my job to entertain.

New Yorkers, maybe, feel differently about this than most people. New Yorkers spend so much time as a "captive audience" -- because of their daily use of mass transit -- that they observe an unwritten protocol of not forcing a lengthy conversation on another person just because that person is seated nearby. And that's not to say I've never struck up a conversation with a stranger on the subway or responded to one. They tend to be brief, limited to something particular like a book someone is reading. The conversation quickly hits a natural lull and that's the end.

For this flight, for 45 minutes, I suffered silently. But when it gets really bad, I take out my noise-canceling headphones, put them on and open a book. Maybe that makes me a jerk, but according to Dawn Summers I'm the original assface. I may as well live up to my rep.

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A Shame to Be Home

Last night I arrived home, after 28 hours, from Cebu. Cebu is the "second city" of the Philippines and played host to a 2009 APPT stop. In 2008 I referred to the Philippines as the Mexico of Asia (or, at the very least, Manila as the Tijuana of the Philippines). The location where the APPT event was held in 2007 and 2008, in the heart of the Malate section of Manila, could charitably be described as "sketchy" outside the walls of the hotel. This year the event was at a resort in Cebu. It sounded great in theory, but after my experiences at the "resort" in Cyprus for WPT Cyprus, I was skeptical that the Cebu resort would live up to the hype.

Boy was I wrong.

Everything about the week -- from the room, to the food, to the entertainment and the service -- was over-the-top amazing. Things kicked off on Tuesday night with one of the better PokerStars parties I've been to (and I've been to a score of EPT, LAPT and APPT parties). It was beach-side, with live music, fireworks, fire dancers, APPT models for company, a full open bar and more food than I would have believed possible. There was a whole roast pig AND a whole roast calf. The party was followed up by an after-party at another spot on the resort where a DJ mixed dance music for a few more hours.

We then had two nights "off" -- one I spent at the resort, the other in Cebu City with Mark Vos, Tony Dunst and a few random poker players -- before a party on Friday night at a club in Cebu City that was hosted by the Metro Card Club, a local partner of the APPT and the FPT. Saturday and Sunday nights wound up being late nights at the resort's ocean-front bar, soft ocean breezes keep things just cool enough.

We even had the added benefit of the Pacquiao-Cotto fight, on a large projection screen, in the tournament room Sunday morning before the final table began.

Of course the poker itself was exactly what we've come to expect from TD Danny McDonagh and his team. Cash games were running non-stop allowing with side events and a Main Event with an excellent structure that made for nine-hour working days. In the poker industry, a nine-hour day is blessedly brief.

My hat's off the APPT President Jeffrey Haas and his crew for putting together an outstanding and wildly successful event. The general consensus amongst many of the players was that Cebu would be an event they would not miss next year. Haas himself said he would be willing to be that the APPT could improve on this year's 319 players and top 500 next year.

I wouldn't be surprised at all.

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November Nine Errata

I'm sitting in a noodle shop in Taiwan (no, really) waiting for a flight to Manila so that I can connect with a puddle-jumper to Cebu. While I wait to play my next leg of Asian hopscotch, I'll download a few lingering thoughts from... whatever day that was that that the final table of the WSOP was played.

* WSOP and Harrah's made a *significant* improvement in stage design this year. Last year, people in the audience of the theater couldn't see the table at all. Instead they were forced to watch the action on two projection screens set up to the sides of the stage. This year it was done right -- the table was brought front and center on the stage so that everyone had a decent view of the action.

* If this were 2005, this final table would have LOL DONKAMENTS written all over it. If you were all in with the best hand, you were almost certainly doomed. I thought my proximity to the table might have something to do with it (I was sitting fifteen feet away and my cooler powers are legendary) until I remembered that no, poker is just a gross game sometimes.

* Did they or didn't they? After the elimination of Eric Buchman in fourth place, there was a very long break -- longer than typical for the usual bust-out interviews. When play resumed, all three players came back to the table together. Just saying...

* Phil Ivey is impervious to excitement or adrenalin. He was all-in with ace-king against ace-queen and didn't even flinch when Moon flopped a queen (of course he did!). In fact, Ivey reached over to a side table, picked up n apple he was eating, and took another bite out of it.

* The Handshaking Issue: You'll see on the broadcast that Darvin Moon eliminates three people: Phil Ivey, Steve Begleiter and Eric Buchman. What you won't see is Moon shake hands with Ivey or Begleiter. I have no idea why. If Phil Ivey was the picture of calm, Moon might have been asleep or dead. He beat Ivey (AQ v AK) and Begleiter (AQ v QQ) from behind, then sat stone still at the table when his miracle card hit and his opponent stood up to shakes hands and make his exit. Moon did, however, offer a handshake and a few words to Buchman.

* Despite eliminating three player, Moon finished the day with almost exactly the same number of chips that he had at the start of the day. That's because of two different mind-bogglingly bad raises: one with a total airball when Antoine Saout had already committed 60% of his chips to the pot, and the other with... ? (we'll find out tomorrow) when he check-raised Steve Begleiter from 5MM to 15MM and then folded to Begleiter's shove for 6MM more. As Joe Sebok said on the live Bluff audio commentary, Moon "could have had a Tarot card and a Snickers wrapper" and he still should have called.

That's all I've got for now. It was an honor to be that close to the action for the second year in a row. I hope everyone who followed along with the live coverage at PokerNews enjoyed my and FerricRamsium's efforts!

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T Minus One

The long wait for the 2009 November Nine is almost over. Tomorrow at noon local time, the WSOP Main Event resumes from the Penn & Teller Theater at the Rio. I'll be on hand as a last-minute addition to help PokerNews provide Live Reporting.

Last year the atmosphere outside the theater before the final table began was more akin to a live sporting event than a multi-million dollar poker tournament. As I described it in the PokerNews live-reporting blog that morning,

The day dawned gray and rainy in Las Vegas, but that hasn't dampened spirits in the hallway outside the Penn & Teller Theater. Spectators were lining up hours in advance of the official 9:30am opening of the theater to the general public, stretching almost all the way to Buzio's seafood restaurant. Nobody was tailgating in the parking lot outside, but there were people downing a breakfast of barbecued meats; people carrying giant foam hands and thunder-sticks; an army of people dressed as Dennis Phillips (red St. Louis Cardinals caps and white button-down shirts) and the usual assortment of attractive models hawking poker-related products. The Starbucks outside the theater was doing a brisk business.

Last year was the first time the November Nine concept had been tried. Most would agree it was a rousing success: there was significantly more interest in the live proceedings than was previously the case and ESPN's television ratings for the final episodes of its WSOP coverage showed a marked increase over 2007.

The 2008 November Nine spectacle gave us the Dennis Phillips Army with its truck horn and the Ooba! Ooba! chant of Peter Eastgate's entourage. What will this year bring? We're all going to find out in less than 24 hours.

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On Phil Ivey, Full Tilt and ESPN

I found myself home between 4pm and 5pm today and, thanks to Elaine, turned on my TV in time to catch Chad Millman's E:60 segment on Phil Ivey.

I haven't read the article that Millman wrote for ESPN the Magazine, but I knew the basic premise. Millman accompanied Ivey on a four-city, three-day jaunt to Foxwoods, then Montreal, and then Amsterdam before arriving in Salzburg, Austria for the Full Tilt Million Euro Challenge. Ivey diced for 30 minutes at Foxwoods, where he won about a quarter million, and 30 minutes in Montreal, where he won three-quarters of a million despite the fact that he let Millman throw the dice with $240,000 on the table and Millman sevened out. The segment included some clips of Ivey dicing, shots of private villas, private jets, fancy cars and all of the extravagances that you would expect along with such a lifestyle, and interviews with a childhood friend and Ivey's mother. There was also the story of Ivey's early days in NJ, his move to Vegas, and his success in Larry Flynt's high-stakes stud game in LA.

One thing that was missing? Almost any mention of Full Tilt Poker.

Sure, there were shots of various Team Full Tilters wearing the logo. There was an interview with Howard Lederer in front of a Full Tilt step-and-repeat (probably from Salzburg). And there was a throwaway line at the end of the segment about Ivey "building his image as the face of Full Tilt Poker". But that was it.

I know that Ivey's success in poker is what's driven him as far as he's gone in life, and Millman makes sure to point out that Ivey was reputed to have made $7 million playing online poker last year. But to me it's irresponsible journalism not to mention that Ivey is reputed to earn $1.5 million a MONTH from his association with FTP. That's $18 million a year, more than twice Ivey's take from cash games last year, and an amount that surely helps Ivey not to care about how much money he throws around when dicing or playing poker.

I'm not trying to take anything away from Ivey's poker accomplishments. He is without a doubt one of the very best (if not the best) players in the world and definitely the most feared player in the world. But by ignoring this major income source, ESPN paints a misleading image of a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants gambler. Ivey may be willing to go broke -- admitting there were some nights that he went broke and slept under the Boardwalk in AC are testament to that -- but unless his -EV gambling gets wildly out of control, Ivey doesn't have to WORRY about going broke ever again. ESPN gets a big demerit for missing (or choosing not to report) that angle of the story.

Still, despite that flaw, I'd recommend the segment. It's a glimpse of something most of us are never likely to see.

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