My third and final day of play at the Bellagio $25K WPT Championship was even more fucked up than day two, and my
swings were even more insane.
Early in the day, at the 1200/2400 level, I bumped up to 300K. During the next level at 1500/3K, I picked up a bunch of good hands, ran a crazy but successful bluff against Vivek Rajkumar, sucked out twice, vs. Matt Graham and Beth Shak respectively, and ended the level with almost 700K in chips. By the end of the next level, after missing a draw vs. Quinn Do's set, losing a close hand vs. a young British player named Javed Abrahams, and not properly adjusting to being card-dead, I was down to 300K. Near the end of the next level, 3k/6k, I was busted.
***
Sammy Farha was moved to my table sometime during the 2k/4k level; it was my first time playing with him, and he was basically a lot of fun to play with, as suave and charming as one might expect. The table was also filled out by David Kim and, briefly, Steve Brecher. For a moment or two, we had some fun talking about why there's no mainstream sponsorship in poker and about how Brecher was involved in computer programming at UCLA a solid seven years before I was born: "So, like, they had computers back then?"
"Well, they had one," Brecher quipped in his deadpan way.
"Sammy," I asked, "How much is Lacoste paying you to wear that hat?" Sammy just gave his trademark wry smile underneath his Lacoste baseball cap.
"Shit," I said, "By now you should be sponsored by Nike...Air Sammy...No, wait, better yet, Air Farha!" David Kim let out a hearty laugh. "And Phil Ivey ought to be the face of American Express."
Then I told Sammy that I wanted to come work for him next after I quit poker, and he said, "Well first I gotta get the job as Dealer Supervisor."
"Perfect," I decided, "I'll be Assistant Dealer Supervisor."
While this was going on, I was playing too loose on my shorter stack, which had dipped just below 200K. An orbit later, as I was rebounding and had built my stack back up near the 250K mark, the crucial hand that would have restored my tournament health was played:
I raised a pair of jacks UTG and Sammy, two players behind me, said "re-raise." He threw out the 17K to call and another 30K or so for the re-raise.
While I was waiting for the action to come back to me (and quite sure that I would wind up putting Sammy allin and most likely with the best hand), the overzealous dealer screwed up some aspect of the raise-take-in-the-chips procedure by bringing the 6K big blind into the center of the pot and then taking 6K out of my stack and then Sammy's, making it as unclear as it possible which player had to call what raise size while Abrahams, in the big blind, was still deciding what to do.
Farha, the would-be Dealer Supervisor, started giving the dealer a hard time and was totally correct. I got frustrated too, and in that instant I had a sinking premonition that after the dealing debacle was resolved, I was going to wind up getting a bunch of chips in the middle with the best hand yet losing.
Sure enough, the action was eventually folded back to me, and I said, "OK, Sammy, I'm allin."
Sammy, who will usually not fold a hand once he has touched his chips, much less put in a re-raise, called my allin without any further contemplation.
"I got a pair of jacks, Sammy, can you beat that?"
"Of course I can't beat that," he replied in his perfectly-toned accent, "But I'm gonna try," and he tabled a pair of eights. Before I knew it, the flop was dealt and Sammy hit his set, the hand was over, and I was paying him the 134K he had in his stack, leaving me with around 130K chips. Winning would have put me back up into solid 400K territory.
As soon as I paid off Farha, Yevgeniy Timoshenko, a young Ukrainian-American online poker superstar who was sitting on my direct left, did something which got under my skin and represents my number one pet peeve about online players in live tournaments: the way they deal with ascertaining chip counts.
"Sorry," he said, "but how much do you have left now?" Fuck, go screw yourself, I thought. But instead, I just frustratedly splayed my remaining chips out in front of me and said, "I dunno, what, 130K or so?" There was no reason for him to ask me how many chips I had at that point, as it was information he didn't need until he was going to be involved in a hand with me.
Several hands later Quinn Do called my raise out of the big blind when I opened with AA, and he put me allin for my remaining 85K stack on a flop that contained two spades. He had something like 87ss and spiked his flush on the river to bust me.
***
Meanwhile, I wound up getting interviewed twice during the day by female poker reporters, and for a decent change of pace, I got to speak a little about my evolving relationship with marijuana instead of entirely discussing dumb poker shit.
The first interview was with Lora Leviev, who is the newest poker media reporter on the scene, doing interviews for the new
Poker Battle website. This was after the 1200/2400 level. Her first question was about the "holiday" 4/20, which was the day before:
Two levels later, after going up to 700K and back down to 300K, Amanda Leatherman grabbed me for an interview on break and we covered some of the same topics:
WPT break interview.
