 Depending
on how you want to do the accounting, today is either Day One,
Day Two, or Day Three of the 32nd Annual World Series
of Poker, but we finally set the final table in a record
breaking opening $2,000 Limit Hold'em Event at 5:40 a.m., an
old Bay 101 nemesis of mine, San Jose, California's John Pires,
was probably just thinking it was His Day.
With an astounding 615 entrants (shattering last year's record
of 496) shooting at a first prize of $441,440, Pires holds
the chip lead with $327,500, and much as Jim McManus
vaulted into contention in last year's Championship
event in the time after Mickey Appleman survived an
all-in small blind, Pires almost doubled the stack
he brought to the "quasi" final table of ten players
("quasi final" because the real final table later
today will indeed consist of nine players; when we reach ten
finalists on day one of each event, tournament officials are
combining the players into one table of ten, to avoid hand-for-hand
delay) when Phi Nguyen, who arrived at the table with
only $6,000 and immediately had to post $5,000 of it as a
small blind, survived a four-way all in by making a straight
with 6-7.
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"It
looked like he was going to 'pull an Appleman'." |
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Nguyen's stack continued to rise, and for a brief
in time that somehow seemed an eternity, it looked like he
was going to "pull an Appleman" and charge
close to the chip lead. But in the end, after five different
players took turns surviving as short stacks, Nguyen
fell, exactly the result everyone had expected an hour before,
but in that eventful hour, both the blinds and Pires'
stack grew higher.
When we start back at 4:00 today, the blinds will be $5,000-$15,000,
playing $15,000-$30,000, and our final table will look like
this:
|
Seat |
Player |
Chip Count |
| 1 |
Ralph PiPiero |
$112,000 |
| 2 |
Ken Shareval |
$113,500 |
| 3 |
Vani Dollison |
$242,000 |
| 4 |
Eli Elezra |
$80,000 |
| 5 |
Pete Vilandos |
$119,500 |
| 6 |
Chau Giang |
$69,500 |
| 7 |
Meng La |
$87,000 |
| 8 |
Sirous Baghchehsaraig |
$85,000 |
| 9 |
John Pires |
$327,500 |
If the spellings on any of those names are wrong, blame the
players, whose handwriting at this late hour left, shall we
say, much to be desired.
I felt like a bit of a genius, because with 18 players left
and the chips rather even distributed I had predicted to World
Champion Chris "Jesus" Ferguson that the (ladies,
are you listening?) tall, dark and ruggedly handsome Pires,
who always seems to sport that same three day growth of beard
that worked so well for Tom Selleck, would win the
tournament. He's a long way from winning, of course, but with
the blinds this high, a big stack is going to give a big edge,
especially if anyone goes into survival mode, because the
ladder steps the rest of the way ($19,090, $23,860, $29,830,
$41,760, $53,690, $71,585, $113,345, $226,690, $441,440) ain't
chump change.
It took four hours to reduce the following "in the
money" 27 to our elite final table:
10th-12th, $14, 315 each: Phi Nguyen, David Oppenheimer,
Jack Keller.
13th-15th, $11,930 each: David Essad, Samuel Arzoin,
Richard Fong.
16th-18th, $9,545 each: David Tran, Julian Levy, Phillip
Nguyen.
Third table finishers, $7,160 each: George Paravoliasakis,
"Vito" (there were a number of players who
were not anxious to see their names on the Internet, for some
reason), "Wink," Mark Bremont, Dan Barnett,
Mel Judah, John Esposito, Andre Boyer, and Buddy "Visor"
Ashmore.
TAKE THAT, NASDAQ!
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"The
opening limit hold'em event usually has more 'dead money'." |
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I had planned to enter today's opening $2,000 Limit Hold'em
Event for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, the opening
limit hold'em event usually has more "dead money"
(entrants who have no realistic chance to win) than any event
with the possible exception of the final, and second, because
it was the one event I knew I could play where if I survived
for a few hours I wouldn't be missing my journalistic obligation
to cover the 4:00 p.m. final table from the previous day's
event.
I had started wondering a bit about the "dead money"
issue, though, because a lot of prophets of doom had been
saying that the pounding the stock market has taken in the
past year would wind up hurting the World Series. Attendance
would be down, almost certainly, these optimists declared.
It turned out I was exactly right to wonder about the "dead
money" issue, for exactly the wrong reasons.
As I took a look around my starting table, and saw myself
surrounded by Jennifer Harman, John Esposito, Kevin Song,
Men "the Master" Nguyen, and Alan Goerhing,
I figured any equity I might have from "no chance entrants"
had vanished with this unlovely draw. Just about the time
I figured that out, Tournament Director Bob Thompson
grabbed the microphone and told the assembled throng that
we had 615 starters, blasting last year's record of 496 out
of the water by a mere 24%.
Plenty of dead money, in other words, just not at my table,
unless you counted me, because I didn't last too long. Getting
two pairs of pocket aces cracked along with a pair of pocket
kings will do that to a guy, especially when the dead money
was somewhere else in the room… or in the other room,
because as with the Championship Event last year, this
tournament was far too large to fit into the main tournament
room, and we had players both upstairs and downstairs.
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"The
2001 WSOP is off to a roaring start" |
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So much for the naysayers. The 2001 WSOP is off to
a roaring start, and if the Big One enjoys the same climb
in attendance, the winner will walk off with a $2,000,000
first prize; that's what's been promised if we have 625 starters,
and this year's WSOP is a week longer than last year's,
so that's another full week of supersatellites to pad the
attendance figures.
DAY ONE IS ACTUALLY DAY TWO, OR THREE, OR…?
Call it a personal bias. I consider the WSOP to have
started today (which was actually yesterday), even though
the $500 Limit Hold'em "Casino Employees" tournament
began the day before yesterday. The winner does indeed get
a bracelet, but I figure any event that excludes most of the
world's best players really shouldn't be counted quite the
same as an open event. I've said that before and I'm sticking
to my guns, even though I know and like this year's winner,
Travis Jonas, a dealer who works the tournament circuit,
and who had to battle his way through a field that included
players like Dave Crunkleton, Rod Peate and Denny
Axel.
Travis came to the final table as the chip leader
and was never seriously threatened. His chip total never dropped
below the $28,300 he brought to the final table, and once
he got his total to $50,000, it never dipped below that. He
used his stack and experience to cruise to victory and a nice,
no-deal payday:
- Travis Jonas, $40,200
- Jae Kim, $20,640
- Dave Crunkleton, $10,320
- Robert Tamanana, $6,520
- Don Harkey, $4,890
- Kenny Franks, $3,800
- Royal Miles, $2,715
- Ben He, $2,175
- Raymond Cruz, $1,750
Crunkleton, a two-time WSOP Championship Event final
table finisher, started us right off with a nice "chip
and a chair" story when he arrived at the final table
short stacked, eventually got down to a single $500 chip,
and eventually parlayed that chip into third place.
TOMORROW'S BIG SHOW
I'll be back with the report on tomorrow's big money conclusion
tomorrow, but then you're going to get what I expect will
be a pleasant change of pace, although for a personally difficult
reason. The phone call I received this morning that I thought
was my wake-up call turned out to be my sister telling me
that my step-father had passed away unexpectedly, and so I
am heading out Monday morning to support my mother and sister
and attend the funeral in New York.
Veteran tournament reporter Mike Paulle, who much
to my regret retired from tournament writing after last year's
WSOP, has volunteered to make a special Mario Lemieux
(my analogy, not his) unretirement to help me out during the
family crisis, and he will cover the next two final tables.
I expect to be back in action on Wednesday… so in a way
that will sort of be my tomorrow, even though it is three
days from now.
I can't continue my time traveling delirium by saying something
cute like "time flies when you're having fun,"
because personally, today was not a fun day for your reporter.
But despite fears about the Nasdaq and various other
uncertainties that surrounded the start of this year's WSOP,
it's clear that poker's growth isn't going to stop… anytime
soon.
Andrew N.S. Glazer, Editor
Wednesday Nite Poker
For more information on this newsletter read "What
to Expect from Wednesday Nite Poker".
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