Monday, June 1, 2009 - Gene Bromberg
As you might expect there’s a big crowd watching the two remaining tables of World Champions battling it out. Phil Hellmuth is still in (as of a half-hour ago he had 10k, up from the starting stack of 1,000) and they’ll play until they get down to the final nine for the final table. There are 12 players left (Brad Daugherty, Scotty Nguyen and Chris Ferguson were just eliminated) so chances are they won’t play too deep into the night. I’ve been elbowing and kidney-punching my way around the rail snapping pictures and I thought now might be a good time to share a few of them.
I have to warn you, I like grainy black-and-white pics that have that old-time feel to them, so you’ll have to indulge me if I post a lot during the Series. Truth be told, a crappy color photo can be turned into a compelling B&W pic with a little creative adjustment. I’d like to think I salvaged something from a fairly blah photo here:
That’s Robert Varkonyi, Chris Moneymaker, Greg Raymer, Huck Seed, Dan Harrington, Carlos Mortensen, and Chris Ferguson. A from-the-hip snapshot captures seven World Champions.
Doyle Brunson. He’s always been The Man, he’ll always be The Man.
The always-thirsty Prince of Poker, Scotty Nguyen.
And, of course, Phil Hellmuth, wearing his game face. I think I would too, if I was in serious contention for a 1970 Corvette Stingray. And the title of Champion of Champions.
I’ll be posting a lot more photos here on the blog throughout the Series, and if you want to see those that either didn’t make the cut or couldn’t be shoehorned into a post no matter how hard I tried, they’re posted at my Flickr page. Now I’m gonna grab my machete and see if I can clear a path to Dan Harrington.
Tags: 2009 world series of poker, 2009 wsop, carlos mortensen, champions invitational, Chris Ferguson, chris moneymaker, dan harrington, doyle brunson, greg raymer, Huck Seed, Phil Hellmuth, Robert Varkonyi, Scotty Nguyen, world champions invitational, world series of poker, WSOP, wsop champions invitational, wsop invitational
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Saturday, April 4, 2009 - Phil Hellmuth
Y’all would be surprised—somewhat anyway—at all of the crazy bets that are made amongst the high stakes poker players. I’ve decided to write about just some of these fun bets.
“Chip” Reese betting Yosh Nakano $5,000 on whose bag would come up first at the baggage claim belt in Australia—Chip won. Mike Matusow betting me $10,000 on the position of Robert Varkonyi when he played a huge pot with John Shipley, where Varkonyi’s J-J was up against Shipley’s A-J at the 2002 World Series of Poker’s (WSOP) final table; Matusow bet they were on the button, and in the small blind, and Mike was right for $10,000 of my money!
Huck Seed betting me $10,000 that he could float in any “body of water” for 24 hours; Huck was allowed to wear a wetsuit. Huck lost, but I hear that he may have won the bet had he tried to do it in the Dead Sea. Huck flying to Madison, Wis. to play me nine-ball for $2,000 a game in my basement, on my beautiful Italian cloth pool table; I lost $24,000 in one night. Me betting Yosh Nakano on the Academy Awards in 1992 or so (the year that Marissa Tomei won best supporting actress for “My Cousin Vinny”), and losing $12,000 in the process; although I did win the first $2,000 bet of the night when Tomei won!
A group of player’s, who shall remain nameless, that bet $10,000 a “prop” while they play $80-$160 Hold’em at UltimateBet! Doyle Brunson and Mike Sexton scrambling vs. Huck Seed and Howard Lederer scrambling for $80,000 NASA (five ways) at TPC Summerlin; Brunson and Sexton were playing the red tees and Lederer and Seed the blue tees.
According to Doyle, he and Sexton were huge favorites in the match, hitting irons into every par five, and flip wedges into every par four. Even still, Doyle says Huck and Howard played like “supermen” and were ahead on the number sixteen green, staring at a short birdie putt to lock in to a big win when Doyle knocked in a fifty-footer for a birdie for his team. Now Howard (Bub) and Huck, to their credit, still made their putt. However, the Bub/Huck team then proceeded to implode with bogies on holes 17 and 18 to lose $160,000, when pars on those two last holes would have won them at least $160,000.
In August 1999, I bet Tiger Woods to win at 6 to 1 odds against Bill Gazes, for $1,000 a bet: luckily, I bet it three weeks in a row and won $18,000–go Tiger go! A couple of years back, I bet Curtis Bibb that David Duval would win at 12 to 1 odds after Duval was 10 strokes back going into the weekend. I checked the scores on Saturday night and gave up all hope, only to find out that Duval shot 59 on Sunday to win.
Mike Matusow and I betting $5,000 on the position I was in during a hand at the 2003 WSOP with 27 players left. Only thing was, we bet one week after the fact, and I hadn’t slept all week because the hand haunted me; not to mention that I had just finished writing an article about the hand. Of course Mike lost that one, but he figured it out in time to not lose $10,000—I was in the process of kicking up the bet when it dawned on him that he’d lost!
David Grey betting Doyle $10,000 a tournament on last longer bets at the WSOP a couple years back; Doyle won the first eight bets.
Then there’s Amarillo Slim’s classic bet where he bet several gentleman $38,000 (a ton of money at the time) that he could hit a golf ball at least one mile. By the way, Slim’s book, “Amarillo Slim in a World full of Fat people” is really excellent! The ground rules were set; the ball had to go one mile, but not downhill, he couldn’t hit it off of a mountain, he couldn’t hit it out of an airplane, he couldn’t hit it into a moving boxcar, in fact there were three pages of legal paper filled with conditions. So Slim went out to a frozen lake in the dead of winter, and teed it up downwind! Two of the now chagrined gentleman followed the bright-orange-colored-ball with power cat snowmobiles for about a mile and a half. But this ball, under these conditions, was like the energizer bunny; still going!
Finally, I want to mention Doyle Brunson’s bet (getting laid some odds), where he won one million dollars from Lyle Berman, Chip Reese and Bobby Baldwin for a weight bet that ended at the 2003 WSOP! Congrats Doyle, you look great as always!
Tags: Academy Awards, Amarillo Slim, Chip Reese, doyle brunson, Howard Lederer, Huck Seed, Mike Matusow, mike sexton, Tiger Woods, WSOP
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