Saturday, July 4, 2009 - Phil Hellmuth
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As we approach another WSOP in Vegas – I look back and recall WSOPs from years gone by. Here is some commentary from years ago. Hope y’all enjoy.
I would like to say that I am proud of the WSOP itself. Does that sound kind of stupid to you? Then let me explain–if only you could have seen the final six in the Big One in 2000. Discovery channel had a wall of technical equipment and at least four cameras surrounding the action. There were two separate live internet audio broadcasts going on at the same time.
Let’s not forget that we had over 510 players put up ten thousand dollars each to play in the final event! As Johnny Chan said, “I don’t know about the rest of the country, but there sure were a lot of people wandering around the Horseshoe with ten thousand dollars in their pockets!”
The worldwide press was out in full force for the WSOP. It was amazing to watch the cameras going off when the WSOP’s 2000 winner, Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, was posing after the event ended. To the point about the worldwide press, I personally was interviewed during the WSOP by Geraldo Rivera (NBC), E! Entertainment, the Discovery Channel, and many magazine writers as well. Also, I am proud of Chris “Jesus” Ferguson and T.J. Cloutier for the way that they played poker and handled themselves throughout the final two days. In my opinion, they both deserved to win the World Championship’s this year. These are just some of the reasons that I am proud of the 2000 World Series of Poker.
There were some great surprises at the 2000 WSOP, including Jim McManus and Jeff Schulman. Jim McManus is a novelist/poet/writer who was sent out to the WSOP to cover it for Harpers magazine (and eventually wrote a 16 page article on it, which turned into his book, “Positively Fifth Street”). Jim decided to play some satellites for the Big One and whoosh–he finished fourth in the main event. Jeff Schulman played a fantastic game of poker throughout this year’s WSOP. Maybe because Jeff hasn’t been there before, he was moving $200,000 to $1,000,000 stacks around like they were water. What Jeff lacked in experience, he more than made up for with fearlessness and great ‘reads’ on the rest of the field.
Here is a hand that came up between Jeff Schulman and Chris Ferguson with seven players left on poker’s biggest stage (WSOP 2000). Remember, when the WSOP gets down to six players, they end for the day and come back the next day to battle in front of the world for fame and fortune ($1,500,000 for first place). Jeff had been moving his chips around beautifully, he was raising and re-raising (presumably when his opponents had nothing) almost every hand. The blinds were $15,000-$30,000 and the antes were $3,000 per player, when Jeff opened for $200,000 on the button with 7-7. Chris Ferguson decided to move all-in from the big blind with 6-6 for about $860,000. At this point, Jeff was the chip leader with over $1,500,000 and Chris was second in chips with his $860,000. After less then 20 seconds, Jeff decided to call Chris for all of his $860,000.
Wow, Jeff would start day four with over $2,300,000 in chips, and T.J. Cloutier in second place with only $600,000. Chris would finish in seventh place, but wait a minute, they didn’t flop the cards yet. Jeff wasn’t home yet—he was, however a 4 ½-to-1 favorite to win this hand. The flop was 3h-6h-10h, giving Chris the best hand, but giving Jeff a flush draw. The next card was the 5c to also give Jeff a straight draw. Now Jeff needed a heart (excepting the 5h), a seven or a four to win the pot. Chris called for (out loud), and received, a ten on the river, to make the final board 3h-6h-10h-5c-10s and give Chris the winning hand (a full house 6-6-6-10-10). Too bad for Jeff, but he kept his composure (much like I would have [Yeah, right!]) and still was in second chip position with roughly $700,000.
The rest of the story is even more brutal for Jeff–as if losing this pot wasn’t tough enough. About one round later, Jeff picked up pocket kings in the small blind and moved all-in after TJ opened for $300,000 with pocket jacks. Chris picked up pocket aces in the big blind, and Jeff ended up finishing in seventh place. So he went from 2.3 million and the chip lead going into the last day to being the next player out. Seemed like Jeff deserved better than that, but that’s poker.
Anyway, back to the 7-7 vs. 6-6 hand. (The aces versus kings is pretty natural.) I love the way that Jeff played this hand. He had been raising a lot of pots, so he opened for a huge over raise of $200,000 to send a message to Chris that he had something. Then when Chris moved in, Jeff correctly deduced that his pocket sevens were the best hand. As John Bonetti would say, “He had Chris by the throat.” It is hard to be 4 ½-to-1 favorite for all of the money, but Jeff put himself into this great position for the most important (and biggest pot) of his life.
How about the way that Chris played the hand? I don’t like his play very much, but it’s certainly not too bad. On the one hand, I like the aggressiveness of the all-in move with the pocket sixes. Chris was trying to stop Jeff from running over the table with this move. On the other hand, Jeff did send a message with the size of his raise, and Chris was in second chip position, so I could very easily see him fold his hand here and wait for a better spot to risk all of his chips. I probably would have folded the 6-6 in this situation just because it was for all of his chips and he still would have been in great chip position. I mean, why risk all of your chips in second chip position with seven players left at the WSOP?
Tags: Chris Ferguson, Geraldo Rivera, Jeff Schulman, Jim McManus, johnny chan, Phil Hellmuth, t.j. cloutier, WSOP
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Friday, June 5, 2009 - Gene Bromberg
The bubble just burst in the $2,000 No-Limit Hold-Em tournament, and one of those who made the money was one Phillip Hellmuth, Jr., who cashed for the 70th time at the World Series of Poker. That extends his own record for cashes; next on the agenda would be his 42nd final table, and beyond that his 12th bracelet–all also WSOP records.
But right on Phil’s heels is T.J. Cloutier, who also cashed today and now sits in 4th place. He’s also second to Phil in career WSOP final tables. And he happens to be sitting directly to Phil’s right at the moment:
There was a big hand where T.J. folded pocket Jacks and Phil folded pocket nines (so they said) after a player holding pocket eights made a big re-raise to push them off their hands. That player blundered into the pocket Aces of the player in the big blind, and neither T.J. nor Phil was crazy about that play (actually it was T.J. who was the far more animated). “That was sick,” Phil said, “people think you’re stealing with Jacks…this table scares me.”
That got T.J. in a storytelling mood–he talked about a four-handed game where three players flopped sets and the fourth flopped the nut flush draw. Then he talked about a couple who got decapitated in the parking lot of the Bicycle Club in the early 1990’s. Uhh…I liked the first story better.
Tags: 2009 world series of poker, 2009 wsop, most overall wsop cashes, most wsop cashes, Phil Hellmuth, phil hellmuth wsop cashes, phil hellmuth wsop record cashes, record wsop cashes, t.j. cloutier, world series of poker, WSOP
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Sunday, May 31, 2009 - Phil Hellmuth
Well it’s that time of year again – the good old WSOP. I have been reflecting on previous years and came across this journal entry from a few years ago. I hope you enjoy the read as much as I enjoy reflecting back on these times.
I have been knocking on history’s door at the World Series of Poker (WSOP) for the last eight years. After a long four days of playing in the 2001 WSOP main event, there were nine players left heading into the final day. Walking into the room as one of the finalists, I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by it all. Discovery Channel was filming the finals and had cameras everywhere and it was standing room only with spectators watching monitors just so they could witness the final table. There had to be over 100 reporters representing everyone from NPR (National Public Radio) to the Travel Channel. www.ultimatebet.com and www.pokerpages.com were both doing live ‘web casts’ of the action. And the prize money, wow! 1.5 million dollars for first place, $1.1 million for second, $700,000 for third, $400,000 for fourth, $300,000 for fifth, $240,000 for sixth, $180,000 for 7th, $120,000 for 8th and $92,000 for ninth!
It was announced during the player’s introductions that I needed to finish fifth or higher in order to take first place on the WSOP all-time money list! This is an accomplishment that I have been waiting almost ten years to do! However, even more important than that was to win the WSOP for the second time and put myself down in history as the fifth two-time winner. I would just win the thing and break all of the records at once! So much for the best-laid plans of mice and men! At least I did manage to finish fifth and claim the all-time money lead at the WSOP with $2,844,850, but it’s a small lead! I’m only $26,000 ahead of TJ Cloutier and $52,000 ahead of Johnny Chan!
The final table play was very aggressive, with players raising and re-raising on pure bluffs for hundreds of thousands of dollars. A young 29 year-old Spaniard named Carlos Mortenson was right in the middle of all of the aggressive play. In fact, in one key hand that I believe contributed heavily to Carlos winning the WSOP, Mike Madisow opened the pot for $70,000, whereupon Carlos raised Mike $160,000, then Mike raised Carlos another $350,000, and then Carlos Finally raised all of Mike’s remaining chips (about $500,000) with a Q-8! A Q-8 is a very weak hand in Texas holdem! Carlos had smelled weakness in Mike Madisow, and then made his bold and courageous move! After Mike folded what he claimed to be an A-Q, Carlos showed the hand to the audience, and then the audience gave him a standing ovation, whereupon Carlos bowed, and the audience cheered even louder for him. Carlos’s play in this hand was both gutsy and brilliant, and that’s what it takes if you want to become a World Champion of poker.
Meanwhile, I sat back and watched the show. I felt like one of these aggressive players was going to make a mistake, and that I would be able to take advantage of it. My downfall was when I raised the pot $100,000, and then Phil Gordon re-raised me about $450,000 more (all of his chips, but I had about $1,000,000 in chips at the time). Instantaneously, I said, “I call” and then flipped up my pocket nines quickly. Somehow I was certain that I had the best hand! Indeed I did, because Phil Gordon had pocket sixes, and I was a four and a half to one favorite to win this 1.1 million pot, and take the chip lead. Unfortunately for me, the flop came 6-8-K, and I wound up losing the pot to Phil’s three sixes. After I was finally eliminated, I felt really sick, because I had blown a very big chance to make my mark on poker history. There will be other World Series of Poker’s, but with the field swelling up to 600 + players this year, it won’t be so easy to win another one. However, I will keep showing up, year after year, trying my hardest to win it again! I believe that great things happen to people that ‘go for it!’ I will be waiting on history’s door for the next opportunity to break through! Right now though I offer my congratulations to Carlos Mortenson, the 2001 World Champion of poker.
Tags: Carlos Mortenson, johnny chan, Mike Madisow, NPR, Phil Gordon, Phil Hellmuth, Poker Pages, t.j. cloutier, texas holdem, ub, WSOP
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Monday, March 23, 2009 - Gene Bromberg
This year marks the 40th World Series of Poker…and it also marks the 40th anniversary of my birth. Yeah yeah, I turned 40 a few months ago, can we please change the subject? I actually didn’t make that connection until a few days ago, that I’ve been alive roughly the same amount of time as the World Series. Not an especially interesting or relevant detail, except for me, and as I’m the one writing this post I hope you’ll forgive me for dwelling on it a bit.
Back in 1970 Benny Binion invited six of the best poker players to the Horseshoe to compete for the title of World Champion. It wasn’t a freeze-out tournament–the six voted on who they thought was the best player. They voted Johnny Moss the champion, a good choice as he also won the following year. The next year Amarillo Slim Preston won the title, followed by Puggy Pearson, and over the next decade or so the WSOP title was captured by such legendary figures as Doyle Brunson, Stu Ungar, and Jack Straus.
If you’ve attended the World Series the last two years you can trace it’s history through the huge posters hanging from the Amazon Room rafters. A portrait of every World Champion looms over the vast throngs who flock to the Rio to pit their skills (and luck) against the best in the world. I’m fascinated by those posters, because they show not only how the game has changed, but how much the world has changed over these 40 years.
The pictures from the 70s are almost all black-and-white, and feature rough-hewn men with sharp eyes and lined faces. A few are smoking–the idea of someone lighting up at the table is now so alien that I think people would be less shocked if someone chose to play in the nude. As time goes on the photos transform from B&W to color, but they still have that fantastic old-school feel. The clothing is dated, naturally, but the lighting isn’t optimized for television, there’s no dramatic backdrops. They could be regular guys playing in any casino in the world.
The posters of the recent champions aren’t quite as interesting. We’ve seen these guys before, on TV, in countless photos published online and in magazines. Go to the World Series of Poker and you’ll see scores of photographers flitting among the tables, and of course the fans who cluster ’round the rail either have digital cameras or cell phones with one built-in. It’s a digital world, a wired word–thousands of players qualify for Main Event by playing online, something that wasn’t even science-fiction when Benny Binion invented the WSOP. Dozens of poker sites provide live updates of the action, ESPN streams final table action over the internet, terabytes of photos and video are produced before the final bracelet is awarded. There’s so much information to digest that it’s almost too much to keep up with.
I thought about that last year as I looked at those posters and realized one name was missing. Bill Smith won the World Championship in 1985, but his name and portrait are nowhere to be found. Smith was a colorful figure even for poker’s golden years–from an interview Dana Smith did with T.J. Cloutier, who finished runner-up to Smith:
He was one of the greatest players of all time, Bill Smith was. He was the tightest player you’d ever played in your life when he was sober. And when he was halfway drunk, he was the best player I’d ever played with. But when he got past that halfway mark, he was the worst player I’d ever played. And you could always tell when he was past the halfway point because he started calling the flop. Say a flop came 7-4-10 — he’d say, “21!” When he got up to take a walk, he would have a little hop in his step, a “git-up in his gittalong” we used to call it. And then you knew he was gone. You never worried about Bill when he was sober because you knew that he played A-B-C — tight — and you knew where he was all the time. The only time you worried about him was when he was about halfway drunk, and then he’d play all the way to “H.” But he had such great timing on his hands when he was younger and wasn’t drunk … he’d make some fabulous plays, plays you couldn’t believe. Bill was a truly great player.
I asked around a bit to find out why there wasn’t a poster of Smith, who passed away in 1997. No one was 100% sure, but a few people said that there weren’t many photos of Smith, and those that did exist were the property of his family. They chose not to make them available and so there was no entry for Bill Smith in the Ring of Champions. Today it’s hard to imagine that there wouldn’t be a photographic record of, well, anybody. But again, times have changed.
When I cover the WSOP this year I’ll have my trusty camera along and I’m going to try to re-create the feel of some of those old-time photos. It won’t be easy, I don’t think I’ll find many players wearing leisure suits with yard-wide lapels, but I’ll try to mix things up a bit, try to shoot more black-and-white stuff, play with the pixels a bit. Who knows–when Phil Hellmuth makes his grand entrance at the Main Event this year maybe he’ll go with a disco theme?
Tags: benny binion, bill smith, johnny moss, old-school poker, Phil Hellmuth, phil hellmuth disco, phil hellmuth main event entrance, t.j. cloutier, world series of poker, WSOP
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Thursday, January 15, 2009 - Gene Bromberg
T.J. Cloutier once said that he didn’t care how many people he knocked out of a poker tournament, so long as he knocked out the LAST person. Because, obviously, that meant he’d won the tournament, and that’s the ultimate goal. But as anyone who’s watched poker on TV knows the most dramatic moments are the big confrontations, when all the chips go in the middle, the cards are flipped over, and one player’s life hangs in the balance.
Not that poker players usually need extra incentive to go for the throat, but last night’s UBOC event gave them even more reason to channel the shrieking, befanged beast that lies within. UBOC Event #8 was our Sniper event, where each player has a $30 bounty on his/her head. Knock someone out, collect thirty bucks. Knock two people out, collect sixty bucks. Knock three people out…but I’ve made my point.
So in addition to the money you’d win for cashing there was another revenue stream to be had–collecting scalps. And one of the trophies most prized at UB’s tables is a knockout of Phil Hellmuth, who made a deep run and finished 31st. His run might’ve been deeper had he not been crippled by RAM20INCH and then polished off soon after by CALMJACKAL, which delighted the railbirds watching Phil.
Speaking of the railbirds, some anthropology Ph.D candidate should eschew the indiginous tribes of the Amazon or Papua New Guinea and do a detailed study of people who rail well-known poker players. There’s important and interesting work to be done among those people.
Several other well-known players came close to making the final table, including Jon “PearlJammed” Turner (who finished 12th) and Frank “gator43″ Hernandez (who finished 13th). HUSSRAMILTON, who was the runner-up in Tuesday night’s H.O.R.S.E. event, followed up that impressive result by posting an 11th place finish. And Robbie “CUNNINGHAM” Cunningham finished 16th…here’s a picture of him from the 2008 Aruba Poker Classic:
That’s Liv Boeree standing on Robbie’s shoulders. Good picture of him, yes?
Anyway, there were nine players who DID make the final table, and here there are/were:
And as the final table played down here’s how they placed and cashed:
- 9th: Corey “CMB8757″ Burbick $2,611
- 8th: THALAIET $3,682
- 7th: AGS104 $5,022
- 6th: MICOJONES $6,361
- 5th: TWOLIP69 $7,700
- 4th: RAM20INCH $9,374
As the survivors played three-handed SAILORLOBELL held nearly 60% of the chips in play, and he seized total control when he raised to $33,000 on the button and Jason “TAKNAPOTIN” Somerville moved all-in for his last $303K. SAILORLOBELL called and his Ac-Ks had Somerville’s Kd-Qs dominated. The board bricked for both players and SAILORLOBELL went into heads-up play with a $1.17 million to $315K chiplead over STRIFE23.
A lead that lasted just one hand, as STRIFE23 doubled up when, holding A-3 to SAILORLOBELL’S A-9 and all the money in preflop, STRIFE23 rivered a trey to stay alive and get himself back in serious contention. But despite that brutal beat SAILORLOBELL didn’t falter, winning the next four hands to get his stack back up over $1 million. He maintained that lead until the last hand, as the two players saw a 6c-4s-8s flop and STRIFE23 led out for $50,000. SAILORLOBELL made a small raise to $120,000, and STRIFE23 moved in the last of his chips. To find that his Jc-7c were in bad shape against SAILORLOBELL’s Js-10s. The 8d on the turn and 9c on the river didn’t save STRIFE23 and he finished as our runner-up, winning $20,088. While SAILORLOBELL took home $32,810, an UltimateBet Online Championship title…and $30 for knocking the last person out of the tournament.
Tags: Poker Poker Poker, poker tournaments, sniper tournaments, t.j. cloutier, ub, ub sniper tournaments, ub tournaments, UBOC, uboc tournaments, ultimatebet, ultimatebet online championships, ultimatebet tournaments
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