WSOP 2009 Trip Report: Part 2

Part 1| Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Jack Links and NASCAR

The 2009 World Series of Poker was presented by Jack Links Beef Jerky. It takes some effort to step down from Milwaukee’s Best, the presenting sponsor for the past few years, but when a man in a Sasquatch costume appeared on stage to speak, or more accurately to growl, “Shuffle Up and Deal!”, it was apparent that Harrah’s had pulled it off.

Jeffrey Pollack, the commissioner of the WSOP, is a man with an admirable mission and an enormous task: to bring poker into the mainstream of American sports culture. A lot has been accomplished in this regard, much but not all of which can be attributed to Pollack: poker programming has appeared not only on ESPN but on such diverse networks as GSN, Fox Sports, the Travel Channel, and even NBC. The most prominent players are household names, and the WSOP itself is a two-month long spectacle that attracts tens of thousands of players and quite a few spectators as well.

Despite these accomplishments, though, poker has not yet “broken through” entirely. It is still poorly understood by the American public at large and viewed skeptically at best by the sports editors of most major news outlets. Even the WSOP, let alone smaller poker events, have had difficulty attracting sponsors outside of the immediate poker market: online poker sites, poker apparel, energy drinks, and closely related products such as beer and beef jerky.

Pollack comes to poker by way of NASCAR, so he’s very familiar with saturation advertising. He’s even said that he wouldn’t mind seeing players who resemble NASCAR drivers, with ads plastered all over their hats and clothing (though he did ban face tattoos this year, apparently in response to an actual incident).

At the same time that he is littering the felt of his poker tables with advertisements, Pollack is trying to infuse the WSOP with tradition and austerity. Giant portraits of main event winners from years past adorn the walls, and this year he introduced a new ceremony where tournament winners receive their gold bracelets as their native country’s national anthem plays and the Commissioner waxes poetic about the prestige of the event..

Yet Pollack’s insistence on emphasizing the solemnity of the event every time he is in front of a microphone smacks of wistful thinking. The fact that the former president of my alma mater, the University of Chicago, never allowed the words “Harvard” or “Yale” to pass his lips without adding, “our peer institutions” only served to emphasize that they were no such thing, and such is the effect of Pollack’s grand rhetoric as well. Not to mention that as he asks everyone to stand and be silent for a national anthem, he is standing on the same stage where he was so recently joined by the Sasquatch, who is now prowling the aisles of the WSOP handing out packets of beef jerky whenever a player makes four-of-a-kind jacks.

The Beginning: Levels 1 and 2

Even before Sasquatch gave the dealers the go-ahead, I had a bad feeling about my table. It was populated almost entirely by young guys roughly my own age. You might think that an older player would be more experienced and thus more dangerous, but the twenty-somethings who can afford to compete in a $10,000 poker tournament are a strongly self-selected bunch. If a guy my age is playing in this event, it’s almost certainly because he’s very good at poker, not because he has $10,000 to spend on a hobby as a middle-aged business owner or wealthy retiree might.

Plus, half an hour into the tournament, there were still two seats at my table paid for but not yet occupied. Again, only very good or very wealthy players can afford to be so blase about showing up on time for a $10,000 tournament, and the two who eventually filled those seats proved to be of the former variety.

I’m inclined to put WSOP participants into three categories: the weakest players who are just playing their own cards and don’t really understand the basics of tournament poker, the average-to-good players who know how to adapt to tournament situations and take advantage of weak players, and the really great players who will fight for a lot of pots and know how to take advantage of not only the weak players but those in the second category as well.

The third strategy is certainly the best, but it also requires the most skill and experience, and fortunately very few players are capable of it. Unfortunately, one of them happened to be sitting two seats to my left.

My goal, then, was to play pots with the slightly weaker- and I emphasize slightly, as many of them still identified as professionals- players on my right. There was a Spanish pro to my immediate right who had been raising a lot from late position. I figured one of his biggest weaknesses would be playing out of position to a 3-bet, so when I looked down at K [heart] 8 [heart] on my button, it seemed like a good spot.

He open raised to 250, I made it 800, and he called. The flop came A [heart] 2 [club] [4 heart], which was pretty perfect for my purposes. I had a strong draw to semi-bluff, and the Ace gave me a very plausible hand to represent. I bet 1100, and he called quickly.

The turn brought the 3 [heart], giving me the nuts (well, second nuts, but I wasn’t too concerned about him showing up with the straight flush) but making the board a lot scarier for my opponent. To my surprise, he took the lead on the turn, betting 2500. I took some time to count our remaining chips- more than 25,000- and then raised to 9000. He thought for a long time, stared me down, showed me a 5, and folded.

Curse these competent players! I probably stack a fish there, or at least get a 6500 call on the turn, even if he folds the river. Granted this guy had called my re-raise from out of position with a hand containing a 5, but he’d also been able to fold a straight to a single raise. Maybe it was overly optimistic for me to aim for his stack. It’s possible that just calling the turn and then betting or raising the river would have been better.

Ideally, the early stages of a tournament are an opportunity to win chips from weak players before they are eliminated. At this table, though, I largely had to stay inside of a bubble and hope that the table would break, which it eventually did. Towards the end of level 2, our table broke and I moved to a less tough table. By the end of that level, I’d managed to turn my 30,000 starting chips into 45,000.

Having played four hours of poker, it was time for a dinner break.

New Beginnings: Levels 3 and 4

We were only playing four two-hour levels on the first day, so play was already half over. This was a welcome change from my first WSOP, where we played six two-hour levels and didn’t finish until 4 AM, but it was if anything too short. The end result is that we have to play longer days later in the tournament, when it’s most important to be sharp and when there is less time to recover between sessions.

I was the first player back after dinner, so I found myself sitting alone at the table with a heavyset dealer whose nametag read “Diamond”. I asked him if that was his real name, and he responded that it was. “I was born to be either a dealer or a stripper,” he told me, then, glancing down at his ample stomach, added, “I think I made the right decision.”

In level 3, blinds had escalated to 150/300. A player in late position opened with a raise to 675. The player on the button, who was young and probably the best player besides myself at the table, called, and the small blind folded. I was in the big blind with QT of diamonds. I was certainly getting good odds to call the raise, but I decided to go for the squeeze.

I raised to 2500, the first player folded, but the second called. I didn’t know a lot about him, but it was a safe guess that he knew what a squeeze play was and wasn’t giving me a lot of credit here. Now we had a mind game going on: I knew that he knew that I didn’t have a strong hand, and he probably knew that I knew that, and so forth. I was going to have to make some tough decisions in this hand.

The flop came 972 with one diamond, giving me nothing but a few backdoor draws. Given the mind game I mentioned above, though, that was a good thing, because I didn’t feel I could profitably bluff just once with no further plan. My opponent will call too often to make that profitable. I decided to bet at this flop and then follow-up on any Ace, King, Jack, 8, or diamond turn. These were all cards that would improve my hand or be scary for my opponent or both. I bet 3500, and he called.

The turn was the Jack of diamonds, which vastly improved my hand. I didn’t have much yet, but now any diamond, King, or eight on the river would make me a huge hand. Even a Queen or a Ten could be enough to win me the pot. That’s nearly half the deck, so my hand was definitely too strong to give up on. I stuck with my plan and bluffed at it again, this time betting 7500. My opponent called.

The river was a 2 of clubs, missing all of my draws. I thought for a bit about bluffing one more time, but at this point the pot was huge and a bluff would cost me nearly all of my chips. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it, and so with a sigh I checked. My opponent quickly checked also and showed a pair of 4’s, which was even weaker than I expected. If I had known for sure that he could have a hand that weak, I probably would have bluffed the river. Even without the river bluff, I still think I played the hand well, and I did have a nearly 50% chance of winning it on the turn. The cards just didn’t fall my way; that’s poker.

That hand cost me nearly a third of my chips, but I was still in fine shape with a little over 30,000. That’s where I stayed until the end of the day, when I found myself in a very strange spot. A tightish but pretty decent player opened to 750 in middle position. The cut-off called. I had KTo in the BB, which is not a hand I like playing out of position, but I called getting 4.5:1.

The flop came K [heart] 5 [club] 3 [club]. I checked, the pre-flop raiser bet 1600, the CO called, and I called. I think this is close but OK. There’s a good chance the raiser’s range is wide, as I imagine he understands continuation betting. The CO can have KQ, KJ, or a set, but I can also see him showing up with flush draws and stuff like 66-TT. At this point, I was not really looking to put any more money in the pot, but I thought I might be able to check down a winner.

The turn was the 5h, putting out a second, though unlikely, flush draw. We checked around.

The river was the Tc, giving me K’s and T’s. I led out 5000, the pre-flop raiser folded, and the CO pretty quickly raised to 12,000. This felt strong to me, but there were very few hands I could put him on. There were only two combinations of KK and TT possible, and one if not both of those probably 3-bets pre-flop. I think he bets bare trips last to act on the turn with two flush draws out there. So for value hands I think he has to have almost exactly the only 55 or one of the three 33 combos. Meanwhile, the draw missed, and I’m getting 3.5:1.
Nevertheless, I was pretty sure I was going to fold. It was the toughest decision I’d had all day, and I spent a good five minutes thinking and staring my opponent down. He was impassive, leaning forwards with hands covering his mouth and eyes revealing nothing. I’d nearly talked myself into a fold, but I decided to count out the chips for a call and see how my opponent responded to that. I slowly stacked up the 7000 chips I would need, which at that point was about 1/3 of what I had left, and watched for a reaction. Still nothing.

I picked up the chips, as though about to put them in the pot, and my opponent blinked. I thought I detected a subtle flinch as well. I dropped the chips into the pot. “Call.” Wordlessly, he turned over 33 for a full house. I thought I’d detected weakness, but I was wrong, and it cost me.

In just a few more minutes, we were done for the day. I finished with 16,000 chips, a lot less than the 30,000 we’d started with but still enough to maneuver in the early stages of the tournament. That’s the nice thing about the WSOP: unlike in some poker tournaments, there is room to make mistakes and recover from them. Let’s just hope I can.