You call, it's all over ... the front page of Yahoo!, baby

Scotty Nguyen's bracelet in the $50,000 H.O.R.S.E. event makes the front page of Yahoo!

PEACE and good trading, Commisso

It was with great excitement that I followed Shamus's coverage of the epic 6-hour heads-up battle in the WSOP $5,000 NLHE Six-Handed event last night, which lead to the ultimate victory of Joe Commisso.

I "met" Joe many years ago on EliteTrader, an online trading community. He was young and bright back then and it appears nothing has changed.

Congratulations, Joe, on the bracelet and the accompanying $911,855!

Poker Hall of Shame IV

There's always a few rotten apples to spoil a good lineup, and apparently the MGM Grand is no exception. Yesterday, harper983 posted the following on 2+2 :

Playing 1/2 cash game at the MGM. Three players are involved in a pot with about $100 in it, and on the river the board reads 8A8x9 rainbow. UTG checks, mid pos. checks, and the button checks and turns over the 8d and puts it on top of his other card and says "I got the 8". Dealer looks down and repeats what he says, mid pos. mucks, and UTG flips over A9. Dealer grabs buttons cards, buries them in the muck, and pushes pot to UTG. Button tries to stop her, but isn't quick enough. Dealer calls the floor, tells them what happened, that she saw his 8 and others at the table confirm, and they rule that he has to flip over both cards and he's hands dead. UTG rakes the pot and tips dealer $15. Button gets pissed and cashes out.

Just wondering what others would do in this situation as the dealer, floor, and UTG.

BTW UTG is a dealer there and I saw him dealing the next day.

The general consensus seems to be that the dealer should have given the button a chance to show both cards by saying something like "I can't turn over your hand." Unfortunately the whole incident reeks of collusion and flies in the face of the maxim that justice must be seen to be done.

And a big kudos to the UTG douchebag dealer, a great ambassador for the interpretation of the spirit of poker rules in general, and playing at the MGM in particular.

WSOP Main Event

Desperately short of funds, my significant other has decided to sell 50% of herself in the upcoming WSOP Main Event. She can be found nightly at the Rio hooker bar and is very approachable.

Please stop calling!

By all rights, I should have a quiet Father's Day as I have no children. Yet with alarming regularity, this peaceful Sunday is always shattered by phone calls from all over the world.

It started at 6:35am with a "Hyvää Isänpäivää" (Happy Father's Day) from a young Finn claiming to be my long lost 15-year-old son. "Äitisi nai poroja" (your mother fucks reindeers) I mumbled and went back to sleep. At 7:23am I heard some Dutch kid yelling "Vrolijke vaderdag" and promptly dispatched him with a "Je moeder is een hoer" (your mother is a hooker).

This continued all morning with greetings in Thai (สุขสันต์วันพ่อ), Persian (روز پدر مبارک ), Turkish (Babalar günün kutlu olsun), Hungarian (Boldog apák napját), French (Bonne fête Papa) and many others. As is my custom, I "thanked" them all in their respective languages.

What are they trying to tell me? That their whorish mothers lied to me years ago when they promised they were practicing birth control? That I happenstanced upon the 1 packet of condoms that didn't fall within the 99.9999% quality control specifications? That I was the victim of a swallow and switch? I'm not buying any of it.

Nothing new under the sun

We have been blessed with multiple controversies currently raging in the blogger universe. This is not surprising and when they die down and are forgotten, they will be replaced by new ones as sure as your flopped set will be pipped on the river by a backdoor flush.

2008 WSOP - II

"Maybe you too can find a single player to babysit the entire event and report their every move." - AlCantHang

With this in mind, I decided that I would cover the journey of my good Australian friend, Bruce Kelly, in his attempt at taking down the coveted 2008 WSOP Main Event bracelet.

Bruce is about 10 years my junior, the bastard son of an alcoholic sheep farmer and an out-of-work actress. He, like myself, is currently unemployed and shares my passion for poker, though he does rent an apartment of his own. The bugger has a real temper and my sole concern is chaperoning him through the entire tournament and preventing one of his classic blowups. And by blowup, I don't mean à la Hellmuth or Matusow. No, a Bruce Kelly blowup is something that the Rio Convention Center has never been privy to. And that's the way I'd like to keep it.

Last year, Bruce had occasion to communicate via telephone with VicRoads, the government body responsible for licensing and registration of motor vehicles. Unfortunately for all concerned, the call was recorded (warning - offensive language) :




So here we are, 6 days into the Main Event, with 643 players left. We are nearing the bubble and the tables are playing hand for hand. Bruce, sitting on a healthy 2.5 million chip stack, looks down at his cards. I have a mounted telescope set up in the back row of the spectators' gallery and can see by the throbbing carotid artery in his neck that he's picked up a big hand. I also have a dismantled elephant gun, together with tranquilizer darts, within reach.

Bruce, who is UTG, raises to 100,000. Everyone folds to the button, Allen Cunningham, who makes it 400,000. The small blind folds, but the big blind, Jamie Gold, pushes all-in. Jamie has Bruce covered. With everyone's attention diverted to the all-in, I slowly start assembling the elephant gun.

Bruce calls without hesitation and Cunningham folds his jacks. Jamie Gold sheepishly turns over pocket tens and Bruce gleefully tables 2 red aces. The rush of the media to the table gives me enough time to finish assembling the rifle. Better safe than sorry.

The flop comes

T 7 2 rainbow

Gold leaps triumphantly into the air. I load the dart, cock the rifle and locate Bruce's still throbbing carotid artery in the crosshairs of my sight.

The turn is a harmless 8.

I decide that waiting for a 2 outer on the river may be too risky as Bruce would probably be completely out of control, making an accurate shot almost impossible.

As Bruce slumps forward flat on his face, the river card, the black ace of spades, hits the green felt. I rush toward the table, fumbling for the bottle of concentrated Epsom salts in my shoulder bag.

2008 WSOP - I

You fine folks at Full Tilt, sitting in your comfy chairs somewhere in Louth, don't seriously expect me to grovel to your demands to "showcase my ability to provide journalistic coverage for the biggest poker event in the world".

Read this blog and you will readily find glowing examples of Pulitzer quality poker coverage. Ask around, make some phone calls. Everyone will corroborate my natural aptitude for covering major events like the WSOP - with a twist of course.

The best WSOP coverage

For those of you fortunate enough not to be physically present at the 2008 WSOP, read all about it here :

Pokernews.com

Tao of Poker

LasVegasVegas