The 2006 WSOP, Part One: Grades

This is the first portion of a four-part series about the 2006 WSOP and its aftermath. This part evaluates the experience as a whole, the second part will deal with Paul’s jaw-dropping breakthrough, the third will discuss that breakthrough’s ramifications for me personally, and the fourth will recap what I have been doing since the WSOP.

First, revisiting the over-unders I established before the WSOP:

# of WSOP events I play: 21
BARELY UNDER: (Actual - 20)

# of WSOP cashes I make: 3
OVER: (Actual – 5)

# of WSOP cashes from the house: 12
BARELY OVER (Actual – 13: Moon – 5, Fish – 3, PiMaster – 2, Gambler – 1, MasterJ – 1, Nappy – 1)

# of WSOP final tables reached by the house: 2
OVER: (Actual – 3: Fish – 1, PiMaster – 1, MasterJ – 1)

# of WSOP bracelets won by the house: 1
BARELY UNDER: (Actual – 0 despite three valiant attempts)

Without question, our house was the most dominant of the several WSOP houses featuring young online players. The Holla-Bolla or whatever Shannon Shorr-led house had a few nice results late and the Alex Jacob/Jason Strasser/Duke house performed well, but our overall results (and one ridiculous cash) crushed them all.

# of World Cup games I will watch: 7
UNDER: (Actual – 5)

# of World Cup games I will watch decided by terrible officiating: 6
UNDER: (Actual – 3)

# of times Jose's mom will break up the soccer game: 83
BARELY UNDER: (Actual – roughly 75)

# of times I hear "Pour Some Sugar on Me": 3
EMPHATICALLY UNDER: (Actual – 0)

# of times I watch a full episode of "Yes, Dear": 0
CORRECT

# of times I watch a full episode of "Lost": 23
UNDER: (Actual – 6)

# of 100 degree days: 43
ROUGHLY CORRECT

# of 110 degree days: 9
BARELY UNDER, I think

# of rainshowers: 1 (it has never rained while I have been in Vegas)
OVER: (Actual was something like 3, depending on your definition of “rainshower”

# of 200 games I will bowl: 1
UNDER: Bowling was shockingly non-existent throughout the trip. I'm not sure why.

# of 250 games the Gambler will bowl: 2
UNDER

# of laptops found in the house at its peak: 11
UNDER – somehow MasterJ is an online pro poker player without a laptop

# of times the Gambler says "I hate my job": 49
WAY UNDER

# of times the Fish says "yet again": 74
WAY UNDER

# of times I use the phrase "incongruous romanticism" in a blog entry: 0
CORRECT

# of times I use the phrase "So the turn comes the Tc" in a blog entry: 3
WAY UNDER – Actual (0)

As for Wolf’s predictions:

# of times the nerdiness of the house is referenced/made fun of: 35
UNDER (but close)

# of times moon plays live NL above 10/20: 0
CORRECT

# of times Bag and I get wasted in vegas: 4 (for a 3 day trip)
ROUGHLY CORRECT

# of times someone in the house gets ass: 5
ROUGHLY OVER
Late in the trip MasterJ struck up a relationship with an exotic dancer. The determination of this over/under is based upon that relationship, the details of which I am not privy to.

# of times someone in the house get ass from a woman: 0
OVER

# of kleenex used from the 11 laptops all perusing porn sites: 432
UNDER – too many people in the house for “alone time.”

# of stupid/amusing prop bets made: 21
ROUGHLY CORRECT (with the Moon going approximately 7-0 and winning about a week’s worth of dinners and drinks from Victor and Paul).

# of times Moon asks Kwick to "pour some sugar on me": 3
UNDER
___

And now the grades, in alphabetical order:

Bag: A
Three trips to Vegas, a monster run in the shorthanded tournament, making him 2 for 2 in WSOP cashes, and the decision to quit his job and become a poker pro! Pretty stunning stuff. However, the Bag once again failed to come over the top of Juanda.

Cake: A-
The perfect Vegas-in-the-summer soundtrack.

Clerks 2: C
It seems like everyone I talk to liked this movie quite a bit. I just don’t get it. It was so stale, the jokes were forced, nothing came naturally, it was like having the WSOP at the Rio instead of Binion’s.

Females: B+
I think this would have been a pretty miserable experience without a few girls coming through the house. I can only handle 100% Dudeness for so long. It was really comforting to have Andrea (Toph’s girlfriend) at the house. I just felt a lot more relaxed anytime a female was staying with us. Near the end of the stay, Mandy Baker added a female voice to the House of Pain fraternity. Lee and Laura’s visit provided a desperately-needed refresher for me halfway through the WSOP. I don’t think I would have made it through without a major meltdown if Laura had not visited.

And then there was the one girl who stayed throughout: Zoe. Although she
a) clawed a ton of damage in the upstairs carpet
b) had to be tackled by Paul milliseconds before exposing herself to the Landlord and getting us in a ton of trouble,
c) whored herself out, sleeping in multiple beds and flirting with just about everyone who walked into the house (and three German Shepherds on every one of our nightly walks),
Zoe may have been the most indispensable member of the house. It was such a great feeling to come home after a long day of sitting around a table with fat men and see the excitement on her face, then go outside and watch her glee explode into impulsive, aimless sprinting around the block.

Harrah’s: D+
The 2006 WSOP featured great disorganization, several major gaffes from the tournament staff, tasteless all-encompassing greed, and a general aura of corporate sleaze (not the “good old fashioned” sleaze of Vegas of old). It was pretty damn lame for PiMaster to make a WSOP final table and have it played in a sparse corner of the room with no monitors or crowd within thirty feet of the action. The payout structures were generally abysmal, with the early money finishers usually receiving about 1.2 buyins. The main event payout structure was one of the worst I have ever seen, though it was recently bottomed by the Legends of Poker main event. There was the NLHE shootout fiasco, when the tournament staff switched the format of the event at the last minute without telling anyone. A decision that particularly annoyed me was choosing to start some of the preliminary events 11-handed. Not only is this uncomfortable, I think it barely qualifies as poker.

The one saving grace: The main event featured one of the finest blind structures in poker history. Harrah’s did not compromise the quality of the structure one bit. They let the players play deep-stack poker the entire way. Surely this was one of the greatest poker tournaments ever played.

Heineken: C+
This has become the default beer for me at the casinos, as pretty much all of them have it and microbrews are pretty impossible to find on the Strip. A default flavor for a default beer.

Hollingol: A
Never in my life have I been this scared of another player, and we didn’t even play at the same table.

Housemates: B+
First the lowlights: The housemates putting in a combined 3000 hours of Starcraft; Gambler and Hostile One cranking up the chip sounds on Party Poker to deafening levels heard throughout the house at all hours of the day and night; the kitchen area becoming a wasteland, climaxing in MasterJ’s explanation that he didn’t throw away a particular piece of garbage because “the trash can was too full”; Lazypoo accidentally walking off with a pair of driving shoes from a Go-Kart business; Matt stumbling into the wrong room at the Rio the night after Paul’s 2nd place finish, sleeping on the floor despite an unclaimed couch, then snoring loudly, waking me up on the day I needed to drive to central Utah in the middle of the night; Gambler failing to read my WSOP 2005 playbook and plunging down a spiral of bad gambling and lifestyle, chasing good money with bad; the Hostile One failing to return to Vegas for Paul’s final table, offering up some sort of excuse involving horses.

Overall, however, I enjoyed the shit out of the house and everyone who was there. We had a lot of good times. I was a bit worried about how things would go, especially considering I had never met about half the guys who would be staying at the house, some for over a month. It was definitely a risk to invite some unknown dudes to live with me in Vegas for weeks at a time. Luckily they were all really cool guys. I can honestly say I hope each and every guy who stayed in the house is a friend for life, and I think some of them will be.

Landlord: D+
The antithesis to Mr. Wolf from Pulp Fiction. How this fellow manages to run a fairly significant business is beyond me.

Lost: A-
I only finished six episodes but this appears to be an absolute stalwart right up my alley. “This isn’t just a bear…it’s a POLAR bear” was probably one of the top ten moments of my life.

Miami Vice: C+
The pluses: Jamie Foxx, the delicious Gong Li, pretty sweet shots of things like Miami at night and boats traveling through the Caribbean, some solid villains, and some of the most entertaining violence ever put on film. The minuses: a who-cares plot, Crockett (a protagonist with basically zero character development), inconsistent direction from Michael Mann reminiscent of his mostly-unwatchable Ali. Basically this was a Bond movie with cooler action and less-cool everything else.

Moon: B+
This was a pretty good World Series for me. I cashed a very respectable five times. I learned to play the short stack extremely well, I think. I sacked up and made some plays. I limited the stupid spewing of chips with crap hands. I made some tremendous calls with weak hands. My tournament game came a long ways this summer and I feel pretty confident about taking the next step and making some big final tables in the next few months. Perhaps more importantly, though, I think I did a really good job of captaining the House of Pain. This was an unusual situation in which others relied on me. It’s somewhat rare for me to take on a role of leadership and I think I proved I can handle it.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest: B
As my friend Dave pointed out in his blog, the original Pirates was an entertaining summer movie with creative performances from Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush. It was not a masterpiece, but it seems many remember it as just that while they forget their original expectations for the movie. Then the sequel comes out and everyone is expecting the best popcorn flick since Independence Day. While I disagree with Dave that this Pirates was better than the first (I think Depp mailed it in and they bit off a bit too much for one installment), it was still the most entertaining movie I saw all summer. One other note – bring a backpack with plenty of supplies for this one. Food, water, coffee, eye drops, an extra seat cushion, etc. I’ve seen longer movies but never one that felt so endless.

Red Hot Chili Peppers: B+
I’d probably give By the Way a 10/10, Californication a 9, and Stadium Arcadium an 8. Maybe not the most creative band on the planet but definitely one of the most dependable and functional. Rick Rubin’s production is excellent as always.

Rio: D
The Jose Cuervo of casinos.

The Squeeze Play: C+
The popularity of this move has gotten out of control. It became a virtual certainty that if a pot was raised by an aggressive player and then called by someone else, a third party would come over the top with a large reraise. Young, internet-trained players are busting out the squeeze with alarming frequency. It is just so devastatingly effective. Even if you think they’re doing it, it’s sort of hard to do anything about it without a hand. The squeeze has also gotten ridiculously common at the high-stakes no limit tables online. I’m currently devising counterstrategies for the squeeze. Frequent slowplaying may be the best way to slow down the squeezers.

Sun Chips Garden Salsa Flavor: A
The over/under on how long a bag would last in the house was in the minutes, not hours or days. Perhaps the top snack food on the market right now.

Superman Returns: C-
Seeing this movie in IMAX 3-D at the Palms salvaged a passing grade. There just wasn’t anything good about the movie really, and the Kate Bosworth casting/performance was just terrible.

TheGraveWolf: B
Two trips in one WSOP, a huge improvement from the ’05 debacle.

X3: C-
I’ve now seen three X-men movies and the only thing I can remember from any of them is “Do you know what happens to a toad when it gets struck by lightning? The same thing that happens to everything else.”

As always, there's no point in trying to follow up those words of wisdom.