The 2006 WSOP, Part Two: The Six Million Dollar Man

My friend Paul got second place in the World Series of Poker for 6.1 million dollars.

It actually happened. There are still times when I start thinking about that and just burst out laughing.

The money is so much. It’s staggering. It’s dizzying. I still can’t believe how much money it is. It’s two and a half times as much as Moneymaker won in ’04. It’s more than Raymer won. It’s more than Seidel, Ferguson, Forrest, Harrington, Grinder, Greenstein, and Goehring have won in tournaments. More than Erick Lindgren, Gavin Smith, Tuan Le, David Pham. More than Doyle Brunson. More than Johnny Fucking Chan.

How did this happen?

First off, it happened because he’s a gifted player. Paul is a juggernaut at the table. He has the complete package. His hand-reading abilities are superb. He’s fearless and will put it all in with nothing if he thinks that’s the best play. He knows how to manipulate bad players. He knows how to manipulate great players. He can play really tight. He can play really loose. He can be aggressive or passive. It’s still a bit hard to say for sure, but I do think he’s one of the top twenty or so deep-stack tournament players in the world.

He won six million because he’s really, really good, and he won six million because he got ridiculously lucky day after day after day. I don’t think most of his family and other friends less experienced with poker really understand just how incredibly lucky this was. I don’t think he realizes it himself, in fact. It wasn’t easy to see the luck, that’s the thing. Most of the time when he got all-in he had the best hand. He wasn’t in there beating aces with ace-jack or nailing two outers after the flop. It was just that he kept on picking up hands at just the right moment, and most importantly, he never took a bad beat for all or most of his chips.

Paul was always the unlucky one. He seemed to take more outrageous bad beats than anyone else. I always sort of wondered if he was unluckier than the rest of us, or if his personality just made the bad beats more conspicuous. In any case, it’s all forgotten. No matter what happens in the future, it’s almost impossible to ever imagine calling Paul unlucky in poker again. Even if he’s knocked out of his next thirty tournaments on one-outers, the luck scale will still be heavily weighted in his favor.

Think of all the players who made waves throughout the WSOP main event. Daniel Negreanu. Mark Vos. Shannon Shorr. Dmitri Nobles. David Chiu. Jon Lane. Jason Strasser. The kid who sucked out on Jason Strasser. Jeff Lisandro. William Thorsson. David Einhorn. Lee Kort. Richard Lee. Allen Cunningham. I’d look at those guys, and especially the stacks in front of them, and think, there’s someone who has a shot at really doing something huge here. With Paul I had those thoughts the first few days when he was near the top of the leaderboard, but not really afterwards.

It was so weird because after around day three or four, it never really seemed like Paul was a contender. We were just praying he would hold on and find a way to survive. I never really even thought about his chances of winning the thing until he made the final nine. Even then, I didn’t really think about him actually winning it until it got heads up. Even THEN it seemed pretty unlikely. There was just never that moment where I was like, WOW, he really has a shot at this thing! It was just touch and go, hopefully he picks up a hand soon and doubles up. And it was like that for hour after hour after hour, until he was sitting across from Gold and everyone else had vanished.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – Paul did not play his best poker during the World Series of Poker Main Event. There were other tournaments, like the 5k shorthanded at the WSOP and the WPT Championship, where I thought he played quite a bit better. He made some mistakes at the end of the WPT Championship that he learned from – no question his WSOP finish does not happen without that experience at the Bellagio. It just seemed to me like he was picking up a lot more pots with the worst hand during those other tournaments, and his chips were gained more through skillful hand-reading than favorable situations. It’s mindboggling to me that someone can finish second in an 8,700 player tournament without playing their best poker.

There’s the old expression “It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.” It’s really true this time. Paul really is the nicest guy I know. Maybe this happened because he’s a good person. Maybe it happened because he is a man of faith. Maybe because of both.

One thing I know is it would not have happened without his friends and family, and it would not have happened without me. It was a pretty spectacular feeling watching him at the final table, and watching Paul and his family cry at the party the day after, knowing I had helped change lives.
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Now a few thoughts on the final table:

I don’t know if I’ll ever forget the look on Erik Friberg’s face when he got knocked out. It was so clear that he, perhaps better than anyone playing at or watching the final table, really understood the significance of the moment. He knew he would probably never return to that table, and it had slipped through his fingers. It was a combination of awe, disappointment, and just a little bit of satisfaction from having competed his hardest at something he loved.

I’m really trying to figure out how Rhett Butler made it as far as he did, and spent a large portion of the tournament as a big stack. Maybe this guy made a lot of Dan Harrington type moves capitalizing on his image, and I should give him more credit. It just didn’t seem like he was capable of that though.

There seems to be this idea out there that Allen Cunningham didn’t play his best at the final table, maybe even “choked” a little bit. I don’t know about any of that. We didn’t get to see much of his cards. He never had a really favorable hand-over-hand situation at the final table. He had trips against Gold’s trips/higher kicker and didn’t lose that much. He lost a huge race against Gold that would have put him right back in the thick of it. Sure he got bluffed by Paul in one big pot, but it was a pretty sick bluff.

I seem to be the only one who has any respect for Jamie Gold’s game. Maybe because I seem to favor unpopular characters. Maybe it’s because he plays pretty similarly to how I do in the cash games. I don’t know, it just seemed to me like he had way the best hand in 80% of the big pots he got involved in. Gold was the luckiest player in the tournament. But that doesn’t mean he can’t play poker, and it doesn’t mean he didn’t deserve to be the champion.