Big Phan of Hand-For-Hand

If you made it through to the end of my last, epic blog, you may remember me discussing Hand-For-Hand coverage. You may also recall that when it got down to one table Andy and I traded off transcribing the hands. We could have done more than one hand at a time if we had liked, but trading off every other one kept us from having to stand for long stretches of time...or at least, in theory that was the plan.

On occassion, I run well. Very rarely do I run well at something that matters, like poker for money or my love life. I run well at relatively useless things like fantasy sports leagues in which no money is on the line, free poker at bars, games of tic tac toe, or finding pennies. On this fine day in July though, I began to run well at Hand-For-Hand. How do you run well at Hand-For-Hand you may ask? Well, here's how...

In poker, sometimes hands are over very quickly. Bob raises from the cut off and everyone folds. He wins the blinds and antes. Other times, hands take longer. Heck, every once in a while we even see flops, turns, and once in a blue moon a river. I have been told sometimes there is even a point in the hand where the players involved turn over their cards and a winner is declared.

I did not encounter many of these situations during Bellagio Cup Hand-For-Hand experience. Most of my hands were over preflop after one raise and, if I was unlucky if I encountered a reraise with some thought before the initial raiser folded. Andy, on the other hand, had to deal with the wrath of John Phan. Many of you may know that Phan is notorious for just how long he takes to make decisions. I often wonder what a day in the life of John Phan must be like. Does he tank on everything? If so, can you imagine him at McDonalds? How long does John Phan stand in front of the closet every morning, contemplating what to wear? What about really important decisions like who to marry or what to name your kid? Do these types of decisions take him literally years, if not decades, to decide upon?

Sorry about the John Phan tangent, I am just morbidly curious. Anyways, I would literally not even write down half the hands because it was easier for me to just verbally dictate the hands to BJ. I would tap Andy and he would look at me with indignation and say, "are you serious?" I would then sit down and 10-12 minutes would pass before Andy would return with the previous hand. I'd get up, watch the next hand, and return less than 30 seconds later, provoking Andy to become more and more cranky.

"I used to like you, you know."

"I was going to say it will be sad working without you until December, but I take it back.

"I hate the new girl."

At one point Phan tanked for, I kid you not, over ten minutes. Granted, it was a fascinating hand that I later learned was a pretty ballsy bluff on the part of Mike Watson, but that entire time Andy was languishing in Hand-For-Hand hell while I sat at the table sipping on my strawberry julius, reveling in the fact that I may not always win many coin flips in poker, but at least I run well at something.

A Day In the Life

My friends and family continue to ask what exactly it is I do every day when I am working. Considering most of them have little to no understanding of poker, the task of explaining a typical work day becomes markedly more difficult. However, I am going to try to give it a go.....

11:00AM - Arise. The other P5ers will attest that I generally get up earlier than this because I am a bit of a freak, but I am going to say 11AM to convey to you how late the day starts. It is fantastic and one of the best things about the gig.

11:15AM - When I was with P5s, we would usually leave right around now to drive to the Rio. At WPT I was fortunate enough to stay at the Bellagio, so I literally just took the elevator down to the "office".

11:30AM-12:00PM - This is the time right before play starts for the day. I will set up my laptop, gather pen and paper, etc. At P5s, we had the text phone to deal with and, since I adopted this task as mine, I would go through the texts and figure out where people were seated. The logisitcs of preparing for the WSOP are much larger in scope than the WPT. At Bellagio, a good glance around the room and I was ready to go in terms of knowing where people were sitting. At WSOP, we had to figure out if people were playing in any of the other rooms like Brasilia or Tropical or even if people had been seated over in the casino, which was about 1/3 of a mile away.

12:00PM-2:00PM - Now, depending on what day of play it was, this time would vary drastically. If it was the first day, at P5s we tried to go and get pictures of players to upload to a gallery. Sounds simple, right? ::snicker, snicker::

Photos are an unbelievably time consuming process because they must be uploaded, edited, cropped, resized, named, uploaded, and named once again. Several other steps have been omitted from the process, but just trust me that it was always a major pain in the ass. I actually LOVED taking photos and felt like I got to be a decent photographer by the end of the summer, but I also felt like I wasted away several hours of my life I won't be getting back seated in front of my laptop, missing the action, trying to edit the countless cans of All-In Energy Drink out of the frame of a picture.

As an aside, if you ever look at the photos on P5s Live, you can easily figure out who took which photos. Jill's are the beautiful, almost artistic looking ones. They are of a quality that shames the rest of us and I am super jealous of her mad skills. Mine are the ones that are quite closely cropped. They also tend to have all sorts of crap like water bottles, food, etc in them, because I am so short that my angles are a little low sometimes. Adam's, God love him, are usually of people looking down or not paying any attention to the camera nor the action at the table, and Brett's, because he is so tall, look as if they have been photographed from space =)

Anyways, this is the time I usually just figured out who was playing and where they were sitting. I would try to catch a couple of big hands to report on and tried to do one chip count as well, but this was usually when I would do more non-poker related posts about what is going on around the Rio since the hands and pots were generally rather small and less than thrilling.

2:00PM-Dinner Break - This was the time where we would start to catch more big hands, eliminations, early chip leaders, etc. As the WSOP progressed, this part of the job got much easier because players began to recognize and get to know us. Oftentimes, if we missed a big hand, they would tell us about it to report on versus us returning to their empty seat and wondering whatever happened to them.

During breaks, especially at the WPT, I would try to snag the guys who were doing well and chat with them about how their day was going that way I could provide some sort of explanation as to how someone went from having 100 chips to having 150,000.

Dinner Break-End of Play - At the WSOP, often several events would be running at the same time and we would just try to divvy up the workload by events with each of us taking two that were being played in close proximity to each other. It was also the time where things got to be a bit more exciting. For those who have never watched a poker tournament before, it is fascinating to me to watch how the demeanor of the players changes as play progresses and this was the point in time where it would start to get really nervewracking as their would only be 4 or 5 tables left and you began to really think someone you were covering was going to win.

For the WPT, we actually started Hand-For-Hand coverage when there were only two tables of players left. To quickly explain, Hand-For-Hand coverage is detailed descriptions of what occurred during every single hand played at the table. It is great for those following the event over the net because they are able to see trends and patterns in the way people are playing. For example, if you look back at coverage of Bellagio Cup, you'll see that once we were down to 7 or 8 players, Per Ummer went nearly 30 hands (which is quite some time) without voluntarily putting a single chip in the pot.

I would imagine this would be a great way for players to review their play too, much in the same way online players review hand histories provided by the poker sites. I have never asked anyone about it though, so I could be wrong.

In terms of logistically how we as reporters were able to do Hand For Hand Coverage, when it was down to 2 tables, we split into teams of two. Jeff and I would trade off and watch 5-6 hands and return to the computer to type them up while the other person watched play. Once it got down to one table, Andy and I traded off transcribing each hand and bringing it to BJ, who would type it up on the computer.

Wow, this is very quickly getting uber-long, but that is basically the gist of my day. On early days of play, we would get done at a relatively reasonable hour, but some events at the WSOP had me staying until 5AM and 6AM (mostly the shootouts). Once again, thank goodness for the noon starting time.

Its Been a Long Time Since I've Blogged a Good Rant

As I mentioned in my last blog, I am both fascinated and frustrated by online poker names. Some are simple enough and strike me as relatively inoffensive. "aaronbeen", "shaundeeb", "JasonGray", the ones I don't even have to type when I report because they become redundant--these are great. I don't even mind the simple number/name/school combos like "USCPhildo", "mattg1983", "ckingusc", "AJKHoosier1", "JP OSU", "uscjess" (heh heh), "THAY3R", etc (although I think the excessive number of "USC" names, albeit the wrong one, make me appreciate them more than I should).

There are even several online poker names that I really just love and appreciate because they just sound cool: "FatalError", "snagglepuss", "SLOPPYKLOD", "MrCasino", "BigRiskky", "THE_D_RY" to name a few.

Then there are the indecipherable. hfus832gai. YGhas&t76dq. Ones that look like that. First, let me just be up front and admit that I am lazy. I don't like having to set aside two minutes to type out someone's online name. It is also unbelievably difficult to memorize these and I hate not being able to quickly rattle off the online names to other people.

Now this is where I may lose some more ardent online poker fans. To say that I hate when people are only referred to by their online names in real life would be excessive. To say I just don't get why people do it would not adequately address the issue. Why don't we just say my feelings rest somewhere in between those two poles and that I do not like to refer to people by their online name rather than their given one in a live setting?

In my line of work reporting on the online poker pros playing in live tournaments this can be somewhat problematic. Oftentimes players ask me who someone is and I respond "Oh that is Justin Rollo."

"No, I mean his poker name."

"Sigh."

I understand. When you play online poker as your occupation, you have only the name and perhaps an avatar to define these people by. I get that, I really do. But I must admit, it is kind of humorous to me when I divulge their online name and the player I am talking to will say something like "oh yeah, he's a buddy of mine" or "I know him" despite clearly admitting he/she does not even know this person's name.

Brett and I actually got into a bit of a debate regarding the online vs actual name debate regarding photos on P5s Live. One of the odd glitches in our photo galleries on the site is that the captions cannot extend past one line or else it will throw the rest of the photos in a given gallery out of alignment. Therefore, several names must be abbreviated in order to fit into the allotted space.

In these situations, Brett elects to use the first initial of a person's name, their online moniker, and their last name. I always opt to forgo the online name altogether for a couple of reasons. First of all, the space consumed by the quotations marks around the online names further restricts the number of letters you can fit on a line. Second, I find the quotations to look cluttered when they aren't adequately separted from the first and last names with a space. Third, it is much less time consuming to just quickly type their first and last name and photo galleries can easily eat up hours of our time. Finally, and most importantly, I adamently believe that we should never forgo someone's actual name for their online name.

As I explained to Brett, these are people, not video game characters. Craig Gray's mom likely does not refer to him as "My son, MrCasino." This is the obnoxious academic in me I suppose, but I am concerned that our identities in a virtual space are spilling over into real life. I completely understand that many of these guys are only known within the community by their online poker names so, whenever I am writing a post, I always include both. However, in instances like photo captions where one must be chosen over another, I can't reconcile eliminating someone's actual name to make room for an Internet identity.

Part of the appeal of online identities is their inherent ability to deceive and manipulate. It is a chance to be someone you are incapable of being in real life and the control you have over your persona on the web is obviously appealing. Plus, the lack of policing and verification of identities on the Internet results in the opportunity to create an identity that in no way reflects your personality in real life.

It might have been in his WPT Final Table interview with Amanda Leatherman, but I remember Luke "IWEARGOGGLES" Staudenmeier explaining that he chose the name as means of getting action at the table because it is kind of silly. We can't do this in real life as easily. I can't really dsiguise the fact I am a female and I look like I'm 12 when I am playing live, although many times I wish I could. While I can ham it up sometimes--throw on a Little Mermaid t-shirt, wear my hair in pigtails, etc, etc, I still have to work within a certain set of parameters of my actual identity. Not only in online poker, but in other games/sites in the virtual world like WoW, Second Life, and MySpace people are able to become someone they are not or an exaggerated version of themselves with relative ease. As someone who has spent most of their life leading a relatively dull existence, I can absolutely see the appeal.

That does not change the fact that these online personas are not actually us in real life though. I know this is going to sound rather paranoid and silly, but I am sincerely worried for the day when a fabricated construction on the Internet is able to become its own personality and entity outside of the computer without a name and a face behind it.

Gavin Smith My Ass

So I am working the World Poker Tour Bellagio Cup IV event and I am engrossed in the action at one of the tables.

I hear a familiar voice behind me ask in a shocked tone, "are you taking a picture of her butt?"
I turn around to find one of my favorite photographers, Steve, pointing his camera in a downward angle that does indeed appear to be aimed right at my posterior. I also see one of my favorite players, Gavin Smith, staring at Steve as well and I realize it was him who asked Steve what excatly he was up to.

"You just took a picture of her butt didn't you?"

"Oh...no, I, I was adjusting the settings, see?" Steve says, clearly embarrassed and starting to blush. He futilely tries to show Gavin and I that his camera is not on "photo mode", but Gavin is having none of it.

"That's why you're blushing, you're embarrassed you got caught." Again, Steve tries to explain he was just adjusting the settings. I decide to join in on the ribbing...

"I see how it is Steve, my ass isn't even worth taking a picture of, that's fine."

"Oh trust me," Gavin replies, "it is definitely worth taking a photo of."

I smile to myself, wondering how on earth I ended up where I am and go about my day.

Later, I am once again caught up in the action at a table when I hear the distinct click of a camera shudder. I turn around just in time to see Gavin run up to me and show me the photo of my butt that he's just taken on his phone.

"You know, so you don't feel bad about yourself," he explains.

As play winds down for the night, I walk by the table one more time as I hear Smith tell the table, "anyone want to see a picture of a really cute butt?"

I love the WPT.