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.

Hooooookkkkkkaaaaayyyyy?

So, as you may have gathered from the photo of Brett a few posts back, there was a non-bracelet event at this year's WSOP where the winner instead got a ridiculously large trophy.

This event, the media event, was also sans buy-in and anyone who made the final 9 were able to choose a charity and a donation would be made to that charity in their name. Both Court and I decided to play for the foundation established for Devin Porter' s dad. I had told Devin about the event and he kindly texted me to check on me shortly after we combined to the final 3 tables. Then, I kid you not, Devin hops in a cab from the Palms and I get myself a lil railbird.

Unfortunately, the event was designed to be over with in like 4 hours, so I very quickly found myself rather short stacked. Brett and I were put at the same table and he raised in early position when I was in the BB. I look down at 5-5 and very quickly ship it in. He looks frustrated and calls. Before he turns his hand over he asks, "do you have a pair?" I turn over my pocket fives and Brett laughs as he turns up---the other two fives. The board then runs out J-6-6-9-J and we are both playing the board to chop the pot.

A few hands later it folds around to me and I have A-Q, so I very quickly ship it for 9 big blinds or so. The dude from Bluff in the big blind beats me into the pot and I think I am in bad shape until he turns over his hand and shows me K-10.

K-10? Well, I am ahead, but not a huge favorite or anything and the guy manages to spike a gutshot straight on the river no more than ten minutes after Devin arrives. Apparently Devin has nothing better to do though, because he sticks around to cheer on Brett with us in addition to wish ill will on the K-10 guy (we even booed and hissed when he was introduced at the finaltable. Sore loser? That's me!)

Also on the sidelines watching the action is an hysterical Swedish man with a proclivity for punctuating his sentences by a long pause followed by a drawn out "hoooooookkkkaaaay?" He was also dressed like the most stereotypical tourist you'll ever encounter, complete with: fanny pack, socks with sandals, and an appalling print shirt of dogs playing poker. Don't believe me? See for yourself:

He was laying odds for the players at the final table and, when it was 3-handed, he offered 2-1 odds to Devin on Brett. Devin took him up on the bet and put down $5 on bertminatti taking it down. Well, when it is almost over and Brett has a HUGE chip lead, CrazySwede comes back to Devin and says he is about to win $10. Devin corrects him, "No, you mean $15."

CrazySwede then proceeds to explain to us that odds are very different in Sweden and 2-1 is equivalent to doubling your money. He and Devin debate the semantics of oddsmaking for a minute or two before Devin is finally like, "bet's off...give me back my money." Needless to say, CrazySwede was the life of the party and had everyone, including Nolan Dalla, rolling on the floor laughing.

In the end, Brett took it down and won a ridiculously large trophy, but I still maintain he should have thrown the event in order to get 2nd or 3rd, which also received trophies. The difference was that these trophies were open/challice-like objects, perfect for consuming copious amounts of alcohol out of while Brett's larger, ostensibly more prestigious trophy had a closed top and was essentially good for nothing.

In completely unrelated news, I randomly googled myself today and stumbled upon this. I can't quite figure out the context of the post, even when I read the posts preceding and following it in the thread. Nonetheless, I am going to just take it as some sort of compliment that I exist in the 2+2iverse. I have no idea who "clowntable" is on 2+2, nor any idea why he/she would have any clue who I am, but still, kinda bizarre.