Friday, June 22, 2007

WSOP Day 21: Late Night Hijinks, Lisandro's Breakthrough Victory, and Fantasy Sports Live

By Pauly

3:22am... Bored shitless. Sitting in a near empty media row waiting for Change100's event to end so we can go home. Tragically, it's a Limit Hold'em event and they have to play down to a final nine players. Some kid named Vivek was the shortstack but he's doubled up a few times and his drunken friends liquored up on Beast Lite keep shouting from the rail keep, "Ship it to Vivek!!!"

I'm too lazy to break a $100 bill so I can hail a cab home. My assignment covering the Final 8 of the Heads Up bracelet event ended two hours earlier when a 21-year old former professional video game player who lived in South Korea took down a bracelet after beating Tao of Poker reader Mark Muchnik in a best of three heads up match.

An odd sickness plagued me all day. I felt hungover despite the fact I hadn't drank enough in the last three or four days to warrant a sluggish demeanor. I wasn't full on sick, yet I had all the symptoms... fever, chills, breathing problems. I could have had anything from the bird flu to malaria. And after spending three weeks inside the Rio breathing their recycled air, I'm shocked that my body has been run down by infection from all the widespread germs from poker players who lack personal hygiene. By week three of the WSOP, some guys are in dire need of a bath, shower, and change of clothes. Sometimes I think some players should be spending their money on deodorant, a new pair of shoes, and clean underwear instead of buying into the $1,500 NL donkfest.

For most of Day 21, I longed to be at home sleeping off my bug instead of covering heads up tournaments. As soon as my event ended, my pharmaceutical cocktail of generic Vicodin and NyQuil Day medicine (which Ed from Gutshot pointed out was actually called DayQuil) finally kicked in. Wired. Eight hours too late. That's what I was so I wandered around in a buzzed state and fucked around in the media room. I gave Benjo a new nickname, Benjo Crackhead. Because it's funny to think about French people smoking crack cocaine in Las Vegas. I kid. The guy is a good egg and crack free.

Steve Hall lurked in the media room. I had spotted him intermittently over the last three weeks. He usually hung out with his German lady friend who was flat broke but had the ability to get strange men to hand over $5,000 so she can donk it off at the tables or blow in the Forum Shops at Caesar's. Steve Hall told me about his new Liz Lieu. In 2005, the Liz Lieu du jour was Liz Lieu. In 2006, he shifted his focus to Lynette Chan. In 2007, it's Jennifer Lam. Steve Hall might be the horniest person on Earth that hailed from the British Isles and he has a devestating penchant for young Asian women. I'm glad the new girl who works for Poker Listings had already been warned about Steve Hall. His reputation precedes him.

I went looking for Otis but he wasn't around I assumed that he headed back to his room to masturbate into his hand towels. Since the maids that clean his room at the Rio already think he's a chronic pud wanker for using too many bottles of hand lotion to soothe his chapped hands, he might as well rub one out thinking about Tilted Kilt Waitresses frolicking with Milwaukee's Beast girls.

Moving on...

ESPN decided to tape the Stud final table with Daniel Negreanu, Nick Frangos, and Jeff Lisandro. Eventually, Lisandro went on to win. Ironically, late on Day 2 when the remaining eight players initially voted on whether to quit and come back for a Day 3 (of a scheduled two day event) or if they should play it out, Lisandro was the only person who wanted to play it out. He changed his mind and the rest did him well. He went on to win his first bracelet.

It was a sweet moment for Lisandro who most of the poker world knows as the guy who Prahlad Friedman accused of cheating during the 2006 Main Event when he claimed Lisandro did not ante and shorted a pot. ESPN went to the videotape and proved that Lisandro was innocent. However, for several minutes after the incident, Friedman was relentless and kept pestering Lisandro about shorting the pot. If you don't know, Lisandro is from Australia but has ties to the old country back in Italy. Draw your own conclusion. But let's just say the Friedman was lucky he wasn't found dead in a ditch somewhere on the outskirts of Pahrump.

I will be covering Day 2 of Event #35 aka the $1,500 Donkfest. There are 147 players left and I don't get to go home until nine remain. Phil Gordon has chips along with Kathy Liebert, Nam Le, JC Alavarado, that Esfiandari character, and Clonie Gowen. Yes, Clonie actually cashed in a WSOP event. Maybe she'll finally have enough money to pay back that $500 debt she owes Michalski.

Click here to follow my live updates for Day 2 of Event #35 $1,500 NL Hold'em over at Poker News.

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Do you waste all your time watching sports and wishing that you signed up for a fantasy league?

If so, check out Fantasy Sports Live. I'm a partner in a brand new fantasy sports website. Blinders came up with the idea and business plan for Fanstasy Sports Live. He brought Joe Speaker and myself in on his brainchild. I'm happy to be part of the team. We launched the site the other day.

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Fantasy Sports Live is perfect for lazy gamblers who don't want to have a fantasy team over an entire season. You can get your fix in one day. It's sort of like an SNG version of fantasy sports where you join a league, draft a team, and can play for as little as $1. And everything is over in a day!

Here's how Blinders explains the site:
I bring to you a website that compresses the Fantasy Sports experience to just a few action packed hours, offers you the ability to profit long-term from your sports knowledge, and eliminates all of the hassles of standard fantasy sports offerings like season long commitments, fees for adjusting your rooster, waiver wires, free agents, trades...

Just choose your stakes, draft a team of starters from the contest's games, and test your sports knowledge against others from around the country. We run the contests like sit and goes. They form up real-time, and close when the maximum entries are registered. Players then have until the start time to complete their draft. Once the contest starts, you can see the fantasy players on the teams you are against and a leaderboard shows the real-time contest standings. Also, by law all of our cash prizes are guaranteed. If we don't get the maximum entries it is like an overlay for those that are entered.

What I did was rewrite the rules of fantasy sports. I hope you enjoy the results.
For more information head over to the website... Fantasy Sports Live. And if you want a sign up bonus, use bonus code: Pauly.

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Bouncin Round the Room on Day 21

Phil Hellmuth was steaming over something Change100 wrote about him on Poker News. He sought out everyone's favorite Hollyweird blonde and was ready to chastise her. Apparently, someone misread something she wrote and called up Hellmuth to ask him why he was chasing a gutshot. We all know that the greatest Hold'em player in the world would never do such a thing. But that person had poor reading comprehension and gave Hellmuth wrong information. Once he realized what happened, he settled down. Although Hellmuth cashed in another event, he failed to make another final table as he seeks out bracelet #12.

Tony G offered to arm wrestle a guy $40,000. His opponent punked out and did not want to do it. Hear that Bad Blood? I think you should fly out to Vegas and take on The G! If I were you, I'd scrape together the cashola from all your G-Vegas buddies and take a shot at The G.

Two tourists snapped a photo with David Chui in the hallway. After Chui went back inside the ballroom to his event, one guy turned to the other and said, "That's so cool we got a picture with Chau Giang!"

Number of Bad Beat Stories I Heard from Pros in the Last 48 Hours: 27

Number of People Who Asked Me for Weed in the Last 48 Hours: 9
Last 5 Pros I Pissed Next to...
1. Layne Flack
2. Ray Davis
3. Men the Master
4. Mel Judah
5. Josh Arieh
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Don't forget to check out LasVegasVegas for Flipchip's WSOP photos and there's the Poker Prof's cool 2007 WSOP Info page.

And come back at the Tao of Poker for daily recaps and head over at PokerNews for live coverage and updates including chipcounts.

Original content written and provided by Pauly from Tao of Poker. All rights reserved. RSS feeds are for non-commercial use only.

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