How do people get here?

Recently I've seen myself listed by other poker bloggers (specifically Bill Rini and Wicked Chops) as among their top referrers. It occurred to me that I've never done more than glance at the Google Analytics report about who has been referring hits to me. I herewith correct that deficiency. For 2010, the top ten referrers were:

1. http://craakker.blogspot.com/
2. http://www.allvegaspoker.com/
3. http://pkrdlr.blogspot.com/
4. http://taopoker.blogspot.com/
5. http://magicalmysterypokertour.blogspot.com/
6. http://ftrain.blogspot.com/
7. http://www.thinkingpoker.net/Blog/
8. http://bwop.blogspot.com/
9. http://www.twoplustwo.com/
10. http://bastinptc.blogspot.com/

While I was at it, I also took an updated look at what Google queries lead people to something I've written. To be sure, the great majority of Google searches that find me are clearly looking for me, with some combination of "poker," "grump," "rakewell," and "blog." But setting those aside, for as long as I've been peeking in at this sort of thing from time to time, the top inquiry has been about Tom Dwan's sexual orientation. I wrote about it the first time I saw Dwan play on television. Then a while later, I discovered that Google searches about Dwan were by far the most common thing leading people to my blog. For 2010, such questions remain in the lead by a huge margin, with at least 1200 souls having looked through my pages in an attempt to satisfy their curiosity on this vitally important matter.

Interestingly, for the first time, I can actually provide something of an answer. Since I last mentioned the subject, I have heard Dwan speak openly about his girlfriend when playing in various televised events and on his Twitter feed. Assuming that he is telling the truth, and that this refers to a romantic rather than platonic relationship, the answer appears to be that he is straight. Not that there's anything wrong with that....

Oddly, the next most common Google search that leads people my way is now "Brad Booth broke." That plus a few variants on the same idea brought over 650 searchers to the blog. The only thing I've written about Booth is a post pointing readers to an interesting All In magazine article about his travails: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2010/05/brad-booth.html It's not like either Booth or Dwan actually feature heavily in my thoughts or writing.

There are also some strange keyword searches that show up in the rankings:

• poker grump jeep (209)

Huh? I've used the word "Jeep" exactly once in four years. It was in a non-poker-related post, just showing a few photos of a crazily decorated car that I noticed while walking downtown, here. And yet more than 200 people specifically sought out that post? I don't get it.

• shannon elizabeth (152)
• shannon elizabeth feet (61)

Um, OK. I have no idea what these people are doing here. I just tried a Google search for Shannon Elizabeth, and I'm nowhere in the first five pages of results. If you have a foot fetish for her, I'm surely not the go-to guy about that.

• grange95 blog (131)

Baffling once again. When I replicate this search, I find my first mention toward the bottom of the second page of results. If people are looking for the infamous Craakker, how do so many of them get diverted my way, rather than where they presumably want to go?

• cory zeidman drunk (46)

One of my personal favorites, this--though just as mysterious a result as the others. I did write once about having Zeidman at the table with me briefly, but he was not drunk. He consumed only water while he was playing.

As I have found in the past when doing such high-tech navel-gazing, what specific things people are looking for when they find me has zero correlation with either what I write most about or with what I think are my best pieces of work. Oh well. I'm glad I have at least a little something to offer to people with such widely varying interests.

Jason Alexander is as delusional as Shannon Elizabeth

Since I picked on Shannon Elizabeth yesterday, I might as well share with you another roasting of a poker-playing celebrity that I did in the same yet-unfinished article that I started writing last year. I couldn't (and didn't really want to) find a photo of Jason Alexander in a bikini. I think that the above is about as close as any of us will want to get.

Here's what I wrote:

Paranormal vision

Jason Alexander, best known for playing
George Costanza on “Seinfeld,” is one of many television and movie stars who
play poker with some regularity and seriousness in public events. An article in
Bluff magazine recently profiled his poker thoughts and experience. In the
interview, he claimed an ability which, if real and reproducible, would make him
the most formidable player in the history of the game—being able to see, through
mental imagery, what card the dealer was next going to turn over:

“I’ve got to tell you that in the last two tournaments I played…I’ve gone
to this very quiet place and I have mentally pictured what the turn or the river
card is going to be and if it doesn’t come up for me in that moment of fantasy,
I get out; but if I saw the card and played it, good things would come. I don’t
know if it was instinctual or that third-eye thing. I’ve played some risky hands
when I was in big trouble, and, of late, it’s really paid off. You know, I just
saw it happen as if it had been turned.” [1]

Fortunately for Mr. Alexander, the rules of poker do not disallow such
clairvoyance (as long as it is not the result of collusion with the dealer). But
one has to wonder why, with such ability, he does not win every time he plays. I
assume that this talent, if it could be repeated under controlled conditions,
would also readily qualify for James Randi’s $1 million prize for demonstration
of supernatural abilities. I have not heard that the actor has not made
application for this money. Of course, he may not need the money, but he could
donate it to a charity of his choice. Perhaps he simply does not know of its
existence.

[1] Michael Friedman, “Jason Alexander: Seinfeld’s George finds serenity
now at the poker table,” Bluff, May, 2007, p. 42. Available online at http://www.bluffmagazine.com/magazine/Jason-Alexander-Michael-Friedman-817.htm.

It's scary enough that these people have their private delusional moments. But that they feel perfectly free to share them with the public, with apparently no more concern for being deemed mentally ill than if they admitted to seeing yellow elephants dancing around them, says sad, alarming things about how unjudgmental our society is of whatever weird ideas people want to entertain.

Shannon Elizabeth is as delusional as Jerry Yang

At the end of the post I just put up a short time ago (the last substantive post; I was about to start this one when I noticed that it would be #700, so I had to take a slight detour and take care of that housekeeping before coming back to the serious stuff), I mentioned Jerry Yang and his strange beliefs about God rearranging the deck in the dealer's hand. I was about to include, in the same paragraph, mention of Shannon Elizabeth. She believes in basically the same nuttiness, except that she attributes the power to her own mind (and that of people around her) rather than to a deity.

I didn't include it there because I realized that I hadn't written about that fact in detail before, so I couldn't easily link to a previous post on the subject. This is to make up for that deficiency. Besides, it gives me an excuse to illustrate a post with a photo of Ms. Elizabeth in a bikini, and I think we'd all have to agree that, whatever positive attributes this blog might have, it has been woefully short of pictures of pretty women in bikinis.

Last year I started writing an article that I intended to submit to a magazine. It's about the weird things that poker players believe. I got distracted by other projects (including this blog), and never finished writing the article. But here's what I wrote about Elizabeth in the unfinished first draft:

Shannon Elizabeth, best known for starring in the movies “American Pie” and
“American Pie 2,” is one of the most accomplished actors-turned-poker-players,
having recently made it to the semifinals of the televised 2007 “NBC National
Heads-Up Poker Championship,” in which matches are played one-on-one—an
especially difficult format—defeating some of the world’s best players in the
process.

She claims to call on a mysterious skill: She seems to
believe that her thoughts can rearrange the cards in the already-shuffled deck.

In an interview after her first-round win in the heads-up
tournament she said, “One of the biggest things, like a change that I’ve been
making just in my overall life, is the law of attraction and positive energy,
and really trying to, to picture the cards I need and not to picture the cards I
don’t want, cuz I don’t want to attract those cards.” [1]

As
stated, she may simply be thinking that her mental energies can change how the
cards get arranged during the shuffle—which would be remarkable enough in
itself, if it were a demonstrable ability. But an incident later in the
tournament seems to show that she extends this to influences that can be exerted after the shuffle, too.

In the last hand of her quarter-final match, Elizabeth is all-in before the
flop with K-10 against her opponent’s K-3. While they wait for the dealer to
produce the first three community cards, Elizabeth can be heard chanting, “Ten,
ten, ten.” This is not too strange, as it is natural to hope for a card that
will strengthen one’s position. It does not require any supernatural belief to
possess such hope. But immediately thereafter, she hears one of her supporters
mention a “three.” She quickly turns, hold up the palm of her hand to this
friend, and earnestly rebukes him, saying, “Don’t call for that…. Don’t call for
what you don’t want, call for what you do want. Please. Ten. Seriously. Ten. Law
of attraction. Ten.” When she is still ahead with only one card to come (and no
pair to her ten having been revealed, despite her incantations), she can be
heard repeatedly saying “Five of clubs, five of clubs, five of clubs,”
apparently having arbitrarily picked a card that would help neither player, and
thus leave her with the winning hand. The ace of hearts comes, which, while not
the card she willed to appear, accomplishes the same thing. [2]

It
is difficult to interpret her apparently deadly serious instructions and actions
here as anything short of manifesting a belief that her mental exertion, perhaps
combined with that of her supporters, can actually change the order of the
shuffled deck in the dealer’s hand. The ordinary view would be that once the
shuffle and cut of the deck is complete, the die is cast, and what cards are
dealt out cannot be altered (barring, obviously, simple errors or outright
cheating on the part of the dealer). But Elizabeth appears to truly believe that
if a pair to her opponent’s three—a losing card for her—was destined to appear,
she can change that by what she and her friends think and say in the few seconds
before the dealer turns over the card.

Unfortunately, the broadcast’s host did not ask the actress in her
interviews to explain in detail the mechanism by which this influence is
supposedly exerted. Do the cards physically rearrange themselves in the dealer’s
hand? Or perhaps the printing on the critical card is supernaturally altered, so
that we would find a duplicate of some card in the deck upon inspection after
the hand has been played. Or maybe her belief is that her will acts in a
temporally retroactive fashion, affecting the shuffle that occurred a few
minutes before via some sort of space-time warp. We are left to wonder.

[1] The entire 2007 tournament, as broadcast on NBC, is available
at http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/23011821/site/21683474/.
Elizabeth's comments, as transcribed by the author, are in Episode 3, Segment 2.
Her reference appears to be to such recently popular books as Michael Losier, Law of Attraction: The Science of Attracting More of What You Want and Less
of What You Don’t, (self-published, 2004), and Rhonda Byrne, The Secret (Atria Books, 2006), both of which claim that one can alter the physical
universe and the actions of other people by thinking correctly and positively
about what one wants to see happen.

[2] This hand is played
out in Episode 8, Segment 5, at the URL above.

So now you know: Shannon Elizabeth is just as crazy as Jerry Yang. They simply put different labels on what is, at its root, the same basic delusion.

She looks a lot better in a bikini, though.* That doesn't put a dent in the delusional thing, but it's something.


*Clarification added in anticipation of snarky reader comments: No, I haven't actually seen Jerry Yang in a bikini. I'm just guessing here. I think it's a pretty safe guess.

What's the deal with "Deal"?

My occasionally spacey sister left some of her clothes in a drawer in her hotel room at Sam's Town last week. Housekeeping found them for her, and today I had to go pick them up so I can mail them to her. I had noticed in the local movie listings that the newest poker movie, Deal, directed by Gil Cates, Jr., was showing at only two places, and one of them was the cinemaplex at Sam's Town. It seemed like destiny. So I went to the 3:00 showing. At 2:55, I was the only one in the theater. It would have been an unprecedented experience to see a movie in a theater completely alone, but five other people came in at the last minute to ruin the opportunity.

I was prepared to hate this film. I even posted last fall that it was probably going to suck. The initial reviews have been far from kind; Wicked Chops Poker quoted these review snippets:

"Deal has to take the title of the worst film ever about the game and that
includes the how-to videos with Joan Rivers impersonators you see in your Vegas
hotel room." - Erik Childress, efilmcritic.com
"One
of the most cliche-ridden and generally misguided films of not just the year,
but the decade so far." - Brian Tallerico, Deadbolt.com
"Director/co-writer
Gil Cates Jr. gives us a by-the-numbers execution of a by-the-numbers story,
which would barely be movie-of-the-week material but for Reynolds's 'star
power.'" - LA
City Beat
"A poker movie that has the dubious honor of being even worse
than Lucky You." - Gary Thompson (but not the Gary Thompson?), Philadelphia
Daily News

In a later post, the same site noted that the film had received a perfect 0% on rottentomatoes.com (i.e., not a single good review), which doesn't happen too often. Similarly, I see that metacritic.com finds an average review score of 35/100, and not a single one better than 50 (see here).

So, like I said, I was prepared to hate it. After all, I've hated most of the poker movies I've posted about here (click the "movies" label at the end of this post or along the left-hand margin to see them all), and griping about things that I don't like or that are just plain bad is, well, it's kind of my whole schtick here, y'know?

But I have to say--it wasn't all that bad.

Sure, it managed to pull together every cliche you might imagine--the hooker with the heart of gold, the washed-up, has-been poker great of yesteryear trying to mount a comeback, the brash, young internet poker whiz who has to learn about live poker tells and whose family disapproves of his playing, the inevitable teacher-versus-student finale for the championship, etc. Also, it definitely takes a while to get going. You can see the "surprise" ending coming from a mile away (especially if you've seen Lucky You, which should sue for plagiarism). And nobody's going to be winning any Oscars for this baby. I could also note the oddity of the World Poker Tour suddenly being broadcast live, and with Mike Sexton and Vince Van Patten doing commentary all the way through, rather than just at the final table. Also, there are small poker continuity problems, such as the community cards being swept away at the end of a hand not being the same ones that were shown in close-up as the hand progressed.

But on the positive side, the soundtrack was pretty enjoyable (including tracks from Delbert McClinton and Lorrie Morgan), and you get to see Shannon Elizabeth in her underwear. (Her part, incidentally, is so insignificant that it could have been edited out without disturbing the plot--except that then we'd miss out on seeing her in her unders.) Phil Laak and Antonio Esfandiari play themselves, and do very well. That sounds like it should be a laugh line, but it's not. The pros playing themselves in most other poker movies come off far stiffer and more uncomfortable than they are in real life, but Phil and Antonio look, sound, and act just like they do everywhere else you've seen them--relaxed and funny. Most importantly, the poker itself doesn't suck, and there's a lot of it, neither of which could be said about many so-called poker movies.

I particularly liked the one truly surprising aspect of the big showdown at the end--the way that the Burt Reynolds character adjusts for the fact that his protege has apparently picked up on a tell that he has. It's daring, brilliant, dramatic, and even plausible, given the circumstances. (Which is why I'm not going to tell you what it is here.)

I suppose that overall it's somewhat duller than Lucky You, with fewer characters and fewer diversions from the main plot, but it also avoids most of the things that drove me crazy about Lucky You (getting poker stuff wrong, relationships that don't make sense, unlikeable main characters).

I think the movie's strengths and weaknesses are summed up best in this paragraph from the review that Wesley Morris wrote for the Boston Globe:

But "Deal" doesn't really care about the characters as much as it does the
World Poker Championships, where Tommy and Alex end up. Once we get there the
movie becomes interesting because Cates understands the game and its dramas a
lot better than he understands people and theirs.

Incidentally, I saw previews for two non-poker-related movies that both look excellent: Hamlet 2, a comedy, and American Teen, a documentary.

More from Caesars Palace

It's a gorgeous day here in the high desert, 73 degrees, sunny, not a cloud in the sky. Convertible tops are down, though I'm sure the drivers' pleasure is muted by the fact that no car in the city is going over 10 mph, because every road is clogged with NASCAR visitors--a couple hundred thousand of them, we're told. It's a day when your left leg becomes hypertrophied from working the clutch, and you wonder why they bother making cars with five gears, when you just go from first to second to first to second.

But none of that matters, because we've got us a poker match!

You can get updates on the NBC "National Heads-Up Poker Championship" every few minutes here: http://www.pokernews.com/live-reporting/2008-nbc-heads-up-poker-championship/main-event/. Michael Craig is also doing live updates: http://www.fulltiltpoker.com/poker-blog/.

My guesses for the first-round first bracket were horrible. I only picked two out of eight. (Fortunately, I knew they were mostly coin tosses, so unlike everybody else, I didn't put any bets down. I just highlighted my picks on a printed schedule.) I got Andy Bloch over Shannon Elizabeth and Jamie Gold over Tom Kelly. But who would have guessed Orel Hershiser would knock out Ted Forrest? That's kind of like last year, when Don Cheadle beat Phil Ivey in the first round. I also thought that Antonio Esfandiari would make mincemeat of Vanessa Rousso; after watching her on TV several times, I think that she's just not very good.

There's a lot more disorganization about this event than one would think, given that it's now in its fourth year. I found no fewer than five different starting times listed various places for the first matches today, including two different ones on different signs at Caesars! I arrived at about 9:30, which is what a sign I saw yesterday had said, though I didn't really believe they'd get things underway that early. There was already a long line for spectator seats.

I thought it was pretty dumb to wait for what turned out to be another two hours for a seat. After all, the thing goes on well into the evening, and not many will stay through the whole thing. (People quickly discover that you can't really follow the action, and things only get interesting when there's an all-in.) I noticed in last year's broadcasts that there were lots of empty seats showing in the background, so I decided to--what else?--play some poker and see what developed.

It was another bad poker day for me. After I had taken enough abuse, I went to check out the status of the viewer seats. More complete chaos. There are two clusters of seats, one on each end of the room, totalling maybe 100 seats. The main entrance to the room leads directly to the left bank of seats. But there's another entrance that goes to the right-hand end.

I went to the main one, and there were a whole bunch of people milling around. It was impossible to tell whether they were all waiting to get in, or just watching from the doorway. I asked a security guard what the procedure was. She told me to go back to the front desk and sign in, and as seats opened, they would call off names. I found the list-keepers. But they said that they had ditched the list. All I could do was wait in a line way back at the entrance to the poker room (which is maybe 50 yards from the entrance to the tournament room, where the taping was going on). She said they had been told not to let any more people in until 2:00. This was at about 12:30. I asked how they were going to fill empty seats as people left before then. She said they weren't going to.

I didn't believe this for a second. I think every TV show director wants every seat filled, because empty seats suggest that the event is too boring for people to bother being there. So I wandered over to the secondary entrance to the room. Here there was no cluster of people, no security guards, no list-keepers. Just a few people standing in the threshold to the room watching, and a bunch of empty seats inside. So I just wandered in and sat down in the second row. People were freely coming and going. After being in there a while, I overheard the floor director trying to encourage bystanders to fill the seats, because she didn't want any of them empty--just as I had suspected.

I have no idea where the people at the main entrance to the poker room and the other entrance to the tournament room got their instructions, but they were screwing things up, and couldn't even keep their stories straight between them. What a stupid mess.

Anyway, I was in. I was far enough away from the action that I had to use the maximum zoom on my camera, and that meant amplification of even minor hand movements, so unfortunately most of the pictures still came out blurrier than I'd like. But you can at least see what's going on.

As I arrived, two matches were already done (Cunningham/Brown and Wasicka/Deeb), and one had the last hand just as I walked in (Gold/Kelly). Two matches were finished up shortly thereafter, almost back-to-back.

The first was the Forrest/Hershiser stunner.

Orel was using a baseball as a card cap, which is distinctly odd. He had Forrest sign it. Ted said he had never signed a baseball before. Kind of a turnaround of roles, eh?

Next out was Todd Brunson:

I've read several times that Scott Fischman had to give up poker dealing and turn to playing because of his rheumatoid arthritis. When I've seen him on television, I haven't been able to tell that anything was wrong with the small joints of his hands, but in person it's painfully obvious (and I mean that literally), even from about 20 feet away.

Survivor Bellande was the next victim. T. J. Cloutier dropped in to visit. If you're a big name in the poker world, they let you just kind of wander around the tables in the middle of taping. Apparently "big name" doesn't include me, because when I tried it, six burly security guys tackled me and beat the snot out of me. Or at least that's what I imagined would happen if I walked out there.

Then it was Esfandiari's turn. In the first shot, he's consulting with his family between hands. (There's a ton of down time during this thing. Whenever there is an all-in at one table, everything has to stop on the other tables. When there is an all-in and a call, the players have to wait an agonizingly long time before the cameras are all in place, and the tournament director instructs them to show their cards.) In the second, he's showing us the fine sitting posture that results in poker rooms hiring massage therapists.

The last match to conclude was the feature table, Bloch vs. Elizabeth. (If you look closely, you can see Doyle Brunson in the background.) In the third photo, Esfandiari pops over from his table to watch Bloch's A-K double him up against Elizabeth's A-Q. Antonio predicted a Q would come and eliminate Bloch, but it was not to be.

They went back and forth many times. I saw him be all-in with the worst hand and survive at least three times against her (e.g., K-3 offsuit versus her suited A-Q), and finally won it with, as I recall, a 10-8 offsuit sucking out on her K-Q. After the match, Ms. Elizabeth was comforted by Clonie Gowen, who scolded Andy Bloch for winning (but said that she still loved him). The actress was having a hard time holding back tears. I was less than ten feet away, and could see them welling up, and her lip trembling, and she was trying to force smiles. But basically she was crying. I wanted to yell, like Tom Hanks, "Hey! There's no crying in poker!"

But I didn't.

However, Andy Bloch ended up standing right beside me, so I took the opportunity to lean over and whisper to him, "Now look at what you did, you brute--you made her cry." He just smiled, shrugged, and said, "Yeah, well...." It seemed he couldn't think of any way to complete the response. I don't blame him. Hard to say anything sympathetic--and mean it--in that situation. For every winner there's a loser in this game, and nothing he can say or do changes that fact, or the fact that he's happy that he was the winner. If that makes her the loser, and she cries as a result, shrug your shoulders and move on--there's nothing else to be done. Some days you're the winner. Some days you're the loser. You have to take both in stride, or you'll drive yourself crazy.

As they say, that's poker.

Here's a shot of Clonie Gowen. She has lost weight dramatically in the last couple of years, it appears to me, to the point of looking quite unhealthy. She may have the flattest, skinniest butt on Planet Earth:


Finally, here are some random shots of the amazing equipment the TV team was using. That double-ring aluminum scaffolding is hung from the ceiling by just a few chains that look wholly inadequate to support all that weight. It's either magic, or it's going to come crashing down, killing everybody underneath:






Addendum, about 10 minutes later:

I did much better predicting the outcomes of the second set of first-round matches: I got 7 out of 8 right, wrong only in thinking that Daniel Negreanu would take down Michael Mizrachi.

That makes me 9/16 overall so far. Obviously, that's HUGELY better than random chance would predict. Isn't it?


Addendum, late Friday night:

First round action is done. I hit 19/32 overall. Glad I didn't lay out any $$$ on it. Not that anyone cares, but my picks for the second round are now:

Hearts: Bloch, Fischman, Cunningham, Deeb
Diamonds: Townsend, Mizrachi, Benyamine, Lindgren
Clubs: Kaplan, Raymer, Matusow, Ferguson
Spades: Hansen, Laak, Ivey, Tran

There's a party at Caesars Palace--and I'm not invited

Much of the poker world's best talent is at Caesars Palace, which I just left. Tomorrow begins the NBC "National Heads-Up Poker Championship," and tonight at Pure (the nightclub next to the poker room) is the party at which they draw names for first-round action. This is breaking news, folks--I'm posting these pictures before the event ends!

I chose Caesars for my game tonight partly to see who would pop in. I have not played there since this shameful event: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/06/shame-on-caesars-palace.html. I figure by now I've pretty much brought them to their knees with my boycott, so I'm willing to start letting them collect some rake from me again.

The photos above are the tournament room re-sculpted for tomorrow's fun. It's an amazing transformation. It's as if there's nothing of the old room left.

Anyway, the game wasn't going well. (The correct way to read that sentence is: "I was hemorrhaging money to the worst player at the table, and it was pissing me off.") So I took a break to do a little celebrity watching.

They had a red-carpet area set up, but I was way too late to get in position. So let me admit in advance how utterly horrible most of the pictures are. Without elbowing my way through a crowd, all I could do was hover at the end where the players were just getting into line for their red carpet walk--which meant that I was mostly taking pictures of the backs of heads. You may need a little imagination to see who was there....

This problem was compounded by camera glitches: shutter lag, flash intermittently not working, zoom a bit iffy, etc. My digital camera is now almost eight years old, and showing it. It was one of the first 3 megapixel models in its day, but it's reaching the end of its useful life, I'm afraid.

So no place to get good shots combined with a sometimes-working-sometimes-not camera, well, it's a bit like trying to play 9-2 offsuit from early position. It's an uphill battle, and the results usually won't be stellar. But hey, nobody's paying me to do this, and you're not having to pay anything to see, so keep that in mind before you submit your angry notes of complaint.


This would have been a nice, lucky grouping of William Edler, Greg Raymer, and Huckleberry Seed. But it was only after taking these first few photos that I discovered that my flash had been set to "off" (there were so many flashes going off that it was easy to be fooled), which meant the poor little camera was trying for a long shutter exposure. That wasn't going to work. But by the time I figured this out, my targets had moved on and a security guy had told me I couldn't stand where I was.


See that blurry figure in white in the middle? That's Shannon Elizabeth on her cell phone. Gorgeous, isn't she? Yeah, *sigh*, I could look at that photo of her all day long.


Jean-Robert Bellande, recently of "Survivor" fame. Hey, you can almost sorta see a face in this one!


Got the flash problem resolved. Still wrestling with the position problem. Gus Hansen, Phil Laak, and Huck Seed.

Scotty "You call, gonna be all over, baby" (maybe the best poker teaser line in history) Nguyen.

See that one-quarter of a back of a head with a white cowboy hat on? That's Gabe Kaplan, who had been in nice profile until the one one-billionth of a second before my shutter opened, when he sneakily turned away. You may have to take my word on this one.

That was the last photo I snapped before security shooed me away. I went back to my game, lost another buy-in, and gave up for the night. I thought all of the hullaballoo would be over, but the last few celebs were taking their turn for photos and interviews. The crowd had thinned out a lot, so I was able to get some more normal shots.

Erick Lindgren

Kenny Tran. No, not the one with the red and white earrings.

In terms of height, this was a pretty amusing grouping: Howard Lederer, Huck Seed, and Freddy Deeb. Those two had better not ever get him angry; he could punch them in the kneecaps. Sorry that this little group broke up before I could get a picture with all three of them clear at the same time. Passers-by and the official camera people kept getting in the way.

David Williams. As Williams stepped into the camera for his interview ("All right, Mr. Demille, I'm ready for my closeup"), one bystander near me asked another, "Who's that?" The second one said, "It's Paul Williams." The first one turned around and excitedly yelled at a friend several yards further back, "IT'S PAUL WILLIAMS!"

For the record, THAT is Paul Williams. Not the same guy. Two very, very different people.

Just before this, two young women approached me from behind. One of them tapped me on the shoulder and asked, "Do you know who these people are?" I was trying to think of a polite way to say, "If you don't know, why do you care?" But my struggling brain was rescued by a woman standing nearby who piped up, "They're poker players." The girls seemed dejected, perhaps because these red-carpet people weren't real celebrities.

John Juanda, with a stranger that asked him to pose for a picture, which I leeched off of.

John Juanda and Lee Watkinson. No, not the guy picking his nose in the background.

The games start at 9:30 tomorrow morning. I shall attempt to be there. If they allow pictures, I'll try to get some better ones. With studio lighting, that should be much easier. However, I suspect they'll have a no-cameras rule in effect, so that flashes don't show up on tape. (I should be exempt from such a rule. I can definitely turn the flash on my camera off; it's turning it on that has become dicey.)

Mr. Destiny

Yesterday was an interesting day. It's the first time I have shelled out for the pay-per-view live feed from the World Series of Poker main event final table. I watched all 15+ hours of it.

It's hard to know for sure until we see the broadcast with the hole cards, but it looks like in Jerry Yang we've just crowned our most unskilled player ever as world champion. It appears that he's a far, far worse player than the other two relatively unprepared amateurs, Robert Varkonyi and Chris Moneymaker. I think that when those two won, they were both better players than I currently am, though they have taken licks from all around because they simply weren't in the same league as the poker world had become used to seeing in the title role. I'm no poker genius; I think I have a pretty good handle on where I am in the poker food chain, and it's just barely high enough to be a long-term winner at low-stakes games rather than a loser or a break-even player. I wouldn't consider myself a better player than anybody I saw at yesterday's final table, except for Jerry Yang.

So how did he win? Well, to hear him tell it, God ordained it to be so.

From early in the final table, when he was all-in with another player, he could be heard saying things like, "Lord, you have a destiny for me today," and "Father, I will use the money to glorify your name." He gave the Big Dealer in the Sky further credit in his closing interview with Norman Chad.

I have to wonder about this. Does God really care who wins poker tournaments? If so, does he actually make his picks not only during the course of the tournament, but right at the very moment that a hand is being played out? If not, then it would seem to me that entreaties made while waiting for the last cards to be dealt out are pretty useless; the deck has already acquired a particular arrangement, and that has already determined what cards will be coming. There would, then, seem to be little point in pleading to God to favor one person over another that late in the course of things.

And, by the way, does it really help your case to tell God what you plan to do with the money? That is, can an omnipotent being really be bought off with a bribe? Isn't he able to bring into existence all the money he might need to carry out whatever his plans are, without needing 10% of Jerry Yang's winnings? What if Yang's opponent at the same time promised God to donate, say, 20% of the prize money to noble charities, or to "glorifying God's name" (whatever that might mean)? Does he then decide on whose behalf to intervene based on who will be giving him the biggest cut? If so, then why didn't Barry Greenstein win, a guy who would have donated 100% of the money to children's charities? (Oh, I know: God hates Jews because they killed Jesus, right?)

Does Mr. Yang actually believe that if he says just the right prayer, God will miraculously change the order of the cards in the deck that the dealer is holding? This is just as nutty, frankly, as Shannon Elizabeth invoking the "law of attraction" in an attempt to make it more likely that cards favorable to her will be dealt out (which absurdity was shown clearly on NBC's "Heads-Up Poker Championship"). And if God really does step in in this manner, it seems to me that it's a pretty clear violation of the one-person-to-a-hand rule. After all, if it's illegal to ask a friend in the stands whether to make a tough call or to fold, how much more wrong is it to get an omnipotent supernatural being to alter the order of the cards in the deck after the shuffle?

On the other hand, maybe God really does help Mr. Yang. Maybe that's how he knew to call Lee Watkinson's all-in reraise with just a stinky little A-9: God was whispering in his ear (in a voice like that of Charleton Heston, no doubt), "He's only got A-7, so you're about 75% to win. And besides, I've peeked at the deck with my x-ray vision, and there's no 7 coming. Go for it." That would be a pretty darn handy way to win poker tournaments, all right. Maybe it's the only way Mr. Yang can win. In fact, come to think of it, maybe that's what is meant by the "glorifying your name" business: Having him as the game's ambassador for the next year tells the world, "Look, God is so powerful that he can even make a really, really bad player the world champion! Walking on water is child's play next to that kind of miracle!"

But if so, I still have to wonder how God goes about picking his winners. After watching Mr. Yang, it certainly isn't on the basis of skill and preparation. Nor is it based on conduct at the table. He wasn't over the top or downright rude, but the loud cheering every time a card fell that was favorable to him just isn't cricket, as the Brits say. When you see Phil Ivey, Chris Ferguson, Doyle Brunson, Dan Harrington, Greg Raymer, Allen Cunningham, John Juanda, T.J. Cloutier, or other classy guys start doing this, then you'll know that the rules of conduct have changed (for the worse), and it's OK. Until then, keep a lid on it, dude. It's obnoxious and annoying.

Look, I have nothing against people in general, or poker players in particular, being religious. Daniel Negreanu has said several times in his blog that when he feels his relationship with God is out of sorts or taking a lower priority than it should, his poker results suffer. OK--so be it. I certainly can't prove that that's not so. And believing that God will help you win a tournament is, objectively, no crazier than, say, Gavin Smith thinking that not cutting his hair gives him better luck than when he cuts it. On the other hand, it is, objectively, no saner and no more rational than thinking that a certain fat denizen of the North Pole brought the presents under your Christmas tree in a magical sleigh pulled by eight flying reindeer.

But putting your slightly nutty beliefs on international display in a manner that opens all sorts of unanswerable questions of logic and theology just isn't smart. It just makes you look foolish, as if you haven't given more than passing thought to what you're doing and its implications for how you think divinity operates. Keep it to yourself.

Addendum, added 7/20/07:

I just saw this article in the Las Vegas Sun:

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/sports/2007/jul/19/566665723.html

More evidence for Yang's peculiar thoughts about how God works is found therein. Note that apparently divine omniscience doesn't mean that God necessary understands poker, because he needs Mr. Yang to tell him what specific cards to have the dealer pull out of the deck in order to make him a winner.

Once, for instance, he risked a big chunk of his stack of chips with just a
pair of 4s and ran smack into an opponent's higher pocket pair.

It was then Yang - like a lot of poker players, including some who are probably more
reluctant to admit it - turned to prayer.

"I kept saying, 'Lord, give me a set,' " Yang said, using the common poker term for three-of-a-kind. "And there was a 4 on the flop."

Another time, Yang needed an ace or a 4 on the final
card to fill a straight and extend his tournament life.
"I said, "Lord, if you want me to win this, put the ace or the 4 on the river,' " Yang said. A 4 came, and Yang lived to fight on.

"I've seen miracles," he said.