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.)

More on religion at the poker table

I previously wrote about some of the strange (in my view) things that Jerry Yang did at the final table of the World Series of Poker main event: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/07/mr-destiny.html At the time, I had watched the event live. Now, though, I've seen ESPN's broadcast. I taped it last night, so I can transcribe some things accurately, instead of relying on memory. Moreover, ESPN's multiple cameras and microphones caught things that weren't shown on the live broadcast. In terms of overt religiosity, there was even more strangeness than I knew.

In the hand in which Jerry Yang eliminated Lee Watkinson, Yang raised pre-flop with A-9, then Watkinson moved all-in with A-7. While Yang was thinking about what to do, Watkinson's financee, whose name is Timmi Derosa (see http://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/player.php?a=r&n=56512), is seen on the sidelines. She says, "If he calls, he's gonna double Lee up. No weapon formed against him shall prosper."

This appears to be an allusion to Isaiah 54:17: "No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper; and every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn. This is the heritage of the servants of the LORD, and their righteousness is of me, saith the LORD." (King James Version.)

So apparently Lee Watkinson is, according to his fiancee, a servant of the Lord, and as a result, he can't lose a hand of poker.

She repeats this a few seconds later, after Yang announces his call. Looking upward, she yells, "Come on, Father. In Jesus's name. No weapon formed against you shall prosper."

Note the little change of pronoun there, from "him" to "you." Now she is saying not that Yang is a weapon against Lee, the Lord's servant, but against God himself! Wow! I wonder what Yang did to deserve being accused of being a weapon formed against God, and how Derosa knows whatever this deep, dark secret is. But either way, whether one conspires to defeat the Lord or just the Lord's servant, one is obviously destined to fail.

Except that--OOPS!--Yang won the hand, and Watkinson was bumped out of the tournament. Hmmm. I guess that makes Ms. Derosa a false prophet. And what does the Bible say about false prophets?

But the prophet, which shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I
have not commanded him to speak...even that prophet shall die. And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the LORD hath not spoken? When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously.... (Deuteronomy 18:20-22, KJV.)

I'm not sure if that bit about the false prophet dying means that the religious community has an affirmative obligation to off Ms. Derosa, or if the good Lord will take care of that himself. Assuming, though, that she believes this passage to be true, she ought to be sure she has her affairs in order.

After the flop and turn haven't helped Watkinson's inferior hand, and only the river can save him, Derosa closes her eyes and says, "C'mon. Make him a believer. Make Lee a believer, Father." I don't know how to interpret this. Is this rhetorical, or is Lee not of the same faith as his fiancee? Well, if he wasn't, I doubt that this hand converted him.

Making this hand even more bizarre was Yang's simultaneous prayers for a contrary result: "Come on, Lord. You know your purpose for me.... You have a purpose for me today.... Father, in the name of Jesus Christ, c'mon, let me win this one." Norman Chad picked up on the strangeness of these dueling prayers, and said, "I'm not sure who the Lord is listening to."

I'm just speculating here, but perhaps Derosa's prayers were less effective than Yang's because God was offended by her vanity. Based on the shots of her on the ESPN broadcast, it appears that she has had way too many collagen injections to plump up her lips, a visual effect that is accentuated by her use of dark lip-liner. Or maybe she got stung by a bee, or maybe Watkinson smacks her around. Who knows? Whatever the cause, it looks awfully strange and unnatural. "Surely God will not hear vanity, neither will the Almighty regard it." (Job 35:13, KJV.) "Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD? or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity" (Psalms 24:3-4, KJV.)

But back to the Dueling Christians. I can't help thinking of one of the coolest stories in the Bible: Elijah and the priests of Baal (1 Kings, ch. 18). Elijah sets up a contest between him and the priests of Baal, to see which deity will better respond to entreaties and an animal sacrifice, by miraculously lighting a fire under the sacrificial altar. The priests of Baal pray all day, even cutting themselves with knives in an apparent show of devotion. But nothing happens. Then Elijah takes his turn. In a showy display of confidence (and, I suppose, to ensure that nobody thinks he was cheating and somehow had fire hidden away), he has servants come and dowse the entire altar with barrels of water three times, then dig a trench all around the altar and fill that with water, too. Then he utters a simple prayer, and WHOOSH! Fire leaps down from heaven and consumes the whole thing. Then, of course, he has the priests of Baal slaughtered, because no showdown is really complete without that. When you go all-in against the Lord, he apparently takes it very seriously, man.

The difference here is that, presumably, Derosa and Yang were praying to the same god, which makes the whole thing sort of a "Heads I win, tails you lose" situation. No matter how the cards fall, one camp or the other can say that Jesus was on their side. Which makes the bizarre incident a heck of a lot less compelling than successfully calling down fire from heaven. Oh well--maybe the god Yang and Derosa were praying to isn't really the same one that Elijah had on his side. Or maybe his powers have weakened over the centuries, and now all he can manage as a manifestation of his power is a little card trick. If Elijah had been at the WSOP final table, I assume that he would have stepped back, invoked a curse on his opponents for daring to stand in his way, and the whole table would have been consumed in a massive inferno from above. That would have been a lot faster than the 14 hours or so that it took Yang to defeat his opponents the hard way--and it would have been a lot cooler to watch.

Moving on, we have the hand in which Yang's J-8 outdrew Lee Childs's J-K to eliminate the latter. Again we get to eavesdrop on Yang's praying: "Father, I will glorify your name.... Let people see your miracle. I believe in your name." Of course, he only says this after the "miracle" 8 hits on the turn to give him the winning pair. But again, what a weak, pathetic kind of "miracle" this is, compared to, say, turning water into wine, healing the blind, raising the dead, feeding 5000 people with one loaf of bread, making a mule speak, sending manna from heaven, bringing down the walls of Jericho, etc.

Later, Yang calls an all-in bet from Alex Kravchenko before the flop. The latter has pocket 3s, and makes a set of them on the flop. Yang has just an offsuit K-Q, and is drawing dead. That is, by the usual rules of poker Yang cannot win the hand no matter what cards come on the turn and river. And in this situation there is a conspicuous absence of praying from Yang. Why? Does he have so little faith in his deity that he just assumes that he has lost? Even without going so far as to consume the entire table in a fiery blast, surely the Lord could, for example, make the dealer put out on the turn or river a card that was an exact duplicate of one already there (or of one in one of the players' hands). If there were found to be, e.g., two 8 of clubs in the deck, it would be declared to be a "fouled deck," and all the money put into the pot on that hand would be returned to the players. It's like the poker version of a children's "do over." Can't Yang's god perform even so trivial a miracle as that?*

I noticed that frequently after winning a hand, Yang and/or his family could be seen and heard saying "Hallelujah," which presumably means, to them, something akin to "Praise God." (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallelujah.) But oddly, we never see that happen when he loses a hand. I don't know how to interpret this discrepancy. Perhaps they declared their praise exactly the same either way, and it was edited out--though that seems unlikely. Assuming that they praised God when winning but not when losing, I have to wonder about the theological implications. Do they attribute winning hands to God's intervention, but not losing hands? If so, on what basis? Don't they believe that God is controlling everything that happens, for good or for ill? Wouldn't consistency require that they praise God for making Yang lose hands, too, since that presumably fulfills whatever his mysterious purposes might be? Hey, if Kevin Bacon in "Animal House" can choke out a "Thank you, sir, may I have another?" after getting whacked with a paddle (see http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=351627), surely Christians can respond to the small adversity of losing a poker hand with praise for the being that they believe controlled how the cards were shuffled and how the betting went down, right?

Overall, I'd have to say that if the best evidence for God's intervention in poker that so-called Christians can muster is that a mediocre player (and after watching the final table, there is no doubt that that's what Yang is) can get lucky and win the WSOP main event, then I'm going to have to hold to my conclusion that prayers such as Yang's and Derosa's are just a showy, weird, embarrassing, and slightly demented version of rubbing a lucky rabbit's foot--and precisely as effective.

Too bad ESPN cut out Norman Chad's great line during his post-match interview with Yang: "Do you think this is the most poker the Lord has ever watched over?"


* NBC ran an interesting invitational poker series last year: the "Pro-Am Equalizer," in which celebrity amateur players were given a substantially larger starting stack than the pros at the table. In one event, Penn Jillette (of "Penn and Teller" fame) was playing. With the river card yet to come, he was drawing dead in a hand in which he and his opponent were all-in. He said, "The only way I can win now is if they let me deal." This was a very funny line, coming from a man who is a genuine expert on slight-of-hand and card cheating. (He has even published a book on how poker cheaters work. See http://tinyurl.com/yrun4s.) I assume that if he were inclined to show off, in a situation in which nothing was at stake (so that it wasn't really cheating), that's one of the ways in which Penn, handed the deck of cards to deal the river, would resolve the dilemma in his favor. He can't win, but he could at least force the hand to be nullified by slipping a duplicate card into the deck. It doesn't say much for Yang's god if he isn't even as powerful a conjurer as Penn Jillette.

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.