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.)