Me and the Amazon women

Yesterday I spent some time at the Rio Amazon room sweating my friend Cardgrrl as she played in the Ladies event. In contrast to her first tournament, this time she was at Table 48, right on the rail--literally close enough to touch. That's her, closest to the camera and looking right, in the top photo. The woman in Seat 9 (white blouse) is the one that eventually knocked her out.

You can see the rest of the table in the second photo. You might recognize the blond with the cute hat--it's Erica Schoenberg. As Cardgrrl notes in her video blog post (she is not doing her vlogging from the shower, as a certain other well-known female pro has decided is best), Schoenberg is (1) very pretty, and (2) as a result of #1, constantly being photographed. In fact, my pic of Cardgrrl above catches one of the media in the act. Oh, she also has one freakin' enormous diamond ring on her left hand. I wonder if she regrets doing that sleazoid strip poker game (under a phony name) for video distribution, now that she doesn't exactly need the money.

Cardgrrl was the anonymous "opponent" in a hand against Schoenberg reported by PokerNews here. I know from close observation of the process how difficult it is to get all the facts of a poker hand right, even when it's a fairly straightforward one like this, so it's not too surprising that they got a few details wrong. E.g., you can see from the pictures that the two of them are not in adjacent seats, so they could not have been in the cutoff and button seats. (Should have been "hijack" and button.) One of the cards was reported incorrectly, too, though it didn't make a difference. Cardgrrl reflected on this hand with me during the first break, and in retrospect realized that she should have moved in on the river. I agree that this would have been a better play, and almost certainly successful. Not something you'd do against a dumb calling station, but Schoenberg is clearly a good enough player not to risk the majority of her chips on a guessing river call, early in the tournament, when she has only one pair and the board has that many scary possibilities.

Just a bunch of disconnected observations here:

-- The physical layout of the corridors through the Amazon room is terrible. In the particular spot where I was standing, one line of spectators along the rail looking into the Blue section, and another line of them looking into the secondary "featured table" area immediately behind where I was, left just barely enough room for anybody to squeeze through. The entire time there was a process of constant jostling and frustration.

-- How crowded was it? Well, I spotted my pal Shamus doing his PokerNews live blogging from an elevated perch above that final table. When I couldn't get his attention by waving, I shot him a text message: "I'm standing 20 feet in front of you." A few minutes later he replied that he couldn't see me. That's how crowded and chaotic it was. (He and Cardgrrl and I are meeting up for dinner tonight, so I hope to hear some more juicy insider stories.)

-- I was not the only one to notice a change in the staffing of the massage therapy area just outside the Amazon room. Whereas before it was largely populated by young women plying their trade, yesterday they had suddenly been replaced by guys that looked like they were taking a day off from their gigs with the Chippendales. Coincidence? I think not. I've ranted before about how stupid it is for the recipient of a massage--especially a fully clothed one occurring in public--to care about the appearance and/or gender of the person performing the service. It seems that the WSOP organizers believe that their customers of both sexes will not agree with my view on that. But even if they're right, doesn't the change of personnel disregard the rather common observation about the sexual orientation of a large fraction of female poker tournament players?

-- From my vantage point, it was trivially easy for me to see the hole cards of Cardgrrl and the player to her right pretty much whenever I wanted to, even though both were using a shielding technique that would have been perfectly adequate to protect them from being seen by players to their right and left. I think this is an important lesson. You never know when a railbird will somehow signal that information to another player. When Cardgrrl finally pushed all-in, and I knew what two cards she was holding, and the player in seat 9--who could see me perfectly--was taking a long time contemplating a call, I felt that I had to be extremely careful not to give away anything. Most likely, that opponent didn't know that I knew what the cards were (an ace and a seven, by the way), but maybe she had watched me and suspected that I knew and would be looking at me to react in some way. All in all, it's a rather dangerous situation for leaking crucial information.

-- Some of the play was truly atrocious. I saw a woman in the big blind (first photo, the person who is mostly obscured, wearing a turquoise-blue blouse) just call a pre-flop raise with K-K, then play the rest of the hand in an utterly passive, weak-tight manner. She started with a safe-looking flop, but let the board get so scary that it went check-check on the river. I actually laughed out loud (involutarily) when the hands were revealed, just unable to believe that somebody trying to win a WSOP bracelet could play that horribly.

-- I noticed a few groan-inducing, inappropriate, condescending things about the way this tournament was handled that would not occur for an open event. Cardgrrl collected more such observations, and I hope she'll make them into a good rant of her own. For now, though, you might read Jennifer Newell's restrained seething over at Pokerati, here, as well as her more let-'em-have-it blasts from earlier years, here and here. I'm with you, Jen. If there is going to be a Ladies event, I think the very least we should demand is that it be treated with the same basic respect that every other event gets, and not treated in the openly demeaning "kiddie-table" fashion that it is now. (Just as a thought experiment, would the WSOP organizers even think about hosting a "blacks only" bracelet event? If they did, would they do things like offer a fried-chicken special for the dinner break and have little containers of pomade waiting for the players at their seats? If not, then what's the difference?)

-- Here's one possible example of what I'm talking about. In one hand I witnessed, a woman folded to a pre-flop all-in raise, deliberately showing the table that she was mucking pocket fives, when there were three players left to act behind her. (She's the one in the second photo above, with the glasses, in Seat 3.) This year, a new WSOP policy requires a mandatory penalty for exposing one's hand when there is still action pending, even if the exposure is inadvertant. One might argue whether that's the right way to handle it, but it at least has the advantage of taking out the sometimes difficult determination as to intentional versus accidental, if it is applied consistently. But for this fully and obviously intentional exposure, the dealer just issued a gentle, smiling caution. Maybe, just maybe, he would have done the same for anybody else in any other event, but my sneaking suspicion is that, consciously or not, his thought was something like, "They're just women. We can't expect them to actually know and abide by all those complicated rules. It would be mean to impose a penalty here, and I don't want to embarrass her further by calling the floor over."

-- This same woman, by the way, in an earlier hand, had announced "raise" when the post-flop action was checked to her. Uh, excuse me, but how can you raise when there has been no bet? This was obviously one of her first times playing poker in a casino, and she simply had bad home-game habits that she hadn't broken yet. I see this all the time in cash games, and it's neither surprising nor disturbing--everybody has to have a first time, and everybody has to learn. But is this really the place for it? I realize that she is far from alone in treating the WSOP as break-in ground for casino poker, but it strikes me as damned peculiar every time I come across evidence that that's what's happening. It's like signing up for the Olympics as a way to get introduced to some sport that you've decided you'd like to try. But hey, it worked for Chris Moneymaker, right?

-- It is always interesting and amusing to overhear snippets of conversation in the hallways outside of a major tournament. Yesterday as I was arriving right at 2:00, one of the players heading to his seat in Day 3 of one event was upset and on his cell phone because, apparently, somebody had called and said they were starting without him. He said, "Goddamn it, tell them to wait! I'm not even at my seat yet!" Yeah, right, buddy. Everybody else managed to arrive on time, but they should hold up the whole show for you, because you're so much more friggin' important than everybody else. During a break in the action, I heard one woman on her phone telling somebody, "He Sneaky Pete'd the pot away from my husband." I didn't even know that was a verb, let alone how I should punctuate it.