Celebrity sighting

The Moneymaker effect has completely taken over the Palms this week, so it's appropriate to have spotted the guy it's named for playing in the poker room.

I was in the other room (the Palms has sort of a split poker room, with the two sides divided by a hallway), so I didn't get to watch the activity, just snuck over for the photo.

But one player at my table had just been moved over from a table in that room and had watched the goings-on for a while. He admitted that he didn't watch poker on TV, so he wasn't too up on putting names with faces of poker pros. But there had been, he said, another pro that everybody seemed to know playing on that side. He said it was a lighter-skinned black man, and that he was arguing with the player next to him. He thought maybe it was Erik Seidel.

I couldn't help laughing. I don't know who this guy saw, but (1) it's unlikely that anybody would describe Seidel as black (light-skinned or otherwise), (2) he's about the least likely guy in the entire poker universe to be arguing with another player, (3) he's not likely to be sitting in a $1-3 or $2-5 game (all that the Palms had to offer), and (4) he's probably not going to be at a PokerStars gathering, being a Team Full Tilt pro. Other than those small points, yeah, sure, it could have been Seidel.

Poker gems, #7

Chris Moneymaker (http://www.texasholdem-poker.com/interviews/chris_moneymaker):

In the World Series, you'll have 8,000 people: 200 world-class players, 2,000 real good players and 5,000 complete morons who watch it on TV and think they know what they're doing.