A Main Event Anecdote

If you read 2+2, you've probably seen the latest "epic" thread. It's entitled "MY TURN - Tiffany Michelle's post-WSOP thoughts!" and was started by Tiffany Michelle as a direct response to her negative portrayal in this week's ESPN WSOP Main Event broadcast. I'm not going to digest the thread except to say that most of what is posted after the first 100 posts or so is the usual 2+2 NVG puerile stupidity (absent one post from Jimmy Fricke's mother, who wrote "seriously Tiffany, I was extremely embarassed for you and I'm the mom of the freaky weird dude, so that's saying something.". That's gold!)

By the time the Main Event rolled around I had formed a somewhat negative impression of Tiffany. Although I never worked with her directly, being employed by PokerNews gave me some exposure to her. In short, she seemed entirely self-impressed. I hate people like that. It was easy enough to avoid her during most of the WSOP since she was doing video clips outside the Amazon Room and I was blogging inside the Amazon Room.

During the Main Event I was less able to avoid Tiffany for the simple reason that she often sought out the bloggers to give us updates on her tournament progress. Plenty of people playing tournaments do that; generally I don't begrudge them it. They have friends and family following along in far-flung places, and one of the perqs of getting in good with the bloggers is that we're willing to throw a little press your way. However there was one particular episode from Day 4 of the Main Event that really etched itself into my memory.

I was sitting in the absolute back corner of the Amazon Room, near Blue #1, chatting with FerricRamsium. The money bubble burst on Day 3, with 474 players finishing the day with chips. So at the time of this incident I'm about to relate, somewhere around 300-400 players remained in the tournament. If my memory serves, about 6% of the starting field were women, which means that all other things being equal at least twenty females were still in the field.

Tiffany saunters up to our media table and gives us an update on her chip count. Then she adds, "Maybe when you guys have some time, you can figure out how close I am to being the last woman standing."

To say that I was dumbstruck is an understatement. Here we are, doing our damndest to provide the most comprehensive coverage of the biggest poker tournament on Earth, and Tiffany expects us to figure out how many women are left because she wants to know how close she is to being the last one? Never mind the fact that there were still hundreds of players left, and that without standing up and from the back corner of the room, I could see Van Nguyen, Evelyn Ng and Kara Scott.

I guess this is my way of saying that Tiffany's behavior that the world witnessed on ESPN's broadcast was in line with the behavior I personally witnessed in the Amazon Room. I'm not a fan. But maybe she'll change; one of the things I was most surprised by during my trip to Macau was that Hevad Khan came off as a genuinely likable person. He was completely different than the persona displayed in the 2007 Main Event coverage.