2009 WSOP: Big Problems with Event 4 (It's All About the Math!)

Oh Harrah's. In a certain way I love the fact that you want to open your greedy, corporate arms to as many donkeys as you can squeeze into the Rio Convention Center. On the other hand, I hate that you don't often stop to think about what you might reap from the seeds you sow.

Today is Day 1a of Event 4, the $1,000 NLHE "Stimulus Special", and by all accounts it is a smashing success. The tournament is completely sold out, with 3,000 players starting today on Day 1a and 3,000 players starting tomorrow on Day 1b. There's just one little problem: it's a three-day event.

"Wait a second," you say. "Day 1a is at the dinner break and already only 1,100 players remain." Sure. And if play continues at its current pace, around 280 will emerge from the carnage by the end of the night. The only problem with that figure is that it's already into the money. WSOP events typically pay 10% of the field; that's 603 players for this event (nine-handed tables). If play is not stopped EARLY tonight, the field will already be into the money.

Fine. They'll stop early. Say they stop at 350. Then they do the same thing on Day 1b; they stop early at 350. That wouldn't be too much of a problem except that Event #4 is a 3-day event. The schedule requires Day 2 to play all the way down to the final nine. That means that Day 2 faces the daunting task of playing from 700 to 9.

Yikes.

A little historical perspective is in order. At the 2008 World Series of Poker, yours truly covered Event #2, the $1,500 donkament that drew 3,929 players. Day 2 started at 2pm with 448 players remaining, average stack 26,310, blinds to resume at 500 / 1,000 / 100.(FN) At 6am there were still 18 players in the field. Those players, tired and frustrated, mutinied and demanded that play be halted. Tournament staff acceded to the request and suspended play until 1:30pm in the afternoon. Three-and-a-half hours after the 1:30pm restart, ten players remained. Tournament officials made a wise decision to play a ten-handed final table. It started at 7:30pm and ended at 4:45am.

[(FN) It seems that my "40 big blind rule" may not apply to these small buy-in donkaments. I wonder if that's because amateurs will wait much, much longer to start moving before seasoned veterans will -- especially if a bracelet is at the end of the road.]

It's deja vu all over again. With 18 million total chips in play, and assuming they only play nine full levels tonight, the math says it will take about 18 hours on Day 2 to get to the final table. But given my footnote above, I'd add a few hours to that. Most of these guys are amateurs and will tighten up massively the closer they get to the final table.

I'll beat this horse til it's blue in the face. You just can't put that many chips in play and still keep a tournament as a three-day event without massively shortening the length of the levels or making the blind increase more dramatic. Poker tournaments don't work that way.

Good luck cleaning up the mess you've made, Harrah's. Expect a mutiny on your hands in the wee hours of the morning on Day 2, even if you push up the re-start time to 12pm.

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2009 WSOP: Welcome Home

The decision yesterday was: stay home and work; or work from the Amazon Room. I should have known that it was a false set of options. Going to the Amazon Room (as I ultimately did) would mean that almost no work would be accomplished whatsoever.

There were many, many familiar faces. It was a long time before I even unloaded my gear as I caught up with friends I hadn't seen in months. When I finally did unload and set up, I ran smack into the first problem of the 2009 World Series of Poker: the media wireless network does not work on the far side of the Amazon Room. With all of the spots in the press box already occupied because of the depth of the $40k field, I was relegated to the media room just behind the Amazon Room. It's like being in a luxury box at a major league baseball game (except without the luxury): you know there's action going on just outside the room but you're so removed from it that it's hard to notice.

Still, Harrah's learned a few things from the 2008 World Series of Poker. The feature table area has been redesigned with a secondary feature table area that includes some limited seating. That was a big problem last year, especially the night that Phil Hellmuth final-tabled the $1,500 H.O.R.S.E. and was pushed to the secondary feature table in favor of the $10,000 PLO final table, which was being filmed by ESPN on the main feature table. Spectators were crammed three and four deep along some very tiny rail space, craning their necks to see if the Poker Brat would win his twelfth bracelet and his first in a non-hold'em event (he finished third).

The Tropical, Brasilia and Miranda rooms have also been redesigned this year. Tropical, previously used for satellites and some overflow tables for large-field events, is now tournament registration; Brasilia is double the size it was last year; and Miranda (formerly used as suites by various poker outfits) has even more tables. All told, Amazon, Brasilia and Miranda give tournament organizers 306 tables. Hopefully that means the overflow tables outside of Buzio's Seafood Restaurant (a 5-minute walk from Amazon) and the Rio Poker Room (a 10-minute walk from Amazon) are a thing of the past.

Oh, and this one's for DocChako: there's a Corvette Stingray parked in the Amazon Room, a prize to go to the winner of the Tournament of Champions invitational that starts tomorrow. Benjo labeled it "an American piece of shit" in a dismissive tone mastered only by the French.

Interesting sightings yesterday: David Chiu having his wrist wrapped and iced by medical personnel as the first poker injury of the year ("This is what happens when you play bad," he said to me) and Teddy "Iceman" Monroe giving one of his patented rambling interviews in the media room. His monogrammed "ICEMAN" headphones were firmly affixed to his head. Of course.

Towards the end of the night I kept a periodic eye on Shirley Rosario's progress in the $1,500 Omaha Hi/Lo. I first met Shirley in Costa Rica last year. She is smart, savvy and skilled (she has an impressive O8 record and also recently took down a $1,000 H.O.R.S.E. tournament at the California State Poker Championships) in addition to being one of the "good guys" of the poker world. It's easy to root for people like that.

Today I really do need to get some work done. Despite the siren call of cash games that are sure to be filled with horrendously bad players who bust out of Day 1a of the Stimulus Special (the registration line last night snaked down the hallway), I think I'll remain parked at home for most of the day to focus on what I need to do.

After all, there are still plenty more days to this 2009 WSOP. I'll probably be sick of it soon enough.

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2009 WSOP: Whither the F-Train?

The 2009 World Series of Poker is finally underway. You can argue about when it really started -- Harrah's says Day 1 was Tuesday, when the cash games and satellites opened; casino employees say it was Wednesday, when Event #1, $500 Casino Employees No-Limit Hold'em kicked off; and the rest of the world says it was yesterday with the start of Event #2, $40,000 No-Limit Hold'em -- but really things will get into full swing today and tomorrow with the $1,500 Omaha Hi/Lo Split and the $1,000 No-Limit Hold'em "Stimulus Special". Tomorrow most if not all of the tables in the Amazon Room will be in use.

I popped into the Amazon Room last night after missing the first couple of days because I was on a last-minute trip out of town. When I arrived I was fresh off a very long plane trip home -- and by fresh, I mean as wilted as a daisy left to bake in the Vegas summer sun for a few hours. Yep, like a total degen I went straight to the Amazon Room from McCarran Airport, but it wasn't to check out the action. I very quietly made my way into the Amazon Room via a back entrance, grabbed my media badge before almost anyone saw me, and then left to head home and rest up for a long series.

One thing I noticed while I was in the Amazon Room was how empty it was. Last year, Events #1 and #2 were $10,000 Pot-Limit Hold'em and $1,500 No-Limit Hold'em, which drew 352 and 3,929 players respectively. Things have started off more slowly this year, with the largely ignored Casino Employees event and the $40K NLHE, which drew 201 runners. The number of people that pony up $1,000 for the "Stimulus Special" tomorrow should be a good indication of how numbers will be for this 2009 WSOP. If Harrah's doesn't come close to drawing the 3,929 that played Event #2 last year, it won't bode well for fields to come.

Today's a day of rest for me. Not sure if I will go down to Amazon Room or not. Tomorrow starts the Stimulus Special which means the cash games should be very juicy. I think I'll have to be there.

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Quick Hit

Massive congratulations to my colleague and APPT blogging partner, Heath "TassieDevil" Chick for his second place finish at ANZPT Melbourne! Heath had some bad luck at the end, when his pocket queens couldn't outrun Ah-Jh. Win that pot and his opponent would have been crippled to just 6 big blinds. The title would have pretty much been Heath's.

That's tournament poker, I guess. 2nd place (and AU$103,000) is nothing to be ashamed of mate. Well played.

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Airport Blogging

My flight out of LAX is delayed two hours. That means you get some thoughts that are probably better meant for Twitter (except I have plenty of time to flesh them out):

1. One Step Ahead - Have the terrorists figured out a way to prevent x-rays from penetrating a thin plastic bin? TSA security procedures now require passengers not only to take off their shoes for screening, but to place them directly on the belt - not in a bin. I wonder what could have prompted such an inane policy shift. It's likely the fact that U.S. airport security seems primarily designed to give passengers a false sense of comfort that the government is making active strides in the "war on terror".

2. Who's Flying This Thing? - Cabin announcement on my first flight: "Welcome to United Flight 797 to Los Angeles with continuing service to San Jose. San Juan...? Somewhere. *This* flight's going to LA."

"OK, maybe it's Cabo San Lucas. Is that right?"

3. Ex-sneeze Me - My departing gate at LAX is being used right now for a flight to Tokyo. Predictably, I am surrounded by Japanese people wearing SARS swine flu masks. Never mind that it's been well-established that swine flu isn't much worse than a seasonal flu. I've recentlycome to appreciate how obsessive some Japanese can be about hygiene -- which is why I really want to rip off one of the masks and cough in the person's face. Dawn Summers offered me $50 to do it but wanted video proof. Dammit.

4. Dead Tired - Guy next to me at the gate is stretched out across FIVE seats. I know traveling can be exhausting, but this guy looks like he's being measured for a coffin. Will be interesting to see what happens when the gate gets a bit more crowded.

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Do Svidanya

Wheels up tomorrow.

What?

Yes, not the best timing. I'll be gone for almost a week and will have limited access to the grid. It's unfortunate. The week before the WSOP starts -- the week when everyone in the poker media assembles in Las Vegas and starts mentally preparing for the 50 days to come -- is one of the most fun weeks of the year. Everybody's excited to be re-united and we actually have time to enjoy each other's company. Time will be a scarce commodity once cards are in the air for Day 1 of the $40K NLHE next Thursday afternoon.

Until then I'll be furiously typing the last of my articles for Issue #2 of the PokerNews Australasia magazine -- a feature piece on Andy Bloch. You can read it when the issue hits Aussie poker rooms and various other distribution points in mid-June.

Who knows? Maybe there will even be a few copies floating around the Amazon Room.

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Knowledge of Self

I am not the type of person who drinks to forget.

Two times in my near-33 years on the planet I attempted to annihilate my mind with booze in order to take away the pain of living in the present. The first time, my friends were a co-worker who deserved better and a bottle of Talisker scotch whiskey. It was a mild autumn night on the roof of a downtown Manhattan apartment building, two blocks south of what was then the World Trade Center. I don't know why I wound up on that roof. We didn't quite empty the bottle as we stared across the city at the twinkling proof of other people's existences. There were always lights on in the World Trade Center, a reminder of the energy that courses through the city 24 hours a day.

The next morning I couldn't remember how I had gotten home but I could still remember what had driven me to my friend's roof. Drinking to forget didn't work. It hadn't taken anything away. If anything it had put me more in touch with the pain -- made the jagged edges much, much sharper. I cried that night, on that roof, in a way that I've never cried; the tears I shed when the World Trade Center came down a year were a fraction of the tears that fell that night on that roof.

***

I keep a bottle of whiskey in my home at almost all times. The current incarnation is a nice Laphroaig quarter-cask, with a smoky quality I really enjoy, that I picked up in late December. Most nights it stands untouched in a back corner of the kitchen counter behind a couple of bottles of wine.

***

I have always been musically inclined. I can carry a decent tune; I used to play various instruments; and I have a guilty pleasure for show tunes. Around the same time that one co-worker was putting up with a blubbering wreck on his roof, another was introducing me to the world of trance music and other forms of dance music. In the halcyon days of my mid-20s I spent more nights than I should probably admit to spending in NYC nightclubs and at underground raves. This was before I started going to illegal underground poker rooms for my "underground" fix.

It's easy to mock the raver scene given the types of people who frequent it, but for me the music allowed me to touch a part of myself -- a happy, hopeful emotional part -- that usually stays well hidden. I wouldn't think about anything on those nights. I'd get out on the dance floor, turn off my brain and let the beat and the soaring melodies fill me up.

In the beginning drugs helped me surrender control to the music and its emotional response. Later on they were an unnecessary bonus. But to this day much of the music that I was initially exposed to during that part of my life remains on my iPod.

***

Tonight I am listening to Above & Beyond (and some BT) while drinking my third glass of the Laphroaig quarter-cask. Both seem about right. After all -- I am not the type of person who drinks to forget.

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Double Up or Go Home?

A scene from the Strip last night --

I was standing at a craps table in, of all places, the Rio. God knows why it had to be the Rio; I'll be spending every day there for two months starting in just more than a week. With my self-imposed ban on table games back in place, I had no money on the $10-minimum table. Instead I was sweating a friend who wasn't exactly having the best time of it.

After a half an hour of play, a middle-aged and visibly intoxicated man walked up to the table and squeezed himself onto the rail between me and the stick man. He had exactly two red ($5) chips in his hands. Just as the shooter was about to release the dice, Drunky McDrunkerton put his two red chips in the "Field". Shooter rolled a four, which pays out 1-to-1 on the Field. The dealer at our end of the table put two matching red chips beside McDrunkerton's original bet. Delighted, Drunky McD picked up all four chips, thanked the table and headed straight to the cage -- where I watched him cash out $20.

The $64,000 question is: What was going through McDrunkerton's mind during this little episode?

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2009 WSOP: I Don't Quite Run Good Enough

There were 25 runners in the first PokerListings Run-Good Challenge WSOP freeroll today. Only one player would walk away with the $1,500 prize.

I came in a very frustrating 3rd place.

Now, to be fair, I could have been out a lot earlier. I busted Change100 all in preflop with A-8 against her A-K, but I only barely had her covered. If that hand goes the other way, I'm out in the middle of the pack. But this is the Run-Good Challenge. Naturally the spoils go to the player who runs best. For that hand it was me, but it would not be me for the tournament win.

I scrabbled my way to the final table, hanging on with the raggiest of rags. About all I could do at the final table was re-raise all in with suited connectors when it looked like people might be stealing. I finally got a boost when Benjo open-shoved his button for 4,500 at 200/400 and I found A-J in the big blind. He had Qd-9d and didn't improve.

Once we got to three-handed, I started getting the cards I'd been missing all tournament. Q-Q in the big blind, no action. K-K in the big blind, no action. Then the final hand -- T-T in the small blind. With blinds about to go up to 300/600, Poker Grump (20k) opened for 1,200. I made it 5,000 to go (7k more behind), folding Jason Kirk on the big blind. Grump shipped his stack and of course I called. He showed down A-Q and took the pot when four clubs hit the board. He was the only one with a club.

Not much I can do there. I like my hand more than his. If I could have just run a little better... Grump scored the win and the $1,500 about ten minutes later.

Good game to all and thanks again to PokerListings for setting it up. One more opportunity next Saturday.

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2009 WSOP: Time to Run Good!

On the tournament circuit, media types tend to bond with each other fairly quickly. It's natural; we're the only ones besides the highest-ranking tournament staff who spend all day every day in the poker room and don't walk away with a six- or seven-figure payout at the end. If we didn't bond with each other, it'd be a miserable time. Although we work for different outlets, we're not really competing with each other. There's a lot of help that's given from one outlet to another.

Almost all of the people I've met at various media desks around the globe have been "Good People". The guys from PokerListings certainly fit in that category. So it gives me great pleasure to be invited to, and to take part in, the PokerListings Run-Good Challenge 3, a short series of WSOP prelim freerolls hosted by Matt Showell for poker bloggers. The action begins tomorrow morning (I think -- what day is today?) at 11am Vegas time on PokerStars with a winner-take-all battle royale for a $1,500 donk-ament seat. In the unlikely event that I run good and win, that donk-ament seat will probably become part of a $2,500 razz-ament seat.

Good luck to everyone else who's playing. And thanks to PokerListings and Matt for putting this together.

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2009 WSOP: Triple Your Pleasure, Triple Your Fun?

Shamus has been exploring what the potential effect of the new "triple starting stacks" at this year's WSOP will be. He's expressed some concern about dreadfully long Day 2s (Day 2 is always the worst because rather than play a set number of levels, the tournament has to play down to a set number of players).

I don't think Shamus needs to worry too much about Day 2s as long as the fields of any events he covers are not huge. The size of the starting stack doesn't really change a tournament all that much. The bigger determinant of the pace of play is the structure versus the total chips in play.

[If I could drop footnotes, I'd drop one here to counter the inevitable comment someone will make to this post. It goes like this: Commenter asks, "Doesn't the size of the starting stack affect the total chips in play?" Of course the answer is yes, but a much bigger impact on the total chips in play is the size of the field. A 500-player field with 30k starting chips will still play faster than a 1,000-player field with 20k starting chips.]

Don't get me wrong. Having a triple starting stack allows players to be more patient in the early-going because there is less pressure from the blinds. But at some point, the pressure from the blinds will catch up to the total number of chips in play and force players to bust out, no matter how many are left in the field. In my experience, the point that the number of chips in play catches up to the structure for a NLHE tournament is when the average stack is about 40 BBs.

[Next footnote: Different calculations apply for games other than NLHE.]

Once that happens, the average stack will remain close to 40 BBs for the rest of the tournament and the pace of eliminations will match accordingly, no matter how many chips are in play. At that point, since the average stack will always remain close to 40 BBs, the speed of the tournament is dictated solely by the structure and by the pace of the blind increases. If there are 300 players left, blinds 5k/10k, average stack 40 BBs (400k), then at the next level (6k/12k) you'll quickly get to a point where there are 250 players left in the field, average stack 40 BBs (480k). It's just a question of at what point in the tournament you reach the magical 40 BB average stack. Even with 300 BB starting stacks, it comes sooner than you think.

2009 EPT Monte Carlo is a good example. Players started with 30k in chips and blinds at 50 and 100. With 300 big blinds in the starting stack, EPT Monte Carlo qualified as a "deep stack" tournament by almost any definition. The structure (viewable here) was as generous a structure as a player can expect. Yet at the start of Day 2, after eight levels of play on Day 1, there were 535 players left of the original 935, blinds of 500/1000, and the average stack was already down to 52.5 BBs (52,500).

By the start of Day 3 (where players were still 50 spots off the money), the tournament caught up to the structure. Six levels of play on Day 2 brought players the following conditions at the start of Day 3: blinds 2,500/5,000, 138 players remained, average stack 40.6 BBs (203,000).

Day 4: blinds 12k / 24k, 31 players, average stack 37.7 BBs (905k).

Day 5: blinds 40k / 80k, 8 players, average stack 43.8 BBs (3.5MM).

It's not an exact science of course, as you can see. Sometimes a level or two will play a little faster than 40 BBs and sometimes one or two will play a little slower. But the tournament will always tend towards that 40-BB marker.

I had to giggle when the EPT staff said they weren't sure how the new EPT structure and starting chips, used for the first time in Monte Carlo, would change the speed of the tournament. Unless the level increases are achingly small, the extra chips don't change all that much. Once you know the total number of chips in play, the rest is just math. It becomes very easy to predict almost exactly at which level you'll reach the final table.

[Footnote: Final tables are a bit trickier, because once play is less than five-handed all guidelines are out the window.]

The difference: 935 players, 30k starting stack, eight-handed final table predicted to be reached in Level 28 (40k/80k). 935 players, 20k starting stack, final table predicted to be reached in either Level 26 (25k/50k) or Level 27 (30k/60k). So giving players an extra 50% in chips would result in adding one or two levels to the tournament. That's it.

Enjoy those triple stacks while you can, kids.

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A Quick Weekend Summary

* Snapped the head off of my driver playing golf on Saturday. I've gotten more than my money's worth from the club, which was part of a twelve-club $200 starter set that I bought when I first took up golf eight years ago. The question now is, "Do I replace it?" Golf is one of those games where you can go crazy with the amount of equipment you buy in an effort to give yourself the greatest edge. For my part, I'm happy shooting in the mid-90s, which I can easily continue to do without replacing the driver. The thing that would probably be a greater help in lowering my score is a few lessons. In the same way that I used to be able to say I had never read a poker book... I've never had a golf lesson.

Dumb? Stubborn? Both?

* Experienced one of my greatest gambling moments ever later that day while I was teaching a few friends to play craps at IP. I did something I never do -- I made a $5 fire bet on someone other than myself. In this case it was my friend A., who had never thrown the dice in his life. "Maybe he'll have beginner's luck," I thought. I don't think you can even call what he did "beginner's luck", because what he did was proceed to roll for 45 minutes, hitting 7 points total and 5 discrete points (hello, 250-to-1 fire bet payout). I've never had that much fun playing craps -- not even when I was running to the craps table during each of our 10-minute breaks at APPT Macau.

We cashed out once A. sevened out, then nicknamed him "Fire Bet". I encouraged him never to play craps again, since he'll never have a roll like that for the rest of his life.

* I allowed myself to be sucked into the last hour of the Annie Duke v. Joan Rivers silliness that was on television last night. Half of the poker universe is up in arms about how unjust the result was. That's fascinating to me, because I don't think that a different result would have had any measurable effect on their lives. It wouldn't "mainstream" poker, that's for sure.

You know what would mainstream poker? Incorporating more naked women into the broadcasts.

* I didn't play any poker but now that I'm back in Vegas until the start of the WSOP, I see some sessions at Mirage and/or Bellagio in my future. It's a pretty small pond of people that populate the games I play (oh, my beloved limit hold'em). One of the nicest parts is going down the poker rooms and seeing some friendly faces I haven't seen in a while.

* Summation thought for the weekend: I don't have disdain for people. I just have high standards.

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2009 EPT San Remo: Constant Requests for Payment

While we were in San Remo covering the EPT, some rumors surfaced in the media room that the eventual winner, Constant Rijkenberg, had oversold himself. Nobody was sure what the exact number was; it ranged from 130% to 160%. It's the kind of scam (securities fraud) that, in the U.S., will earn you the attention of the SEC and ultimately a rather lengthy stay in a federal penitentiary. In poker it just earns you the contempt of the poker world and the reputation as a scumbag.

I see that news of Rijkenberg's antics has exploded on 2+2 over the weekend. It's been two weeks since his EUR 1.5-million win in San Remo, and several backers have yet to be paid. Of course they haven't been paid! An over-sale scam requires the seller (the poker player) to purposefully play badly in the tournament he has over-sold in order to bust himself long before the money bubble bursts. Then he doesn't have to worry about paying 160% of his winnings -- money that would ultimately have to come out of his pocket -- to his backers; he just keeps the backers' money over and above the amount of the buy-in and has a nice vacation to boot.

[Part of the San Remo prize was an entry in the Monte Carlo Grand Final. Since the seat in Monte Carlo was part of the San Remo winnings, the backers for San Remo would have been rolled over into Monte Carlo. Barry Greenstein tells an anecdote in the 2+2 thread about Rijkenberg's erratic play in Monte Carlo and how, after Rijkenberg was eliminated, "Everyone remarks that it looked like he was trying to go broke!"]

It's always possible that Rijkenberg may have made an innocent mistake here and not realized how much of himself he had sold. It's possible. The fact that he refuses to post a full list of backers or in any other way defend himself certainly isn't helping the perceptions of his actions that many people now hold. Neither is the fact that several posters on 2+2 (and some of the Dutch PokerNews crew) have stated that Rijkenberg's reputation in money matters was full of questionable practices before the latest allegations.

That leads me to ask -- how dumb do you have to be to cash in a tournament in which you've oversold yourself? Busting yourself out of a tournament doesn't require any skill whatsoever. If you know you've oversold yourself, and you want to "make it look good", you can play your normal game on Day 1 and then make crazy plays and stupid folds on Day 2 to ensure that you never come close to the money.

Maybe some players just can't help themselves. They sit down at the table and, even though they've oversold, they can't help themselves from trying to win. Like the story of the scorpion and the frog, it is their nature. Some of those traits are more deep-seated than most people care to admit.

When I was a child, I eventually came to realize that my parents had flaws (this is a world-shattering revelation every child goes through -- that our parents are not the immortal, flawless heroes we thought they were). Particularly, my dad was quite bad at expressing his emotions to any of the rest of us and as a result came off a bit cold and indifferent even though we meant everything to him. I vowed never to let myself be like that. Fast forward twenty years and people who mean to me what I meant to my dad have essentially have started to tell me the same thing that I learned about my dad twenty years ago -- despite all of my intentions in between never to let that happen. Sometimes people can't help themselves no matter how hard they try.

I'm not sure how this all ends for Rijkenberg. Even if he only sold 130% of himself, that's still an extra EUR 450,000 he would have to come up with in order to make his backers whole. That seems unlikely to happen. More likely is that some of the smaller investors never get paid, or most of the investors get paid only a fraction of what they should have received. Either way, it seems most likely to be another example of a young Internet poker player (Rijkenberg isn't even 21 years old yet) -- like so many multi-accounters, account sharers, super-users and other cheaters before him -- doing something incredibly dumb under the cover of the invincibility of youth and a mantle of greed. Like almost all of the rest, he wasn't able to get away with it.

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One for the Road

I'm still in Monaco. Heading over to Eze, France today to visit some sort of 9th-century medieval village. I get a kick out of things like that.

This is my final chance, the very last day, for a little rest and relaxation. Once today is over and I fly home, it will be time to start preparing for the packs of donkeys and dreamers making their annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas. The 40th Annual World Series of Poker starts in three weeks. The WSOP will be seven weeks of long days and crazy action. It will also mark one year since I left New York City and took up the poker pen.

I also need to start proactively pushing for some other changes that I've talked about the last few weeks. Like a shark, I can't rest still for long. Stasis is death, and I'm slowly settling into that stasis point right now and just sinking to the bottom. That's not me. I have to be moving forwards. I'm working on that -- too slowly for some, maybe, but things take time. Nothing in life that's worth doing comes easy and the things I want to do will definitely require time.

Good thing I have lots of time the next three weeks to push for, and work on, that change. During the seven weeks of the WSOP that come afterwards, I won't have any.

Speaking of time, my bus is leaving soon. And I really need to enjoy my last day.

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2009 EPT Grand Final: Taxi!

I've been in Monaco for the last week. Cabs here are a little strange.

I came to Monaco by train from Bologna, Italy. The evening that arrived, I emerged from the mountainous underground train station into a light drizzle on the sidewalk of a narrow street. Signs pointed the way to "TAXIS", but there wasn't a taxi stand in sight. I was quite confused until spotting a phone booth with the sign "TAXI". There was a plain white phone inside of it.

Hmm. Really? I have to call my own taxi?

I pushed my way into the booth and picked up the handset. The wire connecting the handset to the phone pulled right out of the phone.

Hmmmmmmm. Really? I have to fix my own taxi-calling phone?

With a little bit of MacGyver-like ingenuity, I jammed the wire into the phone long enough for someone to pick up the other end. I speak absolutely no French so I could only hope that I had successfully called a taxi once I stammered a few words into the phone and hung up. It worked; within ten minutes, a cab came screaming around a bend in the road and pulled up to the curb. The driver popped out and helped me with my luggage.

Since then, I've learned that you cannot street-hail a cab here. If you want a cab, you have to request the reception desk of the establishment that you're in to call one for you. It's a weird, inefficient system that I would only expect to find in a place so close to France. (And that's my one gratuitous shot at the French for this post.)

You can imagine my surprise when I tried to order a cab last night at about 1am and was told that there weren't any. "The phone lines of the cab company are very busy. Maybe we can try again in fifteen minutes."

Say what now? There are no cabs anywhere?

Apparently there are approximately 10 cabs in all of Monaco, and if there's a run on cabs -- because of a party or something similar -- then anyone who's too slow to order a cab is out of luck. That was me, last night. I guess people in the richest, most expensive place in the world have no need for cabs when they're cruising around the Mediterranean in their yachts with helicopters on the back (really).

"You could walk," offered the guy at the reception desk. "It's a 25 minute walk." I looked at him skeptically but he assured me it was no more than 25 minutes and pulled out a city map to sketch the direction I should take. "Here there is a shopping center where you will take an elevator," he said, pointing at one section of the map. "Then up this road is the entrance to the train station. You should walk all the way to the end of the train station, make a left, then take another escalator up to this road. It's a five-minute walk from there."

I walked. It was about thirty minutes. I did not encounter a single other soul on the street the whole way there. I guess people in the richest, most expensive part of the world, in addition to not needing taxis, don't walk to many places.

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