WSOP to Caesars in 2011?

Normally we here at RTFT don't traffic in rumors. We leave that to Rumorati Pokerati. But yesterday while covering the WSOP Circuit event at Caesars, we overheard a floor person telling a player that, for sure, the WSOP will be at Caesars next year. Who knows if he was blustering or if he had inside information.

With the Rio officially put on the auction block by Harrahs recently, it's clear where the 2011 WSOP will not be held. There has been lots of speculation that Planet Hollywood, recently acquired by Harrahs, would be a natural replacement. But the Caesars poker room (as much as it has fallen off in the last few years) is the premier Harrahs poker room on the Strip, and the Caesars convention center could theoretically be big enough for the Series. Parking...?

Two other random tidbits while I'm thinking about it: the WSOP Circuit event started with stacks of 500 BBs. This, along with excessively long late registrations periods, is a trend that needs to die.

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The WSOP Circuit Deep Stack Extravaganza

Another BBT5 final table, another 5th place finish. It was more than a little frustrating since I felt I was the second-best player at the final table. If I had won the key pot (my QQ v. Linda G's AK) I probably would have taken at least 2nd place.

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Tomorrow the $5,000 "Main Event" starts for the WSOP Circuit series at Caesars here in Las Vegas. I'll be covering it for PokerNews as a tune-up before the real WSOP starts in four weeks. Given that only 231 players came out for Saturday's $2500 "Main Event" at the Venetian for the 2010 Deep Stack Extravaganza II (compared to 280 last year), and given that last year 187 played the Caesars Main Event, I'm expecting about 160 players tomorrow. I doubt the tournament will remain a 4-day event as currently scheduled.

In general, the field sizes throughout the WSOP-C and the DSE have been unimpressive. The WSOP-C's $230 NLHE events attracted an average field of 292 players; the $340s drew 224; and an average of 165 turned up for the $550s. The two non-NLHE events, $340 LHE and $340 PLO, did even worse, failing to crack 60 players in the field. Venetian drew an average of 251 for their $340 NLHE tourneys (slightly better than the WSOP-C) and 151 for their $550s (slightly worse).

The two series certainly have sapped each other's player bases. But even if only one series was running, and the fields were perfectly consolidated, tournament poker still seems to be on the decline somewhat here in Vegas (at least the small market, non-televised type of tournament poker). JDN played the last $550 NLHE of the WSOP-C yesterday at Caesars and had this to say about it: "I won this tourney 2 years ago when there were 650 runners. Today: 135."

Counter-programming is, in general, harmful when the product being offered is virtually indistinguishable. All it does is splinter the market. That helps nobody: not the poker rooms running the tournaments and certainly not the players. Sometimes it can be hard to determine exactly who is competing with whom for players, but the TDs in overlapping geographic markets really need to sit down and figure this out. The boom days are over.

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PLO No

Ever since coming home from NYC, I'd had yesterday circled in red on my calendar. At least, I suppose if I had a calendar I might have circled it in red. That's what people used to do when they had calendars, yes? Anyway, there was a $340 PLO tournament at Caesars for the WSOP-C that I wanted to play.

Now long-time readers probably know my feelings about the Caesars poker room, which are: I fucking hate it. I've never had a good experience there other than winning the blogger tourney in 2006. But they W-2G'ed me for that $2200 win (wtf) so even that was tarnished.

Live PLO tourneys aren't that easy to come by and I figured the field would be somewhere around 100 players. It was enough to overcome my aversion to the room. I rocked up to the window at 3:50pm yesterday for the 4pm start and asked how many players were registered.

"Nine."

"Nine? Like, the single digit nine?"

"Yes, nine. No wait. Sorry, I'm looking at the wrong number. It's 24."

24 players is better than 9 players but it is not a tournament. It's a 3-table SNG. I hated to waste the trip to the Strip so I grabbed a copy of Bluff from the magazine rack by the entrance to the poker room while waiting things out. It was unlikely the field would grow that much by the start, but there was no sense in leaving yet. By the time SUAD was called, 35 players had registered.

They started playing 6-handed, intending to fill in the empty seats with late registrations. The time period for which, by the way, was the first three 40-minute levels. If anyone can explain to me why a $340 tournament needs two hours of late registration, they should be doing more important things with their lives than reading this blog. Maybe start by ending world hunger.

Another twenty-five minutes went by, with the field reaching 50 players. Now or never. Even though the field was about half the size I was expecting, I decided "what the hell" and went to the cage to register. Andreas Hoivold got in line behind me. The cashier took my cash but then was having trouble finding me a seat. A few minutes went by. Nothing. A floor finally came to the cage and told me, "You'll be the first alternate."

Say what now?

The field had grown to six 9-handed tables and apparently six 9-handed tables it would stay. If I wanted to play I was going to have to wait for someone to bust, a pretty dumb thing since (let me remind you) there were only 54 players in the field.

I asked for, and received, my buy-in back. Sure, given that it's PLO I probably wouldn't have had to wait all that long. But in light of my past experiences at Caesars the whole thing rankled me. It was another example of the epic-fail that permeates the Caesars poker room on a regular basis.

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Tilt Transfer OK?

I've been thinking quite a bit about this (alleged) grand jury investigation into Full Tilt Poker's activities that's emanating from federal court in the Southern District of New York. I'm not sure I see it ending well for Full Tilt any time soon.

When I was at Mohegan Sun two weeks ago, I overheard David Singer and Phil Ivey negotiating a bet on whether Tiger Woods would win the Masters. Singer gave Ivey 5.5:1 odds to take Tiger, ultimately settling the amount of the bet at $20,000. As they were concluding their negotiations, Singer asked, "Tilt transfer ok?"

In the U.S., anyone who receives a cash transfer greater than $10,000 while conducting their trade or business is supposed to report that transfer to the Internal Revenue Service within 15 days. If the transfer is received by wire to a bank account, then the financial institution that receives the wire must file a similar report with the Treasury Department. Either way, transactions of more than $10,000 are reported to the government. These reports facilitate law enforcement against, among other things, tax evasion, money launderers and other criminal enterprises that deal in high volumes of cash.

Right now, U.S. online poker players can transfer any amount of money to each other without triggering the filing of any reports with the U.S. government. Every day U.S. players are transferring tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of dollars to each other online. It is essentially unregulated off-shore banking. In the case of the Singer-Ivey golf bet, Ivey presumably shipped $20,000 to Singer, but if it had gone the other way Singer may have shipped Ivey $110,000 (assuming they settled the bet right away).

Think about that in light of the SDNY grand jury investigation. From what I understand, the SDNY prefers to consider itself a semi-autonomous branch of the DOJ. It doesn't like to kowtow to the government overlords in Washington, preferring instead to trail-blaze its own path through gray areas of the law. The SDNY takes an especially strong interest in financial crimes, located as it is in one of the major financial centers of the world. Put all of those factors together and suddenly the SDNY's interest in online poker starts to make more sense.

Why Full Tilt though? Why not PokerStars? I can't say for sure. I'd guess it's a case of access to information. Full Tilt's various legal troubles during the last year have brought to public light a fair amount of information about Tilt's corporate structure and ownership, including the fact that some of the owners live right here in Las Vegas. That information for Stars, on the other hand, is more difficult to come by.

There's no indictment yet, and even if the government obtains an indictment, that's no guarantee there will be a full-blown prosecution of FTP. But the facts are not in Tilt's favor. For federal prosecutors looking to make names for themselves, this case is too tempting to pass up. Don't expect it to disappear any time soon.

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SCOOP Oop-A-Doop

The PokerStars Spring Championship of Online Poker is just a few weeks away, with Event #1 kicking off on May 2. Like many people, I won an $11 SCOOP ticket in the WBCOOP a few months ago. I was hoping there'd be a good mix of "low" SCOOP events in which to use the ticket. Turns out... not so much.

Only 8 of the 38 "low" events are $11 events, and three of those are rebuy events. Thus the $11 ticket, which seemed like a modest but useful prize back in January during the WBCOOP, now has considerably less utility. I won't use my SCOOP ticket for any of the rebuy events. Rebuy events aren't to my taste and anyway I'd like to treat my SCOOP foray as a freeroll, as I suspect many $11 ticket winners would. That narrows the list to these five options:

Event #6 - $11 Pot-Limit 5-Card Draw
Event #8 - $11 No-Limit Hold'em
Event #24 - $11 2-7 Triple Draw
Event #26 - $11 No-Limit Hold'em
Event #30 - $11 Pot-Limit Omaha Hi-Lo

Two of these games (5CD and 2-7) are about as squirrel-y as they come and are not wise investments of my $11 ticket. That leaves me with either NLH or PLO8. Given that choice, I guess it will most likely be PLO8.

I realize that Stars is trying to cater to a wide range of interests and bankrolls. That's one of the things that makes SCOOP great. It's just disappointing that the WBCOOP prizes (almost 100 $11 tickets were awarded in each preliminary event, I believe) turned out to be of such limited value and utility, given the vast amount of value and utility that Stars got out of all of the links people put on their sites as a requisite to playing in the WBCOOP tournaments.

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Strong Initial Showing for NAPT on ESPN2

While the legal aspects of online poker get murkier and murkier, poker on television seems to get better and better. The initial two hours of coverage of the North American Poker Tour aired on ESPN2 yesterday. No surprise that the quality and feel of the inaugural episodes was similar to that of ESPN's WSOP coverage, with some PokerStars-specific flourishes (like the PokerStars red spade) added in a mostly unobtrusive way. Yes, some of the B-roll seemed of incredibly poor quality, but that was probably due to the very dark conditions on the Venetian floor where it was shot. 441 could more properly be faulted for some weirdly unflattering lighting during the interview segments, especially if you were watching in HD.

From a production standpoint, 441 has learned a few new tricks this year. They now indicate the button, small blind, and big blind with red B, SB, and BB notations; the card graphics have better, crisper visibility; and a small arrow has been incorporated into the on-screen graphics to indicate which player the action is on. Each change is subtle but improves the overall production considerably.

From an audience-enjoyment standpoint, the NAPT hit the jackpot with the bounty shootout. What makes televised poker most compelling is "the final table". In a bounty shootout, each table is a mini-final table. By setting the price point at $25,000, the NAPT assured itself of a world-class field full of recognizable names, each arrayed at a "final table". There were three such tables in the first hour, and four in the second hour.

We'll see how the coverage of the Venetian Main Event compares to the BSO, but so far I give NAPT and ESPN an A- for this effort. Given: (1) that grade; (2) the price point of NAPT tournaments; and (3) the online qualifying aspect that PokerStars brings to the table, NAPT's biggest problem in the coming months may be finding venues that can fit all of the players that will turn up for NAPT events.

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Hodge Podge, Monday Edition

A few quick hits:

1. Thanks to AlCantHang for setting up the BBT5. The first tournament was last night. I had an excellent opportunity to lock up a TOC seat early, having the chip lead with 7 players to go. Instead I flamed out in 5th. Well done.

2. Things are getting worse and worse for online poker. It's getting that I can't even keep track of all of the open issues anymore. Let's see what we have:

* The State of Kentucky is suing various online sites, trying to recover the losses of Kentucky residents from playing poker online since 2005;

* A grand jury in the Southern District of New York is investigating Full Tilt on money laundering and assorted other charges;

* There's legislation making its way through the Massachusetts legislature that would make online poker illegal and punishable by up to two years in jail and a $25,000 fine;

* Let's not forget the looming enforcement date (June 1, 2010) of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act;

* The arrest in Las Vegas last week of Daniel Tzvetkoff, owner-operator of payment processor Intabill, on charges that originated out of New York of money laundering and wire fraud (and violations of the UIGEA to boot);

* There are also various civil suits: Everest Poker versus Harrah's; Full Tilt versus several of its former employees; etc.

The arrest of Tzvetkoff should serve as a wake-up call for everyone in the online poker industry and especially the owners of Full Tilt. Given that most grand juries will indict a ham sandwich (if the old saying is believed), what kind of odds will people offer that a high-profile arrest of Howard Lederer or another Team Full Tilter with heavy involvement in FTP management will occur during the $50K Player's Championship or during the WSOP Main Event?

3. It's a crowded tournament calendar at the moment. You've got EPT San Remo and Monte Carlo in Europe; the WPT Champs at Bellagio; WSOP Circuit at Caesars Las Vegas; Venetian Deep Stack in Vegas; the Cal State Champs at Commerce starting in roughly two weeks; and APPT Macau just after that. It's getting so that there's always a tournament somewhere if you don't mind a piece of traveling.

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Humble Pie

It can be tough admitting you got something wrong. Even when the facts are plain as day and incontrovertible, it can still be tough to believe them, to swallow them (along with your pride) and to say, "I am wrong." Hans Christian Andersen wrote a cautionary tale about this.

It's even tougher when the whole world can see straightaway what you cannot, or choose not to, see. It's the opposite of the Emperor's New Clothes problem. The vast majority of advisors and on-lookers are shouting down the Emperor's nudity but the Emperor gets his back up and soldiers on. He's determined to makes the clothes appear because he knows that they're really there, if only everyone else will look a little harder.

One of the great things about having true friends is that they're willing to tell you when you're naked. They won't just sing "Kumbaya" and pretend that you're fully clothed and that everything is puppies and rainbows. But they can't pull your head out of the sand so you can see the nudity for yourself. You have to do that on your own.

There are too many poker media colleagues, poker media friends, blogger friends and other long-standing friends from NYC to LA who have been trying to tell me for a long time how naked I am. When a whole universe of very intelligent people who care about you and have your best interests at heart feels the same way about something, it's foolish not to take notice. At that point the externalities that you think they haven't considered don't matter.

Notice the chorus of voices and accept their merit. Two lessons learned. Next round of beer is on me.

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A Play You Wouldn't Make

NAPT Mohegan Sun is over for me. The $25,000 bounty shootout started today but I skipped that for a little R&R in New York City. The $5,000 Main Event finished last night with a lesbian (Vanessa Selbst) battling a strip club owner (Mike Beasley) heads-up for the title. Selbst won. Never underestimate the power of the V.

There were some curious hands played during the course of the tournament. One that particularly stands out is Phil Ivey's elimination hand. It occurred late on Day 3, when 29 players remained out of the 716 starters.

Ivey's stack had been all over the place during the day but after a series of damaging hands he was one of the shortest stacks in the room. He had 115k with blinds at 6k/12k/1k, giving him fewer than 10 BBs and an M of 4.42. Most players in that spot would only make one move if they decided to play a hand. They would raise all in.

Ivey is not "most players". He limped into the pot from under the gun for 12k with, we would later discover, Kh-10h. The remaining specifics of the hand aren't important. What puzzled me was this limp, from one of the worst positions at the table, with a marginal hand and a very short stack. What could Ivey have been hoping to accomplish?

I ran through some theories. I considered the fact that with a short stack and the blinds coming, Ivey may have been unwilling to throw away even a medium strength hand like Kh-10h. But Kh-10h is not the type of hand to shove from early position with seven people yet to act.

The under-the-gun limp looks very strong. When you add the Ivey Intimidation Factor and the fact that Ivey appeared committed to the hand if anyone else re-raised, is it possible that nobody else at the table would raise without a very solid holding? That would allow Ivey to limp with a hand that he otherwise might not be able to limp with. If the raise comes, he can fold and preserve his stack at 8.5 BBs. If it doesn't, he at least has a shot at hitting a flop and doubling.

So far that's the most plausible theory I've come up with. There are plenty of others. He might simply have gotten frisky; he might have made a mistake; he might have been operating at a level beyond which my poker comprehension can reach, planning some play or some line that would never even occur to me.

One of the perqs of tournament coverage is that there's almost always something that makes me stop and think about "the game". I'll be noodling on this one for quite a while.

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Eastward Bound

I've got a bit of traveling coming up in the next few days. I'll be at Mohegan Sun for the next NAPT stop from April 6 to April 11. Following that, I'm heading down to New York City for five days. It seemed silly to be so close to the city without stopping in for a visit.

If you'll be at Mohegan, seek me out while you're there. Unless I hate you, in which case leave me the hell alone. If you live in New York City, batten down the hatches and prepare to be boarded.

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