Battle For Bracelets Begins

Yesterday, Nenad Medic won the first Corum 2008 WSOP bracelet, along with almost $800K taking down the $10K World Championship Pot Limit Holdem event.  He bested 352 entrants and a very strong final table that included Andy Bloch, Kathy Leibert, Mike Sexton, Patrick Antonius and Phil Laak.  I didn't get a chance to witness any of the final table play, which started around 3pm, because I was dealing in the second flight of the first day for event #2 in the back of the Amazon room.  There must have been a very nice spectator audience for this star filled final table, because several times we heard them explode with excitement over big hands.  A somewhat muted applause could also be heard each time a player exited the tournament, even though we were at the very back of the blue section, probably close to 80 tables between our action and the final table grand stand.

The first big No-Limit Holdem event with a WSOP-minimum $1500 buy-in completed its first day with a second flight of nearly 1900 contestants.  After the first break, the tournament director announced officially what everyone was talking about - this is the largest live poker tournament field in history, of any buy-in size (excluding WSOP main events).  The official total number of participants is 3929, about 70 players short of capacity, making a prize pool of nearly $5.5 million and a first place prize over $830K, both WSOP preliminary event records. The first flight played down to about 250 players and we will play down to the exact time on the tournament clock today that they finished the day before, ensuring players in each flight have the same opportunity to accumulate chips prior to redrawing table/seat locations for the second day of play tomorrow. 

I was originally scheduled to start this day at 11:00 am, but dealer coordination is still an issue and the schedule has changed twice in the past few days.  At one point, this was to be an off day, then I was moved to a 2:00pm start, and with so many dealers around, I didn't get an assignment until 3:30pm, when additional breaks were added into the table push strings.  This means dealers are largely doing up-downs.  In the box for 30 minutes (down) and then on break for 30 minutes (up).  It is very hard to make any money this way and the dealers are all starting to grumble about the situation.

After a couple of turns in the dealer break room, I finally got my first assignment.  It is in the low numbers of the blue section, event #2, which should mean that I will avoid being reassigned before my shift ends since the table break order is from the high numbered tables downwards.  I did not see any notable professional players, but towards the end of one of my downs, Ron Price from Houston joined my table.  Ron deals for charity events and iHostPoker casino night parties with me occasionally.  He was once associated with the Amateur Poker League as a tournament director, host, regional manager, but when they moved out of most of the Houston marked he started his own bar poker league, Snowman Poker, which is by far the best organized recreational poker league in Texas.  They now have something like 10 or 12 venues around town every night of the week.  When I was running bar poker tournaments in the Clear Lake area, we tried very hard to emulate his successful formula.  I only dealt a few hands to Ron, and I don't think he even committed a single chip to the pot, so I am sure he was glad to see me move on.

While poker has been pretty popular in Europe and Scandinavia for sometime, they have been experiencing the same sort of explosion over the last couple of years that we saw the few years prior.  Since many of the countries have not banned internet poker, the biggest sites that have been closed to American players can still qualify and buy-in players via satellites to poker events in Europe and Asia.  The WSOP and WPT have created circuits of big events around the region over the last couple of years and their fields have been growing wildly, while attendance at events here in the US have mostly receded a bit.  One of the questions many people have about this years WSOP, which typically draws many European players to its events, is if this increase in events and attendance abroad will somehow impact the numbers of players that come across the pond to play here at the Rio.  If the first few days are any indication at all, it hasn't had much of an impact.  There are many, many recognizable foreign faces playing in the early events.  While I haven't learned all of their names, it seems clear that they have made the trip to play.  Those that do travel are also enjoying a very favorable monetary exchange rate due to the weakness of the US dollar and economy.