Las Vegas Weekly

July 17, 2010 · 9:58 AM

Poker expert Michael Craig on who will survive the 2010 WSOP at The Rio

By Robin Leach

Emily Jillette and Michael Craig at the 2010 World Series of Poker at The Rio.

Photo: Michael Craig

From July 14 through Aug. 4, Robin Leach will be relaxing under the Tuscan sun on his annual vacation and will keep his eyes on what’s happening in Las Vegas from Italy. Meantime, a kindly crew of Las Vegas celebrities and VIPs has agreed to write guest columns for Vegas DeLuxe.

By Michael Craig, guest columnist

Since May 27, the Convention Center at The Rio has served as the home to the 41st Annual World Series of Poker. In 57 events spread over 7 1/2 weeks, the WSOP pits the world’s best poker players against one another and anyone willing to pay the $1,000 to $50,000 entry fees for huge purses and a coveted gold championship bracelet. The pulsing action reached a fever pitch with the start of the Main Event, the $10,000 buy-in No-Limit Hold ’Em World Championship.

The largest and richest sporting event on the planet, 7,319 players competed in four opening sessions from July 5-8. By tonight, only nine will remain -- the November Nine or Final Table. When ESPN completes its weekly broadcasts culminating in the November Nine, two days of play convenes to crown a world champion, who will receive a bling-intense bracelet more coveted than the other 56 awarded to event winners, along with the first-place prize of nearly $9 million, with ESPN broadcasting the highlights.

What’s going to happen in the Amazon Room at The Rio? What can we expect to see on ESPN over the coming months? Who will become an overnight TV superstar? What will be the composition of poker pros, college students, international players, loggers, accountants, home-game hopefuls and women?

Because poker players will bet on any proposition -- witness that legendary pro Ted Forrest, already fit at 180 pounds, has bets worth $2 million riding on his ability to get his weight below 140 pounds by either July 15 or Sept. 24 -- I canvassed the top pros to find out what the smart money thinks we’ll see emerge from The Rio tonight.

A BIG-NAME PRO: 1 IN 2

The conventional wisdom is that the Main Event is too big and too much of a crapshoot for a top poker professional to make the November Nine. That Phil Ivey made it last year seems to some to be merely an exception that proves the rule. But the numbers, the results and the smart money tell a different story. With 7,319 players vying for the nine spots, each player is approximately an 800-1 shot. A group of 80 random players, therefore, is 10-1 against. But if those 80 players were the best in poker, the sheer length of the event and the variation in skill levels argues, albeit subjectively, that those players have approximately five times the likelihood of making the Final Table as average players.

At an enclave of the WSOP Fight Club, a $25,000-buy-in fantasy league based on World Series results, 11 of the world’s highest-stakes gamblers got into an argument on this exact issue. Drafting teams of eight players just before the start of the 2010 WSOP, they didn’t want to wait until November to conclude their pool if one of the 88 players drafted made the Final Table. When one of them dismissed that likelihood as remote, Howard Lederer offered to bet that one of their draftees would make the Final Table. Based on the discussion that followed, it seemed 2-1 would be the likely odds.

A SEEMINGLY CLUELESS AMATEUR: 3 IN 4

In the early days of the WSOP, the top high-stakes poker pros were friends of the hosting Binion family, and it was considered financial suicide for an amateur to pay $10,000 to enter those shark-infested waters. But then-tournament director Eric Drache’s invention of the “satellite” (a tournament to win entry into a tournament) in the early 1980s, turbocharged by Chris Moneymaker’s 2003 win and the online poker boom that followed, has flooded the field with unknown players of all pedigrees.

Moneymaker, formerly a Tennessee accountant, had never played in a live poker tournament. The runner-up to Joe Hachem in 2005, Maryland resident Steve Dannenmann -- also an accountant -- described himself as the fourth-best player in his home game. Last year, Darvin Moon, a logger who also hailed from Maryland, was runner-up. Fashioned as a modern-day Chauncey Gardiner, he reportedly didn’t own a computer, and his trip to Las Vegas for the Main Event was his first-ever flight.

In a contest as grueling as the eight-session/100-hour competition to make the November Nine, it takes numerous skills to succeed. But no one, at any time, has to prove themselves more skillful than all 7,300 players to continue. It is only necessary to be better than the opponents at the table. Given various stack sizes, mistakes by opponents worn down by the event and the proper timing of bluffs and big hands, a rank amateur can repeatedly muster the skill to stave off elimination and make the Final Table. There are a lot of inexperienced unknowns in the field, and usually one will play his A-game and make it through.

It’s not luck that gets one of these amateurs through. Dennis Phillips, the amateur who held the chip lead going into the 2008 November Nine, lost most of his chips early, then put on an impressive display of heart and tenacity to rebound and finish third. He followed that up with a 45th-place finish last year and was a 2010 NBC Heads-Up semifinalist.

AN UNKNOWN POKER PRO: 3 IN 5

Few people, even in poker, realize the depth of the talent pool. With residents of 117 countries playing at the WSOP, there are hundreds of players from Europe, Russia and the Pacific Rim with skills and credentials honed in high-stakes, big-money competition -- mostly out of sight of U.S. poker fans. Additionally, the ubiquity of online poker in the U.S. and internationally has created a pyramid in which millions of players (mostly under age 25) engage in a 24/7 Darwinian struggle to survive and thrive. Those players, like Tom “durrr” Dwan (who finished runner-up in a 2,500-player WSOP event in June) and Justin “Boosted J” Smith (who won a bracelet last year at 22) have won millions online before they are seen at live tournament or known by anything but their online nicknames. And there are a lot of them.

A HOME-GAME KILLER: 1 IS LIKELY

The structure of the Main Event allows home-game champs and serious recreational players a chance to test their skills against the best. When patent attorney Greg Raymer won in 2004, online poker communities already knew him as a serious player. His five subsequent WSOP Final Tables suggest that his victory was anything but a fluke.

Last year, there were two such players, Steve Begleiter and Jeff Shulman. Begleiter, a investment professional and former managing director at Bear Stearns, won his way into the Main Event at his local home game. Shulman, the editor of Card Player magazine, had a superb record in part-time play at big-money events, including a Final Table finish at the 2000 Main Event (along with author James McManus, who chronicled the adventure in the best-seller Positively Fifth Street).

A WOMAN: 1 IN 4

There is no reason why a woman should not make the November Nine or win the championship. Eventually, more women will make the Final Table, and one will win. Barbara Enright finished fifth in 1995. The next-best Main Event finish by a woman is Annie Duke’s 10th place in 2000. But it didn’t happen this year based on the numbers.

Approximately 3 percent of the Main Event entries are women -- 200 players. Of 7,319 players competing for nine spots, those 200 women combined (assuming they are of average skill level) have approximately a 25 percent chance of getting representation on the November Nine.

With only one woman ever making the Final Table, two explanations are possible: (1) Through variance, they have underperformed the expected result. And (2) there is some reason why the women, on average, have been of less-than-average ability. If the latter is true, it is merely because with fewer women players, say, 10 years ago, there are fewer women in the field with 10 years of experience. Time will prove an equalizer, especially with so much poker experience available online.

What were the odds I would be seated next to another celebrity contributor to Robin Leach’s column? You would think astronomical, yet when I sat down to play the Main Event at Pavilion Room Table Yellow 126 Seat 3, the player to my right was Emily Zolten Jillette. Unfortunately, neither Emily nor I survived Day 1, so we won’t be vying for spots as clueless amateur or woman at the November Nine.

To read all about the action, as well as the spectacle of the 56 preliminary events and more than 60,000 players who entered them -- more than a few of them unusual, strange, bizarre or otherwise noteworthy -- check out my WSOP coverage in The Full Tilt Poker Blog.

Check back right here at Vegas DeLuxe tomorrow for the list of the 2010 WSOP Main Event’s November Nine.

Flamingo headlining magician Nathan Burton is tomorrow’s guest columnist.

Robin Leach has been a journalist for more than 50 years and has spent the past decade giving readers the inside scoop on Las Vegas, the world’s premier platinum playground.

Follow Robin Leach on Twitter at Twitter.com/Robin_Leach.

Follow Vegas DeLuxe on Twitter at Twitter.com/vegasdeluxe.

Follow VDLX Editor Don Chareunsy on Twitter at Twitter.com/VDLXEditorDon.

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