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Posted: Friday, July 15, 2005
By Michael Kaplan
ENTRY NO. 7
JULY 15, 2005
Raymer Goes Out, Negreanu Goes Up and Gordon Goes Scissors
The World Series returned to Binion's Gambling Hall and Hotel (formerly known, of course, as Binion's Horseshoe) for its final two days of play. Following a week in the antiseptic confines of the Rio, it seemed a little bit like returning to your hometown for one last beer blast. For big name pros, however, day one at Binion's felt more like a bloodbath and less like a homecoming. Greg Raymer, Phil Ivey, Minh Ly and Tim Phan, all front-runners at various points, busted out with varying degrees of ugliness.
The biggest name remaining in contention is Mike Matusow, who occupies fourth place with $7,410,000 in chips. No poker-faced mope, he's kept things lively at the table, particularly when seated in shouting distance of Shahram Sheikhan, a Las Vegas pro nicknamed The Iron Sheik. They got into one obscenity-laced argument, which threatened to turn physical, and resulted in 10-minute suspensions for each player.
Sideline whispers from those in the know have centered around how long it will take for volatile Matusow to lose it, melt down and blow the tournament. But right now, trailing chip-leading Aaron Kantor by only $3.3 million, Matusow might very well become the new, angry, high-strung and emotionally naked face of poker. He'd be the anti-Raymer and would make for a compelling champ.
Among elite poker players, there is a new favorite game, and it has nothing to do with cards. As the World Series broke for dinner last night, skyscraping Phil Gordon recounted a recent tournament that centered around Rock, Paper, Scissors. Sixty-four pros—including Annie Duke, Rafe Furst and Gordon himself—kicked in $200 each to create a winner-take-all first prize of $10,000 (the rest went to charity).
According to a recent story in Rolling Stone, the flaky genius Dutch Boyd and his notorious crew of poker players use the kids game to sharpen their instincts before tournaments. Gordon describes it as "the ultimate psychological battle." Then he adds, "It's certainly a game of skill in which you need to figure out what your opponent will do next."
Pressed to reveal some of his RPS strategies, Gordon says, "Most people go rock too frequently, so you need to go paper a lot. Plus there are hand tells and the fact that people are terrible at randomizing. But mostly, just like with poker, Rock, Paper, Scissors is about patterns. If you lose twice in a row with rock, you won't go rock a third time because it looks like a losing move. So I'll go scissors and, at worst, tie."
Yeah, I tell Gordon, but now I know that you know that. So I will go rock a third time. "There's the rub," replies Gordon, revealing that the tournament winner was Dutch's brother Bobby Boyd. "It all comes down to how many levels you are capable of X-raying."
Phil "Unabomber" Laak is always up for a challenge. So when the organizers of an event called the Robot World Series of Poker requested that he square off against their winning computer, Laak was game. Tonight, he and a computer will play a freeze-out of limit Texas Hold'em one floor below the World Series at Binion's. He apparently spent much of last night practicing against a computer produced by a company called the Poker Academy -- up till then, he had been mistakenly preparing for a no-limit match. While he hopes to have a solid line on the event this morning, yesterday he put it "somewhere between 60/40 one way or the other."
Famed for table-side histrionics and often seen playing with a sweatshirt hood pulled low to hide his facial expressions, the Bomber will not be able to employ many of his most dependable weapons against the ‘bot. "I'm gonna have to come to the table gimmick-free," he acknowledges. "It will be very straightforward, mathematical poker. As the computer gets used to playing against me, it will call my bets on the assumption that I haven't made my hand. I won't be able to steal a lot on the river, but my best opportunity for stealing will be at the beginning of the match, before the computer has enough information to remember what I've done on previous hands."
As for his penchant for table talking, Laak insists that he won't bother reining it in. "I'll coffee-house for the fun of it," he says, acknowledging that it might serve to put the programmer on tilt.
Over at the Wynn Las Vegas poker room, media-saturated Daniel Negreanu has been participating in a poker challenge of a different sort. He's announced that he will play a $100,000-or-higher freeze-out in any form of poker against any player who's willing to take him on. So far, Mimi Tran, David Oppenheim, Barry Greenstein and Joe Cassidy have matched wits with Negreanu; they've collectively beaten him out of $1 million.
Today's challenger, Tony Bloom, is a successful sports bettor and pot-limit Omaha specialist from the United Kingdom. That is the game they played, and Negreanu emerged victorious before dinner -- which means that he's now $500,000 in the hole.
Win or lose, however, Negreanu is clearly getting off on making history by issuing such an open-ended challenge. "Plus," he says, "playing heads-up against the best players in the world will turn me into a better player. And now I'm getting random challenges from rich dudes you've never heard of who want to take me on. Those are the challenges that I am really looking forward to."
Go to Entry One, Entry Two, Entry Three, Entry Four, Entry Five, Entry Six, Entry Eight.
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