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#1
05-21-2003, 08:54 AM
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WSOP on NYTIMES Cover
Coverage of the WSOP is on the front page of the New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/21/national/21POKE.html 
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#3
05-21-2003, 10:35 AM
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Skip link - article bellow
New York Times - front page
At Poker's World Series, 838 Jokers, One King By JODI WILGOREN LAS VEGAS, May 20 — Just after midnight this morning, the bet was $3,000, and Phil Hellmuth Jr., a professional poker player since he became the game's youngest world champion at 24 in 1989, was deciding whether to raise. "How much?" Mr. Hellmuth sneered at the player with the lesser stack two seats to his right, Achilleas Kallakis, a British shipping magnate, asking Mr. Kallakis to reveal how big a bet would knock him from the tournament altogether. Advertisement "I'm counting," Mr. Kallakis, who entered the $10,000-a-seat competition on a whim even though he said he had never before played the game, sneered back. Mr. Hellmuth decided just to match Mr. Kallakis's $3,000, and the dealer flipped another card in this hand of No Limit Texas Hold'em, in which players get two cards face down to combine with five common cards, which are turned over in three steps between aggressive rounds of betting. Mr. Hellmuth held ace-jack; Mr. Kallakis a pair of kings, both good hands. But when another king appeared in the middle of the table, Mr. Kallakis had three of a kind, and $6,000 more of Mr. Hellmuth's chips. And so it goes in the World Series of Poker, where gambling legends who autograph books and photographs during the breaks can be taken down by unknowns, like Robert Varkonyi of Brooklyn, who walked away with last year's $2 million first prize. That 2002 upset, combined with the enormous growth of online gaming and the prime-time television broadcast of high-stakes tournaments, brought a record 839 players to Binion's Horseshoe Hotel and Casino this week for the 34th annual event known as the Big One. That is a 33 percent jump from last year's record 631 players, making the total purse $7,802,700: $2.5 million for the winner, $1.3 million for the runner-up and $15,000 each for those who place 55th through 63rd. The nine who make it to Friday also get the coveted final-table jacket, and the last one with chips goes home with an engraved gold bracelet like the nine that Mr. Hellmuth has collected in various World Series events (but, tactfully, does not wear at the table). The tournament has always drawn its share of guys with more money than experience, like Mr. Kallakis, 34, who was here on business when he heard buzz at the Bellagio casino about the Big One and decided to sign up. This year, it has also drawn a pizza-delivery man from Cleveland, a Connecticut State Police detective and a Swedish horse breeder. They are among 37 players who won seats through PokerStars.com, an Internet site that has paid $16 million in prize money since December 2001. There were 13 former world champions and about 30 women in the original field. There was Tom Rice, who won his seat, airfare and hotel room through a series of smaller tournaments at the Greektown Casino in Detroit. There was Lynn Crewse, who lost $5,000 in qualifying tournaments over three days before finally winning a spot at 4:45 a.m. Monday, eight hours and 15 minutes before the first deal. There was Nick Browning, who brought five wacky hats, one for each day, but got to wear only the purple velvet and gold king's crown before he busted out. And there was Mr. Kallakis, who admitted playing five-card stud with matchsticks as a child but said his only preparation for the World Series was reading a Texas Hold'em book the night before, "How to Play Poker and Win," by Brian McNally — not Mr. Hellmuth's newly published "Play Poker Like the Pros." "I think life is full of experiences," Mr. Kallakis said as he hurried off for dinner on Monday, before his showdown with Mr. Hellmuth, having already lasted longer than he expected. "Whether I win or lose, I know I've beat 200 people." This morning, long after his scheduled flight home had departed, Mr. Kallakis returned to the table with $33,225 in chips, ranking 68; the leader, Barry Greenstein, had $94,775. The original field had been chopped in half to 394 by the first day's last shuffle at 1 a.m. today. It shrank to 288 after Day 2's first round, 189 by 6 p.m., 143 by 9. Even the unlikely survivors could not help dreaming of final-table glory. "I know I'm going all the way," said Bryan G. Watkins, a San Francisco police officer making his first tournament appearance. "I'm just rolling all over everybody." By this afternoon he had amassed more than $170,000 in chips, which brought the ESPN crew filming the event for broadcast next month over to introduce themselves. Imagine if every duffer who ever shot par could buy his way into the Master's. If the M.V.P.'s of Pop Warner football were in the Super Bowl huddle with Heisman Trophy winners. Only in poker, where, as in life, success equals skill plus luck. "They saw me win, and they think if he can win, I can win," said Mr. Varkonyi, the 2002 champion, whose crown gave him the embarrassing honor of having his Day 1 ouster from this year's tournament broadcast over the public address system. "It's more fun when you win," he added. The biggest change this year was the influx of players who qualified through Web sites like PokerStars .com, which spent $160,000 on T-shirts, hats, plane tickets and hotel rooms for its players, nine of whom finished in the top 100 on Day 1. The lavish steak and seafood dinner the Web site sponsored Sunday night for its team was like a reunion of relatives who had never met, as people searched out the strangers behind the screen names when their aces lost to some lousy hand transformed by the last card turned. "Where's the Krazy Kanuck?" asked Bruce Van Horn, a pathologist from Ada, Okla., who placed second in the 1996 tournament and has been chasing ever since. Jim Worth, who lives outside Toronto and just sold his coffee company to make a run as a poker pro, went over to shake hands. "There's nobody on the site that I fear more on my left than you," Mr. Worth told Dr. Van Horn, paying him Hold'em's highest compliment. "I've had to change my play every time you sit down." Such niceties ended as soon as the cards were dealt. There was little banter around the brightly lighted room, where cellphones and cigarettes are banned and bottled water is the cocktail of choice. Players wearing dark sunglasses or caps pulled down to their brows ceaselessly shuffle their stacks, creating a symphony of clacking chips. The antes climb in each two-hour round, separated by 15-minute bathroom breaks, with 75 minutes for dinner. Massages are available tableside. There are time-out penalties for exposing cards or harassing dealers, as the dwindling number of players flashes on television screens overhead. In one corner, T. J. Cloutier, author of "Championship No-Limit and Pot-Limit Hold'em: On the Road to the World Series of Poker," miraculously turned $600 into $10,000 in 15 minutes, winning four hands in a row where he pushed all his chips into the pot, risking his seat. In another, with "just a peanut" left after Day 1, sat Amarillo Slim Preston, the 1972 champion who is in the Guinness Book of Records for being in five Halls of Fame: poker, gambling, seniors, legends of Texas and legends of Nevada. Mr. Kallakis, meanwhile, managed to collect $60,000 in chips by the end of today's first round. He almost lost a $50,000 pot after trying to collect it without showing the table his winning hand when the final bet was called. It was a beginner's mistake that he will not make again.
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#5
05-21-2003, 12:58 PM
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Re: WSOP on NYTIMES Cover
And to think they would require you to spend a whole 30 seconds of your day to become one, and for the privilege or reading their newspaper at no cost they charge the outrageous fee of nothing.
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