WSOP Article--Long

[DougBrennan]

Thought some of you would get a kick out of this article is the SF Chronicle this morning.






You could fit all of the virtue in Las Vegas onto the face of a single poker chip and still have room to spare for its grace and charm, its subtlety and sincerity.

More conspicuously absent of course are the clocks, windows, exit signs, fresh fruit and vegetables and any sense of style whatsoever -- not that the place caters to the health-conscious or the haute couture. But for all its glaring deficits this vacuous, vice-infected town does have plenty of something: Good old-fashioned cash money.

And around 9 p.m. last Friday night, after surviving seven exhausting days of folding and holding, Gregory "Fossilman" Raymer pocketed $5 million of it when his deuces full of eights bested David Williams' deuces full of fours, winning him the 35th annual World Series of Poker No-Limit Hold'em Championship.

His entry fee? $160 at PokerStars.com.

After Chris Moneymaker's mythical victory last year (ESPN, show it again, please?), PokerStars players are now 2-for-2 and have grossed over $7,500,000 on a combined buy-in of $200. No matter how you look at it, that's an impressive return on investment.

This is precisely the kind of mouth-watering bait that WSOP host Binion's Horseshoe Casino, ESPN, Internet cardrooms and all professional poker players love using to lure hundreds of "fish" into the tournament each year (guys with no chance of winning; dead money), thousands more into the city, and millions worldwide into the sexy jaws of Texas Hold'em itself.

Everybody who watches the "World Poker Tour" (WPT) on TV, has seen "Rounders" more than once (by the way, few pros give away their hands by eating Oreo cookies), or even played a little at home or online, thinks that they have mastered the game. The ones that actually have are bellying up to the buffet table and having a feeding frenzy.

Perhaps my favorite rationale for coughing up the $10,000 to buy a seat in the World Series goes something like this: In what other sport can you spend ten grand and sit down next to its legends and superstars? Fair enough, $10,000 won't get you on the court with Shaq or on the links with Tiger, but I think I'll wait until I spot Doyle Brunson or Johnny Chan hopping onto a bus and snag the seat next to them for a buck-and-a-quarter.


Even more enticing is the fact that very few of the 2,576 entrants in this year's championship event (more than triple that of 2003) actually forked out the 10 large themselves. Rich backers stake many of the top pros (as if guys like Phil Hellmuth or Howard Lederer need any more help). Many of the solid veterans won their seats via "satellites" (winner-take-all mini-tournaments that cost between $225 and $1,025 to enter).

That said, 2004 was undeniably The Year of the Internet Player.

The majority of the field qualified through "free-rolls" and "shootouts" (basically the web's version of satellites) hosted by online casinos like Party Poker, Planet Poker, and of course, PokerStars.

Alex Jagodik of Pokerworld.com -- who took a stack off me in a $10/$20 game downstairs in Binion's main room and then was still gracious enough to answer a few questions -- said that at last count the number of Internet players was over nine hundred. Not that you could really miss them.

Like troops of typical Vegas conventioneers, the sponsored players sported color-coded golf shirts and matching baseball caps embroidered with the name and logo of their respective poker sites. (They were easier to spot than East Fremont Street's delightful, yet orthopedically challenged escorts; decent teeth are also atop the list of things missing from this city).

Then there's the Fossilman himself, who may have been flying the PokerStars flag at this year's WSOP but is far from your average Internet player. He's anything but average, and there's nothing Internet-related about his playing background.

Greg Raymer is not this year's Chris Moneymaker, who busted out of the tournament within two hours on the first day. Moneymaker didn't even outlast celebrity participants like Jimmy Kimmel's crazy Cousin Sal.

Raymer is a 39-year-old biotech patent attorney from Connecticut. His day job sounds as boring as Moneymaker's accounting gig, but that's where the similarities end. Raymer's been playing for nine years, has notched over 300 live tournaments (finishing third in the WPT finals at Foxwoods), and when I asked him if he considered himself a "professional," he nodded, gave me a lopsided grin and replied: "For tax purposes."

Greg is a hefty guy but he wears the weight as well as he wore the pressure of being the chip leader for the last three days of the championship.

He's also remarkably accommodating; near the end of his Herculean week (close to 60 hours at the tables), he agreed to meet me for an early lunch late in the morning -- it was on Thursday, the next-to-last day of competition, less than an hour before the frenzied action kicked off again. The tourney started up at noon each day, adding to the absurdity of ESPN's showdown-at-high-noon motif.

Unsure whether or not to ask about the sunglasses or the fossils, I decided to go with the former, which was funny ha-ha, whereas the latter was funny weird.

Raymer flipped on these hilarious shades with oily, orange lizard eyes super-imposed on the lenses every time he stared an opponent down during a pot battle, the novelty of which endured until the final table, and yes will be captured and joked about tirelessly by ESPN's legion of cameras and commentators.

He says that he picked them up while vacationing at Disney World with his wife and daughter and knew immediately that he'd debut them at the WSOP. The little gag reveals a lot about the guy behind it, who plaintively describes himself as, "only appearing to be wacko -- in reality I'm much worse."

Greg couldn't say whether or not the unusual specs rattled any of the countless pros he coolly dispatched of hour after hour, but wearing them clearly didn't unhinge his own game.

He confidently rolled over the field with rock-solid play, suffering only one really bad beat the entire tournament (losing $600,000 in chips when his pocket aces were cracked by a third 10 that appeared on the last card). But even that didn't unravel his composure; he calmly slid the shiny black fossil from his cards, expunged the unlucky hand from his mind and readied himself for the next one, the hallmark of a great poker player.

So what about the damn fossils? Well, all hold'em players place markers of some sort on their two hole cards to indicate that they're still in a hand, and while most simply use a chip or a dollar coin, the Fossilman naturally uses fossils.

And not just any old chunks of rock. Raymer primarily collects specimens from the cephalopoda decabrachia family, or squids. Greg admits that at first he thought they were a cool kind of talisman to display on the table, and when people started asking about the calcified calamari, he began hawking them at tournaments. (He doesn't need the extra pocket change anymore). Thus his Vegas nickname was born, a colourful little vignette that ESPN will no doubt siphon each and every pigment out of before their epic broadcast concludes.

At precisely the same time my interview ended and Raymer starting preparing for Thursday's round, set to begin in minutes, a few miles across town John Murphy was still sleeping in his hotel room at the Bellagio. It's not uncommon to stay in bed until noon in this town, unless of course you're sitting on a $2.5 million stack, poised to threaten the chip leader at the World Series of Poker, and everybody and their brother is waiting for you to show up at Binion's to start playing for the crown.

Murphy, the 21-year-old Cinderella story from Danville, was so restless the night before that he popped enough Tylenol PMs to paralyze an elephant and was out cold when the action picked up again on Thursday.

Matt Savage, one of the WSOP's directors, tried calling John several times on his cell phone (turned off, of course) and several more on the hotel phone (there were three "John Murphys" registered at the Bellagio). And neither John nor his seven buddies who made the trip with him, all sardined in two adjacent rooms, heard the ringing. Classic.

By the time Murphy finally danced into his jeans and T-shirt and rocketed down to the Horseshoe an hour late, tourney officials had already penalized him $160,000 in chips. (It's policy to automatically toss in a player's blinds and antes if not at the table).

The kid unflinchingly stormed back and by late Thursday night had elbowed his way into position to make the final table. He was one of only 13 players left at 10:45 when he stared down 25-year-old Texas schoolteacher Matt Dean's $500,000 raise and then peeked at his hand: big slick (ace-king). Murphy moved all-in.

In John's own words: "I had a read and didn't put him on Aces or Kings and figured that it was a perfect time to pick up the half-million. ... Being so close in chips and so close to the final table I figured there was no way he would call with anything less."

Alas, Dean called and twirled over pocket jacks, so Murphy was both right and wrong. The nearly 50-50 race was on and unfortunately John couldn't spike an ace or a king on the flop, turn, or river, and the Rip Van Winkle kid from Danville busted out in 13th place, earning him $275,000 in prize money and a note as one of the most endearing stories of this year's WSOP.

The precocious Murphy, who won his $10,000 seat by winning a $1,000 satellite, began playing no-limit hold'em nearly three years ago at Hayward's Palace Card Club and today sharpens his skills at other Bay Area casinos like San Jose's Bay 101 and Colma's Lucky Chances.

He was pretty shocked about Dean's all-in call, but still very upbeat about his own overall performance, and when he I asked him what he planned to do with the cash, the 21-year-old paused -- the third of a million perhaps finally sinking in -- and laughed: "I dunno yet, but I really want a beer."

I didn't suspect he'd say pay off the mortgage and put some away for the kids' college education.

By the time Friday evening eventually came around and the final table had been shaved down to five (who were already all millionaires; $5 million to first place, $3.5 million to second, $2.5 million to 3rd, $1.5 million to 4th and $1.1 million to fifth) everybody at Binion's was spent -- the players, the dealers, the media and the fans.

Apparently, the Poker Gods were tired too because they snapped their fingers of fortune and expedited a speedy finish to the event. Within three short hours we were treated to one lightning knock-out after the other, all culminating with David Williams' A-4 getting busted by Greg Raymer's 8-8 on the official final hand of 2004's WSOP -- flop 2-4-5; turn 2; river 2.

The Fossilman threw his big arms into the air, the MC shouted, the crowd leapt to its feet and ESPN's cameras caught it all, including the smoke burning from my heels as I sprinted out of the place, down Fremont Street and straight back to my fleabag hotel, where I happily cocooned until my flight left the next morning.

After four days my body and mind had far exceeded their maximum capacity for Las Vegas and its soulless blinking and clinking, its insatiable all-you-can-eat appetites, its revelry and tackiness, its stale air and spirit; even the $5 million of good old-fashioned cash money, piled up a mere 10 feet in front me on the final table, scarcely gave me a goosebump.

Plus, if I smoked another cigarette or drank another cup of coffee my heart surely would have exploded.


Dying to get back to San Francisco, I snagged an earlier flight on Saturday and checked out of the hotel before 9 a.m. As the girl behind the front desk swiped my Mastercard, a really giddy feeling swept over me and I just couldn't resist ...

Orange lizard-eye novelty sunglasses: $7.99

Blinds and antes (while you were sleeping): $160,000

Seat at the World Series of Poker: $10,000

Believing, if only for a moment, that you have a chance in hell of actually winning: Priceless.



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Joshua Hudson is a San Francisco-based freelance writer.







Doug

[BreakEvenPlayer]

Great article, thanks. At least some writers know enough about poker so as to not label Raymer a lucky "unknown."

[Dynasty]

Greg was lucky. He acknowleged that immediately after winning.

And, Greg is an unknown. Posting on an internet poker board does not make you known to anybody other than the readers of the board.

So, why is calling Greg a lucky unknown bothersome to you?

[BreakEvenPlayer]

[ QUOTE ]
Raymer's been playing for nine years, has notched over 300 live tournaments (finishing third in the WPT finals at Foxwoods), and when I asked him if he considered himself a "professional," he nodded, gave me a lopsided grin and replied: "For tax purposes."

[/ QUOTE ]

Lucky? Sure it takes some luck... Unknown? Hell no.

[chrisjp]

Finally a great article about the WSOP. Give that author an award.

[Hiding]

I don't know you Dynasty, but it seems to me anything positive said about Greg rubs you the wrong way, what gives?

[chrisjp]

I agree with you Hiding. What is his problem. Raymer is a super nice guy and a damn good poker player. Plus he is a wonderful family man with a steady job.

[Aloysius]

Hmmm... I've been noticing people reading a negative connotation into the word "unknown". Seems to me that it's a fairly neutral term.

And really, it's pretty fair to say Greg Raymer is an unknown. Perhaps he is somewhat known in poker circles, but he is still a relative unknown (when compared to people like Phil Ivey, Phil Hellmuth et al) in the poker world, let alone the entire world newspapers write for.

However, if people are using words like "lucky" as a blanket assessment of Raymer's win... that definitely has a negative connotation. Of course luck is a factor, and he was lucky, but he is also obviously a skilled player. For someone to say "Greg was lucky and an unknown" without qualifying the statement with a nod to his skills, that just seems wrong to me.

[BreakEvenPlayer]

http://www.poker-babes.com/bio/greg-raymer/

You read his posts over the years, and then you read something like this and you realize that this guy's game is light years ahead of most peoples'.