Shane Schleger

My desire to recap the WSOP 2009 diminishes rapidly as the memory of Friday’s bustout grows distant and seems less relevant. The post-bustout consolation of having a couple of friends to sweat in the main event is also gone, now that Owen Crowe and Jordan Morgan have been eliminated too.

That leaves my primary rooting interest with Jeff Shulman, the only one of the 27 remaining players in the main event with whom I’ve had any social connection. Some might remember that Shulman had a really good shot at this same title in 2000, before the poker boom, and before Chris Ferguson beat him with 66 vs 77 and then Jeff ran KK into AA in the event. Ferguson went on to win, and I sometimes wonder how much different the poker world might be if Jeff had scooped the event that year.

Besides Jeff, I guess my rooting interest turns to Phil Ivey, probably the greatest natural poker player of all time whose persona doesn’t require any kind of noise to grab people’s attention.

Besides that, a handful of young “internet” players are still fighting for the big payday, and although I don’t know them personally, I would be happy to see Jamie Robbins, Joseph Cada, Andrew Lichtenberger or Nick Maimone (in descending order of chip count) go the distance.

***

Overall, the WSOP 2009 seemed to pass by in a time warp in which the entire six-week stretch felt simultaneously dense and expansive and then just disappeared in a moment, leaving whatever constitutes “reality” in its place. Playing a major tournament almost every day for several weeks offers a distinct sense of direction and purpose for the time period, but as easily as the stress and ponderous nature of the work becomes all-encompassing, it evaporates at an equal rate into the stale desert air, and now I just wonder where the time went.

In any case, I didn’t have too much fun this year. I played tennis against Tony Dunst one evening a few weeks ago, and he expressed a very positive and carefree attitude towards the whole experience: “To me,” he said, “I look at it like a win-win: either I do well in the tournament or I bust out and then go out and do fun things,” like, he told me, going to the gym, going out nights picking up women, drinking, shopping, etc. As he laid out his recipe for balance and ongoing satisfaction, I just looked at him.

I wish I could have adopted the same attitude, but I was focused strictly on making money while in Vegas, and I basically failed at that, too, having cashed in only one of the 19 events I played and spent all the money I earned in satellites on living expenses. The possibility of creating a fun, healthy balance while trying to make money playing poker freezouts every day felt miles away.

As for the fun aspects, I did get out to the movies a few times, and I also got onto the tennis court and went bowling a handful of times (but far less than I would have liked). There was also that one enjoyable day I spent with friends on Lake Mead, but that was early in the Series when the upcoming summer still felt full of possibilities.

During a brief trip home, I took my waterski out of the garage and put it into my car, expecting to have at least one more run on Lake Mead when I got back to Nevada. The zipper to the bag that carries my waterski was rusted shut, and I never had the occasion to cut it open either. Instead I just rolled around Vegas with a slalom ski in the trunk of my car for several weeks.

Of course, the WSOP is still unique on a number of levels. I can’t remember a year in which more individuals put up mind-boggling results as this year, and even without that, there is still a distinct aura that surrounds the WSOP that will probably have me returning each year even if I never cash another event (and despite the fact that the competition this year seemed distinctly tougher than any year I’ve attended since 2005).

In the end, 19 tournaments is still only 19 tournaments, and even though the energy required to put into those tournaments can leave a poker player feeling empty and lost after it’s all done, keeping perspective on the whole thing is still the only aspect one can really control.

Even during the torturous early levels of the main event, when my stack dropped to 10K and it felt like an early exit was inevitable, I looked around the room and took stock: Six years ago, I was basically just another slack-jawed poker fan working a day job, watching this unique event unfold in the form of an ESPN broadcast.

Today I not only have the opportunity to compete in the event but also a reasonable chance of winning it. I am in a fortunate spot to have been able to play poker and the WSOP for the past five years, and if I make it out in 2010 for my sixth year and have another shitty series, I’ll still consider myself incredibly lucky to have been able to participate.

The WSOP 2009 ended for me during level 10 of the main event. I arrived back to California last night around 3AM. As soon as the empty feeling in my gut refills, I’ll try to post a recap of my 2009 series.

Despite the truncated schedule for today, eight hours of poker felt like an eternity. I’m not happy with Harrah’s random last-minute decision to make the flights lopsided, but I’ll save my gripes for later.

My table draw was, again, very bad: every one of my opponents was somewhere between competent and expert at NL tournaments and, again, the one weak player was super tight and didn’t give away any chips. Before I realized quite how tight he was, I doubled him up in level 6, four-betting him with AK when he raised my 1600 opening bet to 6K, and I put him in for around 20-25K total if I remember correctly. He thought for quite a long time considering that he had kings, and after he didn’t instacall, I actually thought he was going to lay down his hand or call with a hand that I was in good shape against.

Eventually he called and tabled the kings (I believe the kids these days call this incident a “nitroll”), and I didn’t hit an ace. In that hand I dropped from 50K to around 30K, and it ushered in the downward tumble in which my stack dipped to 11k before dinner break, a low point similar to yesterday’s dinner break. The two levels after dinner were swingy, but I managed to chip up to 25K without a showdown and my stack stayed in the range of 20-38K for the rest of the night.

I ended the day with 34,200 chips. While the action was concluding and the management was distributing plastic bags for storing players’ chips, a hand began where a very good player named Josh raised and Travis Rice, also a great player who had been at the table since the start of the day, re-raised on the button. I folded my big blind and went outside to smoke a cigarette. While I was walking back in, I saw Travis in the corridor between the Brasilia Room and the parking lot and said, “Wow we bagged up that fast?” It didn’t occur to me the hand would have been Travis’ demise, and he explained that Josh 4-bet allin with 66 and Travis called with AK and lost the race to bust out on the last hand of day 2.

Of course, he handled busting out like a professional, but there was a palpable level of heartbreak in that tinny hallway. That’s because the WSOP Main Event is kind of a crazy and unique tournament with a particular level of focus and stress embedded into it. I don’t have a lot of chips, but with almost 30 big blinds to start day 3 with, my stack is playable, and I am looking forward to extending this odyssey for as long as possible when the game resumes on Friday.

Day 2B (today’s flight) is playing four levels total, and I lost most of my stack during the first two. We were given “dinner break” around 4:30, and I am writing this from the hotel room across the street. After dinner, I will post the 800 big blind and then have 10,200 left in my stack. The situation is more dire than it was yesterday, but the process of rebuilding will hopefully be similar.

During the level following dinner break, I hit a crucial 12-outer (flush draw and overcard vs. top pair) to get some chips back, and I hovered around 25K for a while after that. The rest is kind of a blur: I remember pulling off one succesful and critical bluff out of position, I won a medium sized pot with AK vs QQ, and by the time I was moved to a new table with 45 minutes left in the night, my stack had risen above the 50K mark.

I played tight at my new table until the last few hands of the night, when I became very active and picked up about 20K chips to give me a healthy 70K to work with on day 2B, which begins tomorrow.

My first table was rather tough. The only player I knew was Dustin Dirksen, a very accomplished and talented no limit player, but the other players, strangers to me, played with surgical precision. There was maybe one weak spot, but he was weak-tight as opposed to spewy, so there were no crazy incidents of chips flying around. With the strange pressure that comes with the uniqueness of the WSOP Main Event on my mind and the tough table, it was a long day.

The reason I don’t like updating my tournament progress as the event goes on is because I try to absorb the larger picture and ignore the minutiae. This is an eight day tournament just to get to the final table, there are over 180M chips in play. Given that, early level chip counts are almost completely meaningless, and it can just be discouraging to report on having a big stack and then bust two hands later, a totally standard possibility. I don’t understand how people devote energy to twitter during the event, but I guess I will continue to update my progress in this space until the bitter end.

I never post while tournaments are in progress. What’s the point?

Anyway, I’ll change that pattern since the WSOP Main Event so far has been frustrating, overbearing and annoying and I need an outlet. I have 10K chips, a third of our starting stack, at dinner break.

On the last hand of the final preliminary event of the 2009 WSOP, the $5K 6-handed event, I lost with AKs to French pop star Patrick Bruel‘s pair of tens.

This was shortly after dinner break, around 9PM. By 10 o’clock, I decided to drive home to Santa Monica despite having played three full days of poker and being exhausted. I had no real reason to go home, except to clean out the mailbox and take care of a couple errands, but I had a yen to spend a night or two in my own bed. Making the drive at midnight enabled one extra night and despite a fatigued, four-hour trek through the desert, it was worth it.

When I stopped by the Vegas rental apartment to pick up a couple of items for the drive, the living room looked barren, paper cups full of soda and remote controls decorating the area. The preliminary phase of the WSOP definitely felt over. Whatever wishes and dreams lived in that furnished sublet had now evaporated into the flat desert air.

Prior to the $5K event, I had my first and only cash of the 2009 WSOP event in the $3K “Triple Chance” event, which was added to the 2009 schedule as a superficial attempt to fill the absence left by the elimination of rebuy tournaments.

“Triple Chance” is basically a dumb gimmick that has nothing to do with rebuys and just allows players to start with 3k, 6k, or 9K chips, or to take the extra 6K chips whenever they feel like it. It seems clear to me that the best move 99% of the time is to just start with the full 9k, but many players experimented with different proportions of chip allotment. I generally think the gimmick, while nothing even close to a substitute for rebuys, did make for a better tournament, since it added an extra layer of strategy (however illusory) and that caused people to over-think things and basically to play worse.

After the first day of play, I had exactly 100K in chips and by the time we were near the money bubble the next day, I had well over 150K. After dinner on day two, I lost with AK to KK, which brought my stack down to the 50-60K range. I doubled up with JT vs A7 to a young, annoying player who celebrated at literally every street of the deal and then cringed when my ten hit the river. I couldn’t even see the winning river card from the one-seat, but after watching his reaction, I knew I didn’t have to get up from the table and instead counted my stack down.

I had 115K or so and two hands later I got it allin with AK vs the 77 of Jon Van Fleet, a famous internet player also known as “Apestyles.” He won the coinflip, and I took 46th place for $9145. As I was collecting the piece of paper needed to claim my cash, the annoying kid approached his entourage on the rail and said, “at least I made a little bit more money” indicating the slight prize jump from 46th to 45th place.

***

I returned from California on July 2nd and mostly vegged out at my room at the Palms, where I will be staying until I am done with the $10K main event, over the following two days. They gave me a nice spacious room, and the bed is extremely comfortable. I saw Jay-Z perform at the theater here last night, my first time seeing one of my favorite MCs perform live, and it was a great show. So far this seems like a good spot for me to be during the main event.