As I write this the number of entries for the LAPC Main Event is 713. I have just quickly popped back to hotel and what do you see – pros arriving – just so they can take their seats one minute before registration closes at 5pm.
Mr Hellmuth is in LA but how will he possibly engineer being the last possible person to register? I just saw Hoyt Corkins in the lift and he was just checking in and going across. Who will win the competition to turn up the latest? Heard the Devilfish isn’t in town otherwise there is your odds-on favourite!
It’s a shame the WPT do not adopt my attitude towards players who are blinded out – as Luke Schwartz found out at the Premier League in Vegas.
A human size stuffed cuddly donkey was too much
Yes, you just put a stuffed cuddly toy monkey in the seat. Couldn’t we just fill the whole poker room at the Commerce with stuffed toys for the pros that like to leave it late? Maybe not, as it will look like a branch of Toys R Us. Also, as Mr Matt Savage warned me at the start – no Lush toys in my poker room!
Talking of Toys R Us, I really still cannot believe that my credit card got rejected there when I went shopping for bikes and trikes in Vegas. I was also looking for cuddly toys and the lady in WalMart had told me that they had the best stuffed animal collection in the city. A human size stuffed cuddly donkey was too much, however, so the monkey had to do…
PartyPoker.com have 16 qualifiers at LAPC
Back to the LAPC. This is my first trip here and the sheer scale of the event is something to behold. This is a huge field, one of the biggest on the WPT. PartyPoker.com have 16 qualifiers and so far they seem to be holding up well.
We had a great player meal at Stakes last night and there were a few familiar faces for me. Top British pro Jeff Kimber qualified online at PartyPoker.com and was very tired after a big night out with JP Kelly et al in Vegas – I am yet to spot him today – maybe he is entering the who can arrive the latest competition?
STOP PRESS
Mr Hoyt Corkins is going down in the lift wearing his cowboy hat – I had trouble recognising him without the hat earlier on. I spent some time with him in London around a year ago, real gentleman with the Alabaman twang. I congratulated him on his recent WPT win and NAPT high rollers success.
“I can still show those young ones how to play,” he said.
The first to bust has to get tattoos of the other two players’ faces
I expect that most of the time in this tournament I will be sat on stage in the media section. Canadian pro Gavin Smith comes up to say hi to the media. He has this prop bet with Jeff Madsen and Joe Sebok – basically it is great for whoever remains in the tournament the longest out of the trio. This how our friends on the www.worldpokertour.com update teams describe it:
“Joe Sebok, Gavin Smith, and Jeff Madsen have made some crazy prop bets in the past, including one that famously ended in Sebok wearing a bear suit and Madsen wearing a jester’s costume as they played in the WSOP Main Event.
Well, they’re back at it again.
This time, the stakes are much higher. In fact, they’re permanent. Regretting his (drunken) decision to enter the bet, Sebok now calls this a “bet with no winners, only losers.”
Here’s the prop bet:
All three players (Sebok, Gavin, Madsen) are playing today in the WPT LA Poker Classic, and they have a three-way last-longer bet.
- The first player to bust has to get tattoos of the other two players’ faces somewhere on his body.
- The second player to bust has to get a single tattoo (of the one player who outlasted him) somewhere on his body.
- The surviving player gets to laugh, and laugh, and laugh …”
Sound a bit extreme, I thought so! I’ve been around the block on this circuit and am cynical – are they talking a good game? I ask Gavin directly and as he mocks my English accent he says they have a buy-out clause. They can pay $20,000 not to have the tattoo permanently plastered on to them. I point out that $20,000 is probably pocket change to them and that the buy out clause has to be much, much bigger. He walks away…oops.
I also overheard talk of a conversation where Kathy Liebert says that limit poker shouldn’t count in evaluating who the best female player in the world is. Well, Kathy – when you became the first woman to win over $1 million in a major tournament it was on the PartyPoker.com Million I and that was limit. Cannot count that then!
Good luck to everybody at the tables and all those railing their friends…
