Michael Craig's Journal

I eventually settled on a solution to my problem of two tournaments - the Full Tilt Ironman Freeroll and the Blogger Tournament - taking place at the same time. Freeroll? No thanks, I’ll pay.

I decided to play the Blogger Tournament, doing everything in my power to assure that I would not get busted holding A-A for a third time. I entrusted my friend Ted Corse with the job of playing the Freeroll for me online.

Just GETTING to the tournament was an adventure. The day before, at lunch with the bloggers at the Wynn, the upcoming tournament was almost all anyone could talk about. All these great people were gathered together and the main topic of conversation was the awful poker we were about to play.

Tim Lavalli was nice enough to compliment me on the Chris Ferguson profile I wrote for the December BLUFF. When I told him it was the first I had heard from anyone about the article, he shocked me by telling me that someone on RGP actually praised the piece.

RGP? Someone on RGP said something nice? The previous praise offered on RGP was probably “that kid Johnny Moss is a real up-and-comer.” Then than was followed by 20 posts making fun of the word “comer”, then 60 posts making fun of the people making fun of that word, and the modern RGP was born. It’s hard to believe that RGP was once the place where people like Chris Ferguson, Phil Gordon, Paul Phillips, and Greg Raymer met. Now, it’s the place where poker players express their sexual frustration toward Clonie Gowen, Annie Duke, Jennifer Harman, and Liz Lieu.

After leaving the Geisha Bar at the Imperial Palace at 4 AM Saturday, I sandwiched in just enough sleep to make a morning meeting at Mike Matusow’s house before the tournament.

Mike seemed … odd. Maybe it’s because he has a new girlfriend, a charming, attractive woman named Jessica, who seems to understand exactly how much crap to put up with from Mike, and how much to call him on. Or maybe it’s that Matusow seems like less of a misfit after a day and a half in the company of poker bloggers.

Here are some examples of the oddness:

1. We met at 11 AM. Previously, the only time Mike Matusow would be awake at 11 AM was when he was STILL awake at 11 AM. But he was bright-eyed and alert.

2. His banter of misery lacked its usual bite.

Previous 20 conversations with Matusow:

Mike Craig: Mikey, how are you doing?

Mike Matusow: I feel like I want to die.

Saturday morning conversation with Matusow:

Mike Craig: Mike, how are you doing?

Mike Matusow: I feel like I want to die.

OK, you’re not getting nuances like inflection when you read that, but it was entirely different. For one thing, Mike was not laying on his bed, moaning, face down. For another, he was fully clothed. For a third, we met in his family room.

It was my first meeting with him in which I didn’t feel like I was Howard Hughes’s gofer during his final years.

I had brought Carmen along because we were talking about me interviewing Mike for a movie or book project and I wanted him to hire her to type the transcripts. We didn’t actually decide anything, other than that I would try to help, conducting interviews and maybe writing a screenplay, and Carmen would transcribe. Carmen, who had resurrected herself for the meeting on no sleep, was fine, except that she dropped her digital camera into a glass of water. (The same camera had been dropped into a beer at the MGM less than twelve hours earlier.)

We had to leave for the tournament, and Matusow suggested the next step: “Why don’t you guys come by tomorrow? We can watch the football games, play the Full Tilt tournament, order out food, and work on the project. We’ll have fun. We’ll get a lot of work done.” He must have seen something in the look on my face - he is, after all a world-class poker player “Well, we’ll have fun.”

The Blogger Tournament started about 45 minutes later than expected, but I had already committed to have Ted play in my place. I had asked April - who did a phenomenal job organizing the whole weekend and whose only compensation was our sporadic thanks and $7,500 - if I could bring my computer into the tournament area and play both tourneys.

She was kind. She was diplomatic. She said something about how Harrah’s, the parent of Caesars Palace, had some reservations about allowing the bloggers to play at all because we might be “associated with a dot-com site” so I told her I wasn’t going to push it.

I was accumulating some chips in the Blogger Tournament and had gotten moved to another table. While carrying my chips over, I received a call from Ted.

“We’re in the money and I have decent chips with 400-something remaining.”

I congratulated him on outlasting over 2,000 of the 2,500 in the tournament.

“The hard part is the talking. Playing under your name, everyone wants to talk. One guy - it was a friend of my brother who has occasionally watched me play online - was asking questions and, while I tried answering, then said, ‘Why are your answers so short?’ The best ones are all the people asking, ‘How is it going in the blogger tournament?’”

Speaking of which, I had to get back to that tournament. “When is the next break?” I asked Ted.

“Twenty-nine minutes. But don’t worry. I have chips and I’m not going anywhere.”

As I threw away my hole cards on the next hand, my phone rang again.

“I’m out. I took a bad beat. An aggressive player raised and I called in position with king-eight of hearts. Then the flop -”

I cut him off. “Stop, Ted. No bad beat story starts with ‘I called with king-eight of hearts.’”

I got back to my game and raised in late position to steal. I was called by the button and checked when I completely missed the flop. Unfortunately, I had king-eight of hearts on the brain and thought THAT was what I had.

I looked down again after the turn and discovered I had queen-ten offsuit. I had mistakenly checked top-two pair. I bet but my opponent now had a draw, so he called. I lost on the river.

That started a downward slide that ended when someone raised the 100-200 blinds to 700. I had 2,100 in chips left, about one-third what I had an hour earlier. I was getting antsy. I looked down and saw the seven of diamonds and the deuce of spades.

Hammer time.

I thought for a moment and moved all-in.

The raiser thought about it for awhile, shrugged, and said, “Well, I want to go to the bar and drink,” and called, turning over pocket nines.

I picked up a deuce and two spades on the flop, and a third spade on the turn. But I didn’t hit any of my 14 outs on the river and was eliminated.

My nemesis, Iggy, was sitting across from me and his war-scarred face lit up when he saw me turn over The Hammer.

Could it be that I lost a tournament but closed some wounds?

Who can say, but I know that Iggy offered me his Hammer Pin, that cherished keepsake that poker bloggers use to identify each other.

“Iggy,” I told him, putting my arm around his back to frisk for weapons, “It’s a wonderful gesture but I have to turn you down. The only way I’m taking your Hammer Pin is by stealing it, and your clothing reeks far too much for me to be poking around it - or you - on the sly.”

Still, it was a special moment. After he busted, we talked outside the tournament area, suddenly, finally, colleagues.

Asking about the horrors the bloggers would visit on themselves that evening, I wondered if Iggy was getting any sleep.

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead. Or tomorrow night.”

“Same difference,” I told him. “You take care of yourself now, and don’t go triggering renal failure.”

“What’s renal failure?” he asked.

“Oh, you’ll find out soon enough, Iggy. Soon enough.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 13th, 2006 at 5:53 pm and is filed under Categorized.