'Gone in 60 Seconds' Sequel Produces Poetic Justice

As you will be reading about in an upcoming issue of Card Player, when I started the World Poker Tour $200,000 Celebrity Invitational Freeroll Tournament, I was finally healthy enough to play a no-limit hold'em tournament without excuses, for probably the first time in eight months.

I've played very few tournaments in that time, so making the six-player final table and the WPT TV show that went along with it felt pretty good against an odd field. There were 104 players, roughly 50 of whom were extremely talented, 25 of whom were pretty solid, 15 pretty average, and 15 extremely terrible.

The "terrible" group wasn't stupid, just inexperienced. Some of the celebrities in the field could play quite well, and some were practically raw beginners. I felt like my starting table was about average. Excluding myself from any category, we had only two tournament stars, Humberto Brenes and Men "The Master" Nguyen, so I was doing well there compared to the table right next to me, where Tom McEvoy, Johnny Chan, T.J. Cloutier, John Juanda, and Bill Gazes were sitting one right after another. Yum.

On the other hand, none of our "celebrities" were weak. Gabe Kaplan is a real player, L.A. Lakers co-owner Frank Mariani is a real player, and Willie Garson, whom I later learned most people know from a show I don't watch, HBO's Sex in the City, played pretty well despite his protests that he was an Omaha player, not a hold'em player.

Oh, No, Not Another "Star-Anything"!

Actually, I wouldn't have known Garson was an actor, except that the very night before the tournament started, I had watched an episode of Stargate SG-1 ("Oh, no," you think, "he's not going to start hitting us with Stargate stuff to go along with all the Star Trek and Star Wars junk, is he?" The answer is no, I don't currently plan to, but I am developing a fondness for it, so you may have one more burden to bear while reading my World Series of Poker reports), and Garson looked so much like the episode's guest star that I had to take a shot and ask him if he'd been in a Stargate a few years ago.

"Yes," he said, "they ask me to do about one a year. The fans are really out there, almost like the Star Trek fans. You wouldn't believe what they pay me to sign like 5,000 baseball cards, and I'm only a once-a-season guy."

I kept my poker face, but inside I was laughing my, um, posterior off. To my knowledge, I hadn't ever seen Willie before the previous night, when he'd cracked me up, and here he was sitting at my starting table.

OK, enough stalling. It's time to get down to karmic cases. In the most recent issue of my Wednesday Nite Poker e-newsletter (you can get it free through casino.com, and in addition to the biweekly articles, it's also the fastest way to get my WSOP reports … just don't try to subscribe using an AOL address, because it comes out of Sweden, and apparently AOL isn't fond of e-mail originating in Sweden), I wrote a rather extensive critique of John Shipley's rather startling 2002 WSOP championship event tournament-altering call.

The Tale of Shipley's Sinking

I won't go through the full analysis here (you can always find it in the newsletter archives if you're interested, issue No. 55), but in capsule form, Shipley, who had started the final table as the chip leader with more than $2 million, had receded to a still-leading $1.3 million when eventual winner Robert Varkonyi raised it to $60,000 from the button (the blinds were $12,000-$24,000, with $4,000 antes).

Shipley found himself holding A-J offsuit in the small blind, and since Varkonyi had been making lots of plays with hands like K-Q or Q-10, Shipley popped him back for an amount I thought was too small, another $90,000. Between the blinds, antes, and the money already in the pot, I thought that raise priced Varkonyi into the pot with any reasonable hand, and A-J really doesn't want to take flops against many hands other than weaker aces.

The big blind got out of the way, and after very little in the way of hesitation, Varkonyi moved all in, a reraise of another $759,000 even after Shipley's $150,000 was pulled into the pot. It was about two-thirds of Shipley's stack, and after thinking for about two minutes, he called with his A-J. Varkonyi had J-J, no ace hit the board, and Varkonyi was now the chip leader.

In my WNP article, I said I thought that given the situation, the number of chips involved, the money difference between a possible eighth-place finish (Shipley wound up finishing seventh for $120,000) of $100,000 and first place of $2 million, this might have been one of the worst calls in WSOP history, especially given that Shipley is a talented pro who had position on Varkonyi, who was before that day a relatively unknown amateur.

I Gave Shipley "Outs," But …

I made allowances for the intense pressure of a five-day tournament, the TV cameras, the burden of expectations, and a few other points, and also pointed out how well Shipley had played to accumulate all those chips, but even with all of that, my analysis of the play was, shall we say, rather harsh.

Let's fast forward to earlier today (as I write this), when I was sitting at a six-player final table of David Chiu, Layne Flack, Men "The Master" Nguyen, Tony Ma, L.A. Lakers majority owner Dr. Jerry Buss, and me. The caliber of the opposition was moderately daunting, but much more so was Flack's incredible chip lead: He owned literally more than 75 percent of the chips as we started, more than $750,000, while the rest of us Laynettes were sitting in a virtual five-way tie for second, with Buss the low man at $35,000 and Ma the "leader" at $72,000. I had $55,000.

I lost $12,000 on the tournament's first hand when I put in a raise from the cutoff seat with a small pair, only to have Buss flat-call me. The flop brought an ace, three clubs, and three overcards. I shut it down and Buss moved in, later telling me he had an ace, believable enough, but we'll get to see on the actual show, because you get to see everyone's holecards on every hand.

The antes and blinds ate a little more away when an opportunity I had come into the day looking for arrived. Don't get me wrong, Layne Flack's "A" game is so far ahead of my "A" game, it isn't funny (at least to me), but the day before, Flack had been playing all kinds of junk and winning with it, to the point where he must have felt invulnerable even without that chip lead.

Flack cracked Cloutier's A-A with Q-J (a runner-runner straight), made a couple of flushes with stuff like 7-4 suited, hit pretty much everything in sight, and finished off the day by eliminating Mickey Rooney (yes, that Mickey Rooney) by taking 6-6 up against Rooney's 7-7 and spiking a 6 on the river; 6-6-6 seemed an appropriate end to Flack's day.

A Shocker: Andy Tries Something Unconventional

Even though conventional strategy would entail staying out of the chip leader's way when possible, I thought going in that my best chance for a double-through, barring picking up a big hand, was to play a reasonably strong hand against Flack, who had shown a pretty consistent willingness to call with what he had to figure was the worst of it.

So, ironically enough, when the deck swung round the next time, Flack raised it (gee, really?) to $14,000, and I found myself with … A-J offsuit in the small blind.

Having just written extensively about why A-J is a bad calling hand (although Shipley's situation and chip position were about as far from mine as you could get), I wasn't going to just flat-call this and worry about Flack outplaying me after the flop, which he figured to be able to do on talent, position, and chip power. It was either fold or move in.

I decided to move in for my remaining $39,000, figuring the odds were good that I was holding something better than Flack, happy to take the pot if he folded, but fully understanding that the odds were heavily in favor of his calling even if he had something like 10-9. If the odds of his calling were strong, I didn't have nearly as much in the way of "two ways to win" as an all-in reraise usually does. I was going to have to make it on the strength of my hand, and as I'd already pointed out in Shipley's case, I was going to be a big favorite against only a weaker ace. I figured that I was probably going to be about a 3-2 favorite in most scenarios.

So Much for Those SAT Scores

As you can imagine, I felt really, really smart when Layne turned over A-K. I asked him where all that cheese he'd been playing the day before was, in a friendly enough way. I hit my kicker, but it didn't matter, because Layne hit his, too. I was out first and fast, winning only $6,000 instead of the $40,000 (second-place money) I'd thought was a reasonable possibility if I could double up early. I'm not rich enough to throw $2,000 out into the street, but the next two ladder climbs were only to $8,000 and $10,000. Third place was much more enticing at $20,000.

When they did the WPT's customary exit interview, I said I felt like I'd just done the remake of Gone in 60 Seconds (see, not every movie reference has the word "Star" in its title), even though it was, of course, a little longer than that.

Not too long thereafter, Tony Ma came over the top of an initial Flack raise with an all-in move for about $50,000 more, and Flack called with K-10. Ma had A-J, too, but a king hit the flop and Ma left the friendly gathering rather early himself.

Look, Ma, History Repeated Itself!

At first, even though I like Tony, I was a little glad to see that he'd made the same move I had - it made me think that my plan wasn't something out of Dumb and Dumber. But the more I thought about it, the more Tony's move depressed me rather than made me feel better, because he got exactly what I was looking for, a chance to double up as a slight favorite, and he still lost - and that was the key.

Unless you feel hopelessly outclassed, and I certainly didn't, despite my opponents' impressive resumes, you don't really want to play for all of your chips with only a modest advantage. Try to do it twice and you're a big underdog to go two for two. About the only defense I'll allow myself is that I didn't have the chips for chopping, and I wasn't going to sit there until I had so few chips that I was going to have to play anything. I used to be a trial lawyer. That wouldn't be enough even to create "reasonable doubt" in a jury's mind, even if Casey Kastle was nice enough to say the play was OK if getting fifth or fourth wasn't important to me.

As I found out, even though Flack had been playing lots of cheesy hands - in part because he felt bulletproof, in part because he correctly felt he could outplay people after the flop, and in part because he had the chips to do it - there was no reason why he couldn't wake up with something legitimate, and even if he had a small pair, I'd be a modest underdog, rather than a modest favorite.

A Flawed Plan

The bottom line is that my plan was flawed. You really need those two ways to win, and even though I felt sure that I was much more likely to catch Flack raising with a mediocre hand than any of the others, against the others I had a much better chance to win with my bet. Against Flack, my hand was probably going to have to hold up, and as Tony Ma proved, my hand wasn't enough of a favorite in those other situations to risk it all. My only consolation, and it wasn't much, was that a player of Ma's ability was able to make the same mistake I had.

I still don't put the play even in the same ballpark as Shipley's, because I was a not-quite-desperate but quite uncomfortable shortest stack at the table, and I wasn't risking the chip lead in a $2 million tournament against someone who had raised not once, but twice. I was trying to grab some chips before my stack got too short to intimidate anyone under any circumstances, but I picked the wrong circumstance for the wrong reason, and the television cameras will record this little karmic irony for all time.

Even though there were 98 entrants who gladly would have traded places with me, I left the table feeling like I'd paid dearly to "relearn" a lesson that I not only knew, but had, in a different framework, just finished writing about.

Even Some Smart-as-a-Fox Advice Didn't Help

Even more ironic was that I'd just commented to one of the TV guys, before we started, that "knowing how to play and playing how you know are two entirely different matters." I guess I was just bent on self-destruction. My friend Jack Fox had even counseled me against doing exactly what I did, and I did it anyway, even though I know Jack to be a better no-limit player than I am.

Better still (or worse still, depending on your perspective), I couldn't just take my money and run. I had pre-committed to covering the tournament, and I had to sit there for the rest of it taking notes when I really wanted to slink off, find a cat o' nine tails (or at least a surgical 2x4), and punish myself appropriately.

What goes around comes around, I suppose, and if I'm to dish it out when I think someone makes a bad move in a tournament, I think I'm under a moral obligation to ding myself the same way. It was nice to be healthy enough to play again, but I hope next time I can complete the triumvirate by being not merely healthy, but also wealthy and wise.