The Fix Was In

Three weeks before the World Poker Challenge began in Reno, I made a bet with tournament assistant extraordinaire Jody Ivener. I bet him $100 that the championship event would attract more than 343 players. I came up with this number because each respective World Poker Tour event this year has attracted more players than it did last year. However, lots of players wanted to rest before the two months of upcoming poker at Bellagio and the World Series of Poker. Ivener thought there would be about 300 players. These types of bets take place quite often. I believe Howard Lederer and Daniel Negreanu are both great at determining the size of a field. The morning of the event, I noticed that the guy who had been running the one-table satellites was not there anymore, and Ivener was the new man in charge. I had made a bet with the one person who had control over how many people would play.

I started watching Jody like a hawk. I have seen this guy work, and sometimes his speed is a little off because he likes to be a social butterfly. At the time, neither of us had any idea of how many players had registered for the event. At one point, I saw Ivener having a conversation with Poker Room Manager Charles Williams that took about two minutes. Another time, I heard him ask Tournament Director Jimmy Sommerfeld how it was looking, and Jimmy responded that there was a ton of people. I even saw Jody make a few floor decisions at the satellite tables. At the time, I was thinking, "This guy should be hustling to register more players," as the event was scheduled to start in five minutes.

This was the perfect time to get three or four more satellites running. Instead, my good buddy thought it was a good time to pay out the winners of the satellites. As you can see, all Jody was doing was his job, but that wasn't good enough for me. If he really loved his job, he would have gone from room to room in the hotel and tried to get another satellite or two going. Forget the fact that people were sleeping and didn't know the difference between Texas hold'em and Caribbean stud. I could see that the fix was in, and I didn't like it one bit.

As the event started, I was too busy wondering if I had won my $100 bet, and forgot that we were playing for more than $600,000 for first place. You can imagine that I went on tilt as soon as I heard Jimmy Sommerfeld say he was pleased to announce that it was the largest prize pool in Reno's history, and that a whopping 342 players had put up $5,000 each. What? I then checked Jody's time card, and saw that he had shown up one minute late for work. Coincidence? I think not.

For those who actually care about the tournament instead of my bad beat, I am proud to say that it was run very smoothly – even though this is coming from a guy who was on the 3:30 p.m. flight back to Las Vegas when the event started at noon. The final six players were: Young Phan, Tony Bloom, Peter Muller, Harry Knopp, Paul "Eskimo" Clark, and Mike Kinney. Kinney and Clark got heads up, and Kinney was the victor and recipient of almost $630,000. Good job, Mike.