Cozied up in Denmark for the better part of the last few weeks. I’ve been doing a lot of watching: I’m watching the World Series of Poker, I’m watching Phil Laak, I’m watching baseball, and I’m watching the World Cup. Not a bad life, I must admit.
Firstly, the World Cup. Right now I’m killing time waiting for Denmark to kick off versus the Netherlands. There have been eight World Cup matches played so far, and I’ve seen every minute of every one. And loved it. And I know next to nothing about to football. But football is the very least of it. I love stuff that captivates the world, I love any event that crystallizes the world in a moment of time. And the World Cup has it in spades.
Anyway, I’ve got a plan for this to continue at least until early next week. As per usual, I’ve sunk into the betting markets hard, with a complete disregard for propriety. And I still don’t know who I want to win. Judging by my results so far, anyone but me. But my favorite team so far has got to be Argentina. How can it not be? Everyone so far has been warning me off them because of the madman at the helm. Well, I’ve watched this madman, I’ve seen him dancing on the sidelines and I remember the pictures of him a few years ago snorting cocaine with Fidel. I don’t remember Maradona from when he was a player, but he’s clearly been a few miles in his shoes and is completely unstable. I’m loving it. Send in Argentina! Bring on Messi, Tevez, and the clowns! They are clearly a team for the world in 2010 and I will cheer them until the end. Everything shoots from the hip, unlike England, who are wound tighter than a constipated dwarf in a rock concert scrum.
Phil Laak. For those who don’t know, Phil Laak set the record of late by playing non-stop poker in a $10/20 No Limit Hold’em game at the Bellagio for 115 hours on the trot. He was going for 80, but once he got there, thought he’d just see where it led. And the whole thing was streamed live on the Internet. There were two webcams: one where you could just watch Phil, sitting in the two seat with a computer on a table behind him that had a clock ticking off the hours on an otherwise blank screen, and, two, a webcam that was fixed on the flop.
I got involved somewhere around hour number thirty-five. At the time, I wrote, “He doesn’t look good. He doesn’t look like a man who’s only half way there. He’s stuck. About five grand, I think. He’s got a yellow pad and his blackberry, a black T-shirt and headphones, and dark black shades. In the last ten minutes he’s limped twice and folded both times to a check-raise post flop. They are eating him alive. He’s not talking much, not talking much at all.”
But at hour number forty, as he called it, he embraced the sickness, buying in for one hundred thousand dollars. And he proceeded to play off that stack for like the next four days straight. If you didn’t watch Phil play for the whole time, although plenty of people did as he averaged over 1500 viewers during the session, it’s easy to pass off what he did. Anybody could do it with drugs, you might say, I wonder what he was on. Well I don’t know what he was on, but if he was on something I want it. Because it was some special stuff.
Over the course of the four days, I went through about eight different emotions. I went from nonplussed, to interested, admiring, concerned, worried, horrorstruck, and down right sick to my stomach. And by the end I was just open mouthed. Because from somewhere around hour number sixty on, he looked just fine. And I mean fine. Obviously, his mind was a tatters, but any drug I’m aware of would have so spun him out by then that he’d have been looking under his chair for cockroaches. And he wasn’t. He was twittering about love and adrenalin. And when a doctor came in after 100 hours to take his vital signs, they were fine. I still don’t know how he did it, but it was a remarkable achievement. And fun to watch.
Laak was a lot more fun to watch, I must admit, than the World Series of Poker has been so far. WSOP, what has happened to you? And this year, out of any other, this year when it should be the greatest celebration of all. Look at all the Brits who have gotten bracelets! Praz Bansi, James Dempsey, and Ashby. Channing and Sam Trickett with seconds. Stuart Rutter with a third. It’s been a heady demolishing of the field for the UK so far this WSOP, and it’s dropped like a spanner in a sub. One little clank, and that’s it. Negreanu wrote a blog about how terrible the coverage has been and took a bunch of heat for it, but the fact is that he is right. Coverage of the WSOP is harder to track than any year I can remember since I started going. Everything has been reduced to the Twitter generation, 140 character bursts. One man still doing real daily journalism is Dr. Pauly, though, thank God for his blog. Is this a scary reminder that if the bubble is not bursting, then it is definitely morphing into something else? A bathtub, perhaps. Don’t enough people care?
It’s easy to nitpick when you’re not there, a matter I shall be remedying in two weeks. I’ll be going out to Las Vega tos start up a new season of The Poker Show radio show with a new sponsor, Party Poker. One-hour podcasts twice a week, and I’d like to think we’ve learned enough in the last three seasons to start hitting the mark more often.
A quick note about this burning issue regarding men playing in the ladies tournaments, which everyone, including the Hindenburg mute, has sounded off on. My psychiatrist friend Petrus, who spent a long time working in the emergency ward where they get the cases running from extremely crazy to fruitier than a loon, told me a while ago that the number of people worldwide that can be clinically diagnosed as psychotic is rising at an exponential rate. From what I can gather, it all has to do with the lack of an ability to feel empathy, and if you don’t have this ability by the age of six, you will never get it. If you take these men who played in the ladies event, and then a good portion of the me me me Twitter accounts, I’m thinking there just might be a bunch of psychotics walking around the Rio. Maybe every WSOP event should begin with a group hug.