Today was an amazing day in the Amazon Room at the 2009 World Series of Poker.
Although I’m not happy with my result — I just busted out of the $1,000 buy-in tournament, after lasting ten hours — it was cool to be part of an event with just over 6,000 entrants. That’s so big that I beat 82% of the field and still came in around 1,100th (the top 621 will be in the money, with first place getting about $770,000). I outlasted Dennis Phillips, but not Joe McGowan, who was knocked out an hour after I was.
While we were playing, the final table of the $40,000 no-limit hold’em event was taking place at the ESPN feature table. Greg Raymer continued to prove that he wasn’t a one-shot main event winner by grabbing the chip lead and holding it until he took a bad beat and then finished third. I could easily make a case that he’s the most talented of the recent champions.
At the same time, the Champions Invitational was taking place. Obviously, Greg couldn’t be in two places at once, and the $40k was a lot more lucrative than the Champions tourney (winner gets the Binion Cup and a classic Corvette — I think Greg can buy one if he wants it), but there were 20 other former champs in there, including Peter Eastgate, Doyle Brunson, Chris Ferguson, Phil Hellmuth, Huck Seed, Joe Hachem, and Amarillo Slim. They were introduced to the whole Amazon room, with Doyle getting the biggest applause and Phil getting the obligatory boos.
Both of those events, plus the final table of the $1k, will be on ESPN later this year, along with the Main Event — but that’s all they’ll air. No pot-limit Omaha, no HORSE, no stud, etc., because the WSOP and ESPN find that the ratings are only there for the big no-limit hold’em events.
Dennis, Joe, and I are going to do some interviews tomorrow for Tuesday night’s Lumiere Place Final Table radio show. I’ll post details when I can. My next tournament is Tuesday at noon, the first $1,500 buy-in no-limit hold’em event. As I did yesterday and today, I’ll post Tweets at the top of this page or you can click here to follow my adventures on Twitter.