WSOP ME Final Table

I watched a lot of poker this past weekend. Haven't played much of it in a while. (Exception: one orbit of PLO on Friday before I had to pick up LJ at the airport.)

LJ had a sweet hook-up for tickets to the November Nine, so we were both sitting on the stage (near the Begs section).

I'm assuming that most of you have read the reports from various media outlets / blogs / twitter pages, so I won't bore you with the details of each of the key hands.

However, the one hand that I can't wait to watch is the Begs v Moon hand where Moon folded to Begs' all-in raise after heavy action on a 2-3-4 (two spades) flop. I posted the following in my twitter feed:

"begs and moon just played a game of chicken for a monster pot. begs took it down with 3-bet shove on turn. board 234. the mighty deuce-four?"

That hand brought to mind a recent Mookie hand between PokerGrump and me. PokerGrump has full details about that hand here. In that hand, the board was 234 with two hearts. I flopped two pair with the mighty (or not) deuce-four. PokerGrump, however, flopped the wheel.

Yeah, I know. A hand at the Mookie final table doesn't really compare to a hand at the Main Event final table, but it was an interesting flashback nonetheless.

Given my proximity to the Begs section, I overheard a conversation wherein Begs told Jonathan Little and Ylon Schwartz his hole cards for that hand. If Begs was telling the truth, it was an interesting move considering the fact that Darvin Moon was pretty much committed to call. The fact that Moon folded is still puzzling to many, but Moon's actions throughout the day were rather curious.

I said to F-Train at one point, "I think Moon is this year's Steve Dannenman." Moon appeared to be uncomfortable making decisions post-flop. He'd shove 50BBs over a 3x raise pre-flop. He started to shove a lot post-flop in the later hours of the evening as well. Perhaps not so coincidentally, Steve Dannenman was introduced to the crowd during the wee hours of the morning (probably around 5:30am PT). I hadn't seen Dannenman at all during the summer installment of the WSOP, and I hadn't seem him in the Penn & Teller Theater all night. Moon and Dannenman exchanged some pleasantries after the final two was set. And they're both from Maryland. Factoring all of those items in, I started to concoct a wild theory that Moon actually hired Dannenman as his coach. But that was just my mind searching for someplace to go at 5:30am PT. Moon has publicly stated that he didn't hire a coach, and I believe that statement.

What isn't so surprising, however, is that those two players seemed to approach the final table with the same perspective. It's the gee-golly, I'm just happy to be hear mentality that you'd expect from an amateur player.

Moon was much more restrained than Dannenman, which made for an interesting situation when Akenhead, Schaffel and Begleiter were eliminated. Akenhead occupied Seat 2, Schaffel occupied Seat 4, and Begleither occupied Seat 5. That meant that Moon and Ivey were the only players to the left side of the table (if you're viewing it from the dealer's chair). Think about the compare / contrast exercise on this one . . . Despite their differences in skill, background, etc., Moon was pretty liberal in sharing his Tic Tacs, and he and Ivey engaged in a couple of friendly conversations.

When play first started, it appeared that Cada was more willing to mix things up. I would expect nothing less from a young online pro. After having watched the WSOP ME coverage on ESPN, I thought he was one of the more talented players. Unfortunately, however, he will probably best be known for getting it all-in twice with an underpair and flopping a set. He was also on the victorious side of two key flips. The televised coverage surely won't allow you to see Cada's talent at work.

So that leads to the whole "who's better for poker" and "luck versus skill" questions that are prevalent in the poker community right now. It's obvious that the televised hands will depict a more luck-based view of poker, but unfortunately that's because the victors in several of the key confrontations got lucky . . . incredibly lucky. What you won't see were the numerous raises and re-raises that were never called pre-flop, the time some players took to make some major decisions (Schulman seemed to be the most prone to do this, although Saout tanked for a significant amount of time in the A-K v A-Q hand against Buchman), the way in which some players were determined to keep grinding away small(ish) pots one at a time to stay ahead of the blinds and antes, the relative quiet from Ivey (in terms of aggression factor) and all of the other nuances in a poker tournament where skill is actually exhibited.

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Some other notes:

* I was rather bummed when Akenhead was eliminated. He was one of my favorite players at the final table and his cheering section was the most interesting. His supporters came up with a couple of different songs and were very coordinated on that front. They reminded me of all of the Ricky Haddon fans from the WPBT Winter Gathering 2007.

* In Change100's WSOP Fashion Report, she wrote "[Cada's] fans went for neon with garish yellow sweatshirts that made my eyes bleed after looking at them for five minutes in the hallway." Not only did their shirts make me bleed, so did their obnoxious frat-boy behavior. In contrast, however, Cada seemed to be very mellow for the most part (obviously with the exception of his sets against Schulman and Saout).

* Phil Hellmuth is a camera whore. Wait, we knew that already. When Schulman was eliminated, Hellmuth started to walk off the stage with the rest of the Schulman supporters. When he was almost off the stage, he turned around, looked back and walked up to the final table so he could shake everyone's hand.

*I'm pretty sure that Linda (the Asian dealer who was in the box for a couple of the insane come-from-behind victories) was the woman who dealt the hand in the biggest single-hand cash loss of my fledgling poker "career." Maybe Dawn Summers' theory about women dealers *is* true.