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Jesse May in
Las Vegas |
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#6 Day Three
Maybe you didn’t grow into
it. Maybe you didn’t find a World Series Of Poker magazine when you were
sixteen years old and dog-ear the pages like a Playboy. Maybe you didn’t
see the tape where Hal Fowler gutter-balled Bobby Hoff when it was still winner
take all and see Hoff’s heart fall to the bottom of his feet. Maybe you
don’t know about Brunson, Chan, Moss, and Ungar. Maybe you just see the
money. But, it’s a whole lot more than just the money. It’s a dream.
And it’s been the dream of almost everybody I know since as long as
I’ve known them.
So you’ll forgive me if my first action upon
seeing the World Series Of Poker winner come Friday afternoon is to prostrate
myself at his feet, kiss his toes and call out “We are not worthy.”
If I treat the man like a religious deity, please understand. Because the last
man sitting come Friday afternoon will definitely deserve it.
There are
some guys who are never going to win the World Series of Poker. Some people
hope that if they sit there and get lucky, other players will bust themselves
out, and they’ll hand you the championship of the world on a silver
platter. Keep on dreaming, because that’s never happened and it never
will. The WSOP can only be won by somebody who wants it so bad that his cards
don’t matter. If you want your name on that wall and that bracelet on your
wrist, then you better stop sitting there praying. You better get in there and
take it.
Now every one of the forty-five players left in the 2002 WSOP
hopes that they sit down today and pick up aces six times. Everyone would love
to get hit with the deck and play twelve no-brainers, and cruise to the final
table with four million dollars. That’s fine, but that better only be the
A plan. Because if you really mean to win the WSOP, you better bring out plans
B,C, and D. You better be willing to get in the muck and get your hands dirty.
Sometimes you have to pull out the stops. Sometimes you just have to win.
Nobody won the World Series of Poker yesterday, on day three. But a lot
of guys lost it. A lot of guys got scared. Hey, twenty thousand dollars is a
lot of money. And if a man wanted to play for that twenty thousand guarantee to
forty-fifth place, if he wanted to lock that up before taking any chances, then
that’s his prerogative and I wish him luck. But the guys who want to win
that twenty thousand the most are the ones who are most likely to get that
amount and not a dollar more. Because those guys got scared on day three of the
WSOP, and they suffered because of it. And they may be in the money, but their
stacks are so short that their only out now is a miracle. They scared
themselves out.
I don’t know Robert Varkonyi. I’ve never
seen or heard before of the man who’s amassed a half million dollars and
currently leads the World Series of Poker. I think class will tell and
they’ll pass him by, but one things for sure. And one thing for sure is
that Robert Varkonyi is trying to win, that trait that is actually most
important of all. He may not have the skills of some who are left, but
he’s clearly got heart. He was shoving it in like three dollar poker, and
if his moves were suspect his nerves never were. Varkonyi was in there
gambling, trying to win the World Series of Poker. Hell, that may be enough.
They were down to forty-one players in the 1999 WSOP, and they were
paying thirty-six spots. And Padraig Parkinson’s partner approached him
and said, “Well, now you can just sit tight and make the money.” And
Padraig said, “Yeah, right”, and then he started raising the hell out
of every hand.
So I shouldn’t have been surprised last night about
seven p.m., when they hit fifty-four players in the 2002 WSOP paying forty-five
spots, and another Irishman named Scott Gray arrived at the back table with
medium chips and just started firing. And in the three hours it took to lose
the last fifteen players, when everybody was playing like a combination vault,
Gray increased his stack from 50,000 all the way up to 236,500. And he done it
without showing a hand. He done it because they were playing scared, and he was
playing to win. You can’t win the World Series of Poker on day three, but
you can damn sure put yourself in position to make it happen, or reduce your
chances down to slim or none.
When Scott Gray filled the three seat in
one of the six remaining tables yesterday, poker theorist David Sklansky was
sitting in the one seat with more chips than Scott. He limped in a hand, so
Scott raised it on up and Sklansky passed. That was the last hand David
Sklansky played in three hours. During the next three hours he was an empty
chair. He anted himself down from seventy thousand in chips to less than ten.
He made the money. And when they pay him his twenty thousand they’ll say,
“Sir, thank you very much for attending. Please come back next year.”
But in the words of Yeller from The Cincinnati Kid, “Man, you better write
yourself a new book.” Because the gold bracelet ain’t being awarded
by a voice vote, nor to the guy who can do the fanciest fractions. The winner
of the World Series is the guy with balls as big as Montana, and a heart to
match.
So anybody who really wants to win the World Series of Poker,
please come forward. It’s time to start playing the
game.
There’s flack and there’s press about how Binion’s
Horseshoe is running this tournament, and I want to say, I don’t know what
everybody’s grumbling about. Some guys are grumbling about the buffet. Who
the hell cares about the buffet, man, you’re playing for two million
dollars. And in that department Binion’s has been second to none, because
this World Series of Poker has been run like a dream. Binion’s has done a
hell of a job, and they deserve the credit for it. And Benny Binion Behnen
really is the legacy of his grandfather, because he knows what’s
important. He’s giving people a fair gamble. He’s giving people a
chance at two million dollars, and he and his excellent staff have done it
without a hitch. And man, besides giving people a fair gamble and the best run
tournament I ever seen, there ain’t a damn thing else that’s
important.
Two million dollars is a lot of money, and it will be the
biggest prize ever awarded in tournament poker. But just to put everything in
perspective, I asked Amarillo Slim how old he was the first time he won two
million dollars. “Well,” he said, “I was
seventeen.”
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