Poker News

John Caldwell

After spending just under three weeks in the Amazon Room, the following issues have been the subject of a lot of talk at the WSOP.

HELLMUTH WINS 11TH, NARROWLY MISSES 12TH

There may not be anyone better at tackling today’s massive no-limit hold’em fields at the WSOP than Phil Hellmuth. Phil won Event No. 15, a $1,500 no-limit hold’em event with more than 2,600 entrants. This win gave Phil his 11th bracelet, putting him ahead of Doyle Brunson and Johnny Chan. Two weeks later, in a small field of more than 800, Phil made another no-limit final table. This time he went out seventh, but his ability to wade through big fields with the style of play these events have cannot be questioned.

BLIND STRUCTURES

The blind structures are one of the hot topics of discussion in the room. Limit events have played especially strange, in that players start with an incredibly deep stack (some say too deep - often something in the range of 125 big bets). By the middle to late levels, however, players are all bunched into the middle. In one of the recent Stud/8 events, a tournament that started with 350 players was down to about 70 players-still 35 places from the money-and the average stack had 9 big bets.

TWO FEMALE WINNERS IN THE SAME NIGHT?

No, but darn close. The really interesting thing about it was that neither event involved was the ladies event. On June 20, Katja Thater of Germany won the razz event, outlasting a final table that included Men “The Master” Nguyen, and 2005 razz champ O’Neil Longson. Across the room at the final table of Event No. 28, Beth Shak was heads up against Shankar Pillai for the Gold Bracelet in no-limit hold’em (this was the event mentioned above, where Phil Hellmuth was chasing his 12th bracelet). Shak eventually succumbed to Pillai, but we were very close to having two female winners of open events in the same night-which would have been a WSOP first.

MORE EVENTS

There are a total of 55 events this year. This is by far the most on the schedule ever, and despite nearly every table being filled, the process is surprisingly smooth. Thus far criticism of dealers has been at a minimum, and the events seem to cycle through the room with relative ease. The room definitely has a factory-like feel to it, but nonetheless, the process of all the events working their way through the room has been fairly efficient, once the first few days had passed.

DIFFERENT EVENTS SPORT DIFFERENT FIELDS

The events this year are breaking down into two distinct categories. The free for all events, like the small buy in $1,500 no-limit hold’em events have attracted a noticeably plain field. Many top players seem to be shying away from these events, and the lack of familiar faces at the tables is noticeable. Meanwhile, some of the larger buy-in (and more specialized) events are looking like a Who’s Who of poker. Today is a great example. As I write this column, two events are being played out: a $1,500 no-limit event with a field of about 2,500, and a $5,000 buy in Omaha/8 event, with 280 entrants. I recognize more faces in the Omaha field than in the no-limit field by a ratio of about two-to-one.

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