WSOP - My Day 6 Recap

[Talking Poker]

Nothing was going to top yesterday, so I decided to take it easy today. The Main Event was moved down to Binions, and I knew it would be a madhouse, so I was in no hurry to get there. I slept til noon, and then checked out of the Golden Palace (where I had been staying with my friends who left late last night - they both pushed their flights back to watch my final table, btw).

I headed back to my friends' place and tried to get a little it caught up in here, with email, and so on. The Main Event started at 3:00 today, so I figured getting there around 10:00 PM seemed reasonable Turns out I was glad I didn't go any earlier. The room is completely closed off to the general public. ESPN has the tables roped off and you need a special pass to get in the room (friends, family, and press). I could get in, but I couldn't get close. By the time I got there, Raymer and Ivey were already gone, which is a real shame. Put those guys at the final table with Matusow and you've got some huge tv ratings... Now it looks like it's going to be "The Mouth" vs. "The Amateurs." I'm sure it will still be good tv...

Anyhoo, I took a few photos as best I could and then headed downstairs. I went over to the Golden Nuggett, because I loved their poker room last year, and they've completely redone it. It's now a pool area and the new poker room, well, sucks. So back to Binions I went. They didn't have any games running that I was interested in, and I was all set to leave when I noticed a few big screen tvs across the room showing computer poker. I went over to investigate, and found out it was some sort of robot competition. 6 guys were hand chosen to write programs to play limit poker, and it was down to heads up. This was a freeroll, and the winner gets $100,000. Tomorrow, his bot plays against a bot from the University of Alberta (apparently, it's good), and then the winner of that goes on to play Phil Laak tomorrow night. As the heads up match was wrapping up, who arrives? None other than the Unabomber and his lovely girlfriend, Miss Jennifer Tilly. I'm bumped into this woman so many times this week, I can hardly believe it. I took a few photos and then chatted with Phil for a few minutes. He seems unsure of his chances against the bot, but guessed his chances are somewhere in the 40%-60% range and will be able to give a much more accurate answer within 5 minutes of play tomorrow. He's practiced against the Poker Academy software (those guy I told you about the other day (I think)), and he says he can "slaughter" their NL bots, but hes about even in limit after one hour of play. A NL bot is obviously going to be much, much harder to program, so this dosn't really surprise me. Anyway, long story long, this should be interesting. I'm going to try to swing by and check it out.

I left Binions after that and decided to check out the Wynn for the first time. The poker room is right inside the door, which was a nice touch. I looked around, but didn't play. They had some nice sized games going on, similar to what you would find at the Bellagio.

And that's about it. 2Tone arrived in town today (turns out he couldn't resist after all!) and gave me a call. We are going to try to meet up sometime tomorrow, but with the Main Event being so insane, I'm probably going to avoid that completely... so we'll have to play it by ear.

TP out.