Posts Tagged ‘Bellagio’

Michael Craig’s The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King takes readers on a behind-the-scenes tour of (at the time) the highest stakes poker game ever played. In search of a new challenge, banking prodigy Andy Beal challenges the best poker players in the world to play for stakes so high that millions of dollars change hands in a session and even these seasoned veterans can barely handle the swings.

As a poker player, I found PBSK fascinating for a number of reasons. For one thing, there were a lot of little details about Bobby’s Room (the high-stakes section of the Bellagio poker room, named for Bobby Baldwin) and the people who play there that I didn’t know. Craig writes for a broad audience, but even as someone who is relatively in-the-know about the poker world, I came away with a much better sense of the culture and traditions of that game. There were even a few regulars I hadn’t heard of, which I suppose is in itself a statement about the nature of the game.

Title notwithstanding, the book’s truly central characters are Beal and Doyle Brunson, not Beal and Howard Lederer. Craig chronicles the two men’s parallel struggles, Brunson’s to herd a team of notoriously stubborn and independent poker players into a functioning team with a 10-figure bankroll, and Beal’s to find an edge against the game’s greatest.  Read the complete post...

My fellow Poker Savvy Plus pro Christian “charder30″ Harder is at the TV table (final 6) of the World Poker Tour $25,000 Championship event at the Bellagio! According to the WPT, Christian comes in at a distant second with 7.5 million chips:

Seat 1 – Elky Grospellier – 5,955,000
Seat 2 – Scotty Nguyen – 3,275,000
Seat 3 – Shannon Shorr – 1,130,000
Seat 4 – Yevgeniy Timoshenko – 13,300,000
Seat 5 – Christian Harder – 7,425,000
Seat 6 – Ran Azor – 2,525,000

As you can see, there a few other well-known players at the table. Nonetheless, my money’s on Christian to win it all. Good luck buddy!

The $15K World Poker Tour Bellagio event always attracts a star-studded field of pros fresh off competing in the World Series of Poker. The six-handed final table this year was no exception:

Seat 1: Ralph Perry – 1,635,000
Seat 2: Luke “IWearGoggles” Staudenmaier – 3,495,000
Seat 3: John “The Razor” Phan – 3,495,000
Seat 4: David Benyamine – 4,860,000
Seat 5: Gabe Thaler – 1,550,000
Seat 6: Mike “SirWatts” Watson – 5,060,000

Watson won over $1.6 million for his first place finish. Sigh, I still recall playing with him at one of my first big final tables, a $10 rebuy on Poker Stars. I’ve had the privilege of meeting him twice, most recently during the WSOP main event when we were both in good shape on Day 2B.

I love this photo of Watson with all the people from 2+2 who were there to see him win it. There’s really an extraordinary collection of talent in this photo, including two other winners of earlier events in the Bellagio series: Tony “Bond18″ Dunst, who won a $3K event, and Jimmy “Gobboboy” Fricke, who won a $5K event just weeks after turning 21. What a huge couple of weeks it’s been for 2+2. I only wish I could have done my part by final tabling the main event.

Congratulations, Mike!