With the WSOP signing off, good afternoon from my office at the Bellagio. The Fontana usually has a band playing Santana but today the only game being played is poker.
319 players, up from 90 last year, paid $10k to receive 20k in chips.Unlike the WSOP this is an all star event.Any event where I can name 7 players a table is worthy of Championship status.
John,the asst TD, has just announced any player eliminated has his name on the list at the buffet cashier for the player and a friend. Hopefully I can find a friend in the tournament before 9pm!!!
Players include: Rene Angelil, David Sihoki Slot, Mark Cole, Darrell Dicken, Steve Frederick, Ted Forrest, Tom Franklin, Stan Fulton,John Gale, Barry Greenstein, Thor Hansen, Dan Harrington, Kenna James, John Juanda, Chip Jett, Kathy Liebert, Tony Ma, David Matthew, Carlos Mortensen, Dario Minieri, Sean McCabe, Scotty Nguyen, Padraig Parkinson, Stuart Patterson, Louis Pagnotti,Greg Raymer,Vanessa Rousso, Erica Schoenberg, Gavin Smith, Simon Trumper, Jennifer Tilly, Eugene Todd, Thomas Wahlroos and David Williams.
One Day at a Time
Play has come to an end for today … we’re down to 27 players and headed to Binion’s! Oh, wait, no we’re not … this is the first year in the history of the WSOP that this stage of the main event will be played at the Rio. Of the 27 players who remain, two of them are Party guys.
Richard Wyrick is the tiniest stack with 570,000. (By surviving til the end of today, he guaranteed himself an extra $165k!) And Rob Roseman is a slightly below-average stack with 1,685,000. I think this bodes well for these guys. After all, how many times have you seen the biggest stack at this point in the tournament actually go on to win it?
OK, so there was that Greg Raymer guy a couple years ago. But other than that … current chip leader Jamie Gold is in trouble.
Play Ends for the Day
In what could be the quickest day in WSOP main event history, play was stopped at about 5:15 p.m. when Lowell Kim was eliminated in 28th place. The final three tables will play down to one nine-man table tomorrow, followed by an off day on Wednesday and the final day on Thursday.
The remaining players are guaranteed at least $494,797.
All that Glitters is Gold
Mirroring Greg Raymer’s journey toward his 2004 Main Event bracelet, Malibu, CA’s Jamie Gold has amassed himself an enormous stack in late-stage play, outchipping his closest opponent by over 7.9 million. Currently, Gold sits on a 14.7 million stack and second-in-chips David Einhorn has 6.8 million.
Before turning his energies toward tournament poker, Jamie Gold was a successful Hollywood agent. As the head of Harter Manning Woo’s Motion Picture/TV Department in the mid-nineties, Gold counted actors James Gandolfini(The Sopranos), Felicity Huffman (Desperate Housewives), Lucy Liu (Charlie’s Angels), and Kristin Davis (Sex and the City) among his stellar client list. He parted ways with HMW in 1994 and opened up his own shop, Gold/Bouchard, closing it only two years later to go completely on his own with his namesake J.M.G. Management, which he still runs.
Gold is also the President of Production of BuzzNation, a fledgling TV production and marketing entity run by Mark Hughes, author of the book “Buzzmarketing.” Hughes is probably best known for getting the town of Halfway, Oregon to rename themselves Half.com, Oregon, which allegedly created the “buzz” leading to Half.com’s sale to Ebay a few months later for over $300 million. Gold and Hughes did the same thing while shooting a documentary film in Santa, Idaho. The town voted to re-name themselves SecretSanta.com in exchange for 50% of the take from the film “Santa’s Little Helpers,” a documentary Gold produced about the town’s residents. Though the town received a $20,000 advance for the name change, the film has yet to hit theatres.
In the last couple of years, Gold has been a fixture in the $100-$1000 buyin events at L.A.-area casinos. He has seven final tables in no-limit hold’em events for over $100,000 in tournament purses including a win at the Bike’s Stars and Stripes tournament in April 2005 and a second in a $1000 NLHE event at Hollywood Park’s 2006 Sport of Kings series.
Gold has more than doubled his chips today, going from 7.3 million to 14.7 million in only a few hours. He’s utterly steamrolling his table as we speak, using his massive stack as a weapon to bully his short-stacked opponents. With over half the field sitting on stacks under 2 million, expect even more power poker from Gold.
(I also encourage all of our readers to nominate your favorite potential Jamie Gold headline since he may actually go on to win this thing [Gold Standard, Golden Boy, Gold wins Gold, etc.] My entry already appears as this post’s title).
