Home at last. After seven-and-a-half weeks away watching other people play poker, I have finally returned to my home on the east coast of the United States. Most of that period was spent in the Nevada desert, where the temperatures outside were exceeding 110°F (43°C) by the time I left last weekend. Of course, for the most part I was inside the sometimes frigid Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino, helping cover the 41st Annual World Series of Poker for PokerNews.

I’ve come home with a lot of memories from the 2010 WSOP. One of them is pictured above — the moment the cash bubble burst in the Main Event, when the Amazon room was filled with raucous shouting and cheers. That moment is always one of the most exciting of the summer.

I thought it would fun as a kind of WSOP postscript to share ten memories from my summer in Vegas — all specific moments which kind of stand out as I think back on the experience of helping report on the Series.

1. The first event I helped cover was Event No. 3, the first of six open-field $1,000 no-limit hold’em events. The field for that first one ended up being the largest in the entire WSOP save the Main Event — 4,345 runners in all. The witty Danafish was my blogging partner for those first couple of days, and I remember asking her at some point early on for an estimate on how many players had shown up. Her deadpanned reply came without hesitation: “One million.”

2. Event No. 17, the $5,000 No-Limit Hold’em event, attracted a star-studded field, including one table featuring Brandon Adams, Shannon Elizabeth, Dan Heimiller, Phil Hellmuth, Chris Ferguson, and David Williams. I happened to be watching the table when a big hand developed that involved Heimiller, Hellmuth, Ferguson, and Williams. During the hand, Elizabeth snapped a photo of her tablemates and sent it out on Twitter. I noticed later I was in the picture, and joked with my colleagues that the American Pie star was taking pictures of me reporting.

3. Event No. 19, the $10,000 Deuce-to-Seven Draw Championship (No-Limit), also attracted quite a few well-known pros. On Day 1, I watched a funny hand between Chris “Jesus” Ferguson and Andy Bloch. Ferguson opened with a raise from the cutoff seat, and only Bloch called from the big blind. Bloch then drew two cards, while Ferguson stood pat. Bloch then bet, at which point Ferguson folded his hand face up — quad fours! Ferguson and Bloch — well known for their mathematical minds — shared a good laugh at the sight of Ferguson’s statistically improbable hand.

4. I helped cover Event No. 22, the $1,000 buy-in Ladies Hold’em Championship, although I didn’t join the coverage until Day 2. That meant I’d missed a lot of the brouhaha that happened on the first day when about a dozen men entered the event. Before the final table, WSOP Media Director Nolan Dalla (whom I interviewed here a couple of weeks ago), said a few words about the history of the Ladies Event at the WSOP, adding that “The WSOP will always support the ladies poker championship. The ladies deserve their day.” His declaration was met with applause, and while the Ladies event will surely continue to draw controversy, I thought it significant that Dalla made the statement he did.

5. Day 3 of Event No. 35, the $10,000 Heads Up No-Limit Hold’em Championship, was supposed to be the last day of the event. The final round — which was best two out of three — didn’t start until around 11 p.m., and the first match between Ayaz Mahmood and Ernst Schmejkal was still going more than six hours after it had begun. By that point the sun had risen, and the players and tourney officials were debating whether to continue with the second match right after or come back later in the day. My blogging partner Tim and I were exhausted — we’d been at it for something like 16 hours. Schmejkal was ready to go ahead and reschedule the second match, but Mahmood wanted assurance that it wouldn’t start until 7 p.m. “If we can’t do seven, I want to play now,” said Mahmood. Tim and I looked at each other in horror. Thankfully seven did work, and our long day-slash-night-slash-day finally concluded shortly thereafter.

6. I reported on Event No. 39, the $1,500 No-Limit Hold’em Shootout, in which Annette Obrestad won her first two tables and thus made it to the final day. I was intrigued to watch Obrestad play, having only seen her on television before this summer — indeed, I’ll admit to have been a little starstruck when watching that first hand or two of hers, something I haven’t experienced at the WSOP in a long time.

7. I had the chance to cover Event No. 44, the $2,500 Mixed Hold’em event in which Gavin Smith won his first WSOP bracelet. Smith cut an interesting figure at that final table, wearing a sport jacket, a fedora, and eyeglasses. There was a seriousness about him that seemed a bit different from the usual happy-go-lucky persona we have seen in the past from “the Caveman.” I remember at one point Smith won a hand and his friend Layne Flack shouted “Winning never gets old, does it?” from the stands. Smith had a reply: “Yeah, but sometimes it gets hard to remember.” He smiled a moment more, but then was back to business. It was clear he wasn’t going to indulge in a lot of extracurricular activity on that day, and I suppose one has to conclude his focus served him well.

8. I helped cover Event No. 54, the last those $1,000 no-limit hold’em events, at which there occurred something quite unique. As is usually the case, late registrants were seated together at newly-opened tables, and at one of the tables were sat no less than five players with WSOP bracelets. Not only that, they had a whopping 16 bracelets between them — Layne Flack (six), Chris Ferguson (five), Tom Schneider (two), Ryan Hughes (two), and Gavin Smith (one). “What are the odds of this at a $1K event?” asked Schneider.

9. On Day 1d of Event No. 57, the $10,000 No-Limit Hold’em Championship (a.k.a., the Main Event), I was there helping report on the action when a fellow leaned over the rail and began asking me questions about the prize pool, the average stack size, and so forth. He wanted to know what sort of stack would guarantee a person reaching the money. His questions became more and more specific; for example, he wanted me to assess what sort of shape a player would be in if he had ended Day 1 with 94,000 chips. Then I finally realized — he had played Day 1a, and was asking about his own situation! Then came the funniest part of our conversation. “Do you think I should play tight?” he asked. While I tried to answer all of his other questions as well as I could, I didn’t presume to advise him on that one.

10. One last story from Event No. 57 (the Main Event), an especially strange hand from Day 2a involving Chris Moneymaker and Bryan Pellegrino. While all of the other players had already left for dinner break, Moneymaker and Pellgrino had reached the river on a hand in which Pellegrino was sitting motionless while the 2003 Main Event champ stood and wandered about, appearing as though he were waiting for Pellegrino to decide how to respond to Moneymaker’s river bet. Finally, after more than ten minutes, Moneymaker said somewhat reluctantly that he was going to have to call the clock. That’s when Pellegrino explained that he had already reraised all in, and was waiting for Moneymaker to act! A pretty strange scene. Moneymaker would eventually bust shy of the cash, but Pellegrino made a deep run, finishing 143rd.

Of course, there were more moments along the way that stand out, including several from the Main Event. And there will be still more come November when the final table resumes. Such is the case every summer at the World Series of Poker!

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photo by flipchip • lasvegasvegas.com

The Big Poker Show rolls into town today for the 41st time and will add another chapter to the rich history of the game. The 2010 World Series of Poker opens today with the Poker Player’s Championship event #2, a $50,000 Buy-In challenge that draws poker’s elite from dozens of countries around the world.

There’s also a WSOP tradition, the Casino Employees No-Limit Hold’em event #1, a $500 Buy-In tournament limited to workers of the poker industry.

For the only official live blog coverage direct from the green felt of the WSOP tables go to PokerNews.com. Hundreds of photos published as it happens.

Today, Friday 28th, sees a full moon rising in the East. How many years before another WSOP begins on a full moon?

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An especially long one yesterday — about a 16-hour workday, all told. Still a little tired this morning, but ready to get back over to the Atlantic City Casino to see how the story of LAPT Lima continues to unfold.

There were 197 players returning for Day 2 of the $2,700 buy-in Main Event. The plan was to play down to 24. (That picture to the left shows the main feature table starting to be constructed at the far end of the poker room.) After ten one-hour levels there was talk of just stopping things after two more levels (at the end of Level 20), regardless of how many players were left. As it happened, the elimination of Costa Rican player Luis Jaikel in 25th place happened just a few minutes before the end of that level, and so we’ll have the three eight-handed tables as planned when play restarts today.

As the day wore on, I began more and more to notice differences in the way the players interacted and what might be called the “culture” of the LAPT event when compared to, say, the World Series of Poker or U.S.-based tourneys.

As happens at the WSOP, there have been occasional displays of emotion as players react to various situations, most often during the all-ins when a player’s tourney life is on the line. And there have been a couple of dust-ups about rulings and such, but nothing terribly out of the ordinary.

I’ve found it interesting, however, to witness what seems like a lot of genuine human interaction at the tables as well, with much conversation and smiling. You’ll see that at the WSOP, too, now and then, but not with as much frequency as I have here, I don’t think.

For example, another player from Costa Rica, Steven Thompson, is one of the 24 coming back today. He has been kind of a gregarious type, talking and laughing quite a bit. And his tablemates seem often to be following suit. Even a simple blind-vs.-blind hand between Thompson and another player in which one bets the other out of a pot seemed always to elicit a lot of grins and good-natured back-and-forthing.

There was one particularly funny moment yesterday when there were just 51 players remaining. The top 48 spots paid, and so the tension had risen somewhat (and play slowed down a lot). Suddenly I noticed a player at Thompson’s table — Leandro Csome of Argentina — standing up with a piece of paper. He had written the number “48” on the paper, and with a huge grin was holding it up over the “51” on the electronic board indicating players remaining.

Csome let out a cheer, and Thompson immediately joined in the celebration, hugging Csome and drawing huge laughs all around. A very funny moment. Felt bad for Csome when he in fact went out soon after, just missing the cash, but he still had a smile on his face as he left.

There were other interesting stories yesterday. American player Martin Mathis started the day with 20,075 chips — just 75 more than the starting stack for the tourney — but survived multiple all-ins early on, then showed a lot of savvy to make it into the money before getting knocked out in 42nd.

There were a couple of other huge comebacks yesterday, too. Probably the most remarkable was that of U.S. player Ben Barrows. Sporting a t-shirt that said “Dazed and Confused,” Barrows started the day with just a little over 18,000, but is still in the sucker, currently in 11th place.

Also — and this is kind of a wild one — the last woman in the event, Pamela Espinosa of Chile, went out in 31st place, and was followed in 30th place by her husband, Mauricio Zeman! Not quite the Mizrachi brothers both making the final table of the $50K Player’s Championship at the WSOP, but remarkable nonetheless.

The big story as we ended the night — told by my blogging partner Brad “Otis” Willis over on the PokerStars blog — is the fact that the two previous winners of this season of the LAPT are first and second in chips heading into Day 3.

Amer Sulaiman, the chip leader, ran especially well during the last hours of play on Day 2, picking up pocket aces at least twice, and seemingly always having the goods when short-stacked players were pushing all in against him. The Canadian Sulaiman won the LAPT Playa Conchal event in Costa Rica last November which kicked off this Season 3 of the LAPT.

And Team PokerStars pro Jose “Nacho” Barbero of Argentina is second in chips. Barbero is an especially tricky player whom I remember covering at last summer’s WSOP when he made a final table in the $1,500 limit hold’em shootout (won by Greg Mueller). Barbero won LAPT Punta del Este in Uruguay this past February.

Both Sulaiman and Barbero had vocal supporters on the rail yesterday, and indeed the scene was pretty raucous at times with a lot of cheering and singing as more than 100 spectators crowded the action.

Incidentally, there wasn’t too much talk yesterday about the Joran van der Sloot situation. We heard he’d been arrested in Chile, but that was about it.

The only other evidence of the story was the fact that a couple of times during the day there were news crews — not covering the tourney — shooting segments there near and in the poker room. On the left is a picture of one such segment being shot as I walked in early yesterday.

We expect there will be more excitement today as they play down to the final eight. Check in on the PokerStars blog to see the next chapter of the story.

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You’ve no doubt heard by now that Liv Boeree took down that European Poker Tour San Remo event yesterday, coming out on top of a huge field of 1,240 players to claim the €1,250,000 first prize. Lot of folks excited about it. Boeree becomes the third woman to win an EPT Main Event, following Vicky Coren (EPT London 2006) and Sandra Naujoks (EPT Dortmund 2009).

Boeree’s win also comes on the heels of Vanessa Selbst’s NAPT Mohegan Sun victory less than two weeks ago. And a month before that, Annie Duke took down the NBC National Heads Up Poker Championship — not an “open” event, but still one in which men had only prevailed in the past.

Some object to assigning too much importance to women winning events such as these, arguing that doing so reinforces the significance of a player’s sex and thus suggests another kind of inequality in the way one views women players as opposed to men.

There’s something to that argument, I suppose. But still, it is hard not to recognize the uniqueness of women succeeding in these big buy-in, “big bet” tourneys, especially given the small number of women entering them as compared to men.

By the way, even before Selbst’s win at the NAPT Mohegan Sun, Jen Newell and I chose the topic of women & no-limit hold’em tourneys for our April “He Said/She Said” columns over at Woman Poker Player. There we were separately responding to a chapter in James McManus’s Cowboys Full in which he offers a few thoughts about why men seem “biologically inclined to sign up for” NLHE tourneys.

As we were working on our articles, Selbst won her NAPT title, and so we both ended up making reference to her win. You can see what else we said about McManus’s ideers here: He Said / She Said.

Last week I also wrote a post here called “Women and the WSOP.” There I mentioned how even though 12 different women had won open WSOP events, none had done so in a NLHE event (aside from Annette Obrestad’s 2007 WSOPE Main Event title). In that post I included a list of women who had won WSOP bracelets in open events, with Vera Richmond being the first to do so back in 1982 in the $1,000 buy-in Ace-to-Five Draw event.

Curiously, when people discuss this topic many tend to overlook Richmond’s victory and cite Barbara Enright’s 1996 bracelet in the $2,500 pot-limit hold’em event as the first by a woman in an open-field WSOP tourney. In fact, when it comes to poker history, Richmond is probably better known not for her WSOP bracelet but for her involvement in that story in which Amarillo Slim Preston allegedly said he’d cut his own throat if a woman ever won the WSOP Main Event — another story the accuracy of which sometimes gets skewed.

According to the story, at the 1973 WSOP Main Event, Richmond — who according to this had to have been the first woman ever to play in the Main Event — enjoyed the chip lead for a time, and during a break took the opportunity to tell Preston she intended to win the sucker. Preston (the reigning champ) responded by telling Richmond that if she were to win the tourney, she could cut his throat with a “dull knife.”

The exchange later got retold in such a way as to suggest Preston had threatened to cut his own throat, and that his threat referred to any woman winning the event (not just Richmond). Preston himself later would exploit the apocryphal version of the story, such as in 2000 when both Annie Duke and Kathy Liebert made deep runs in the Main Event, as recounted by McManus in Positively Fifth Street.

(EDIT [added 1:00 p.m.]: Actually there are other problems with this story, including the fact that Richmond didn’t play in the 1973 event at all. Hat tip to Kevmath here, who points us to an article by Susie Isaacs that suggests Barbara Freer was the first woman to play in the WSOP ME in 1978.)

That was about all I recalled about Vera Richmond, too, other than the fact that she always gets described as a “brusque cosmetics heiress” in histories and on the web. There was, however, a reference to Richmond not too long ago on the Gamblers Book Shop podcast (episode 63, 3/19/2010).

There guest Linda Johnson — the third woman to win a WSOP in an open event (1997, $1,500 Razz) — noted how Richmond “never got credit for her win,” referring to what I mentioned earlier about how Enright tends to be more readily cited as the first woman to win an open WSOP event.

Host Howard Schwartz asked Johnson why that was the case. “Well, she wasn’t very popular,” answered Johnson. “She was kind of mean and nasty… spoke like a truck driver, and nobody liked her. And so when she won her event, she never got credit for it, which isn’t right because plenty of asshole men have won and they are in the record books.”

Kind of interesting — and not that surprising — how the story of the first woman to win a WSOP open event appears to involve ideas of traditional “gender roles” as well as (in the Amarillo Slim story) men showing some resistance to the idea of women playing and succeeding.

Times have changed, certainly. The general enthusiasm about Boeree’s win yesterday — from both men and women — is evidence of that.

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