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Professional Poker Player, T.J. Cloutier, Looks Back on the 2007 World Series of Poker...
Some significant changes were made to
improve the 2007 World Series of Poker. But before I talk about the
good stuff, let me mention a bad thing. Harrah's came out with the
worst deck of cards in history on the first day of play. In these
decks from hell, if you had a 6 and a 9 in your hand, you couldn't
tell what you had unless you could see the middle of the card. In
traditional decks, you don't need to see the middle of your cards,
you just need to see the corners. When you lift your hole cards, one
card covers the middle of the other one, and that's why it's
important that you can tell exactly which cards you have by viewing
their corners. These specially designed decks were bad down to the
last detail: They even had the name on the backs of the cards –
Jeffrey Pollack, Commissioner of Poker – spelled wrong 52 times!
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| "Poker Peek" - Sixes and Nines | |
But I give Pollack and Harrah's credit:
I figured that since they'd bought hundreds of these decks from hell,
we'd be stuck with them for the whole Series. However, by 5:00 that
afternoon, they'd contacted Kem Cards and brought in a whole new
batch of cards for us to play with that were much better. Anybody
with any sense knows that these misprinted decks are like the old
postage stamps that were misprinted with the biplane upside down and
are worth so much money today. These damnable decks could become WSOP
tournament memorabilia items. After all, they're one of a kind, with
the commissioner's name spelled wrong. My prediction is that they're
going to go on sale and somebody's gonna make a lot of money on them.
Sometimes, in business, what seems to be a mistake can turn into a
miracle, something like catching that one-outer on the river to make
your hand and win the tournament.
Now to the good part: Harrah's hired an
excellent floor staff. They retained floor people from last year who
did a good job, of course. But because of the final-table situation
that developed in 2006 where Jamie Gold didn't receive a penalty for
showing one of his hole cards when anybody else would've gotten one –
and with all the unnecessary talking that was going on at the end –
they changed a lot of personnel who were working the floor. The
result was that the floor staff this year was very congenial and very
good at their jobs. We didn't have any mix-ups like we had last year
in the six-handed event and the shoot-outs.
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| Registration Lines @ 2007 WSOP | |
Except for the first few days when the
lines were longer than the trans-Atlantic cable (and I don't know how
the WSOP can get away from that at the beginning), everything went
pretty smoothly. They even had a payout room. I have nothing but
congrats to the excellent staff that kept things together without any
major goofs. They seemed to approach their jobs with the idea of
making things a little easier for the players. And I really
appreciated that.
Of course, you can't please everybody.
I heard players complaining about this and that, particularly about
the juice. The juice was 9 percent on certain tournaments down to
about 4 percent on the championship event. The fee schedule was
pre-posted in plain sight for each tournament, so that if you
objected to it, you simply didn't have to play that event. We're
dealing with corporate America these days and their goal is to make
money on all their ventures. That's the way things are and, as I see
it, it's not going to change.
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