"Sixty-nine fucking hundred."
I'm trying to fall back asleep at 7:45 AM and those words/numbers are ringing in my head.
Sixty-nine fucking hundred.
I just completed an insanely early radio interview with an Austin, Texas, station. And All I could think of was "sixty-nine fucking hundred." Annie Duke has a way of getting under your skin like that.
Yesterday's 5 PM event was $5,000 HORSE, a preview for the upcoming event with ten times the buy-in. By 2 AM, I found myself in the Amazon Room, I thought to see Shannon Elizabeth put an exclamation point on a long, successful day in the $2,000 NLHE tournament, an event in which I had busted out so long ago that, while she was playing toward the money, I went to dinner with my friend and fellow poker writer Jennifer Hewitt, smoked a cigar with Richard Brodie, wrote and edited #176, and went deep in Full Tilt's $13,000 Guarantee and busted.
I knew from news reports that Shannon had 45,000 chips. Something happened in the ten minutes between my room and the Amazon Room, however, because I couldn't find her among the 140 survivors of Day 1 who were bagging their chips.
I had a sick feeling. Elizabeth had been playing well but getting no results at this Series, after cashing 3 times in limited play in 2006. She had been getting instruction from Annie "sixty-nine fucking hundred" Duke and was wearing a diamond poker chip necklace on loan from Cate Williamson and designed by her husband, Robert Williamson III.
I found Annie sitting to Chris Ferguson's left in the HORSE and had started watching them when Shannon Elizabeth and Joe Reitman walkd up. Shannon was carrying a pile of cash, though it looked like she had been crying. She made the money but busted and was very unhappy. She put herself in posiiton to finish the night in great shape to attack for the final table on Saturday but it went awry just before 2 AM.
Annie's situation was much worse. They were probably 18 hours short of the money in her event, and she was very low on chips. In fact, her stack dropped to 500 chips and she had taken to begging Greg "FBT" Mueller and Chris "Jesus" Ferguson to eliminate her during Stud, Stud Eight-or-Better, and finally Hold 'Em rounds.
But it was to no avail. As much as she wanted to bust - her kids are coming to town today and she saw no reason to finish on life support with no chance of cashing but obliged to come back - she kept getting her chips in with reasonable draws and then hitting. She never got in her money ahea, but was never a big underdog.
And as much as she hated being in this situation, she couldn't bring herself to self-immolate. She cursed Mueller and Ferguson when she won but once accumulated a few thousand chips, only to fold on the river to save her last 500 when all her draws failed to hit and she had a Seventh Street decision.
But then she doubled up three times on the last half-dozen hands of the night and was livid that some of the best poker players in the world couldn't oblige her need to be out of this tournament.
Bagging her chips, she told me, "I have sixty-nine fucking hundred, and you can write that in your blog."
Yes, ma'am.
