As you can imagine, the only thing on the players minds at this point is surviving the day in a good enough shape to be able to make a run for the money on Day Three. There are plenty of stars left in the room—Robert Mizrachi, Minh Ly, Huck Seed, David Pham, Berry Johnston, and Brandon Adams to name but a few—but what amazes me more are the ones we don’t expect to see at this point. For example, David Williams’ mom Shirley is still alive! The joker in the camouflage Yankees hat who has been battling it out with Berry Johnston all day is still hanging on! Todd Philips, the director of Old School, is sitting near the top of the leader board!
While every player is keeping an eye on the tournament clock (which shows how many players are left), Bill Baxter thought he saw a chance to make some money. He gave a guy 2-1 odds that the field wouldn’t get pared down to 350 before the fifth level ended, going contrary to popular opinion. “The longer you play the fewer shorter stacks there’s going to be,” he said. “I can’t imagine there are 73 short stacks left in this room.” At that point the field was down to 423. It seemed to hold steady at that total for nearly five minutes, far longer than the usual pace, which had been roughly one bust-out every minute. It’s now down to 405.
At this point in the tournament the measure of a player’s success is how many orange 5k chips they have sitting in front of them. My dark horse Lasse Aspen Melby only has two, but he still has several stacks of yellow chips, so I’m not giving up on him yet. Ethan Steinberg, a friend I used to play with in a home game in Jackson Hole, started the day with 12k, which he has since pumped up to nearly 100k. These are a couple of the lesser known stories that interest me just as much as those of the well known pros. The World Series of Poker is about chasing a dream, and for many of the players whose goal is to simply cash they have gotten oh-so close.
Day 2A of the World Series is a welcome change from the craziness of the Day Ones. Those four days added up to the longest day of my life. There is actually room to breathe inside the Amazon Room, and it’s getting more spacious with the passing of each minute. Everywhere I walked during the first level today I heard the heart-pounding cry of “All in and a call!” One of the quietest tables I came across was table number 65. The fact that Berry Johnston, the 1985 world champion and a man known for not wasting words, was sitting there did nothing to change the table’s tranquility.
