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You are in: Home / Poker Blog Post / Fill In The Blank

Fill In the Blank

2007-07-17 12:34:51
By: Gene Bromberg

Hanging from the ceiling of the Amazon Room are huge posters of past World Series of Poker Main Event Champions. These striking banners ring the room and you can't help but feel like you're being watched. Watched by some of the great players in poker's past, like Johnny Moss, Puggy Pearson, Stu Ungar. As you eyes move left the faces become more familiar, because you've actually seen them playing during this year's event--Phil Hellmuth, Johnny Chan, Huck Seed, Carlos Mortensen. And some of the faces have become household names thanks to poker exploding in popularity, names like Moneymaker, Raymer, Hachem, Gold.

Actually, there's a poster right next to Jamie Gold's that's always struck me as a bit eerie. It shows a poker table piled high with money, a championship bracelet perched at the summit...but instead of a person all we see is a blank silhouette. And printed across the bottom, in lieu of a name, is "??????". As in, who will be our new champion.

That blank outline has loomed over the WSOP since we started way, way back on June 1st. And today we'll know who the next great poker champion is. Well, it might be today, or it might be tomorrow. Play begins at 12pm PT and there's no guarantee we won't still be playing until Wednesday morning. Heavens knows we played late into the night on Sunday...the final nine weren't set until 4:15am on Monday.

That night bordered on the surreal. Scotty Nguyen, who's poster already hangs in the Amazon Room as the 1998 Champion, was making a serious run at Title #2. After guiding a short-stack most of the day he'd built up a monster 17 million pile and it looked like he had his table dialed in. We were down to 11 players and Scotty was playing nearly every pot, while everyone else (especially those at the other table) wanted to stay out of trouble. Making a Main Event final table is a very big deal, but to Nguyen, that's just a stepping stone to the real goal, winning the bracelet.

Nearly everyone in the room was cheering him on, it was closing in on 2am but the room was charged with energy. And then, in a ghastly half-hour, it all went wrong. Scotty ran a bluff and was picked off. He flopped top pair against a player who flopped a set, and lost nearly 9 million in one fell swoop. And then, at the end, he moved all-in with a flush draw. The whole room was screaming for a club...and when the Queen of Spades hit on the river a huge cheer rose up...but just for a second, as folks squinted hard and saw that it was the wrong sort of black card.

Scotty left, and took all the electricity out of the room. We consolidated down to one table and played for two sterile hours in the Amazon Room's brutal cold. And I mean brutal--I was wearing jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, and a zip-up sweatshirt with the hood up, and I was STILL freezing. There were specatators actually leaving because it was so cold, including two very blonde and very Nordic beauties, one of whom muttered "Iz too (deleted) cold in zhere," as she walked past.

Two hours we played on, two dry, dull hours. Though not for the players, who had fought for six days to put themselves in a positon to make history. And at 4:15am Steven Garfinkle moved in with Ac3s and was called by Raymond Rahme's pocket Queens. The sort of hand that's played out a hundred thousand times over the last seven weeks, but this time it meant that our final Final Table was set.

And here are the nine players who will fight today for the World Championship:


If I had to pick a favorite...I couldn't. There's no one with a massive chip lead and, just by getting this far, each has proven that he's one of fortune's favorites. Lee Watkinson has the most experience playing in front of the cameras for big money, and having witnessed Alex Kravchenko win a bracelet earlier this year I know how formidable he is. But it's really a wide-open field. One bad beat, one cooler, one miracle river card could decide our champion. It'll take all day to learn his name. With seven weeks of non-stop poker coming to an end today, I think those hours will fly by.


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