London Calling
2007-09-12 11:20:12
By:
Gene Bromberg
While
reading the live coverage of the WSOP-E Main Event, we learn that today is Annie Duke's birthday! And apparently she and Phil Hellmuth were sitting at adjacent tables and she asked Phil to join her for dinner tonight to celebrate. Hope Phil got her something nice. And peeling off one of his 11 World Series bracelets and wrapping it up with a bow won't do--Annie already has one of those.
Of course it would've been nice to fly across the pond and cover the WSOP-E...at least I thought that until I started reading about how incredibly expensive London is. Thirty-six bucks for breakfast? Nearly $120 for a cab ride? Four hundred bucks a night for a hotel? The field for the Main Event is barely half of what Harrah's was expecting, and it's theorized that the prohibitive cost of London played a major role. It's expensive to get there, expensive to stay there, and the buy-in for the ME comes out to around $20,000. Even for your typical livin' large
poker player, that's a lot of green.
And if you're a humble
poker scribe, like myself, it might be even more costly. From the live coverage:
"...the peripheral operations of the event are not running as smoothly (as the
poker tournament). It seems as though the LCI did not expect the media coverage that this inaugural event would attract, and as a result the facilities provided are less than sufficient. In order to get power, the media and camera crews have to run multiple extension chords and adaptors, one on top of the other, and there are some prop bets floating around as to when the place will catch on fire. There is simply not enough bandwidth on the wireless network they have provided, the media room is completely unsecured and so far the stolen laptop count is at 3."
I'm trying to think of an appropriate punishment for stealing a writer's laptop. Burning at the stake seems a bit lacking, I'd prefer something with a bit more
oomph. Maybe a re-enactment of the closing scenes of
Braveheart? Something along those lines.
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