Poker Mac

As Eric Seidel said, “8 is the new 11.”  With his win in event #37, the $3000 entry HORSE tournament, Ivey is now only three bracelets away from Hellmuth’s record.  Is this his goal?  Doubtful.  The Full Tilt Poker Pro is much more likely to be motivated by the bracelet bets he has outstanding.  Purportedly, Howard Lederer has 5 Million on the line with Ivey.  To win, Ivey needs 2 bracelets from now til 2012.  Only US bracelets count.  Evidence that this is more than just a rumor?

Phil Laak set a new world record for longest continuous poker session.  He finished his session at 115 hours.  One Hundred and fifteen hours!  That is 4.8 days.

Along the way he raised money for Camp Sunshine, a retreat for children with life threatening illnesses and their families.  He donated all of his winnings, sold the shirts and hoodies he wore during his challenge and publicized the camp sunshine Text donation campaign.  You can still text “camp” to 20222 to donate $10 to camp sunshine.  I’ve always wondered why he wasn’t on Full Tilt or Pokerstars, but it looks like the reason is that he has started his own branded site Unabomberpoker.

The prior records for this event are vaguely documented – Guiness is loathe to publicize endurance no sleep events because of the possible untoward effects on the mind and body.  So you will not see the official 11 hour record on their site.  The longest official continuous poker session was 72 hours and 2 minutes, set by Larry Olmstead.  Paul Zimbler, at WSOP-E 2009, set an unofficial record of 78 hours and 25 minutes.  This, is what Paul looked like in the last 15 minutes of his 75 hour attempt unwisely playing Mike Matusow heads up while nearing unconsciousness.  Bottom line — the kid did not look good.

Phil, despite surpassing Paul’s record by almost 30 hours, looked significantly better.  Perhaps this was due to training.  Phil has been working with All American Dave, running on a regular basis and eating well.  As a result he So far, Phil has made it to his first break stuck 2500 with 75 hours to go — he gets 5 miutes per hour and has 5 hours stored up so he’ll be taking 25 minutes of break. He has a nutritionist providing a stream of meals every 4.5 hours.  He did worry a bit at first, as he got a sub-optimal sleep the night before his record attempt start.  Nonetheless, at the end of his 115 hours, he packed up his bag, was coherent, chatting with everybody, in a good mood and left the Bellagio under his own steam.  No ambulances were needed.

Seratonin levels r crushing!!! So happy – wow.. I manufactured my very own high.. 3 days to make it – don’t want to waste it! Happy Phil!

– RealPhilLaak on Twitter

Sweet Dreams, Phil.

Railbirds followed the event via his  tweets, but much more entertainingly by watching the acejones ustream live broadcast.

The game was 10-20 NL at the Bellagio poker room in Las Vegas, NV.  He didn’t want to play too high and be taken advantage of by guys with ginormous bankrolls.  But the 10-20 game at the Bellagio had a few distinct advantages.  It never breaks — very important if you are going for an endurance record.  And it has no cap.  So you can buy-in for whatever you’d like to.  Phil started out with a $4000 initial buy-in.  Played for a good while, up and down, then busted.  So he rebought for only $800.  Not sure the reasoning there, but when that was gone he tried it again for another $800.  $5600 down the drain, he rebought for another $4400 to make it $10K.  Shortly thereafter, he decided that rebuying was too stressful, so he bought in for another $90K for a total of $100K.  This seemed to work well for him, although there were ups and downs, his big wins made up for losses and he finished up $6466.

He had quite a few visitors and other interesting characters show up at his table.  Phil initially sat at Seat 5, with a camera livestreaming the table from seats 1-5 and another camera streaming the flop.  A couple hours in, he managed to switch into seat 2, which was perfect for camera angles, etc.   Chau Giang stopped by.  His good friend, Antonio Esfandiari stopped by a couple of times when his energy was flagging, playing over other stacks that had gone to dinner.  Antonio was still a threat though, and they did get into a tangle with AA vs KK.  Philly Phil won.  Andrew Robl also played over Seat 1 and seemed to have a good time with Phil while he was there.  Jen Tilly, his girlfriend, made daily appearances and hung out in support.  She was loathe to be there when he set the record, because she didn’t want to see him in the state Paul Zimbler had been on his Youtube video.  She did thoughtfully bring him a statue of Ganesh to clear some obstacles.  She was there at the very end, though, at 115 hours to walk him up to his Bellagio suite and tuck him into bed.  Tilly played at the table next to him a bit — also there were Jean-Robert Bellonde, and Scotty Nguyen.  Perhaps his most notorious visitor was red shirt guy.  Red shirt guy sat down next to Phil with a stack significanly smaller than $100K, and preceeded to fold and blind off most of his stack.  With $413 left, he picked up his bottled water and left the table.  On the surface this may seem like an uneventful stay, but along the way the railbirds on ustream tore RSG apart.  At the end, Thuy Doan joined him for a mini marathon session of her own until she had to head over to the Rio to sweat Tom Dwan who was in contention for a bracelet.  Tom finished second in event #11 – $1500 NL HE.  Many of you probably know that Tom has multiple outsized prop bets re: bracelets over the next couple of years.  If he had won this bracelet today, he may have won on the order of $15 million in prop bets.  Wow.  I’m sure he will get his bracelet someday soon.  Until then, the real story is Phil Laak’s – the world record holder for longest continuous poker session.

Congratulations, Phil.  Guiness  would like you to know that along with longest continous poker session, you have now also set the record for world’s craziest dude.