$350,000 poker game holds 'em at card club
Elimination game attracts 4 dozen players

Steve Rubenstein, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, March 5, 2004

To play poker for $350,000 these days, you need a really good pair of sunglasses.

Most everyone had a pair of sunglasses at the big poker tournament in San Jose on Thursday. Not to keep the sun out -- because there wasn't any sun -- but to keep the blinks, the stares, the twitches and the raised eyebrows in.

There was a lot of sun outdoors, but outdoors is a place where world-class poker players do not venture. Four dozen of the very best sat down at high noon inside the Bay 101 Club on Bering Drive to see which of them would go home rich and which of them would just go home.

They wore their favorite sneakers, jeans, T-shirts and baseball caps. Big-time poker does not look like James Bond in a tuxedo at Monte Carlo. Big-time poker looks like plumbers on their lunch break.

It was the second day of the three-day Shooting Star tournament, one of the grandest on the World Poker Tour. The poker tour has been big ever since someone got the idea to stick it on cable TV, with viewers able to peek at the players' cards and second-guess their strategies, complete with commentators going on and on about flops, rivers and all-in's.

The all-in is a key moment. It's when a player, down to his final chips, tosses them all into the pot in a do-or-die attempt to stave off elimination.

On Thursday, the do-or-die attempts seemed to be mostly dies. During the noon hour, one player with sunglasses and jack-10 lost $30,000 to another player with sunglasses and a pair of jacks. And a player with a baseball cap, an ace and a jack lost $25,000 to another fellow with a baseball cap, an ace and a queen.

The game was Texas hold 'em, a form of poker in which each player gets two cards face down and must use three of five face-up common cards to form the best five-card hand. Three-of-a-kind beats two pair, the same way it does for quarters in a college dorm game.

For the pros, sitting down at the green tables was like going to work. Dennis Waterman, a former Berkeley resident who plays in most of the big tournaments, breakfasted on plate of cantaloupe and juice in order, he said, to keep his spiritual self focused. He was 38th on the list of survivors and would need a small miracle to make the final cut of six players.

Waterman, who is also a world-ranked chess player, says he does not play poker on Saturday night with the boys, a six-pack and a bowl of barbecue potato chips.

"Poker is a job,'' he said. "You don't do your job for fun. This is work.''

He spent his breakfast hour studying the list of opponents who would be sitting at his table, fellows with nicknames like "Whippersnapper" and "Doc" and "The Professor.'' In tournament poker, a reckless and aggressive player can often beat a steady and logical one, even though that strategy rarely works in ordinary games.

The Professor, sighed Waterman, is an analytical, calculating machine, unlike the Whippersnapper, who is more emotional.

"Against The Professor, you have to think about what he thinks you think he thinks that you're thinking,'' Waterman said, chewing thoughtfully on his cantaloupe.

At noon came the call over the loudspeaker of "Shuffle up!'' The cards slid across the green felt, and the players peeked at them and tried to look as though they hadn't.

At one of the tables sat actress Mimi Rogers. She is a big-time poker player, although not so big time that she does not constantly find the need to dry her sweaty hands on a hankie she keeps under the table.

After an hour of play, she found herself down to her final $20,000. She shoved her entire mass of green, red and peach-colored chips into the middle and made the mistake of taking off her windbreaker and draping it around the back of her chair. Her opponent called the bet and lost, with Rogers' pair of aces beating his ace-10, with a K-6-5-9-8 in the middle.

"You really shouldn't have taken your jacket off,'' one fellow in sunglasses said. "Made it look like you planned to stay a while.''

Rogers smiled, one of the few facial expressions of any kind exhibited by anyone.

By early Friday morning, the field will be reduced to the half-dozen finalists who will sleep for a few hours, wolf down more cantaloupe, adjust their sunglasses and face off at noon in the televised last round for a first prize of $350,000, which will be paid out in the form of real money and not green, red and peach-colored disks.

Source: SF Gate