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WHAT'S IN A NAME?
Always an interesting question when it
comes to the Tournament of Champions.
Last November's version, held in a
makeshift card room deep in the bowels
of Caesars Palace's convention area,
invited 114 players-top finishers in
WSOP events and a few controversial
sponsor-requested "exemptions"-to
compete in a $2-million freeroll. One
year earlier, Harrah's hosted a tournament
with the same name at the Rio, only as a
single-table, invitation-only, winner-takeall affair. Neither version shared much in
common with the original Tournament
of Champions, the much-beloved (and,
sadly, short-lived) creation of lawyer
Chuck Humphrey and future WPT host
Mike Sexton, where qualifiers played
alternating rounds of Limit Hold 'Em,
Omaha, and Seven-Card Stud before
switching to No-Limit Hold 'Em on the
third and final day to crown a champion
among champions.
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This year, the format was tweaked yet
again, as Harrah's re-invented the
Tournament of Champions as a kickoff
event to the World Series of Poker. The 27
invitees-12 WSOP Circuit Event winners,
the nine men who reached the final TV
table at last year's WSOP Championship,
and six sponsor exemptions-met at the
Rio for a two-day No-Limit Hold 'Em
freeroll for $2-million in prize money and
a World Series bracelet. And while there
was little of the rancor that marked last
year's TOC, there was, once again, a lot of
incredible poker and an ending with
enough drama and poetry to satisfy
anybody who had enough endurance to
make it all the way to the end.
Mike Matusow's victory in the 200S
TOC-maybe the best story of personal
redemption through poker since Stuey
Ungar's run to the WSOP Championship
in 1997 - was nearly overshadowed by a
series of spirited exchanges between Phil
Hellmuth and Steve Dannenmann. There
Who & How
The complete
field of 27
Tournament
of Champions
participants,
broken down by
their means of
qualification:
2005/2006
WSOP Circuit
Event Winners:
Greg Merkow
Chris Ferguson
Vinnie Vinh
Kido Pham
Chris Reslock
Daniel Negreanu
Abe Korotki
Darrell Dicken
John Spadavecchia
Jeff King
Clint Baskin
Peter Feldman
2005 WSOP
Main Event
Final Table:
Joseph Hachem
Steve Dannenmann
lex Barch
Aaron Kanter
Andrew Black
Scott Lazar
Daniel Bergsdorf
Brad Kondracki
Mike Matusow
Sponsor
Exemptions:
Doyle Brunson
Gus Hansen
Phil Hellmuth
Mike O'Malley
Mike Sexton
Sarah Strom
would be no follow-up this year.
Hellmuth was the second player eliminated from the tournament when he had
the misfortune of finding pocket queens
against Chris Ferguson's aces. About two
hours later, Dannenmann (pocket eights)
and 2005 WSOP Champion Joseph
Hachem (pocket queens) both got all of
their money into the middle in a threeway pot with Daniel Negreanu, whose
Ad-Qc looked to be an underdog.
Negreanu spiked an ace on the flop,
however, and it held up to knock both of
his opponents out of the tournament.
Combine Negreanu's immense skill
with a better-than-average run of luck,
and you are probably looking at the most
dangerous poker player on the planet.
"Kid Poker would single-handedly
dispatch nearly a third of the players
II
eliminated on the first day, including
crowd favorite Sarah Strom. After
Negreanu opened with a raise, Strom, an
amateur who won a sponsor exemption
through a Quiznos promotion, pushed all
in with Ah-Qh and a short-stack. The pot
odds pretty much demanded that the
somewhat embarrassed Negreanu call
with his Sh-2h. "I'm sorry," he joked as
he turned over his cards. "I have a
straight." Less than a minute later, an
even more embarrassed (but bizarrely
prescient) Negreanu was hugging Strom
goodbye, having flopped 6-4-3 for the
nut straight.
Poetic justice? Negreanu-who,
last
year, was one of the more vocal critics of
the tournament's
sponsor exemption
policy - would go on to eliminate yet
another sponsor-selected opponent, Mike
O'Malley, shortly after the dinner break.
Let the record show that Negreanu
earned his way into the tournament
the
hard way, winning the 2006 WSOP
Circuit Event in Tunica.
Despite the hot streak, Negreanu
would still finish the day second in chips
to Andrew Black; the Irish poker
pro/Buddhist monk was even hotter,
building a stack of nearly $100,000 in
chips, more than twice as many as
Negreanu, and almost four times as many
as the third-place contender, Sweden's
Daniel Bergsdorf. If the lO-player final
table appeared to be listing to one side, it
was because Black and Negreanu, placed
side by side in Seats Five and Six, controlled
around half of the chips in play.
The severe chip imbalance, left as is,
would have made for a short final day.
The average stack was about $27,000,
while blinds had increased to
$2,000/$4,000 with $500 antes, meaning
that everyone who wasn't Black or
Negreanu was in immediate danger of
elimination. Hoping to stretch out the day,
the players and organizers agreed to add a
zero to the end of each of the finalists'
chip counts at the start of the second day:
Seat One
Kido Pham
Seat Two
Chris Ferguson
Seat Three
Darrell Dicken
Seat Four
Mike Matusow
Seat Five
Daniel Negreanu
Seat Six
Andrew
Seat Seven
Mike Sexton
Black
Seat Eight
Gus Hansen
Seat Nine
Chris Reslock
Seat Ten
Daniel Bergsdorf
$238,000
$166,000
$154,000
$213,000
$443,000
$942,000
$161,000
$74,000
$64,000
$245,000
Only nine players would make the
money. The unlucky 10th turned out to
be Gus Hansen, who, about 20 minutes
after play resumed at 2 p.m. on June 26,
lost with A-K against the unstoppable Black
and his pocket nines. Negreanu managed
to keep pace, flopping yet another nut
straight against Bergsdorf's pocket kings
to reduce the field to eight players. It
seemed that Black and Negreanu were
destined for a massive showdown.
The inevitable took less than four
hours to arrive. Black, riding high after
eliminating Kido Pham in eighth place,
decided his A-K was good enough to
open the betting at $45,000. Negreanu reraised, Black came over the top with all of
his chips, and, suddenly, the two biggest
stacks were battling for more than half
the chips on the table. This time, however,
Negreanu actually had a hand-two
black
kings-that
held up to reduce Black's
stack to a shadow of its former glory. He
would hang around for another couple of
hours, outlasting Ferguson and Darrell
"Gigabet" Dicken, before running into
another pair of kings, this time belonging
to Matusow. Black, once seemingly
unbeatable, was out in fifth place.
Shortly after 9 p.m., WSOP Circuit
Atlantic City winner Chris Reslock busted
out in fourth place, leaving the ecstatic
TOC organizers, for the second year
running, with a trio of outstanding players to battle for the title. Negreanu was
chip leader, with about $1.2-million, but
enjoyed only a small margin over popular
WPT host Sexton ($905,000). As might be
expected, Matusow ($400,000) did most
of the talking - WSO P media director
Nolan Dalla described their highly entertaining banter as a "modern day performance by poker's version of the Rat Pack" until about 11 p.m. After Negreanu made
a relatively small raise to $25,000, called
in turn by Sexton, Matusow decided to
take a shot at stealing the pot, moving
his remaining $200,000 or so into the
middle with A-4 offsuit. Negreanu folded,
but Sexton made an excellent decision to
call with pocket sevens, which held up to
win the showdown. "Mike played amazing poker," Matusow would readily confess.
"I've played against him a thousand
times. He made the right call. I am the
first to say I was defeated."
Given the matchup's aesthetic appealNegreanu and Sexton are two of the more
well-liked players in the game-one
might
have forgiven them for bringing the
night to an early end. After all, both men
were guaranteed at least $325,000 in prize
money, not a bad haul for a two-day
freeroll. And, as the clock approached
FINAL STANDINGS: One Champion, Nine Contenders
LasVegas, NV
LasVegas, NV
LasVegas, NV
Atlantic City, NJ
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Mike Sexton
Daniel Negreanu
Mike Matusow
Chris Reslock
Andrew Black
Darrell Dicken
Waterloo,
7.
Chris Ferguson
Pacific Palisades, CA
8.
9.
Kido Pham
Daniel Bergsdorf
10.
Gus Hansen
Dallas, TX
Umea, Sweden
Copenhagen, Denmark
Dublin, Ireland
IA
$1,000,000
$325,000
$250,000
$150,000
$100,000
$75,000
$50,000
$25,000
$25,000
$0
"Tocome back again all these years later and
win this tournament, especially against such
tremendous competition, really makes me proud."
midnight, both men were registered for
the "official" start to the World Series, a
$1,500 buy-in No-Limit event scheduled
to start in about 12 hours.
Instead, the two champions went at it
as if their lives depended on it. They
played nearly flawless poker for the next
6'12 hours, battling through more than
300 heads-up hands as the momentum
rocked back and forth. "It reminded me
of the scene in Rocky I or II," Negreanu
would later blog, "when Apollo Creed
and Stallone, they went at it real heavy
and then were, like, dead for six months.
I seriously felt like that's what me and
Mike were like at the end ... Once you're
in it that long, your emotions get tied to
it. There's no other way around it."
The pivotal hand wouldn't be played
until just before 6 a.m., when egreanu,
enjoying a slight chip lead, pushed all in,
having flopped four cards to a flush.
Sexton called with top pair and held on
to win. Just a few hands later, Sexton used
pocket aces to put an end to a final table
that took more than 16 hours to complete.
It was a sweet victory for a man who,
nearly a decade earlier, was a founding
father of the original Tournament of
Champions. "To come back again all
these years later and win this tournament, especially against such tremendous
competition, in addition to defeating a
great champion like Daniel Negreanu
after five hours, really makes me proud,"
Sexton announced. Adding to the feelgood atmosphere (for everyone except
the exhausted Negreanu, that is) was the
fact that Sexton had previously pledged
half his winnings to charity. He plans to
spread a cool half-million over five causes
ranging from injured war veterans to
underprivileged school kids.
It's too early to tell how Harrah's will
tweak next year's TOC, but it almost
certainly will undergo yet another reimagining-neither Sexton nor Negreanu
had the energy to play in the next day's
WSOP kickoff, while an exhausted
Matusow, who did decide to play, made a
very early exit. What is clear is that there
is something very special about this tournament, designed to select a champion
from among champions, as it builds
upon a growing reputation for prodUcing
some of the highest quality and most
entertaining poker of the year. ~