/ Short-Stacked Shamus / 02 July 2010 / Leave a comment

The grind continues here in Las Vegas. The final preliminary bracelet events of the 2010 World Series of Poker are now underway, and on Monday begins the big one -- the Main Event which will occupy us all for the next two weeks.

I'll be here through mid-July continuing to report on the Series for PokerNews. Over the course of the last few weeks, I've been assigned to help cover a number of different events, ranging from the low buy-in $1,000 no-limit hold'em tourneys that attract huge fields mostly comprised of amateurs to the "high roller" events like the $10,000 Deuce-to-Seven Draw Lowball Championship that only drew about 100 top level pros.

After watching so much poker, it sometimes feels like there is nothing that can possibly happen that one hasn't seen before. But truth be told, strange, unexpected things do happen. All the time, in fact.

Just yesterday I was covering an event in which a player noticed me by the table jotting down a hand that was taking place. When the hand was done, he called me over, saying "Hey, I got something for you."

I walked around and he said with a kind of pretend excitement, "This player went all in, and another one called, and one of them won!"

The players and I together laughed, and I actually had a ready comeback. "Really? The same thing happened on that table over there!"

His joke referred to the repetitive nature of these events, which for those of us reporting on them do sometimes give us that Groundhog Day-feeling that we've seen all of this time and time again. But in fact, his making the joke was itself kind of unusual -- one of those funny, unpredictable moments that'll come up to help make a day of tourney reporting more interesting.

Sometimes other unusual occurrences will arise that will stand out for having disrupted the usual routines. Players and dealers are human, and thus will make mistakes occasionally that can suddenly make an otherwise ordinary hand become something unique.

For instance, in that Deuce-to-Seven event I covered earlier there actually was one instance when a dealer delivered five cards to each player at the table, then proceeded to burn a card and deal out a flop. "Whoa, whoa!" said the players instantly, and all had to laugh at the misstep.

Yesterday at the $1,000 no-limit hold'em event I was covering, there was another example of a dealer making a highly unusual error. After dealing the turn, one player bet and another called. They tabled their cards, and the dealer proceeded to deal the river. Then the dealer burned another card and dealt a sixth street -- no shinola! -- which actually would've changed the outcome of the hand had it played.

"There are no ocean cards here," cracked a player, referring to a name sometimes given to the card following the "river" in home games with alternate rules.

Such mistakes are, of course, very rare -- indeed, I've never seen a sixth street before yesterday in three years of tourney reporting -- thereby making them all the more interesting when they do happen.

Player error can help create some unusual situations, too. I remember a no-limit hold'em hand from last year's WSOP in which a player limped from middle position, then the player on the button limped in as well. The small blind folded, then the big blind did something that didn't become clear to the players at the table until after the flop was dealt.

It checked to the button who made a bet, then the big blind pushed out a big check-raise. Surprisingly, the dealer pushed the bet back toward the player. "You don't have a hand," was his explanation. The big blind had mistakenly folded his hand prior to the flop -- they were already in the muck, in fact -- rather than just checked (as he surely intended to do). But none of the players, including the big blind, had realized it.

The table erupted in laughter at the player having check-raised with no cards at all! They also immediately began speculating as to whether he could've gotten the button to fold having (literally) been "betting with air."

Yesterday in the $1,000 no-limit hold'em event I was covering I saw another, perhaps less unusual player error result in an interesting hand, too. A player had opened from early position, then another had reraised all in. It folded around to a third player who said he was calling. Then, to his dismay, he realized he'd missed hearing the all-in reraise. He thought he was calling just a standard opening raise, but in fact he had just committed most of his stack!

It got worse -- the player to his left who had everyone covered reraised all in over the top! The original raiser folded, and our hero ended up having to call the few chips he had remaining, given that he'd already committed most of his stack.

One player had pocket jacks, and the fellow who'd shoved over the top had Ah-Kh. The player who had unwittingly become committed was fairly dejected at the sight of those two hands, as he held 9h-7h. But the board ended up bringing him a straight, and he tripled up!

As I say, the grind continues. But amid all of the sometimes mind-numbing routines there will surely be more strange but true moments as the last events finish and the Main Event gets underway.