Live Or Memorex? (full)

Read this first
Read this second

Did that "East Coast-West Coast" angle make sense to anyone? Biggie-Tupac this ain't. And the whole "East Coast fans appreciating the nuances of the game" thing is funny now that you know about the partially coordinated audience. (Though in Lon and Norman's defense, I'm not sure they knew that was going on beforehand. They might have been told in post-production. "Yeah, that side of the room's gonna clap for no real reason. Just go with it.") Lederer actually looked annoyed/confused by the cheering. He had this look on his face at one point like "What the hell is going on over there?"

There wasn't a bad beat in the tournament worse than the one that took Lederer out.

On the "Huck Seed bluffs himself out of the tournament" hand: I first got there in the middle of this hand, so I'm not sure if Huck was in one of the blinds or not, but D'Agostino led with bets twice after he paired his queen on the flop... sitting there with 9-6 and no pair or draw, at some point you have to think you're beaten, right?

The cut to the final 18 was weird and possibly inaccurately edited -- I could have sworn White's elimination (in the main room) came before Greenberg's. Ah, well.

This last group of nine makes me wonder if there's anything like home court advantage in poker -- I found out that several of those guys play in A.C. and at the Taj semi-regularly.

All right... Hoyt's 7-8 offsuit all-in bluff. 'Cause that's what it was, a plan to steal the blinds for some free cash since everyone else had folded to him (the blinds were, I think, 12k and 24k at this point). D"Agostino calls and turns over his 10s and we're all thinking, "Well, that's pretty much it."

Then that flop hit. The TV didn't do the crowd reaction justice -- there was a "Whoaaaaa!" with a definite undercurrent of "Oh, shit" accompanying it.

Another thing you don't hear when you're sitting there live is the chatter at the table. We couldn't hear Cassidy talking himself into folding on the next-to-last hand. They also mercifully edited that down -- he was standing there thinking for a good three to four minutes before he gave it up. It was odd to watch and try to figure out... I sensed Cassidy was beaten, but I couldn't put Aglialoro on a hand that was all that great. And ESPN's graphics people screwed up -- they put the 4 of hearts on the display on the river when you could plainly see it was the 4 of spades.