Yesterday in the poker room of the Landing Casino, Shinhwa World, Jeju, the organisers of the Triton Poker High Roller Series laid on a reception to welcome the elite of the world game to these luxurious surroundings. There was champagne and orange juice, and chocolate desserts fashioned into the Triton logo. There was a boozy kick at the bottom.
There was also a gathering of poker players so talented that we all earned 500 GPI rankings points just by standing in the same room. They mingled, flutes in hand, and listened to warm, welcoming speeches from Triton co-founder Richard Yong, and Tournament Director Luca Vivaldi, then either retook their seats in the $500K short-deck event, or vanished off into the resort in the hunt for food, entertainment or sleep.
It wasn’t until today that something fairly significant dawned on us. A lot of those poker players weren’t actually playing poker. While short-deck hold’em is clearly growing massively in popularity, plenty of the pros don’t yet want to get involved. All of Steve O’Dwyer, Timothy Adams, John Cynn, Christoph Vogelsang, Jimmy Guerrero, Nick Petrangelo and Henrik Hecklen have been in Jeju for more than 24 hours, and a lot of them came to the reception, but they didn’t register for a tournament on the festival’s opening two days. In other words, they skipped the events played with 36-card decks.
Matthias Eibinger, the Austrian sensation, might be one of the hottest properties in world poker at the moment, but he also admitted earlier today that short-deck wasn’t yet something he wanted to play. He said he had spent only about five minutes looking at the strategy and found it difficult to decipher. He made a shrewd move to sit out for now. However, Eibinger settled into one of the leather chairs alongside the feature table this afternoon and prepared for the start of Event #3 — Six-Max Hold’em, with a regular 52-card deck.
The tournament got under way a little after 4pm, and Eibinger was joined by all of O’Dwyer, Adams, Vogelsang, Petrangelo and Hecklen, and soon enough other tournament superstars including Dominik Nitsche, Dan Smith and Erik Seidel settled in. This is a HK$500,000 buy-in event (US$64,000 approx) and there’s now a shot-clock in play as well.
With 40-minute levels and unlimited re-entries until the start of Level 9, there’s every likelihood that this field will grow to match the size of previous events, which will mean another couple of million US dollars in the prize pool. All of that will be decided over the coming few hours.