Weblog Sin Pies

By Charley Daniels

I played in the World Poker Tour Celebrity Invitational Saturday and wrote about it for Hollywood Reporter’s Past Deadline blog here.

That little post doesn’t go into much detail about my personal experience at the tournament. I was planning to do more of writeup for this site at some point in the not-too-distant future. “Planning.”

Here’s the short version:

I hung out at the same party, pulling hors devours from the same trays, as some celebrities like Don Cheadle, Jennifer Tilly, James Woods, the guy who played “Donkey Lips” in Nickelodeon’s Salute Your Shorts, Corey Feldman, Montel Williams. The list goes on. More importantly, I was drinking beer delivered by the same cocktail servers as those drunk by poker players like Erick Lindgren, Gavin Smith, Amnon Filippi, Antonio Esfandiari, Daniel Alaei. The list goes on. Yes, me. Charley Daniels from Grants Pass, Orygun. Rubbing elbows, etc. I made eye contact with Norm Macdonald.

It was a cool night. My table was a little boring on the celebrity front. Best we could do was former Miss USA Shandi something-or-other (apparently she’s best known for her stint on Dancing With the Stars) and Andrew Firestone, who sat right next to me and said he was there because he was on “some reality show.” The topic came up because I asked him if he hangs at the Peet’s on Larchmont. He doesn’t. I see a lookalike there sometimes. Very nice guy. Firestone, not the guy who looks like him. Well, maybe that guy’s nice. I don’t know him like I now know Andy F. And I don’t judge him even though he was not only on The Bachelor, he was The Bachelor — or one of them at least. As Isabelle puts it, he was the only normal bachelor. That makes sense. In an Isabelle sort of way.

Bit of poker talk below the fold (this is my new way of saying “after the jump.” It’s newspaper jargon, even though “news” isn’t even on the list of things this site knows the definition of).

The $100,000 first prize was quite a motivator, but I could never get anything going. Hovered right around the 10,000 chip starting stack for most of the night. I started making some moves when the blinds got high, and had my stack up to about 18,000 at one point. That was the high point.

My knockout was pretty standard. Blinds and antes (and one botched ace-king hand) had chipped away, and by the second hand of the 500/1,000 blind level, I was sitting on about 9,500 in chips when I looked down at ace-ten offsuit. I was in the cutoff seat, one off the button, and there was one limper who had frequently flat called before the flop. I figured it was a good time to try to pick up the already sizable pot, and I declared myself all-in. I’d probably rather make this play with six-seven suited, or some such hand that isn’t as easily dominated by the calling ranges of my opponents, but I was getting desperate. Button folded, small blind folded — so far so good — but the big blind started thinking.

Ah hell, man, just fold. He asked for a count. The dealer told him how much the raise was. “I’m all in,” he said. That was disappointing. It got worse. The original limper called too and turned over a pair of jacks. The big blind had pocket tens. At least I had an overcard, so it wasn’t as bad as I assumed, but of course the limper flopped a set of jacks. There was another paint card in there, though, a king, so I had straight potential. A queen for the win! It didn’t come. I was eliminated with just under 200 people left out of the 420 who started.