Casino Planet Cash

Today my review of Paul “Dr. Pauly” McGuire’s Lost Vegas appeared over on the Betfair Poker site. For those of you who haven’t picked up a copy yet, check out the review to learn what the book covers and my overall take.

Book reviews are always a bit challenging to write, for a variety of reasons. One problem I always end up facing is having to choose between several different points I want to make about the book. That is, I can’t reasonably share every little response or observation I might have had while reading the sucker, so I have to be selective and often end up setting aside certain points in order to keep the review at a manageable length.

One point about Pauly’s book I had written down but didn’t end up including in the review regarded his account of the 2005 WSOP, in particular his description of Binion’s Horseshoe where the Main Event was concluded — the last time the WSOP was played there.

As is the case throughout Lost Vegas, Pauly doesn’t shy away from telling it like it is when it comes to describing Binion’s, noting how the place had deteriorated by then into a less than desirable destination for anyone traveling to Vegas, let alone for the WSOP.

However, as Pauly notes, “What Binion’s lacked in class, it made up for in character.” Here Pauly ends up writing a nifty little elegy to the Horseshoe, a tribute of sorts to the birthplace of the WSOP focusing on the moment the WSOP left it for good. Rather than go on at length here, I’ll let those of you who have picked up the book read what Pauly has to say about how “Benny’s Bullpen was a post-modern version of the Roman Coliseum where gladiators fought to the death.”

Like I say, I ended up leaving that comment about Pauly’s discussion of Binion’s out of my review. I was thinking about it again this morning, though, as I read some of the rumors about Harrah’s having finally sold the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino.

Some are saying the deal has been done, and thus the WSOP will necessarily be looking for a new home in 2011. Pokerati’s short blurb about the sale a couple of days ago appears to have gotten the rumor mill churning in earnest this week. However, the official word from the WSOP appears to be that as far as its concerned the Rio remains a Harrah’s property and thus plans for the 2011 WSOP — at the Rio — continue to proceed.

Actually, rumors about the WSOP leaving the Rio began back in the spring, and there was a lot of talk this summer about where it might possibly go. When I interviewed Nolan Dalla, the WSOP Media Director, for Betfair last month, I asked him about the rumors, knowing full well that even if he knew anything he wouldn’t be able to tell me one way or the other what was up.

Dalla’s answer to me was nevertheless forthright. He said to me that “anybody who thinks they know the answer to that question [then, in early July] doesn’t know what they are talking about.” He added that the issue would be examined by Harrah’s soon after the WSOP concluded, but that “those discussions really haven’t started that much yet.”

Whatever happens with the WSOP in 2011, I think it is interesting to compare what people are saying about the WSOP perhaps leaving the Rio with the often nostalgia-tinged sentiments expressed back in 2005 when the Series left Binion’s.

Of course, for me the WSOP and the Rio will always be closely associated, given that I’ve never had the chance to see it played anywhere else. I haven’t any particular fondness for the place, but it has seemed to me a suitable enough location to accommodate the spectacle the WSOP has currently become.

Will be curious, though, to see what happens next for the WSOP. And — if it does leave the Rio — what sort of “elegies” (if any) will be written about the WSOP during the Rio years.

Had a fun weekend with Vera Valmore at a horse show. It was a lot of fun to get away and be off the “grid” for a couple of days.

I’ve written before about how Vera competes in dressage, that equestrian sport that involves training a horse to perform various gaits and movements — e.g., walk, trot, canter, passage, piaffe, pirouette, etc. Sometimes dressage gets referred to as “horse ballet” or compared to gymnastics, although the judging (in my opinion), while necessarily subjective, is much more heavily technique-based. (That’s a diagram of a dressage ring, by the way.)

Vera had a couple of nice rides this weekend, although her competitiveness and drive necessarily caused her to think she could have done better. We were at the show with some other riders, one of whom did particularly well in her two rides, netting a couple of high scores and first-place finishes in her classes. After her first ride, our friend came away expressing surprise that she had scored so well.

“It’s such a crapshoot,” she said, although I think she was being mostly humble.

Like I say, the scoring is somewhat subjective — it has to be, to some extent. But I do think that since the scoring is so carefully managed by a detailed score sheet on which judges mark the quality of every prescribed movement in a given ride, it really isn’t as much of a “crapshoot” as is the case in other kinds of competition.

That said, like in poker, there is definitely a “chance” element that can have something to do with how riders end up doing. At this particular event, one of the rings in which riders rode was unfortunately close to a nearby highway. Thus would the passing of a loud truck or some other traffic noise potentially startle the horses, and thus perhaps negatively affect a ride. Even just a stray rock stepped on by the horse during a ride can upset things in a significant way.

We were all talking at the show at one point when someone mentioned poker. I had brought some cards and a chip set, and eventually had fun teaching one of the other husbands there how to play no-limit hold’em. Without knowing what I’ve been up to this summer or over the last few years, the woman who had had the good rides then mentioned how her employer had gone to Las Vegas recently.

“Yeah, he played in this… what was it? World Series or something? World Series of Poker?”

I laughed and nodded. Did he play in the Main Event, I asked? She wasn’t sure. Was it a $10,000 buy-in event? Yes, it was. Indeed, he’d played in the ME, busting on one of the Day Ones.

I told her how I’d been there reporting on the Series, and while I didn’t recognize her employer’s name from the thousands who’d played the ME, I told her how he and I may very well have crossed paths at some point when he was there.

She went on to say how her understanding was that he is a very good player, although his credentials primarily consisted of his being a card counter. “He was even banned from one of the casinos because he was so good,” she said. I didn’t explain how card counting wasn’t so relevant in poker, but assumed that indeed the fellow probably had at least some acumen when it came to poker.

“Small world,” I thought, additionally considering how people from all sorts of backgrounds and locations go to Las Vegas each summer expressly to compete in the WSOP Main Event.

On the way home, I chatted some with the fellow to whom I had taught hold’em this weekend about how the ME worked. He was surprised to learn that only the top 10% of finishers got paid.

“Kind of like buying a lottery ticket, huh?” he asked, and I had to agree that in some respects it was. Though I did go on to explain that while one did probably have to get lucky to get all of the way to the final table and the millions of dollars waiting there, like with dressage, it wasn’t quite right to call it a complete “crapshoot.”

Then again, I guess just about anything — especially any competitive endeavor — could be regarded as a “crapshoot,” depending on one’s perspective.

Home at last. After seven-and-a-half weeks away watching other people play poker, I have finally returned to my home on the east coast of the United States. Most of that period was spent in the Nevada desert, where the temperatures outside were exceeding 110°F (43°C) by the time I left last weekend. Of course, for the most part I was inside the sometimes frigid Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino, helping cover the 41st Annual World Series of Poker for PokerNews.

I’ve come home with a lot of memories from the 2010 WSOP. One of them is pictured above — the moment the cash bubble burst in the Main Event, when the Amazon room was filled with raucous shouting and cheers. That moment is always one of the most exciting of the summer.

I thought it would fun as a kind of WSOP postscript to share ten memories from my summer in Vegas — all specific moments which kind of stand out as I think back on the experience of helping report on the Series.

1. The first event I helped cover was Event No. 3, the first of six open-field $1,000 no-limit hold’em events. The field for that first one ended up being the largest in the entire WSOP save the Main Event — 4,345 runners in all. The witty Danafish was my blogging partner for those first couple of days, and I remember asking her at some point early on for an estimate on how many players had shown up. Her deadpanned reply came without hesitation: “One million.”

2. Event No. 17, the $5,000 No-Limit Hold’em event, attracted a star-studded field, including one table featuring Brandon Adams, Shannon Elizabeth, Dan Heimiller, Phil Hellmuth, Chris Ferguson, and David Williams. I happened to be watching the table when a big hand developed that involved Heimiller, Hellmuth, Ferguson, and Williams. During the hand, Elizabeth snapped a photo of her tablemates and sent it out on Twitter. I noticed later I was in the picture, and joked with my colleagues that the American Pie star was taking pictures of me reporting.

3. Event No. 19, the $10,000 Deuce-to-Seven Draw Championship (No-Limit), also attracted quite a few well-known pros. On Day 1, I watched a funny hand between Chris “Jesus” Ferguson and Andy Bloch. Ferguson opened with a raise from the cutoff seat, and only Bloch called from the big blind. Bloch then drew two cards, while Ferguson stood pat. Bloch then bet, at which point Ferguson folded his hand face up — quad fours! Ferguson and Bloch — well known for their mathematical minds — shared a good laugh at the sight of Ferguson’s statistically improbable hand.

4. I helped cover Event No. 22, the $1,000 buy-in Ladies Hold’em Championship, although I didn’t join the coverage until Day 2. That meant I’d missed a lot of the brouhaha that happened on the first day when about a dozen men entered the event. Before the final table, WSOP Media Director Nolan Dalla (whom I interviewed here a couple of weeks ago), said a few words about the history of the Ladies Event at the WSOP, adding that “The WSOP will always support the ladies poker championship. The ladies deserve their day.” His declaration was met with applause, and while the Ladies event will surely continue to draw controversy, I thought it significant that Dalla made the statement he did.

5. Day 3 of Event No. 35, the $10,000 Heads Up No-Limit Hold’em Championship, was supposed to be the last day of the event. The final round — which was best two out of three — didn’t start until around 11 p.m., and the first match between Ayaz Mahmood and Ernst Schmejkal was still going more than six hours after it had begun. By that point the sun had risen, and the players and tourney officials were debating whether to continue with the second match right after or come back later in the day. My blogging partner Tim and I were exhausted — we’d been at it for something like 16 hours. Schmejkal was ready to go ahead and reschedule the second match, but Mahmood wanted assurance that it wouldn’t start until 7 p.m. “If we can’t do seven, I want to play now,” said Mahmood. Tim and I looked at each other in horror. Thankfully seven did work, and our long day-slash-night-slash-day finally concluded shortly thereafter.

6. I reported on Event No. 39, the $1,500 No-Limit Hold’em Shootout, in which Annette Obrestad won her first two tables and thus made it to the final day. I was intrigued to watch Obrestad play, having only seen her on television before this summer — indeed, I’ll admit to have been a little starstruck when watching that first hand or two of hers, something I haven’t experienced at the WSOP in a long time.

7. I had the chance to cover Event No. 44, the $2,500 Mixed Hold’em event in which Gavin Smith won his first WSOP bracelet. Smith cut an interesting figure at that final table, wearing a sport jacket, a fedora, and eyeglasses. There was a seriousness about him that seemed a bit different from the usual happy-go-lucky persona we have seen in the past from “the Caveman.” I remember at one point Smith won a hand and his friend Layne Flack shouted “Winning never gets old, does it?” from the stands. Smith had a reply: “Yeah, but sometimes it gets hard to remember.” He smiled a moment more, but then was back to business. It was clear he wasn’t going to indulge in a lot of extracurricular activity on that day, and I suppose one has to conclude his focus served him well.

8. I helped cover Event No. 54, the last those $1,000 no-limit hold’em events, at which there occurred something quite unique. As is usually the case, late registrants were seated together at newly-opened tables, and at one of the tables were sat no less than five players with WSOP bracelets. Not only that, they had a whopping 16 bracelets between them — Layne Flack (six), Chris Ferguson (five), Tom Schneider (two), Ryan Hughes (two), and Gavin Smith (one). “What are the odds of this at a $1K event?” asked Schneider.

9. On Day 1d of Event No. 57, the $10,000 No-Limit Hold’em Championship (a.k.a., the Main Event), I was there helping report on the action when a fellow leaned over the rail and began asking me questions about the prize pool, the average stack size, and so forth. He wanted to know what sort of stack would guarantee a person reaching the money. His questions became more and more specific; for example, he wanted me to assess what sort of shape a player would be in if he had ended Day 1 with 94,000 chips. Then I finally realized — he had played Day 1a, and was asking about his own situation! Then came the funniest part of our conversation. “Do you think I should play tight?” he asked. While I tried to answer all of his other questions as well as I could, I didn’t presume to advise him on that one.

10. One last story from Event No. 57 (the Main Event), an especially strange hand from Day 2a involving Chris Moneymaker and Bryan Pellegrino. While all of the other players had already left for dinner break, Moneymaker and Pellgrino had reached the river on a hand in which Pellegrino was sitting motionless while the 2003 Main Event champ stood and wandered about, appearing as though he were waiting for Pellegrino to decide how to respond to Moneymaker’s river bet. Finally, after more than ten minutes, Moneymaker said somewhat reluctantly that he was going to have to call the clock. That’s when Pellegrino explained that he had already reraised all in, and was waiting for Moneymaker to act! A pretty strange scene. Moneymaker would eventually bust shy of the cash, but Pellegrino made a deep run, finishing 143rd.

Of course, there were more moments along the way that stand out, including several from the Main Event. And there will be still more come November when the final table resumes. Such is the case every summer at the World Series of Poker!

“People are playing for their lives.”

Poker pro Tom Schneider said this to me over Sports Deli burgers at the Rio a couple of nights back. I first met Tom three years ago, just before he went on to win two WSOP bracelets and earn the WSOP Player of the Year title in 2007. He’s one of a growing number of players whom I’ve gotten to know over the last few years. Tom’s a funny, thoughtful guy whose book Oops! I Won Too Much Money is a good introduction both to his sense of humor and his insight.

Most would say Schneider has had a successful WSOP in 2010, having cashed four times in preliminary events. But Schneider knows that hasn’t been enough. For most pros like him who play lots of events, it really takes more than just earning a few relatively small cashes to offset buy-ins and expenses. “Have a bad WSOP and you really have a bad year,” he explained to me, highlighting the importance of these many tournaments piled on top of one another over the last five weeks.

Schneider could be forgiven for having been a little down about poker during our dinner. Just a couple of hours before, he’d been eliminated from the event I was covering, the last of the $1,000 buy-in no-limit hold’em tourneys (Event No. 54). I’d actually had just happened to see his bustout hand from beginning to end, and had thus been able to report it over at PokerNews.

They had reached Level 5, the last level before the antes kick in, and Schneider was sitting on a little less than the starting stack. He had opened with a raise from middle position, and the player on the button reraised. I stood off to the side — in fact Tom told me he didn’t even realize I’d been there — and watched as it folded back to him. He paused a beat and said he was all in, exhaling the announcement in a way that made it seem like he wasn’t too happy to be getting his chips in here, but that he didn’t see he had any alternative available to him.

His opponent snap-called, and Schneider flipped over two black aces, getting a small reaction from the rest of the table. His opponent had two red jacks. But then the dealer delivered four hearts among the community cards, giving Schneider’s opponent a flush and sending him out of the event.

“That’s kind of how the whole Series has been for me,” said Schneider of the hand afterwards. He has a favorite saying he sometimes uses which seemed to apply here quite readily: “No good deed goes unpunished.”

Poker is hard enough, but the chance element further challenges those who play the game well yet find themselves not being rewarded for doing so. Which happens. A lot. And in fact, there are more and more players playing well these days, much more than even just three years ago when Schneider won his bracelets and the WSOP POY.

But that general increase in the number of skilled players isn’t what Schneider was referring to when he said players were “playing for their lives.” He was referring to the poorer economy and the fact that many players are essentially now playing with their “case money” with no margin for error. Gone (for the most part) are the rich whales playing for fun and without much care about losing their buy-ins. The relative “stakes” are higher for everyone, it seems, whether the buy-in is $1,000 or $10,000.

I was back on Event No. 54 last night for Day 1b where I had an interesting interaction with one of the players which kind of reminded me of what Tom had said. We were getting close to the end of play, and he wanted to know both where he stood chip-wise versus the field as well as what the payouts were.

I showed him what those making the final table stood to make (from $570,960 for first down to $45,286 for ninth). Then I showed him what the minimum cash was ($1,868). Then he wanted to me to scroll back up to the range where he said he “needed” to finish. We got back up to the top 54 and that was where he said he had to get.

I looked at him and he confessed why it was he needed to come away from this $1,000 buy-in event with at least a $9,000 score. “I have to offset what I lost at craps,” he said with a mischievous grin.

Schneider doesn’t have that craps problem to add stress to his efforts at the WSOP. But he is struggling to break even here, as are so many other players. Indeed, for many the idea of breaking even has long been essentially abandoned, with only a deep Main Event run making that even possible.

Schneider did just that last summer, finishing 52nd in the ME and thereby making up for an otherwise not-so-hot WSOP (he’d just one small cash prior to the Main Event last year). I’ll be pulling for him and a lot of other folks next week when The Big One finally gets underway. Though I know it’ll be tough for all, given that everyone is fighting so hard. And the way good deeds (or plays) tend to get punished now and then.

Meanwhile, I’ll be back on Day 2 of Event No. 54 today, when the cash bubble will burst and the fight for bigger rewards will continue. Follow that one as well as the other final preliminary bracelet events (plus the Ante Up for Africa charity tourney) over at PokerNews’ live reporting.

Oh yes, it’s this Thursday.

The 2010 NBA Draft is this Thursday and the great amount of talent and depth this year could make the NBA Draft surprising and unpredictable.

We all know John Wall SHOULD go no.1 overall. After he gets drafted, everybody else can either go no.2. On that note, here are just some of the bright young talents out there who can make an impact for any NBA team once the season gets going again.

First we have Evan Turner, a 6-7 junior swingman from Ohio State. The scout who is skeptical of Wall believes Turner should be ranked as his peer. “Wall and Turner are Nos. 1 and 1a. Turner is going to be an All-Star. I have great faith in that. His size, his approach, his style of game — all are suited to the pros.”

“You can see he’s a guy who enjoys playing,” the scout continued. “His ability to improve his shooting will control his greatness. He’s like Oscar Robertson. He can have that type of impact. Oscar wasn’t a guy people worried about when he went behind the pick and launched the bomb — you almost preferred him to do that — and that’s how it is with Turner.”

Next we have Wesley Johnson, the 6-7 junior forward from Syracuse. “Wesley Johnson has been the surprise of the year,” one scout said. “He has a lot going for him — size, skills — and he’s the reason behind Syracuse’s 18-1 season. He has the potential to be very special, and I’m told he has a good basketball mind. At the end of the day, he can be a 20-point scorer, a good rebounder and a passer.”

“He’s probably the best athlete in the draft,” a team executive…

photo by flipchip • lasvegasvegas.com

Be there for Annie Duke’s charity poker tournament to benefit After-School All-Stars at the Commerce Casino on Thursday, May 20th starting at 6:30PM. California Governor Schwarzenegger’s After-School All-Stars is a nonprofit organization for at-risk youth.

Take the time to help out this cause for some kids that deserve all the help they get. Make a difference in the future of these young lives with participation in this event. Entries are $250 per player with $100 re-buys and $75 for non-players. All proceeds go to After-School All-Stars.

While you’re feeling good about yourself you will be rubbing shoulders with some of poker’s royalty mixed up with a generous slate of Hollywood stars. Maybe you’ll get lucky and walk away with a $10K WSOP Main Event seat. You could ride away on you very own Segway personal transporter or play away on a Scott Ian (Anthrax) signed Jackson guitar. Registration begins at 6:30 pm at Commerce Casino in Los Angeles, CA.

Don’t miss this opportunity to mingle with the beautiful people. Where else can you be a part of the fast lane crowd for a low, low $250?

Hope to see you there.

photo by flipchip • lasvegasvegas.com

photo by flipchip • lasvegasvegas.com

The world’s biggest betting exchange has broken the 3 million mark for registered customers this week. Read on to find out what could be done with 3 million people in some of the world’s favourite sporting venues.

You’ve no doubt heard by now that Liv Boeree took down that European Poker Tour San Remo event yesterday, coming out on top of a huge field of 1,240 players to claim the €1,250,000 first prize. Lot of folks excited about it. Boeree becomes the third woman to win an EPT Main Event, following Vicky Coren (EPT London 2006) and Sandra Naujoks (EPT Dortmund 2009).

Boeree’s win also comes on the heels of Vanessa Selbst’s NAPT Mohegan Sun victory less than two weeks ago. And a month before that, Annie Duke took down the NBC National Heads Up Poker Championship — not an “open” event, but still one in which men had only prevailed in the past.

Some object to assigning too much importance to women winning events such as these, arguing that doing so reinforces the significance of a player’s sex and thus suggests another kind of inequality in the way one views women players as opposed to men.

There’s something to that argument, I suppose. But still, it is hard not to recognize the uniqueness of women succeeding in these big buy-in, “big bet” tourneys, especially given the small number of women entering them as compared to men.

By the way, even before Selbst’s win at the NAPT Mohegan Sun, Jen Newell and I chose the topic of women & no-limit hold’em tourneys for our April “He Said/She Said” columns over at Woman Poker Player. There we were separately responding to a chapter in James McManus’s Cowboys Full in which he offers a few thoughts about why men seem “biologically inclined to sign up for” NLHE tourneys.

As we were working on our articles, Selbst won her NAPT title, and so we both ended up making reference to her win. You can see what else we said about McManus’s ideers here: He Said / She Said.

Last week I also wrote a post here called “Women and the WSOP.” There I mentioned how even though 12 different women had won open WSOP events, none had done so in a NLHE event (aside from Annette Obrestad’s 2007 WSOPE Main Event title). In that post I included a list of women who had won WSOP bracelets in open events, with Vera Richmond being the first to do so back in 1982 in the $1,000 buy-in Ace-to-Five Draw event.

Curiously, when people discuss this topic many tend to overlook Richmond’s victory and cite Barbara Enright’s 1996 bracelet in the $2,500 pot-limit hold’em event as the first by a woman in an open-field WSOP tourney. In fact, when it comes to poker history, Richmond is probably better known not for her WSOP bracelet but for her involvement in that story in which Amarillo Slim Preston allegedly said he’d cut his own throat if a woman ever won the WSOP Main Event — another story the accuracy of which sometimes gets skewed.

According to the story, at the 1973 WSOP Main Event, Richmond — who according to this had to have been the first woman ever to play in the Main Event — enjoyed the chip lead for a time, and during a break took the opportunity to tell Preston she intended to win the sucker. Preston (the reigning champ) responded by telling Richmond that if she were to win the tourney, she could cut his throat with a “dull knife.”

The exchange later got retold in such a way as to suggest Preston had threatened to cut his own throat, and that his threat referred to any woman winning the event (not just Richmond). Preston himself later would exploit the apocryphal version of the story, such as in 2000 when both Annie Duke and Kathy Liebert made deep runs in the Main Event, as recounted by McManus in Positively Fifth Street.

(EDIT [added 1:00 p.m.]: Actually there are other problems with this story, including the fact that Richmond didn’t play in the 1973 event at all. Hat tip to Kevmath here, who points us to an article by Susie Isaacs that suggests Barbara Freer was the first woman to play in the WSOP ME in 1978.)

That was about all I recalled about Vera Richmond, too, other than the fact that she always gets described as a “brusque cosmetics heiress” in histories and on the web. There was, however, a reference to Richmond not too long ago on the Gamblers Book Shop podcast (episode 63, 3/19/2010).

There guest Linda Johnson — the third woman to win a WSOP in an open event (1997, $1,500 Razz) — noted how Richmond “never got credit for her win,” referring to what I mentioned earlier about how Enright tends to be more readily cited as the first woman to win an open WSOP event.

Host Howard Schwartz asked Johnson why that was the case. “Well, she wasn’t very popular,” answered Johnson. “She was kind of mean and nasty… spoke like a truck driver, and nobody liked her. And so when she won her event, she never got credit for it, which isn’t right because plenty of asshole men have won and they are in the record books.”

Kind of interesting — and not that surprising — how the story of the first woman to win a WSOP open event appears to involve ideas of traditional “gender roles” as well as (in the Amarillo Slim story) men showing some resistance to the idea of women playing and succeeding.

Times have changed, certainly. The general enthusiasm about Boeree’s win yesterday — from both men and women — is evidence of that.

*Editor’s note: Mitch the Intern is an NYU undergrad whose favorite Wednesday night pastime includes the TV in his dorm room, a green beanbag chair and two hits of acid. Enjoy.*

There’s punch drunk, which is a neurological affliction that affects your cognitive abilities and coherence after suffering repeated blows to the head, and then there’s punch intoxicated-like-a-white-trash-uncle-at-his-nephew’s-wedding-reception-in-the-trailer-park. Chuck Liddell is the latter.

“The Iceman” is so wasted, athletic commissions give him Breathalyzer tests before allowing him into locker rooms. He’s so wasted, he once mistook a hot dog cart for his car and got 15 miles down the highway before the police pulled him over and informed him of his mistake. He’s so wasted, he’s convinced “Dancing with the Stars” was a fight tournament in Japan.

In short, the man is pure comedy.

First, though, the TUFers are let loose upon their new temporary housing/prison/fishbowl/den of pranks and homoeroticism. Who designs this place? Dr. Seuss? Cypress Hill sprints to a bedroom to claim it but tumbles down a slide made of candy canes into a chocolate pond. Ronnie Kray (yes, the British gangster) picks the room with pictures of assorted fruit on the wall (“These snozzberries taste like snozzberries!”) and Fruit Striped Gum is trapped in a giant glass cube full of bubbles. Congrats, guys.

Then it’s time to pick the teams. Dana is present to flip the ceremonial “f-ing coin”, and coach Tito Ortiz ends up with the first choice. He picks people that mean nothing to us, as we’ve only seen bits and pieces of their fights and none of their training, and Liddell does the same, calling out garbled syllables and gesturing with his hand, even inviting the gym’s janitor, Nevada athletic commission honcho Keith Kizer and a SpikeTV boom operator to join in his cause.

“Is it me or did Chuck’s choices suck?” Dana says to Ortiz when the dust settles.

“I alternate between hating and badmouthing you and liking and respecting you depending upon the stage of my contract,” Ortiz replies.

“I know what I’m doing,” says Liddell, and he picks up a stationary exercise bike, carries it outside and attempts to ride it to the local store for a snack run.

Oh no! Fruit Striped Gum is all banged up from the fight that got him into the TUF House, and he may or may not have a torn rotator cuff, scurvy, scabies and potato famine. Hearing this, Ortiz jumps on his back – literally – and rides him – literally – to, I don’t know, motivate him to work through it? Come across like a douche? Get close to another man? Who knows.

It’s time for choosing the first fight, and as Ortiz got first pick of the fighters, Liddell gets to decide who gets into the Octagon. He chooses Crocodile Dundee versus the water fountain, a decision that leads to confusion. Eventually, Dana convinces him to pick someone else, so Liddell picks Fruit Striped Gum.

Back at the house and it’s prank time! Hawaii Five-O, Cypress Hill and Ronnie Kray! Air horns! In the middle of the night! Aggravated fighters standing around in their underwear, rubbing the sleep from their eyes and trying to act menacing! Somewhere an entire targeted demographic cheers.

It’s the next day and the doctor lays out Fruit Striped Gum’s MRI and talks about what he sees. “No damage to your rotator cuff, no damage to your muscle tissue, just fluid on your bones, a bad hairstyle and a flavor-stripe down your middle.”

Then we get some insight into Team Liddell’s Crocodile Dundee. Yes, he’s Australian, and apparently Australia is so small, everyone famous there is connected to everyone else. For instance, Crocodile Dundee used to be Steve “Crocodile Hunter” Irwin’s pool boy. He also used to be a roadie for Men at Work, and he once ate at the Outback Steakhouse. Small. Freakin’. World.

Lest we forget that there’s supposed to be some sort of drama between the coaches, Ortiz hangs a piñata that looks like Liddell. It’s tougher and can even fight better than Liddell, absorbing a number of blows to the cranium before going down for the count and being carried out on a stretcher.

Fight time, and Crocodile Dundee and Fruit Striped Gum circle, engage, and mix it up. Fruit Striped Gum quickly finds himself in a triangle choke, tapping out.

Post-fight and Fruit Striped Gum is dejected. Ortiz, ever the coach, pleads for him to join him on the mat for some drilling of the defense to triangle chokes. I guess it never occurred to Ortiz to teach his wards this stuff before their fights, eh?

Fade to black.

Well, that’s what most people think. (And what Frankie Edgar is hoping for, probably…)

Once again, BJ Penn is putting his UFC lightweight title up for grabs as he defends his belt again this time against Frankie Edgar in UFC 112. However, there are rumors that claim Penn is gearing up for another run at the welterweight title, leading most to believe that the reigning lightweight champ is not taking his challenger seriously.

However, while BJ Penn hasn’t denied the rumors of him moving up to welterweight, he says he’s not looking past Frankie Edgar. He knows how good of a fighter Edgar is and he can’t afford to take a guy of Edgar’s caliber lightly.

”Yeah, I think there is a possibility of that,” BJ Penn said in an interview, referring to a possible move to the welterweight division.

”I don’t in no way want to look past Frankie Edgar, he’s a good fighter. You never know what could happen. But if I go back to welterweight, maybe I’ll try to give it a run, maybe fight a couple of fights there, we’ll see how it goes.”

Oh yeah, and just when he said in his interview that he’s in no way looking past Frankie Edgar, he immediately went on about his chances against the large 170-pound fighters in the welterweight division like…