Some Pictures While Working the WSOP 2010

Posted by icemonkey9 on Jul 12, 2010 in wsop | 1 comment

While working at the WSOP 2010 I had a lot of pictures taken. Most of which are for use exclusively at PND, but I grabbed a few that had me in them, so I will share those with you here on my blog. Enjoy! (You can click on the pictures to enlarge them)

That is Ali Nejad, you might recognize him as host of the NBC Heads Up World Championship and other broadcasts. The guy does a top notch job and is a very nice guy on top of that.

I interviewed Annie Duke and Don Cheadle at the Ante Up for Africa WSOP event. Don said about 10 words the entire time on the red carpet ... that is until he got to me. I think he and I connected; he's a cerebral guy who thinks a lot, but when I asked specific questions (i.e. not the same 5 they had been asked already by 14 different reporters) he really opened up.

You know this guy, Phil Hellmuth, for his ridiculous entrances. I got to interview him afterwards at the UB Suite and he was in real good spirits. I figured he was actually in line for another Main Event deep run, but he didn't last the day. That's poker!

This is WSOP Tournament Director Jack Effel. He pretty much has the toughest job at the WSOP when it's running (the other person might be their head of PR Seth Palanksy) and was able to take 5 minutes with us right after he did his "Shuffle Up and Deal" speech on Day 1A. Nice guy, smart guy, good interview.

I would never call anyone I've interviewed or ran into a dozen times "a friend" I would say that Joe Cada became a very strong acquaintance during this past trip. Joe's a great guy, obviously very young, but really loves poker and enjoys to play. We talked at the PokerStars cocktail party about his cash game past and he told me about grinding Heads Up for 3 years.

I got to interview Joe Sebok and we did it right in front of the UB Suite. He was just standing there and nobody noticed him so we did our interview. As *SOON* as we started taping and I started interviewing him about 500 people stopped to take pictures of us. It was really funny but the WSOP PR people were uber-pissed because we apparently weren't allowed to shoot in the hallway (contrary to what I was told by a co-worker). Anyways we didn't get in too much trouble and Joe's a great guy so the interview will hopefully come together well.

Nolan Dalla is an old-school poker journalist and writer, and authored Stu Ungar's biography, "One of a Kind" which I highly recommend to all poker people. I talked with him at the WSOP (he's working for their website this year) about the new and the old and we did talk about Stu a bit too. Nolan is the stone cold nuts in terms of being a nice guy to other people in the industry.

Finally, this is Tiffany Michelle who was doing the same job I do basically (well, about 33% of what I do) just 2 years ago before a sick run in the WSOP Main Event. I've written before how she's gotten a bad rap from her exploits from the ESPN broadcast (admittedly she did some dumb stuff) but overall she's a very nice person and a lot of fun to hang out with.