IT’S OVER!
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[Spoiler]Cada raises to 3 million. Moon reraises to 8 million. Cada pushes and Moon calls.
Joe Cada turns over 9c 9d.
Darvin Moon turns over Qd Jd.
Flop: 8c 2c 7s
Turn: Kh
River: 7c
Joe Cada becomes the youngest winner in Main Event history[/spoiler]
I haven’t heard anything about Cada being a douchebag. I heard Moon, on the other hand, had pretty much alienated every other person in the room by the end.
I meant to avoid any news of this until I could catch up on the hands, but there it was on the Yahoo splash page…
Another weird coincidence. Cada started heads-up play with a pocket pair of nines, diamonds and clubs, (and Lost the hand!!) and won the final hand with a pocket pair of nines, diamonds and clubs. (obviously winning that hand).
Congrats to Joe Cada! Another Young Gun!
Yeah, very weird for them to spoil it.
What a lucky guy!
Grrrrrrrrrrrrr. I hate ESPN. I TIVOed the fricking show tonight from 8 pm to 10 pm cst. Thats what the dang program guide said. Apparently they went over 30 minutes. Yes I know what happened, but dang, it is on tape delay. either edit it into the time alloted or expand your window.
I know, I will have 8,000 more opportunities to see it, but I was all set to see it tonight.
I hate ESPN.
Flipping a coin for millions of dollars is fun, in a weird way. 
It seems, from this poker neophyte’s perspective from the ESPN edit (I haven’t reviewed the hand-by-hand results) that luck ruled at the final table. Ivey and Shulman seemed to be, by far, the best players at the table, yet came up short by losing coin flips (or better), no? There’s no justification that anyone comes back from the position Cada was in to win other than “kid was ridiculously lucky”, right?
Remember that there were over 300 hands you DIDN’T see… Cada obviously played very, very well to be able to come back from that tiny stack to win. Of course, he got lucky several times. All of these players got lucky at some point or another, multiple times, in the tournament. (Heck, Moon got lucky constantly). Ivey and Shulman were the best players in that group…and another main event top 10 for both shows that. That’s extremely tough to do with this size of tournament, and they’ve both done it twice.
This was Cada’s third cash at the WSOP this year, though, so he’s got skills.
And, despite his young age, Cada is a pro…does this officially end the ‘no pros’ streak, or because he wasn’t (until now) a poker circuit pro, will they still push that an ‘established’ pro hasn’t won in a long time.
I watched it last night on ESPN. It finished at 3:30 in the morn. It was all about catching river cards. Guys went in with winners and came out losers. You can play perfectly well and lose. Moon is definitely not a great player , but man could he catch cards. The kid was doing it too. But that is the monkey wrench Hold-em has. You calculate the odds, do the right thing and you still could go home. But Moon gets 4.5 mill. Everybody at the last table made more than 1 mill.
No, what I’m saying is that almost all tournaments follow a general structure that pays out in a very top heavy fashion, but has the least amount of play available at the time when the bulk of the money is dished out.
Almost all tournaments are structured this way, but there can be degrees as to how bad or good within that context any given tournament can be. You can design a tournament to be a total crapshoot where your only options are push/fold preflop all the way through, and you can have tournaments where there’s at least some degree of play throughout.
I was commenting on the general crappy nature of tournaments, and you responded to say defend tournaments, implying the WSOP main event is an example of a bad tournament structure. But it isn’t - it’s about as slow and generous as any live tournament in the world. So it’s the shining example, and yet it’s still crap. Such is the nature of tournaments. They could, to some degree, fix this by having less play available in the earlier rounds and actually slow it down later when it really matters, but for some strange reason they desperately cling to this stupid structure.
Witness day 1 of the WSOP ME compared to the final table. In day one, any particular hand is not especially important given that there are thousands of players left still, and yet players often had several hundred times the blinds and hands that didn’t see post-flop betting are relatively rare. During the early stages of the game, some real poker is being played. No one is forced into simplistic push/fold moves. And yet, as I said, this is the least deterministic part of the tournament in terms of who is going to get the winnings.
Then you get to the final table, and you have people playing push/fold games with low pairs against some high cards. Very little meaningful poker is being played at this stage, and yet the vast majority of money is distributed here.
Pretty much every tournament follows this pattern, and it’s the biggest reason why they are just terrible stupid spectacles for the most part.
Speaking of which - there was some really terrible play on the final table this year. The structure was such that it wasn’t as desperate as everyone seemed to think it was. The blinds weren’t completely out of control relative to the average stack, and yet people were doing the sort of retarded moves you’d see on a $2 tournament online… open pushing 25BBs with a low pair from early position and just inexplicably stupid stuff like that. There was almost no interesting poker anywhere in the last 6 hours or so of coverage.
“Poker pro” in common parlance has never actually referred to people who play poker professionally, but rather “poker celebrities” - the people you’d recognize because you’ve seen them on ESPN and world poker tour and such. So if the 50 or so people you’ve seen regularly on TV don’t win it, then a “pro” doesn’t win it, even if the person who won plays poker professionally. It’s pretty silly. Several of the winners of the past decade have been pro or semi-pro, but they’re unknowns (until the win, obviously) - so the supposed no pro winning the ME streak continues.
My friend is married to Buchman’s cousin. I asked him what Buchman thought of the tourney and his finish, he said this (last paragraph is about Cada.):
"He has mixed feelings about his run - on the one hand, it was a fantastic experience (and the $2.5 million and possible sponsorship deal is nice); on the other hand, he was really close and didn’t make it happen, so he’s pretty disappointed about that. He’s played a lot of tournaments and made a good living at the game over the last 8-9 years, but he’s definitely hungry to get back to the November Nine again someday, obviously.
One additional thing about which he was bummed was that Cada ended up winning - Apparently he’s a prick, in contrast to basically everyone else at the table. Moon in particular is supposedly way cool."
It was crappy when every call Cada went over by his parents and buried his head in his dads chest and refused to look at the draw. Look at the damn cards. Play the game.
Helmuth had nothing but good things to say about Moon and praised his play highly. For whatever that’s worth.
I thought Moon was a gentleman at the table. In fact, it didn’t seem like anyone was a jerk. Apparently Shulman had a beef with Harrahs but he was gracious at the table. Cada is probably a little rough around the edges, understandable at age 21.