Heard the one about the poker player who made three flips in a row?
PokerOrg was on the scene last weekend when a - let’s call him ‘disgruntled’ - casino patron flipped over three tables in the middle of the $1,700 Main Event at WSOP Circuit Cherokee.
The news quickly caught the attention of the poker world, many of whom wondered if - with chips scattered all over the floor - it would ever be possible to reconstruct the stacks of every player at those three tables, or whether the tournament would need to be abandoned.
Here's the grim moment captured on camera.
In the end, tournament staff managed to get the stacks sorted in as little as two hours - a fact that surprised and delighted Matt Savage of WPT and the Tournament Directors Association, who described it as a nightmare.
‘Instant DQ, lifetime ban’ was Savage’s take, as shared with PokerOrg.
Now, PokerOrg’s own Content King, Chris ‘Lefty’ Land, has shared his eyewitness account of the incredible incident with the listeners of the Poker In The Ears Podcast.
Lefty right on the spot
If you’ve seen Lefty’s work for PokerOrg - or if you’ve encountered him at one of the many tour stops he covers for us - you’ll know he has a knack for being in just the right place at the right time.
And so it was during the WSOP Circuit Cherokee Main Event.
“This is the World Series of Poker Circuit event,” Lefty told podcast hosts James Hartigan and Joe ‘Stapes’ Stapleton’, “Cherokee is the stop. It's the one everybody wants to win.
“There were 65 players left in the main, they had just hit a 15-minute break and I was running through the field getting chip counts as the clock ticked down to zero. Players started leaving the tournament area, I had literally just stepped out of the row of tables after getting the last count and then I heard a TD just, like, screaming.
“I thought somebody was having a heart attack. Like, when I look up and I see a table flipping, my mind went to ‘somebody's having an episode, they're falling over and the table's going with them’. And then Miss Jessica, one of the tournament staff, started screaming, ‘Stop him!’, and right about that time a second table just lifts off the ground.
“And then, as I'm realising what's happening, the third table lifts up off the ground and goes flying as well.”
That was the moment captured and shared in the video above.
Who was the mystery table-flipper?
Pressed by Stapes and Hartigan for information on the cause of this mayhem, Lefty shares that he has the name of someone believed to be the perpetrator, but without being 100% certain it would be irresponsible to make it public.
But was it, as many assumed, an eliminated player from the Main Event looking to vent his frustration in a destructive, selfish way?
“He was not in the Main Event, to my knowledge, but our photographer Trevor had caught some images of him in a different tournament, a day or two prior.
“He had spoken to some people, a couple days prior, and I guess people just didn't make much of what he was saying. There were two or three separate people that he had told that God had told him to come and disrupt the Main Event because the building was full of sinners."
“One guy actually told me that he had played with this guy in one of the Main Events in Cherokee last year, and he had read his Bible at the table all day long, and only put it down when he was in a hand. And he’d spent the entire day telling everyone at the table that they were sinners.”
How did the tournament continue?
With 27 of the remaining 65 players having their chips scattered all over the floor, the idea that play could continue within a couple of hours must have been almost beyond reason. But that’s exactly what happened.
“There were discussions amongst players around the room that, like, they can't see a way where game integrity can be restored in a way where they can go forth with the event. There was the idea of a 65-way chop being floated. It would have been like $27,000 and change per person; sucks for the big stacks, pretty good for the shorties, but they just weren't sure what was going to happen."
“They did incredible with what can only be described as a really unfortunate and unforeseeable situation. They took the time to get with every single player affected and get what they believed or knew their stack to be, and then they spent close to two hours cross-referencing that with all of the surveillance footage that they had, and reconstructing the stacks in a way that made the players in the tournament feel good about continuing.
“That's huge. I think they crushed it. There's absolutely no way to prepare for it and they really did awesome.”
Was the table-flipper arrested?
“I could not get a tournament staff or director to explicitly tell me that he had been arrested," says Lefty.
“One of the unfortunate things about this entire situation was just, during the melee... they let the guy walk out the front door. I do believe that he was caught. They had what they believed to be his name, they had images, and they were looking to file charges of some kind for sure.”
You can check out Lefty’s full appearance on Poker In The Ears Podcast now, with the episode available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
