The Ongoing Saga of Ellix Powers part 11

I finally got the call I had been waiting for yesterday around 1145 AM. Ellix’s backers had come through and he was playing in the 5000 dollar limit event. I told him I had work all day, but that I would swing by once I was done. I spent the entire time, other than the portion where I had chicken tenders for dinner because shit was good as shit, looking forward to seeing how much of his talk Ellix could really back up. I got to the Rio around 730PM, just as the event was going to a dinner break, and Ellix told me to meet him by the full tilt area.

When I got there, Ellix had just gone out of the full tilt hospitality suite to the hallway to smoke a cigarette, he was screaming to the documentary cameraman inside “Make sure nobody touches my food” as I arrived. We said our hellos and he told me he was sitting around 6-7 thousand in chips, but he hadn’t been able to make a strong move, because he just wasn’t hitting flops. He got a phone call, and I got a lot more information about the tournament by eavesdropping on his end of the conversation.

He was telling the guy on the other end what a tough table he had been at. He said he was sitting next to Phil Lack and that there were two other bracelet winners at the table. Then he said “TJ Courier came and sat down. We had TJ Courier, and he was about the fifth best player at the table. We busted him out. He tried some rookie shit. Tried to steal my blinds.” TJ Cloutier is considered by many to be the best tournament player in the country, and not only did Ellix seem to intentionally mispronounce his name, but he was dismissing him as though he was beneath Ellix. I hadn’t seen him this excitable since we met, and it was great to see him on top of his game.

The cameraman from the documentary named clay came out from the suite to talk with me and Ellix for a little bit, but Ellix first chastised him for not guarding the food. Clay went back inside and produced a plastic plate with literally 2 cheese cubes and a bread crust, which Ellix made him hold on to for the entire forty five minutes we sat there talking, before eventually discarding it.

Some hotshot in a full tilt jersey came by and said hi to Ellix, and they started laughing back and forth about tournament strategy. The second he walked away, Ellix leaned in and whispered “I made that man cry. He couldn’t take it had to get up from the table, I made the motherfucker cry.”

He had to be back at the table at 830 when the tournament restarted, so he was constantly asking people for the time. Clay asked him where his watch was, was he getting it fixed? Ellix responded “Mine’s getting fixed, getting fixed at the pawn shop. Shit, you see I aint got no gold. Mike Fetters got that. He got two pieces, shop in Reno got one. Vegas got one. You motherfuckers broke me living in LA.”

When asked how the tournament was going, he concentrated on the duration. 12 straight hours of poker, “Its brutal man, its fucking brutal. I can’t even feel my arm no more, I’m getting old, my shoulders hurt. I don’t even got a rotator cup no more, motherfucker is gone. Watch this, try to shake my hand.” He put his hand out, but couldn’t lift it above his waist so he brought over his other hand to give it a boost. “You see what the fuck I’m saying?”

Along the same lines he was talking about when they would stop the tournament for the night, since it was a three day affair. “Once it gets late enough, they gotta ask you if you want to keep playing. First motherfucking time they ask me, I’m saying fuck no. No way, no how, no kind. I’m not playing another two minutes, fuck no.”

He was saying that Johnny Chan and Phil Helmuth had been at the final table the night before, and I think Johnny ended up winning. The more interesting part of the story was him talking about Johnny having pocket queens against Phil’s ace king and Phil hitting one of his cards on the flop. Phil kept saying he knew Johnny was going to hit a queen, and one of the people in the crowd offered him a bet, 40-1 Johnny didn’t hit a queen. Phil took the bet for 2500 bucks, and sure enough the queen came on the river. The man made a side bet that paid him 100,000 dollars just because he can. Now that’s the life of action.

Talking about all that money, Ellix said that "I already got motherfuckers calling me up to see how I’m doing. Carl called me up the other day talking bout “you got anything going out there?” I win, motherfuckers are going to put up motherfucking wanted posters for me. Ronnie called me up, I said “fuck you” and hung up."

When I asked how he had got the money, he told me his boy Mickey put up 2 grand and smith put up 3 grand. He said Smith had started with 1500 and was trying to win it up to 3 grand by playing the five dollar slots at the stratosphere. I don’t know that it was the best strategy, but it was certainly an aggressive one. To quote Ellix “He knew he was going to have to go to the bank any damn way, I don’t know why the fuck he didn’t just get it over with instead of trying to do some dumb shit.”

Time was getting late, and Ellix only had about 15 minutes before his break was over so he announced, “I gotta take a shit. Mickey’s getting me some chicken legs from the buffet. He always gets me something. You betcha he’s coming out with bananas or a brownie or some shit. Motherfucking Rio buffet charging 23 dollars, shit.”

With that we parted company, I had to go tutor some kid at algebra from 9-10 and he had to get his game face on. I returned around 1030, and located him at table 15. He was still in, but he had a real short stack, maybe like 6 grand. There were something like 110 players remaining out of the original field of over 270. He was sitting to the left of Annie Duke, who had a huge chip stack somewhere around 30 grand. I watched for an hour, as Ellix mostly folded and stayed pretty quiet.

He did take two beats in that time and both to the same guy. One time he had Ace-King, bet it the whole way and didn’t hit. The guy never raised him and turned over pocket queens at the end of the hand. The second time he had pocket kings, made it 4 bets before the flop, and bet again when the flop came jack, eight, four. The turn came ace, he checked, the guy bet, then blank on the river, same check and bet. Guy turned over ace queen, meaning his pair of aces beat Ellix’s kings and Ellix was furious. The guy said he was sorry, which only further infuriated Ellix.

He came over and talked to me saying things like “Motherfucker said he was fucking sorry. You believe that, he paid for his cards, now he’s fucking apologizing to me. I can’t believe that motherfucking ace hit. I knew that fucking thing was coming. Says he’s fucking sorry.” He then took his seat back at the table and loudly announced “Cocktails”. He hadn’t been drinking yet, but it was probably about time. When there was no response to his original query, he again announced loudly “Cocktails”. The continued unresponsiveness of the staff sent him into a diatribe, “Five fucking thousand dollars I’m paying to play in this shit, and I can’t get a motherfucking cocktail. Five thousand dollars I can’t get me a meal, I can’t get me a cocktail. What the fuck kind of operation is this. Cocktails!”

I could see he was getting agitated, so I flagged down a waitress and got him a Heineken. He calmed for a moment, until he had finished taking it down, and was again in search of another. The process continued, with him getting 3-4 deep and livening up the table. He made a score with ace queen and got his chips back to where he wasn’t in imminent danger of being knocked out. Whenever he was in the big blind, Annie Duke would raise him from the little blind, and he laid down every time it happened. He was getting real agitated and saying “Why the fuck do you keep robbing me. You keep fucking robbing me.” He showed an eight three one time after being robbed and said, “You know I’m gonna pick up some cards one of these times and I’m gonna fucking catch you stealing.” To which Annie replied “How can it be stealing if I have the best hand?” Ellix snapped back “You would do that shit with a two three off suit, just wait. I’m gonna catch you.”

A couple no names at the table were trying to goad him, telling him to play more hands. Saying things like “we need some excitement”. Ellix said “You want some fucking excitement jump out a motherfucking airplane without a parachute.”

He finally caught a hand with two fives in the hole and Annie raising him. He called and the flop came ace five six with two diamonds. Annie bet out, and ellix raised her holding three of a kind fives. Annie wisely laid it down, and Ellix was back up around 8-9 grand in chips. From there on out he was just trying to make the tournament clock expire so he would be in the next day. For literally the last half hour, every hand Ellix had he called for time and took his full time to decide what to do. He would show me what he had and it would be some terrible hand he had no intention of playing, but he would still take his full time before folding. Other players at the table started to get real pissed off, particularly Annie Duke. She said “You’re just being obnoxious”. He replied, “Good, then I’m fucking obnoxious. You want to call a floor man, then fucking call a floor man, but I’m going to take my motherfucking time.”

He would lean back and talk to me or Mickey while he was waiting for his time to expire, and the floor man told us we would have to move back from the table. Ellix didn’t like that, “This is America man. This is motherfucking America. I can talk to whoever the fuck I want to, I got a constitutional right to talk to whoever the fuck I want to. This is fucking America.”

Eventually the tournament clock ran out and players had to sign their cards for their chip stacks. There were only 71 left and 27 get paid, but Ellix is probably in about 60th place out of those 71. He’s going to need to make a run tomorrow to get paid. Mickey, Ellix, Smith, and I had a d�tente on the casino floor, while ellix waited for his triple shot of tequila to arrive. As he had warned me before “Once I get a taste, shit. That tequila knocks me on my ass.” After he had received his shot, the documentary guys asked if we could move our discussion out to the main hall so that they could get better lighting. Ellix was now visibly drunk, and started to accost the documentary crew. “Where the fuck were you guys when I was winning. I get down low on chips and I have to see a motherfucking boom mike dangling in my face, but when I’m hitting hands you guys are nowhere to be seen. You motherfuckers. Fine, Ill do your shot, but don’t think I don’t know what you motherfuckers are all about. Fucking boom mike up in my shit.”

We went outside and they filmed us as Ellix discussed how he thought the tournament was going. The documentary crew asked a question that both Ellix and I hadn’t realized, they asked if he noticed that his nemesis from last year McManus had been moved to that table at the end of the day. Ellix perked up a little but admitted he hadn’t even noticed. I may have to duck out of work at 2PM when the tournament resumes to see how they treat each other.

On his way from the interview at the end of the hallway to the exit of the convention center, Ellix entered no less than 3 business negotiations. He saw a guy selling hustler tee shirts, and got the guy to give him a free golf jacket worth about 80 bucks as long as he agreed to wear it if he made the final table. Ellix had me feel the fabric and shit was sweet. Then he ran into Amir Vahidi, a guy who used to back him and is now a fairly prominent poker player. He tried to make a chop agreement where they would each get 1% of what the other guy won in the tournament, but Amir knew something was up so he didn’t bite. Finally, a guy from Ohio introduced himself as a big fan of Ellix’s, and said he ran some sort of tournament in his hometown. Ellix started negotiating an appearance fee if he made it out for it, and gave the dude his card.

We headed back to my car, and tried to talk about things other than poker. He tossed his last Heineken bottle out the window as we left the Rio, and soon he was back at the safe confines of the Little Hotel, ready to sleep it off until today when he makes his stand.

The Ongoing Saga of Ellix Powers part 11

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