Waging War - Prop Bets...

Monday, June 16, 2008

Waging War - Prop Bets!

By Chris Hall | WSOP

The rage in Vegas has nothing to do with poker at all this summer. It's all about the prop bets. At the start of the series, we saw two much slimmer people than usual, Sorrel Mizzi and Roland De Wolfe had a $25k weight loss bet, though it seemed Mizzi was the one taking it the more seriously, and he easily won.

An even bigger bet though, was that of Mike Matusow weight loss bet worth $100k, 'The Mouth' had bet Ted Forrest $100,000 that he could lose 50lbs before the start of the world series and then shocked onlookers by turning up as thin as you have ever seen him.

But, as always, Phil Ivey is the one making the headlines as he has several big bets going on at the moment. The first was a bet with many pros that he would win a bracelet this year, he's not yet made a final table, the closest was his result in the $10,000 7-card stud event where he could only finish 9th, bubbling the final table.

The big one though, is his rumoured $2 million bet on the LA Lakers to win the basketball series against the Boston Celtics, at the time of writing, Boston are 3-2 in a best of 7 match and Ivey is really being made to sweat.

Sweating the Lakers.

One of the major spectacles earlier in the week, was during one of the earlier matches, Ivey managed to get someone to switch one of the tournament clocks over to the game during the $10,000 Stud event.

During this game he then showed probably more emotion in the hour or so of that match, than he has over his entire poker career, the usual stoic concentrated look had been replaced by a man that looked like he was truly living and dying with every two or three-pointer that either team hit.

This got me into looking up other proposition bets, which from reading, tend to go from the slightly bizarre to the craftily ludicrous, from Ted Forrest's ability to drink ten beers in half an hour to Huck Seed's athletic prowess that has been bet upon many times over.

But where to begin? You would have to go back to the old school hustlers of the early years when Johnny Moss was given 15/1 odds by another gambler to beat up a huge guy in a bar (who had no idea of the bet), with the condition that Moss could get the first shot in. Two weeks in hospital later with numerous broken bones, Moss said, "Fifteen to one was too good to pass up."

He flips for money, backflips that is.

More recently, Huck Seed seems to be the man involved in all the most interesting prop bets, the 1996 WSOP champion has managed to win a bet that required him to shoot four rounds of under 100 on a golf course in one hot summer day using just the five iron, sand wedge and putter.

He learnt to do a standing backflip to take $10,000 off Howard Lederer, whilst losing bets, first, not to shave for a year (a family funeral meant he had to). Then when Phil Helmuth bet he couldn't stand in the ocean with water up to his shoulders for eighteen hours, Huck could only manage three, costing him $50,000.

So why are these sort of bets common between players? The most obvious explanation is that the poker lifestyle isn't really gambling to them, it's more of a job, and these bets are just their version of our bets on horses and football, albeit a little more colourful perhaps.

Holy smokes Batman!

The latest rivalry in the prop betting stakes is the Gavin Smith vs Joe Sebok one. Last year at the World Series, the two agreed on a points system for all the Hold'Em side events, and the one with the fewest points would be forced to wear superhero costumes for time spent in the Main Event. Eventually, Joe Sebok would turn up in a Robin costume from Batman & Robin.

This competition has continued between the two, to the point of a last longer at the LA Poker Classic, where the first one out was forced to get a tattoo of the other's initials on their, ahem, posterior. Personally I think I'd rather lose the superhero one than this one. Either way, Gavin Smith now has J.S tattooed somewhere he won't forget...

It's not purely the domain of the Americans though now. It was in the latter stages of the Warsaw EPT in '07 when I discovered Johnny Lodden, renowned Scandie, had made a 'last longer bet' with one of his fellow players. Surely, you would say, there is nothing inherently unusual about that within itself?

Norwegian grocer.

Well, quite, but here the wager was not about money, no instead, the loser of this bet would suffer a non-monetary kind of humiliation. The terms of this bet were that the man knocked out first would be forced... to work in a grocers for a day back home, and the outcome after a couple of tournament days? Suffice to say, you can probably find pictures of Mr Lodden in an apron of the Norwegian equivalent of Walmart somewhere.

Of course Erick Lindgren's winning of his golf prop bet against Gavin Smith and Phil Ivey, is another that will go down as the stuff of legend. An event that was filmed and almost completely overshadowed the $50,000 HORSE event that Freddy Deeb won, whilst leaving 'E-Dog' around $350,000 richer.

Although we haven't seen anything quite so decadent yet, but that last bet was a spur of the moment thing based purely on Lindgren's exit from the previously mentioned HORSE event, and we've yet to reach half-way in the 2008 WSOP. So all takes is a few beers and a couple of mad ideas...

Of course, if you want to be the one making these crazy bets, then you'll probably need to be here to do it!.