Heads-Up Hold Up at 2007 World Series of Poker

The start of the World Championship $5,000 Heads-Up No Limit Hold'em event at the 2007 World Series of Poker is being help up by the unexpected complexity of the bright orange name-spinner thingy. (Bodog Beat Image)

In their continuing efforts to make sure that the WSOP runs as smoothly as possible, Harrah's is drawing names for the World Championship $5,000 Heads-Up No limit Hold'em event one by one out of a name-mixer-upper-spinner contraption (what do you call that thing anyway?) that looks like it came out of a 1987 bingo hall. The event that was supposed to begin at noon was pushed back to 1pm and, with such a super-efficient process, will actually start sometime next Thursday.

Pros are mingling around wondering why this hadn't been done last night on that newfangled invention called a computer and the brackets just posted for everyone to see this morning. The official answer is that they wanted to do the draw in front of everyone to avoid any suggestion of impropriety at the WSOP. However, the players and media are still questioning the process because of the issue of byes.

Apparently, in an effort to include as many people as possible there is an odd number of entrants. So, unless one guys goes up against himself (with Billy Idol's "Dancin' With Myself" playing in the background), there needs to be byes into the next round to handle the odd number. The byes were drawn first and A LOT of big-names pros heard their name called. However, as you can imagine, the poker players who did not hear their names are a little miffed that they might be eliminated before those that received byes.

At this precise moment, they have finished the bye draw and have started with the seat assignments; slowly drawing 300+ seat one assignments first, then onto 300+ seat two assignments. Yeah, we get it, the spinner thing makes it random and everyone can see that it is. But it's now 2pm and the second round is supposed to start in three hours, so why not draw one match-up at a time so that players, fans and media alike can get started on this already.

Stay tuned for more increasingly impatient updates from an almost ready to go 2007 World Series of Poker.