There's a wonderful moment in the movie "The Natural," when Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford) strikes out baseball legend The Whammer (Joe Don Baker) on three straight pitches. It doesn't happen in a game, but by some railroad tracks next to a carnival.
At the moment Hobbs strikes out the big guy, director Barry Levinson cuts to a quick shot of Barbara Hershey's character, who has her eyes on The Whammer, attracted to him for his stardom and with mischief on her mind. After The Whammer whiffs on strike three, we see Hershey turn her head away from The Whammer and fix her gaze on Hobbs. The shot is only two seconds long, but it's this turn of events that later leads to her going with Hobbs to his hotel room, where she fires the shot that propels the rest of the plot.
Dennis Phillips raised to 65,000 from middle position and Mark Vos reraised to 180,000 on the button. Phillips then made it 400,000 to go and Vos came over the top all in for 1.5 million. Phillips called and showed AA to Vos' AK. He had Mark covered by around 300,000 so this hand was for Vos' tournament life, and when the board ran out Q-9-3-10-2, Vos was eliminated just as Day 5 came to an end. When Day 6 begins tomorrow, Dennis Phillips will be sitting with a 3.4 million stack.
We were all buzzing about this in the Harrah's St. Louis poker room tonight, with one of the floor supervisors checking his progress online and then reporting it to us. We're not even there, but the excitement at our table was palpable.
Dennis has been quietly playing under the radar, making good decisions, playing very well, never going on tilt, and until now being pretty much ignored by the poker media. That has surely changed, as he's now one of 79 players left, and only 5 others have larger chip stacks than he does.
Because of Vos' renown in the poker world, I'm sure the ESPN cameras were there for that all-in moment. And when it was over, those cameras no doubt turned away from Vos and got a good shot of Dennis (we won't see this on TV for several months, but you get the visual metaphor nonetheless).
When I reached him on his cell phone a half-hour later, Dennis told me he was glad that was the last hand of the night, because his adrenaline was pumping so hard for the next 10 minutes that he couldn't think straight. He finally calmed down enough to go have a beer, and then was off to bed to get a good night's sleep before embarking on Day 6.
Let's hope he doesn't run into Barbara Hershey.
Labels: poker/vegas