A retro look at Annette Obrestad’s continued dominance in the 2007 Dublin European Poker Tour
On the afternoon of October 30, 2007, 221 poker players pour into a makeshift poker room that has been carved from a big barn of a meeting hall, situated near central Dublin. This particular leg of the PokerStars.com European Poker Tour, with its €8,000 buy-in, has attracted a smattering of pros from the United States (Erik Seidel blew in and out of Day 1, reportedly on his way to a concert in London), a handful of internet qualifiers from outside the EU, and lots of European tournament pros (though many big names are conspicuously absent, suffering from what some have dubbed ‘tournament fatigue’).
By the start of Day 2, with the field neatly trimmed to a manageable 123 players, the one who is impossible to keep your eyes off is Norwegian wunderkind and WSOPE winner Annette Obrestad. Showing incredible poise and revealing nothing in the way of emotion, she keeps her eyes semi-hidden behind tinted shades and handles her chips with bird-like delicacy. But players know better than to let the feminine facade distract them.
Push and shove
Playing with the aggression of a teenage, chiphoovering cyborg, she begins Day 2 in 19th place and her aggression is unrelenting. It’s particularly visible when Annette goes after much more seasoned players such as Noah Boeken and Luca Pagano. Strangely, though, when she needs to show cards, she rarely reveals a bluff. And when she needs to catch cards, she hits with uncanny frequency. Is she going to win every showdown? That is what players must be wondering. Boeken dances around the bullets and keeps from getting incredibly damaged. Pagano, who has the misfortune of sitting to Annette’s right, is less lucky. Every time he bets, she slams him back with a raise. Inevitably, he sees his chip stack decimated by the Norwegian teen.
Following a table change late in the day, she winds up sitting to the left of Andy ‘The Monk’ Black. He’s the frontrunner, which is fitting when you consider that the tournament is taking place in his town. Chatty and aggressive, joking about the internet lingo being slung around the table (‘value-shove’ is the one that really seems to tickle him), Black is comfortably in the money, with a huge stack, when bubble time rolls around. No doubt that contributes to him gleefully proclaiming that he ‘loves the bubble’. By the time the bubble bursts and there are just 25 players left for the penultimate session of play, Black is chip leader and says, ‘Maybe one of these days I’ll learn to hold on to my lead.’
‘Not if I’m behind you,’ Annette, who’s number two, smartly cracks back.
Out in the tournament parking lot, standing around a clutch of cigarette-smoking pros, Boeken takes his buddy Luca Pagano aside and says, ‘Annette really had your number today. When she raises you, you need to be ready to push all-in.’ Still looking a little stunned, Pagano nods, like he knows what Boeken means, but the advice is clearly too little too late.
Day 3 proceeds apace. Annette keeps building her chips, playing her aggressive game, pulling miraculous cards. Black plays big-stack poker, pushing his competitors around, keeping the jokes flying, making everybody comfortable as he takes their money. Annette is just the opposite: silent, calculating and deadly. The player nobody notices is Reuben Peters – a blonde-haired surfer-looking dude from just outside Boston. He’s a former stockbroker who’s been making none of the big, flashy plays that intimidate opponents and fortify chip stacks. Instead he’s been barely hanging in there, never having much and never going broke either, at one point holding no more than five big blinds.
Mad monk
With 10 remaining players squeezed around a semi-final table, Andy Black basically blows up, dropping 135,000 to double up a short stack. He plays weird hands – like K-5, which loses to K-Q – and makes questionable bets.
Following a briefly successful stab at rebuilding, he faces a raise from Annette and responds by pushing all-in with 3-3. She turns up Jacks, and it’s off to the showers for Andy. Nine players are left – underdog Reuben Peters among them – and he looks extremely happy to be here, even though, with his minuscule stack, no one (including Peters himself) figures he has much of a chance to win this thing.
While the remaining players whip out their cell phones and call friends and family with the good news, Andy Black repairs to the small cottage he rents in Dublin, not far from where the tournament takes place. He spends time thinking about where it all went wrong. ‘Basically I started out playing perfect poker and not getting myself in any bad spots,’ he says, acknowledging that he has a longstanding pattern of dynamiting big leads.
‘I know what I should be doing, I know what a bad idea is. I go for two or three days without doing any of these things that I know are bad ideas. Then I follow through on a bad idea. I don’t forgive myself and just do loads of things that are really bad ideas. I can play as well as anyone when I play well, but then I don’t score the goal at the end. Embarrassing as it is, painful as it is, I am the idiot who does stupid things at the end. My challenge is to move through that. It’s a matter of coming to terms with the dickhead within. I have something internal that I need to address.’
Force 15
The final table starts out as the Annette Show and that appears to be precisely the way it will finish. She plays with remarkable confidence and loves to push around the boys. One by one they fall by the wayside. She breaks a veritable United Nations of opponents, showing no prejudice at all as she takes chips from Dutchmen, Scandinavians and a lone German. Annette wins hands with little emotion and in every way imaginable: by bluffing, by sucking out, by simply having the best cards.
Stunningly, after she wipes out her second to last opponent, by hitting a necessary Three on the river, the final man standing against mighty Annette is Reuben Peters, the surfer dude from Boston. He’s the guy who’s never managed to amass many chips, came to the table as the second shortest stack, and now has less than a million while she has around three million – but he’s still in the game. It seems a fait accompli that Annette will win this tournament. It’s felt that way for the last two days (even Black, who was chip leader, says he figured that Annette would bust him), and, now, wiping out Peters seems a formality. Strangely, Peters smiles in a way that makes you figure this is his expectation as well.
He starts out playing like a doomed man, allowing her to push him around. Slowly but surely, she seems set to whittle him down to zero. Then he bets 50k pre-flop, she raises an extra 100k, and, as usual, he folds. Immediately after, though, it’s as if an aggressor switch has gone off in Peters’ brain. He soon begins playing the brand of jam-or-fold poker that had eluded Pagano. It works. And, in a hand that proves to be critical, Annette bets 420k on a flop of J-K-9. With no hesitation, trapping Peters pushes all-in. Bluffing, Annette folds. And suddenly, for the first time all tournament – and, clearly, at the most critical time – an unassuming American takes the lead.
She looks stunned to have given up control so quickly (in less than an hour), and, seemingly, so easily. Not long after that tournament-defining moment, Peters stuns the room by winning with a pair of flopped Tens against Annette’s pocket Sevens. Attention shifts from her to him, and Annette proves to be as graceful in defeat as she is in victory.
Reuben Peters, meanwhile, comes off as the anti-Matusow. With camera flashes popping in his face, reporters lining up to get quotes from him, and a pair of tournament trophies set down before him, he insists that his opponent is the better player. ‘The luckiest player won tonight,’ he announces, pointing out that small-stack play is easy but perilous. ‘You have so few options. You can push in with anything against the big blind.’
Nobody else in the room seems to agree, not even Annette. Peters played with a lot of heart, he never gave up, and when he had to dig deep to make gutsy moves he found the resources to do it. It’s a lesson in perseverance from which every poker player can benefit.
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