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Taking a couple of days off between NL events (I think my next one will be the 5K 6 max on Thursday.) In the meantime, here's the Scotty story I promised earlier:

My first table of the 1500 had an empty seat on it for over 2 hours. If you've played any WSOP events, you know that an empty seat at your first table is *always* a pro running late, but usually, they tend to show up within an hour. This time, the stack was being blinded off all the way to the 100/200 level, so by the time the pro - who turned out to be Scotty - showed up, he was already down to 1800 chips.

Naturally, Scotty was unhappy about that and asked the dealer why he didn't have 3K. But at the WSOP, only late registrations get their full 3K chips (and get seated in Seat 10); everyone else gets a regular seat and then gets blinded off if they're late, which is normal. Scotty, though, obviously didn't like the idea of starting out with a 9 bet stack, said "I'm not playing", and went off to find the tournament director. I think he just wanted to be allowed to unregister, but instead, a couple of minutes later, the floor showed up with a full stack and gave it to him. On the one hand, this is pretty much blatant cheating - it's a free 1200 chips that nobody not named Scotty Nguyen would ever get; on the other, I a)kinda sympathized with the guy and b)personally was of the opinion that I was better off with Scotty having 15 BB at my table than him having 9. (Don't get me wrong; he clearly plays well. But much like every other live pro, the guy's not particularly math-oriented and doesn't know short stack strategy.)

Also naturally, he then owned my soul by proceeding to suck out on me when he pushed A5 into my queens. Whatever; no harm done, and I guess vaguely condoning the floor cheating meant I had it coming? Heh.

The better part of the story is why Scotty was late. Apparently, his young kid opened the cage containing two very rare, $6,000 capuchin monkeys. The female stayed in the cage, but the male immediately ran off to the nearest tall tree, and the three fire engines Scotty called to his house couldn't get him out. By the time Scotty finally gave up and showed up at the Rio, the plan was to leave the female monkey outside in the cage in hopes of luring the male back there. I've got no word on whether the plan was successful or whether the Las Vegas wild monkey population just increased by 1, but if you do, I'd totally love to hear it!