Do they have booster seats at the final table?

Man, I haven't been this happy for one of my buddies since Absinthe busted Jesus.

In case you've been living in a cave, our favorite diminutive MMA Junkie won his way into the Main Event of the WSOP. When I emailed him asking how much to buy a piece of him, the response was something like "you'd be better off backing me in late-night Pai Gow."

Now, I'd probably take a piece of his action there, too. But the little fucker has made it through the biggest part of the field, and is only a few hundred donkey corpses away from cashing in the second-largest WSOP field of all time.

Maybe the shark isn't completely jumped, after all. But then there's that fucking musical, and maybe it has.

But anyway, I think there's something to be proved by the fact that a self-proclaimed limit grinder has successfully navigated the donk-infested waters to be one of the remaining 1,000 or so runners in the field at the WSOP Main Event. I postulate this - good poker players will be successful no matter the game or format. There is evidence to support this - Annie Duke's first bracelet (I think) came in a game that she got a 5-minute tutorial from her big brother in right before the tournament. That's an extreme example, but you can't discount the fact that even with limited exposure to huge field events, Iggy has logged thousands of hours at the tables in the past few years, and that live experience is standing him in good stead.

I also postulate that his time as a live grinder at the boats have done him more good than a bunch of cashes in the Sunday Million or other massive field online tournaments. In my less-than-humble opinion, live cash game experience is better in a huge live tournament than online tournament experience. The games online and live are so dramatically different as to bear even less resemblance to each other than live limit cash games and live no limit tournaments do. Feel free to disagree, but then you're ten-tabling MTTs, you're not picking up on the sublte nuances of behavior that a good player picks up on at a live table. It all goes back to thin-slicing, like Malcolm Gladwell discussed in his book Blink (which I think is more of a must-read for poker players than Harrington on Hold Em).

So there's my opinion of why the little guy is rocking the Casbah in his first Main Event, feel free to take exception to any or all of my hypotheses. But wish Iggy luck in his quest to be the first WPBT member with a bracelet!