From: Phil Hellmuth Subject: Phil Hellmuth's BARGE trip report - Short When I arrived in Vegas on Friday afternoon, I was planning on taking my Horseshoe Limo to the Bellagio, where I planned to stay for a couple of nights with my wife who was flying in later that night from Florida. When I hopped into the Limo, I decided to call Benny Binion Behnan to see what he was up to. Before I hung up the phone, Benny had offered me one of the 23rd floor suites at the Horseshoe for free!! That was a good way to start the trip! When I arrived at the Horseshoe, my biggest concern was whether or not Chuck Weinstock had been able to secure an overhead projector for my power point presentation (PPP). Right away I found Chuck in the tournament, in fact, he was one of the chip leaders! Chuck told me that everything was all right as far as the projector was concerned, but that I would need to give my floppy disc to someone who had brought their laptop. I gave my floppy disc to Perry Friedman, and what a mistake that turned out to be! When I gave my speech to BARGE, Perry had added a slide of his own to my presentation!! It made for a lot of good fun and laughs, as it related to me playing in the Tiltboys home game (in my own hometown of Palo Alto) once and setting the record loss ($2700), but that in another story for another time! Speaking of Perry, I ran into him at the San Jose airport on the way to BARGE, and played him and his friend Chinese poker on the airplane ride down, and beat him out of $300! However, he did exact a measure of revenge when he beat me in the rock scissors paper World Championships held at BARGE. The calcutta was absolutely wonderful, everyone was having so much fun there! Spontaneous poker 'Freezeouts' broke out on the floor! Imagine, no limit holdem on the floor with Paul Phillips (aptly nicknamed Dot Com)! The people at BARGE just had so much enthusiasm for poker! They clearly love poker, and that warms my heart. The no limit holdem 'main event' was great as well. A consortium of players put a $400 bounty on my no limit holdem head! So that when I moved all-in with Qh-Kh, for $2000, the $300 big blind called me with Q-10 off suit figuring that he needed help, but he would pick up 5th place money in the tourney if he won the pot! Who could blame him? It came 6h-9c-10h, giving me a straight and a flush draw, but giving him the eventual winner, a pair of tens. My wife and went shopping and then took a two hour nap knowing that I had to speak at about 9:00 PM. I felt like the speech went pretty well, and I learned not to read off the slides next time I give a PPP! The group seemed to really get into my no limit holdem stories, and then of course, the 'Perry slide' gave me a chance to talk about setting records, although in the wrong direction this time! The Chowaha game was a blast as well! They told me that the first hand was always capped, and somehow my 'set of eights' held up to win the first pot. Again the enthusiasm was fantastic! On Sunday, my wife and I spent most of the day in bed, and then went out to dinner (Pierros) and a show with Benny and his girl friend. Benny insisted on buying everything, even the $900 bottle of Chateu D Quiem...It was really awesome! When you ante as much as I do in one hand of poker, you might as well enjoy the finer things in life sometimes... Late Sunday night, I played some pot limit holdem with Mike Laing and the "Math genius" Bill Chen, and I lost $500 and everyone quit! Bill picked up pocket aces and busted both Mike and I at the same time (and then he quit us!)! Nice job Bill! At least Bill tipped our Limo driver on the way out of town! The raw 'poker enthusiasm' that was surrounding BARGE really fired me up! Long live BARGE, -Cheers, Phil Hellmuth Jr.