Shaun Deeb had every intention of arriving at the 2023 WPT World Championship with plenty of time to spare. Deeb planned to travel on Thursday from the Bahamas to Las Vegas, potentially giving himself two shots at playing and bagging.
But then Deeb’s plans started to go awry, little by little. Deeb’s friend played through to the end of Day 3 of the WSOP Paradise Main Event, making it down to the final 7 players, and he was all too happy to post up on the rail.
“I stayed an extra day in Bahamas to help Matt Glantz out, in the WSOP Paradise final table,” said Deeb. “Give him hands, coaching – whatever he needed, including moral support.”
Glantz ultimately finished 4th for $685,000, and a group of friends went out afterward to celebrate the result. That’s when the wheel of chaos began to turn a little but further.
“We go to dinner, and during that, I decided, for some dumb reason to piggyback on Jeff Platt’s VIP shuttle in the morning,” said Deeb. “I get up at 7 o’clock in the morning, finish packing, get down at 8:15. Our car isn’t there.
“It’s 8:25 and I’m already sweating it because I have to declare cash when crossing the border and it’s always slow in the Bahamas.”
Someone who worked for WSOP who was waiting around, whose trip timing was a little less pressing, stepped up to try to relieve a little bit of the stress.
“Her car was coming at 8:30, and it was 5 minutes early,” said Deeb. “She gave up her car and then she waited for Jeff’s car because they were a few minutes away. So we get to the airport, and the line is super long but we actually get through customs much quicker than before. Jeff, being the VIP, has a first-class ticket, so he gets on the plane right away.”
While Deeb has been one of the strongest proponents of the “Jeff Platt curse” – a growing meme/trend that implies that anyone with chips in a tournament that does an interview with Platt is doomed to go broke – he did not anticipate that the dark cloud over Platt’s head would carry over into airline travel.
“Me and a bunch of other people are sitting out in the terminal waiting, and while I’m standing in line to check in to go, they make an announcement,” Deeb said. “‘We’re no longer boarding the plane – there’s a maintenance issue.’ We go back and sit down, and 5 minutes later Jeff comes out, along with everyone else who attempted to get on the plane. So obviously Jeff fucked up something.”
With a connection hanging in the balance, every minute in the terminal or on the runway made it less likely that Deeb and five other players intent on making it into the WPT World Championship field would be able to pull it off.
But after landing in Charlotte, there was a little bit of good news, as there would be plenty of time to make that connection. Unfortunately, that news came with a caveat of its own.
“Our flight to Charlotte was delayed an hour-and-a-half out of Bahamas, so we’re already thinking we’re gonna cut it close on our connection,” said Deeb. “We get there, and then we see that our flight to Vegas is delayed another two-and-a-half hours.”
Given a collection of limited options, the players on the postponed flight decided to push through. They managed to get word ahead to the right people at Wynn Las Vegas to get their buy-ins settled up, and their stacks were put into play at the conclusion of the dinner break.
They reached the airport at 7 p.m., just as that break drew to a close. Along with Deeb, Bryce Yockey, Jim Collopy, Josh Reichard, and Gabriel Schroeder high-tailed it over to Wynn and got right into the mix. But Platt ultimately deemed the move too high variance and bowed out.
“There were six of us on the plane who planned on playing World Championship, including Jeff, but Jeff didn’t want to play with it blinding us down from 50 bigs.
“The five of us got our stacks put in play, and showed up here about 30 minutes later,” said Deeb. “I came in with only 10K blinded off, which wasn’t bad. I would have thought I would have lost more.”
If Deeb, or any of the four others who made it into the WPT World Championship field by the thinnest of margins, make a run, they’ll have quite the story to tell going forward. And they’ll likely recommend staying as far away from Jeff Platt as possible.