LAS VEGAS — Darvin Moon’s preparations for a run at the $8.55 million top prize at the World Series of Poker included an extended hunting trip last month in Wyoming where he slept in a two-room cabin without electricity and pretty much avoided any contact with the outside world.

The 46-year-old self-employed logger from Oakland, Md., will get plenty of attention this weekend as the chip leader heading into Saturday’s final table of the richest tournament in poker.
Moon said he played some cards, but didn’t hire a coach for the 115-day break because he didn’t think he could learn enough to effectively sustain a change to his style.
Moon told The Associated Press he thinks it’s more important for him to prepare for a mental marathon at the no-limit Texas Hold ’em main event — 14 to 17 hours, he predicts, to narrow nine players down to two who will go head to head on Monday night.
“I’m not going to come in ninth. ... my plan is to come in first,” Moon said. “You have to have patience.”
And plenty of luck, too, which Moon credits for propelling himself and eight others to the top of a field of 6,494 players at the tournament that began play July 3 at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.
Moon’s opponents include Phil Ivey, a 32-year-old poker professional from Las Vegas regarded by many as the best card player alive. Five others at the final table make a living gambling, including 30-year-old Eric Buchman, 21-year-old Joe Cada, 52-year-old Kevin Schaffel, 25-year-old Antoine Saout and 26-year-old James Akenhead.
Jeff Shulman, 34, of Las Vegas, placed seventh at the main event in 2000 and has cashed 15 times at the series, but makes most of his money as the president of CardPlayer Media, which publishes a popular poker magazine. Steven Begleiter, a 47-year-old former Bear Stearns Cos. executive who works for a private equity firm, sits third in chips.
“Everybody knows what they’re doing, and probably with a little bit of luck that’s how we all got there. There’s no flukes here,” said Schaffel, who bought a house during the break and spent time golfing, going out with friends and playing $10 to $20 no-limit cash games.
“Everybody has had dreams, has had nightmares, has been up in the middle of the night thinking about it — I don’t care who you are, including Ivey — and it’s just going to be so much fun to be there and see what happens,” he said.
Ivey, a seven-time gold bracelet winner at the world series, spent part of last month in or near Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, playing online poker and exercising with a trainer.
“We do cardio for 45 minutes, then we lift weights for a half-hour, then we do yoga for an hour and then we go golfing,” Ivey told Pokerroad.com for its “Life of Ivey” video blog dated Oct. 21. Through a spokeswoman, Ivey declined an interview with the AP.
Ivey said in July that he would spend part of the three-and-a-half month break preparing specifically for his final table opponents, but wouldn’t say how.
Shulman has taken a different route from Ivey during the break, hiring 11-time gold bracelet winner Phil Hellmuth to coach him for the final table.
Shulman said Hellmuth and other poker-playing friends helped him create profiles of each opponent, then practiced in several sessions.
“Of course, as much profiling as you can do, after three and a half months if you don’t like the way you played you can just change it — or at least you can attempt to change it,” Shulman said.
Each player was paid $1.26 million — ninth place money — the day after they made it to the final table. Harrah’s Entertainment Inc., the private casino operator that runs the tournament, stashed the rest of the money in a conservative account that pushed the prizes up slightly. The first player to bust out on Saturday gets nothing more after the final table, while the other finishers will be paid the rest of their prize money depending on how high they finish.
Less than $324,000 in prize money separates sixth place from ninth place, and the payout doesn’t jump above $2 million until fourth place at $2.5 million. That may motivate players to be a bit more aggressive and aim for a bigger payday rather than just pay minimum bets and wait for others to be eliminated and move up a few thousand dollars.
“I might be wrong, but I think the very first hand of the tournament I think somebody will be all in,” Moon said. “It’s not going to be me. I would have to have pocket aces the first hand to go all in.”
Chips don’t have actual value in the tournament beyond being a measure of where players stand in the game compared with one another. A player must lose all his chips to be eliminated and win all the chips in play to win the tournament.
Ivey starts play Saturday with 5 percent of the chips in play, seventh lowest among the nine players but deep enough to survive more than 100 hands if he were to fold every time and pay only minimum bets.
Neither he, nor any of his opponents, will be forced to gamble early unless they feel strongly about their hand or their read on their opponents. Reputations and starting chip stacks matter little in a game where good sleuthing wins pots and players don’t often get chances to make up for mistakes.
“Phil Ivey’s always dangerous,” Moon said. “He can have one chip — one of the smallest chips on the table — and still be dangerous.”
Many poker followers have focused on Moon and Ivey as potential winners because of Moon’s large stack and Ivey’s history and reputation for winning at the richest games in the world.
Poker icon Doyle Brunson knows Ivey and considers him the best player, but he bet tournament professional Daniel Negreanu that Moon would win instead.
“There’s nothing as strong as chips, just like in a cash game, there’s nothing as strong as having more money than everybody else at the table,” Brunson said. “It just puts you in an advantageous situation. He don’t put his tournament life at risk like everybody else does.”