Poker
stcynic | July 31, 2006From the Card Player live updates from yesterday at the World Series of Poker main event. One guy, William Thorsson, has been running incredibly hot and is the chip leader. How hot? This hot:
William Thorsson raises to $700 from the cut off and the button re-raises to $1,200. The small blind makes a third raises to $3,500. Thorsson re-raises $7,000 more and the small blind calls. The flop comes Ah 2d 2s and the small blind checks and Thorsson moves all-in for $100,000. The small blind makes the call after 2 minutes of deliberation and shows K-K. Thorsson taps the table and says "Wow," and…
stcynic | July 30, 2006Daniel Negreanu has a video blog on his website, and if you go to the entry for 7/26/06 you'll hear his take on the lawsuit against the World Poker Tour from 7 top players. It contains some interesting information that may pave the way for a settlement. Lyle Berman, who owns the World Poker Tour, apparently told Daniel that he would be happy to have the players sign the same release they sign for the World Series of Poker (all 7 players suing them are playing in the WSOP and signed that release) rather than the one for the World Poker Tour. If that's a genuine offer and it's made to the…
stcynic | July 29, 2006Yesterday was the first first day of the main event of the World Series of Poker. I say first first day because there are 4 first days. This year may have as many as 8800 players, with 2000 players plus 200 alternates going on each of the 4 first days (the 200 alternates replace the first 200 players knocked out). Each day they'll play down to 800 players, then the 1600 that move on from the first two first days move on to the first second day and play down to 700. Then the 1600 players from the third and fourth first days play on the second second day until there are 700 left. Then there's a…
stcynic | July 27, 2006Some of you may be familiar with the games that have gone on between billionaire banker Andy Beal and some of the top poker players in the world in Las Vegas. There is a book out about them now called The Professor, the Banker and the Suicide King, by Michael Craig. The professor refers to Howard Lederer, one of the world's great poker players, the banker is Andy Beal, a billionaire wunderkind and math genius, and the suicide king, of course, refers to the card in the deck. The games began in 2001, when Beal showed up at the Bellagio and challenged the best pros in the world to play heads up…
stcynic | July 21, 2006There is now a webpage devoted specifically to the lawsuit filed against the World Poker Tour by 7 of the top poker players in the world. You can find the text of the complaint here. I haven't had much of a chance to go over it yet, and I know next to nothing about antitrust law, but perhaps some of the legal eagles here can shed some light on the issue. At issue, essentially, is whether the WPT can require the players to sign away all rights to their own likeness in order to play in a WPT event, even if the WPT uses that likeness to promote something other than the tournament or the TV show…
stcynic | July 20, 2006At the request of Antigua, where many online gaming sites are located, the World Trade Organization has set up a committee to investigate our government's activities in regard to online gambling. Antigua and many other nations say that trying to shut down this trade that is perfectly legal almost everywhere but here is a restraint of trade that violates the WTO agreements. This could get interesting.
stcynic | July 20, 2006I came across this picture on the Pokerati blog. Jennifer Tilly, the actress who usually plays ditzy characters, is now a hot item with professional poker player Phil (the Unabomber) Laak. Tilly has taken up poker and done quite well for herself, winning the women's event at last year's World Series of Poker and holding her own in many other tournaments since then. They call Laak "the Unabomber" because he wears a hooded sweatshirt and sometimes pulls it over his head so an opponent can't get a read on him. Tilly is now called the Unabombshell. And you've gotta love this belt buckle:
The…
stcynic | July 19, 2006This is an interesting development. 7 of the top poker players in the world - Howard Lederer, Andy Bloch, Annie Duke, Chris Ferguson, Joe Hachem, Greg Raymer and Phil Gordon - have filed a lawsuit against the World Poker Tour for violations of their intellectual property rights. This has actually been brewing a long time. A lot of the top players have refused to play the World Poker Tour for the last couple years because they feel the agreement that they have to sign in order to play the tournaments is far too broad and eliminates any control they have over their likeness and image for…
stcynic | July 18, 2006There are no spoilers in this post
There is a long history of problems at the World Series of Poker that most of the public is unaware of, problems with money being taken for one ostensible purpose and used for another and with dealers and tournament staff being cheated as a result. When Harrah's bought Binion's in 2004, everyone hoped that those problems would come to an end. Unfortunately, that doesn't appear to be the case. Let me give some background on that story and then on to the current problems.
The WSOP was begun by Benny Binion, the legendary casino owner, in 1970. It slowly grew…
stcynic | July 13, 2006This is a post about the World Series of Poker, but there are no spoilers in it
Today began one of the most interesting events at the World Series of Poker, the HORSE event. One of the complaints about the growth of the WSOP over the last few years is that the main event, with so many players involved, has become much more of a crapshoot and thus led to a dimunition in the importance of poker skill. But if you're looking for a real test of who is the best player in poker, this event is more likely to provide it. The buy-in is $50,000 and it's a mixed game. In regular intervals, the game…
stcynic | July 6, 2006From CardPlayer magazine's live updates from the $5000 buy-in No Limit Hold Em tournament:
Phil Hellmuth raises to $75,000 preflop. Eugene Todd reraises to $220,000 total. Hellmuth asks Todd, "Are you trying to donk off your stack with ace jack?". Hellmuth proceeds to fold and shows A-Q. Todd just grins as he flips over A-J. Hellmuth, of course, jumps up from the table in disbelief.
That's gonna be fun to watch on TV.
stcynic | July 4, 2006Rafe Furst of the legendary Tiltboys won his first bracelet at the World Series of Poker in the $1500 buy-in Pot Limit Hold Em event. He joins Phil Gordon (formerly the host of Celebrity Poker Showdown) and Perry Friedman as Tiltboys with bracelets. Making it even more impressive is the field he beat. The final 20 players included John Juanda, Dewey Tomko, Randy Jensen, Can Kim Hua and several other top players. And he came to the final table with only about half the stack of the chip leader.
The Tiltboys, for those who don't know, are a group of poker players who met at Stanford and have…
stcynic | June 3, 2006According to this site, Phil Hellmuth is going to be on the next season of The Surreal Life along with Randy "Macho Man" Savage and, allegedly, Carrot Top. With all due respect to Bill Simmons, this could very well shatter the Unintentional Comedy Scale as we know it. My kingdom for just one scene of Macho Man busting a steel chair over Hellmuth's head. Did anyone see the episode of High Stakes Poker on GSN last night where Hellmuth was whining like mad? It was hilarious. The other players were openly mocking him. Even Barry Greenstein, Mr. Nice Guy who never engages in table talk at all, was…
stcynic | May 25, 2006So I was playing poker online, a little .25/.50 no limit game, and this hand comes up. New player had just sat down and he was under the gun. He raised to $1.50. I'm on the button with pocket queens, so I reraise to $5. New player calls. Flop comes 2-5-7 rainbow; he checks, I raise, he goes all in. It's still only a small percentage of my stack and I've got the big overpair and figure the only way he's got me beat is with kings or aces, so I call his reraise. Cards are flipped up, he has A 5 and hit his set of 5s on the flop. The river brings a beautiful queen, I rake the pot and he's…
stcynic | May 20, 2006I'm in the middle of playing in a qualifying tournament for the World Series of Poker's championship event. We started with just over 3600 players and as of now, the second break, we're down to 150 players. The average stack is about $49,000 and I've got $64,000. I dodged a real bullet when I flopped a set of aces with A3 suited. Another player had AJ, but for some strange reason didn't bet to maximize his win. It only cost me about $15,000 in chips when it could easily have put me out of the tournament. 3500 players down, 150 more to go. Then another 8000 at the WSOP for the $10 million…
stcynic | May 8, 2006I know I've got some poker players among my readers, and though I rarely post about poker strategy, the game Saturday night and the ridiculously long journey home combined to spark some thinking. And since at least one of the guys I played with Saturday night reads this blog from time to time, I write this at the risk of having him improve his game. There were 6 players in the game (a size that I like, I prefer smaller tables to larger ones) and 2 of us ended up winning with 4 losing significant amounts of money. That wasn't an accident.
The other 4 players were what poker strategists…
stcynic | November 22, 2005This is becoming a far too familiar story. The police all around the nation are committing enormous resources to stop consenting adults from wagering on a game of skill and it's getting entirely out of hand.
On a busy night at the New York Players Club in upper Manhattan, vice squad officers wearing bulletproof vests and raid jackets dealt the underground poker scene a losing hand.
The team entered unannounced at 11 p.m., detaining dealers, snatching up piles of cash and sending dozens of card players home with empty pockets. Downtown, another popular card club, Playstation, also was…
stcynic | November 17, 2005Paul Phillips has a post about the WSOP final table, which aired Tuesday evening on ESPN, reminding me that I hadn't posted anything about it. The most obvious thing about it, and the thing I found most enjoyable about watching it, was the comraderie among the players and the welcome class with which they treated one another. It probably helped that Matusow was knocked out first, he would no doubt have had some nasty things to say at some point down the line, but I had to feel bad for the guy. How brutal is it to sit down at that table and take KK against AA almost immediately?
I love…
stcynic | November 10, 2005I don't think this has gotten much attention, but I think it's important to publicize it. There's a scandal going on in the poker world over a tournament going on right now, the World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions. You may remember that last year after the WSOP they had a made-for-TV event called the Tournament of Champions, with 9 people hand selected to participate. It was most of the big names you would expect - Doyle Brunson, Howard Lederer, Johnny Chan, Annie Duke, Danny Negreanu, Phil Ivey, Phil Hellmuth and, I think, Chip Reese - along with last year's main event winner, Greg…
stcynic | November 9, 2005The Baltimore police last weekend busted 80 poker players in the city who were participating in a charity tournament. Turns out that the laws in Maryland are so vague in this regard that the police and the prosecutors can't even agree on whether they broke the law or not:
Illustrating the confusion over gambling laws, police and prosecutors bickered last night over whether and how to proceed with charges against 80 people who were caught up in the raid at the Owl's Nest on Wednesday.
Baltimore police rarely pursue charges involving illegal poker, and the city state's attorney's office…