SCOOP: McMang Grabs 8-Game & Gribralter11 Dominates PLO HiLo – Bluff Magazine
May 15, 2010 by admin
Filed under Brock Parker
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SCOOP: McMang Grabs 8-Game & Gribralter11 Dominates PLO HiLo
Bluff Magazine The final three tables, 18 players, paid notables Justin “Boosted J” Smith 11th, Brock Parker 13th, Chad Brown 14th and fresh off his SCOOP title last night … |
Joe Sebok Gets Hot and Sweaty With Sarah Underwood – Gambling911.com
 Poker Room Review |
Joe Sebok Gets Hot and Sweaty With Sarah Underwood
Gambling911.com Sebok questioned if this was a good thing for the game, when the poker world is already overloaded with tournament tours across the world and player … May 14th – Daily DealPoker News Daily |
Poker in Twitter: Mother’s Day, PokerStars Big Game, and Charity Tournaments – Poker News Daily
May 11, 2010 by admin
Filed under Vanessa Rousso
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Poker in Twitter: Mother's Day, PokerStars Big Game, and Charity Tournaments
Poker News Daily Playing with Daniel, Freddy Deeb, Vanessa.” Vanessa Rousso herself was ready for action, Tweeting, “Tomorrow I play in Fox TVs new show The Big Game… can't … |
The Deconstruction of Ivey Continued
April 15, 2010 by admin
Filed under poker news
Ivey on Losing
In this PokerListings interview Phil said, with some passion. “In poker if you’re going to get good you have got to learn to lose. ‘Cause poker is just like any other game or sport.”
Now, everyone knows this; it’s become a poker cliché. It’s what Phil said next that is insightful.
“But you are going to have to learn how to deal with losing in order to become a better winner. That’s why I think poker is such a wonderful game. There are guys that play certain sports that (sic) hardly ever lose, but in poker, you are just going to have to lose.”
This is deeply interesting. It is also stunningly obvious but I have yet to hear anyone make this point explicitly. In our game the emotional stability needed to stay on top is of a different kind than in many other sports and games.
If you’re the best boxer in your weight class you practically never suffer defeat. If you’re on the best team in basketball you’re going to win the vast majority of your games and you will routinely thump the weaker opponents. Hell, the UConn women’s team is up to 78 straight now. Same for tennis and many other sports and games, like chess. An international grand master in chess can go for months, even years without losing a match.
But in poker you can be among the very best, the most skilled, the most feared, and routinely get smacked around the proverbial room, not just by another top flight pro, but by fish, donkeys, contributors who are so bad they couldn’t spell poker if you spotted them the ‘p’ and the ‘o’.
Losing here takes on a different psychological cast. If you cannot become a good loser, you have little chance of becoming a winner.
Ivey on playing style
When asked about his playing style Phil answered that he doesn’t have one. Think for a minute about how different this answer is from how the typical pro responds to such questions.
Phil looks to figure out how you’re playing and adjusts, which fits with a recent comment by Phil Galfond, who said that playing Ivey heads-up was unnerving. Ivey began check-raising him on virtually every hand (probably feeling Galfond was opening light). So Galfond adjusted, began checking behind more and re-raising —- only to have Ivey compensate within just a few hands.
Galfond tried shifting again; Ivey spotted the change and adjusted, Galfond noted, faster than anyone he’d ever encountered.
This flexibility is certainly one of Phil’s most effective weapons. It is also very hard to do. Most of us have our own personal styles, ways of playing our games, living our lives. His “anti-style,” or “stylistic emptiness” (it’s hard to know what to call it) is unusual; most of us would feel uncomfortable with it.
However, it meshes with what I recall from the times we played together in Atlantic City when he was a young (actually underage) kid and I was just another recreational player, like I still am.
I couldn’t put a label on him then and I still can’t (can you?). Sure he’s aggressive but then he’ll seem so passive at times. Sure he plays position but sometimes he’ll almost recklessly make moves from early position. It confused me then; it still does.
Of course, the reason I never figured it out is because I was looking in the wrong place. I was looking at Phil when I should have been looking at the other players.
Ivey on Dumping a Winning Hand
At last year’s WSOP main event Phil (in)famously misread his hand and mucked a winning flush.
Now this could be upsetting, and when told about it he didn’t look real happy but he made a remark that speaks volumes about his grasp of the larger picture. “If,” he smiled, “I do win that pot it would change everything that happened afterward and I may not have made the final table.” Yup. He’s right.
Ivey on Other Players
I don’t know anyone who has anything less than a positive opinion about Phil, certainly not in terms of his poker. But more importantly, he has what seems like a genuine affection for most of his fellow pros, unlike many of his fellow pros who seemed to revel in trashing each other.
The classic case is Phil Hellmuth, the guy everyone loves to hate. Ivey has been at four final tables with Hellmuth. Four times he won. Rather than denigrate Hellmuth’s game, he merely refers to him as “His good-luck charm.”
Is this tactical diplomacy? Or is Ivey just a nice guy? Does it matter? Nah.
Tell us what you think in the comment section below.
More Guest Blog posts from Arthur S. Reber
Walking the Fine Line: The C Word
Stakes: Steaks or Hamburgers?
Visit PokerListings.com
Isildur1 Skips the Big Game – Sports Interaciton Blog (blog)
April 13, 2010 by admin
Filed under Justin Bonomo
 FlopTurnRiver.com (blog) |
Isildur1 Skips the Big Game
Sports Interaciton Blog (blog) Taping started last Sunday and included names like Roland de Wolfe, Jennifer Tilly, Phil Laak, Justin Bonomo, Luke Schwartz and Tony G himself, among others … Isildur1 Backs Out of PartyPoker Big Game IVBluff Magazine Isildur1 Will Not Be Playing in the PartyPoker Big Game IV As ExpectedPoker Bonus Source Isildur1 Pulls Out of PartyPoker Big Game IVPoker News Daily |
Isildur1 Backs Out of PartyPoker Big Game IV – Bluff Magazine
April 11, 2010 by admin
Filed under Justin Bonomo
 Bluff Magazine |
Isildur1 Backs Out of PartyPoker Big Game IV
Bluff Magazine While Isildur1 will not be in attendance for the event, several other big names in the poker world will, including Tony G, Isaac Haxton, Justin Bonomo, … Isildur1 Pulls Out of PartyPoker Big Game IVPoker News Daily |
PartyPoker Big Game IV Lineup Grows – Poker News Daily
April 11, 2010 by admin
Filed under Justin Bonomo
 PokerNews.com |
PartyPoker Big Game IV Lineup Grows
Poker News Daily … and current member of Team PokerStars Online will have several other younger poker pros join him, including Isaac Haxton and Justin “ZeeJustin” Bonomo. … More Names for the PartyPoker Big Game IV, Irish Open Champ Makes Backers …PokerNews.com |
More Names for the PartyPoker Big Game IV, Irish Open Champ Makes Backers … – PokerNews.com
April 9, 2010 by admin
Filed under Justin Bonomo
 PokerNews.com |
More Names for the PartyPoker Big Game IV, Irish Open Champ Makes Backers …
PokerNews.com Man of the moment James Mitchell has put his name down, as has Justin Bonomo, Roland De Wolfe, Sam Trickett, EPT Champion Jake Cody and Roberto Romanello. … PartyPoker Big Game IV Lineup GrowsPoker News Daily |
Walking the Fine Line Part 1: The C Word
April 7, 2010 by admin
Filed under poker news
Politicians, the media and the moralists have made it important. The poker community needs to take stock of the situation, examine its nuances and develop codes for appropriate behavior, lest they be imposed from outside.
Recall how 60-Minutes handled poker last year and the underhanded way in which the US Congress passed the UIGEA to appreciate how important this issue is. So:
A Little History
Cheating has always been a worrisome aspect of poker, with the understanding that theissue isn’t poker, it’s cheating.
Larceny lurks in many hearts and when money is involved and opportunity sits there as open and inviting as a fat cat’s belly on a warm summer’s day, well, you know what’s bound to happen.
Poker became popular in the late 1800′s. It had evolved earlier in the century from a French game (called poque) that used a 20-card deck.
As it grew, mainly in the American south, it became a popular way to kill time while on the riverboats that paddled up and down the Mississippi. And it gave us the game’s first iconic offspring: the Riverboat Gambler, replete with pencil moustache, frock coat and cheroot and known for odd mannerisms in the shuffling and dealing of the cards.
A lot of these guys were cheats. Marked cards, cold decks, false shuffles, dealing seconds and off the bottom, hold-out devices, mirrors, collusion. If you could think of it, someone was doing it. It didn’t take too many ‘honorable’ churchgoers getting fleeced before the outpourings of Puritanical righteous indignation ended it all.
After poker and other forms of gambling were shut down by changes in the law, the game went exactly where you would expect it to: underground. It still flourished, but in private games held in homes, hotel rooms, social clubs and community halls. Some of these games were pretty big and a generation of ‘road gamblers’ sprung up to take advantage of the well-heeled but less-skilled.
Several books have been written about this period, the best are those based on the reminiscences of Doyle Brunson (According to Doyle, reissued as Poker Wisdom of a Champion) and Amarillo Slim Preston (Amarillo Slim in a World Full of Fat People), as well as Des Wilson’s superb chronicle, Ghosts at the Table.
In these books you get a sense of folks walking this fine line. There’s cheating going on all around them. Games are rigged, decks stacked and, yes, they get hijacked and more than once find themselves at the wrong end of a shotgun.
Did these guys, some of them icons of the game, ever cheat? Did they ever stretch the proper bounds of propriety? I don’t know, but some eight years ago we were confronted with:
The ‘Cheating Tapes’
The late Russ Georgiev, an admitted swindler and cheat made a series of public accusations, mostly on the rec.gambling web site. He implicated several prominent players, including some whose photos hang in the Poker Hall of Fame.
Georgiev confessed to long-term, systematic larceny at poker games in public venues, throughout the 1970′s and ’80′s, mainly in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
He also acknowledged having links with some of the most notorious, mob-connected scoundrels in “old Vegas,” including murderer Tony Spilotro. Georgiev does not paint a particularly uplifting picture of the game.
In 2001 Mike Caro, concerned about the possible veracity of Georgiev’s claims, sat down with him and two of his confederates (John Martino, a Las Vegas regular as far back as the ’60s, and Bill Nirdlinger, another long-time rounder) and made the now infamous “cheating tapes” on which Georgiev and friends ‘tell all.’
I’ve watched the tapes, all six hours. They are not exactly convincing. Georgiev was, moreover, a self-promoter who, until his recent death, used the peculiar ‘fame’ this episode brought him to establish a career selling DVD’s of the sessions and writing about cheating.
Did he have ulterior, monetary motives? I don’t know but it’s hard to dismiss the thought.
But, independent of the details of the accusations, it is pretty clear that a lot of sleazy stuff was going on from the dusty back roads of Texas to the glitzy casino poker rooms in ‘old’ Vegas.
Happily, things have changed. The ‘industry’ appreciates that cheating, real or imagined, is bad for business. Far more revenue is generated when everyone knows the games are ‘clean.’
But problems still exist and as the game grows, particularly on the Internet, they’ve multiplied. Stay tuned as we examine them in future posts in this series.
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More Names for the PartyPoker Big Game IV, Irish Open Champ Makes Backer Happy … – PokerNews.com
April 7, 2010 by admin
Filed under Justin Bonomo
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More Names for the PartyPoker Big Game IV, Irish Open Champ Makes Backer Happy …
PokerNews.com Man of the moment James Mitchell has put his name down, as has Justin Bonomo, Roland De Wolfe, Sam Trickett, EPT Champion Jake Cody and Roberto Romanello. … |
