The World Series of Poker is just two months away. Because Full Tilt asked me to come back to cover the Series for The Blog, I’ll be there and I’m looking forward to it. For the first time in several years, however, it is pretty likely that I WON’T be playing much – or maybe not at all. I am not bringing this up to complain, but rather to illustrate the difficulties in making a living playing poker.
The world isn’t especially kind to women of a certain age. Jo Anne is very youthful for 49. She has a dazzling smile and good skin. But she doesn’t have a single friend who knows her original hair color. And after a year of cancer treatments, Jo Anne’s hair came back lush and thick, but also curly and snowy white.
Full Tilt started running a pair of $1 buy-in tournaments with big guaranteed prize pools. I already missed the Daily Dollar Rebuy, which will run daily at 15:15 ET, but I signed up for the Daily Dollar, which runs at 20:15 ET.
Full Tilt was nice enough to let me run a second Relay for Life charity poker tournament to benefit the American Cancer Society. The tournament will take place on Full Tilt on Sunday, April 26, at 18:00 ET. The buy-in, like the first Relay tournament, will be $5 + $5, and Full Tilt is donating the entire $5 rake to my Relay team.
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My apologies on not blogging much in the last couple weeks, I took a little break after the NBC Heads-Up Championship and last week was Hospital Week in the Craig household. Everything is fine and it was all routine stuff. In fact, to give you some perspective, even with two hospital visits in a week my life was way better than it was at this time last year. (And that’s even with a colonoscopy.)
In a pair of sessions over the last few days, Patrik Antonius erased Tom Dwan’s six-figure lead in their challenge match and briefly opened a lead of his own. But in the last session, Dwan won and the match is essentially tied. According to Full Tilt’s durrr Challenge Page, this is how the match stands:
Early Saturday morning, Steve Brecher won the WPT Bay 101 Shooting Star Championship. He outlasted a field of 391, including a marathon final table, to take home the Championship and $1,025,500. Steve succeeded Ted Forrest as the Bay 101 Champ by busting Kathy Liebert at 4:30am Saturday.
It has now been a couple weeks since Full Tilt started offering World Series seats, both for the Main Event and for other events. If your main goal in online poker is to qualify for the World Series, you could literally spend 24 hours a day chasing the dream on Full Tilt and still not be able to take advantage of all the chances.
The first durrrr Challenge, pitting Tom Dwan vs. Patrik Antonius, stands in favor of Dwan through 4,178 hands, though they are less than 10% through their 50,000-hand match. They haven’t played much in the less two weeks – in fact, just once since February 23 by my count – but based on some recent comments by Patrik, I expect that to change. Here is what I have to share for now:
This has been a wonderful weekend at the NBC Heads-Up Championship. It’s my favorite event to cover and write about, and this year was no exception. Thanks to Mori and Eric and Pierre and the whole crew and even the guy who kept yelling at me not to get up during the round even though I had the worst seat in the house and remained motionless for sixteen hours. And in the spirit of cameraderie, let me give a special thank you to LeeAnn Tweeden.
