Poker From The Rail
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Posted by Dave McCarthy | Filed under Bloggers Corner
If you want a proper treatment of Phil Ivey’s WSOP win tonight over Bill Chen — coming in Event #37: $3,000 HORSE — read Al’s Bracelet #8 for Phil Ivey.
If you’ve read Al’s report, and a bunch of others, and still want more on Ivey’s win, here are a few random notes from Ivey’s rail.
Tags: Phil Ivey
Posted by Dave McCarthy | Filed under Bloggers Corner
EDIT: Please note that you don’t have to comment in this post. You can comment in any post written at this blog or Michael Craig’s Pokerblog between Tuesday and Friday. Only comment in this post if you want to share thoughts on the Contributing Editors campaign. If you want to comment on, say, Phil Ivey, do it in one of the Ivey posts. Thanks!
Since the WSOP began, Al and I have been holed up in a dark corner of the Amazon room – all day, every day. I think I’ve left the Rio once since the Casino Employee’s Event, and was shocked to hear a passerby initiate a phone conversation with something other than, “So I flopped a set of Jacks and the dude three bets me with a flush draw…”
Suffering from this lack of connection to reality is no big deal. We can (and in the past, have) lived with that. But if we start to lose connection to our readers, it’s a problem. So we’re looking for feedback. We need some contributing editors to comment on the FTP blogs. For your editorial services, we’ll pay FTP points (which can be redeemed for tournament tickets) and freeroll entries.
Contributing Editors Mini-Promotion
1. Every day from Tuesday June 22 through Friday June 25, we will select the 20 best comments at Poker from the Rail and Michael Craig’s Poker Blog. The authors of those comments will each receive 225 FTP points. Michael might not be experiencing the dementia endemic to Poker from the Rail’s staff, but he’d love to hear your thoughts, too.
2. Everyone who leaves an approved comment will be registered in a $150 freeroll on Sunday, June 27, at 8PM ET. Tournament ID: 168313688
3. You must leave your FTP player ID in the comment (for freeroll registration/FTP point payment).
Contributing Editors could:
- Let us know what they like or dislike about a given post
- Disagree with us
- Add any thoughts, stories, etc. that relate to the post
- Point out typos, misspellings, or grammatical errors
- Write pretty much anything related to the post that readers would enjoy
Note: Comments don’t need to be long, but we’d appreciate it if they said something that will help us provide you with a better blog (rather than “Register me for the freeroll now you monkeys!”)
Winners, and a further clarification of the promotion’s guidelines, are after the jump.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Dave McCarthy | Filed under Bloggers Corner
Poker from the Rail’s Top 5 Stories of the Week: June 13-20
#5. Murder at a Texas Poker game: What happened?
#4. EPT Berlin Poker Robbery: Where’s the money Lebowski?
#3. Lacey Jones: Newest Friend of Full Tilt
#2. Jeffrey Papola wins a bracelet: Is he one of shorthanded NLH’s best?
#1. Twitter and Controversy: How offensive can you be in 140 characters?
Tags: Lacey Jones
Posted by Dave McCarthy | Filed under Bloggers Corner, WSOP
With 28 of the 57 2010 WSOP bracelets already awarded, now’s a good time for a recap of some of the more interesting final tables from the first half of this year’s Series.
Tags: Brandon Adams, Tom Dwan
Posted by Dave McCarthy | Filed under Bloggers Corner, WSOP
I had an opportunity to sit down with Full Tilt Poker qualifier Francois8, during breaks of Event #31: $1,500 HORSE.
Fran won a $2k event package freeroll for forum regs, hosted by TilterRick. He had a big following and many well-wishers in the FTP forums going into the event. It was Fran’s first WSOP, so if you’re wondering what it’s like to play in the WSOP…
Excluding your marriage and all other family stuff, where does this experience rate on the all time life experience list?
It’s a pretty cool high. Everyone’s really taking care of me. Getting in the suite here’s pretty cool, Rick hooked me up with one of everything, I’m getting interviewed…
I’m happing to say I’m holding my own at the tables. I’m not feeling intimidated, just playing poker. I feel good.
Being that this is your first time at the World Series, what were you feeling when the cards were ready to go in the air for the first time in your event?
I felt surprisingly normal, though I was pretty nervous when I got all in for my last 1500. It was a 4-way pot that ended up being 3 way and I ended chopping for 5k.
Posted by Dave McCarthy | Filed under Bloggers Corner, WSOP
Congratulations to our caption contest winners! There were a lot of good submissions; it was tough to pick just one for each.
Stay tuned for another caption contest this week…
Photo A:
While the dealer is looking away, Schoenberg uses her secret Jedi-Forces to switch cards.
– H311f14m3
Photo B:
“Hey Phil, go ahead and bust out so we can hit the Waffle House.”
– rgreen5150
Photo C:
Andy Bloch plays a peaceful game of Scrabble, most likely for a $100k prop bet.
– Ezyrider77
Tags: Andy Bloch, caption contest, Erica Schoenberg, Howard Lederer, Phil Ivey
Posted by Dave McCarthy | Filed under Bloggers Corner, WSOP
Event #22, the Ladies No-Limit Hold ‘em Championship, is now underway. Replace “ladies” with any other historically marginalized group and you get something absurd. (Try it.) As it is, the WSOP will award the event’s winner a bracelet on Sunday.
I played a one-table WSOP satellite the night before the ladies event. There were four women at the table. The gentleman in Seat 9 explained that he had planned to play in the ladies event and donate 100% of any winnings to breast cancer research. (Harrahs obviously can’t prohibit men from playing an open event.) He said that a lot of women got angry about that, so he abandoned the plan – he wanted to make a point but not if it was going to upset people.
A blogger friend of his had written a post arguing for the abolishment of the WSOP ladies event: The Delicate Issue of Women in Poker. It’s a good read for anyone who feels strongly about the issue.
Whether the event is patronizing, or a good way to increase female participation in poker, or just a good way for the WSOP to make money, one question remains: does a woman winning the ladies event counts as one of the three bracelets that will get Mike Matusow to run naked down the strip?
Tags: Gender Equality, gender inequality
Posted by Dave McCarthy | Filed under Bloggers Corner
With all durrrr’s bracelet prop bets this Series, his run at a WSOP title was all the more compelling than just another great player going for his first bracelet. Here are the eight most interesting things (in chronological order) I saw and heard while spending the day on Durrrr’s rail. Durrrr began the final day of Event #11 ($1500 NLHE) as chipleader.
#8. “Nothing better than playing shorthanded with Durrrr as chipleader on your left…”
- Nicholas “ISpewChips” Phillips, seated immediately to Durrrr’s right, after Durrrr wins his third straight pot with 12 players remaining.
#7. A few minutes into the final table, Huck Seed walks up to me near the table and asks how Durrrr’s doing. As he’s asking, Durrrr takes down a pot with a preflop raise. “There’s a lot of that going on…he was running them over shorthanded a little bit ago.” I say.
“They shouldn’t be letting him do that,” Huck says. “They should know better.” Huck has faded Durrrr in the latter’s bracelet bets.
#6. A few eliminations later, 4th place finisher Austin McCormick finds himself all in w/ J10 vs. chipleader David Randall’s A10. The flop gives McCormick nothing but a backdoor flush draw. One of Randall’s railbirds sarcastically shouts “Put a diamond up! A teaser!” When the diamond materializes on the turn but the river bricks, the railbird high-fives a friend. He is one happy Two Plus Two regular.
#5. Durrrr, also playing Event #15 ($10k Stud/8b), hustles over to his dwindling stack at Event #11′s dinner break. Immediately to his left is Chris Ferguson. I try to take a picture of them laughing with my camera phone but this is all I get.
#4. As the final table gets shorthanded, the rails begin to fill with bigshots. David Benefield, Brandon Adams, and Lee Childs are all watching. At various times throughout the night, Chris Ferguson, Michael Craig, Eli Elezra, Barry Greenstein, and David Benyamine all make their way through the ropes to take a look.
#3. @RealKidPoker (Daniel Negreanu) tweeting from the Stud/8b event (a stone’s throw away in the Amazon room):
The atmosphere in the room is electric. So many of us have bets against Durrr winning. 3 left and we are sweating hard!
A couple hours later:
Durr just doubled up and the rail cheered while most of the people in the stud 8 moaned and cried.
#2. That 2nd tweet was a reference to this:
With the blinds at 20k/40k, Durrrr open shoves from the SB with 79, Randall calls w/ A10. The flop comes 7-high. A railbird yells, “7 on the turn!” A 7 comes on the turn. Durrrr doubles up. A good looking blond woman runs from the rails and high-fives Durrrr. Durrrr does not appear to know who she is.
#1. Heads up and shortstacked, Durrrr pushes on the button with Q6 and is called by Simon Watt with 99. Durrrr doesn’t catch up, giving him a 2nd place finish. Cries of relief come from the Stud/8b area that has just finished its final hand of the night.
Posted by Dave McCarthy | Filed under Bloggers Corner, WSOP
For a guy like Tom Dwan who routinely wins and loses hundreds of thousands of dollars in a day, the World Series of Poker isn’t quite the same as it is for the average pro.
Durrrr showed up for the $50k Player’s Championship a couple hours late and was one of the only 11 players to bust on Day 1. The online star spent much of the time on the phone, probably frustrated by the fact that the WSOP dealers were failing to issue 300 hands per hour. He was back Saturday and Sunday for $1k and $1.5k events, respectively. $1k is the big blind in Dwan’s regular games. Dwan again spent much of the tournament on the phone and busted quickly.
But if the prestige of a WSOP bracelet isn’t enough, durrrr’s got plenty of bracelet prop bets to keep him honest. He’s been pretty active on the durrrr blog, listing his various bets and soliciting action. If you’ve got $10k and a Two plus Two account, you can bet him, though the lines will have to be modified as they were offered before the WSOP began.
Durrrr’s most recent blog post ends with the intriguing line “I made a ton of bets, and winning a bracelet would definitely be my biggest winning day ever at this point – so you can extrapolate from there.”
Check out his blog for the details of durrrr’s 2010 WSOP prop bets.
(Note: When he refers to “London” he means the WSOP-Europe. In other words, these bracelet prop bets count for WSOP and WSOP-Europe events.)
Posted by Dave McCarthy | Filed under Bloggers Corner
Top 5 Stories of the Week:
5. Fantasy WSOP unveiled…
4. Matusow’s WSOP prop bets adding up…
3. PPA to rally in Washington state…
2. The nosebleed regulars were busy…
1. New online gambling hearing scheduled in the House Ways and Means committee!
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