While all this is going on, the good folks at Image Masters continue to provide us with some great action shots during the tournaments.  Every morning I receive pictures from the day before that I use to enhance the stories I try to bring the readers.  I hope they’ve added to the experience.

Today I bring you some photos from Week 2 of the 2009 World Series of Poker without my ramblings.  A small taste of what we have available, look for a full gallery coming in the next few days.  All pictures courtesy of Image Masters.

Pictures after the jump, click to enlarge:

The Two Faces of Andy Black
Andy Black started off the 2009 World Series of Poker with players talking about his play AND his appearance. He seemed to be rocking the beard and laid back look at the beginning and looked completely different during Week 2. Your investigative blogger will get to the bottom of this before the end of the series.

Phil Ivey collects World Series of Poker bracelet #6 at the daily ceremony from WSOP Commissioner Jeffrey Pollack.

Phil Ivey wasted no time after winning his 6th WSOP bracelet. He hopped right back into action.  Full Tilt pro Beth Shak in the foreground and may be the recipient of the Ivey stare.

Legends side-by-side.  Erik Seidel and Mike Sexton grinding away in Event #15 of the 2009 World Series of Poker.  Seidel came close to winning his 9th WSOP bracelet in the Pot Limit Hold’em tournament had to settle for a seventh place finish.  Seidel is tied with another legend, Johnny Moss, with 8 WSOP bracelets.

Svetlana Gromenkova and Karina Jett were just a few of the Full Tilt pros to represent in the 2009 World Series of Poker Ladies Championship. Gromenkova won this event in 2008 but was unable to defend her title.

“Miami” John Cernuto and John Juanda playing in Event #16 $1,500 Seven Card Stud tournament.  “Miami” John would put up a great fight ending up in 11th.  Juanda had his first shot at bracelet number 5 by making the final table. Juanda’s run ended with a 5th place finish.

Howard Lederer playing in the $10,000 Mixed World Championship.  It’s been a slow start to the series for “The Professor” this year with only one cash to date.  No doubt he’ll be a factor as the series progresses.

Both David Chiu and Huck Seed won their way to the final table of the $10,000 Mixed Championship with a chance to add to their jewelry collection.  Seed collected over $102,000 for his 5th place finish and Chiu was the runner up for $304,000 but no new trophies on his wrist.

Erica Schoenberg only has one cash in the 2009 World Series of Poker but continues her search for a WSOP bracelet.  As a railbird favorite, she is always easy to find in the poker room.

It’s never a dull moment when Perry Friedman is in the poker room.  He started the series by sporting a “Full Tilt Poker grill” (gold hip hop teeth things for us uncool folk) and he added a little twist in Week 2.  It’s tough to see but he rocking the cornrows on each side of his head with Full Tilt spelled out in beads.  Who knows what to expect in Week 3.

Post from: Poker From The Rail

2009 World Series of Poker – Week 2 in Pictures

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Category	Andy Black	Jordan Morgan	Survey Says
Career Earnings	Over $4 million	Over $1 million	Andy has a few more years on the circuit than young Jordan Morgan, so it’s only natural he has a big lead in this category. Give Morgan a few more years and the margin should be quite a bit smaller. Until then, this one goes to the Mad Monk of poker – Black leads 1-0.
Major Titles	None	None	Morgan does have a WSOP-C victory under his belt, but that really shouldn’t count as a “major” title. Then again, it’s about as close as we’re gonna get here. Round two goes to Morgan, the score is tied at one apiece.
Tournament Play	Excellent tourney player (when he’s on his game).	Both online and live, Jordan knows how to take down a donkament.	This one’s a pretty close call. On one hand, Black has a long history of impressive tourney runs, including making the final table of the 2005 WSOP Main Event. But Morgan is no slouch himself, having done quite well in both live and online donkaments. At the end of the day, though, this category has to belong to Black (at least for the moment). He now leads by a score of 2-1.
Cash Game Play	Not known as a cash game specialist, but I’m sure he’s rocked more than a few ring games in his time.	Also known more as a tourney player than a cash game grinder, Morgan is nonetheless a threat at any table he sits down at.	Hmm, another tough call. Neither of these guys really qualifies as a cash game player, but I’m sure they both play their fair share at the side games. I’m going to give this one to Morgan as he’s probably done enough grinding in the online ring games to qualify FTW here. The score is tied up once again.
Best Game	I’m not certain on this one, so when in doubt it’s time to go with good old NLHE.	My first thought was NLHE, but then a read something where he said his specialty is HU Limit O/8. Whatever floats your boat Jordan…	I think we can skip the pretext here, you know where I’m going with this one. HU Limit O/8 is all well in good if you like sticking needles in your eye, but for us mere humans it just won’t do. Any game where you’re talking about getting halved and quartered on a regular basis just isn’t for me. Once again, it’s NLHE to the rescue. Andy now leads by a score of 3-2.
Playing Style	Irate Irish	American Assault	Andy uses a pretty aggressive style for someone who’s more or less “old school.” Jordan comes from the online school of thought where the manifesto reads “attack, attack, kill, kill!” Guess which way I’m going here (get ready for a shocker). You just have to love the all out aggression of those online guys, and so do I. Morgan takes this one down and ties the score (one more time) at three apiece.
Nickname	The Mad Monk	iMsoLucky0	OK, I might have to rule this one as “no contest” right away. I mean, The Mad Monk might just be the coolest nickname in poker. Besides, do you really want your nickname to declare that you’re a luck box (not that Morgan is one, but his name does seem to imply it)? This category belongs to Black, enough said. He retakes the lead heading down the home stretch.
Outside Poker	After poker thoroughly destroyed his soul the first time around, Andy became a monk for a while in order to regain his composure and come back to the game stronger than ever before.	Not much. Jordan pretty much went straight from school to playing poker for a living. Although, unlike a lot of the young and successful online pros, he’s actually settled down and married instead of out partying every night. So he’s got that going for him (sigh).	I do envy these kids who went straight from school to becoming online pros for a living. It must be nice making your own hours and not having some maniacal boss tracking your every move each day. Except for my boss, of course, he’s the greatest. But Andy’s tale really is one for the ages, a life lesson for all of us so-called born losers out there. It just goes to show that you have to keep it all in perspective and if you become too obsessed with poker it will ruin your life. Except playing on Full Tilt Poker. Do that as much as possible, otherwise I won’t be able to afford adding a second story to my house. At any rate, Black takes down this category and effectively seals a victory in the match (hooray for anti-climaxes!).
Best Pro Tip	Playing Aces in PLO	Big-Stack Play	Both of these are excellent, insightful tips, but I have to go Morgan’s Big-Stack Play on this one. Maybe it’s because he’s talking about the only game I really know and love, or maybe it’s because even after reading Black’s PLO tip I still can never manage to win with Aces in that damned game. Whatever it is, this one belongs to the lucky one.

And that’s a wrap, folks. Black takes down Morgan by a close score of 5-4. You really have to give it to those Irish guys – they drink more than us, they have really cool accents that make it so you can only understand about 25% of what they’re saying, and they can call The Mad Monk one of their own. Check back next week for more fun and games as the Full Tilt Poker Heads-Up Challenge continues. Until then…

Post from: Poker From The Rail

Heads Up: Andy Black Versus Jordan Morgan

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Raised in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Black took a path less travelled and headed south to Dublin where he eventually earned a law degree at Trinity College. Again, however, he veered “off course”, choosing to pursue his passion for poker rather than his love of law. Following two heart-breaking appearances at the WSOP Main Event in the late 1990s, Black turned his back on the game he loved and disappeared from site for five years. He disappeared to England, nursed his wounds, and took up Buddhism. It was a break that served him well.

Bright, gregarious, and maybe just a little nuts, Black is, if nothing else, an original thinker. We were lucky enough to corner him for a brief conversation and, well, we’ll let Andy speak for himself. Enjoy a look at poker and philosophy from one of the game’s brightest minds:

Things happen at a very rapid pace as a result of technology. This is true with life in general, and in poker. Exposure and experience can be gained very quickly more so now than ever. As a result, it’s easy to lose perspective – lose touch with what’s important. Arguably, anytime something happens very quickly, there’s danger of something being lost even though some things can be gained.

Especially with the rise of the Internet, there’s so much out there that people don’t feel the need to discriminate between what matters and what doesn’t. With this, there are a lot of people that are missing out on the details or finer points in life. They become focused on one thing – not necessarily just poker – and then miss out on everything else going on around them. They develop tunnel vision and miss out on other things that are equally valuable.

Of course there are some people who are able to be balanced and integrated, and still totally focused on one particular thing. But for most people – the majority – and I count myself among those, we need a range of activities or at least a range of ways of doing things to remain reasonably sane. In any case, as an individual, you’ve got to step back and figure this out.

One problem is trying to work out what’s missing in life – and in poker as well – is the fact that it’s not there to begin with. It’s a real paradox trying to work this out. But when something is missing, it creates a couple of problems. With so much choice, it becomes overwhelming – there is so much input that it becomes very difficult to stay focused on what is there, let alone what’s missing.

The thing to do is to work out what you need to make yourself sound – whole and sane – and to move forward. I attempt to apply this to poker – and I do say attempt. With poker, the biggest obstacle to overcome in this context is losing your “beginner’s mind” after you’ve been playing for awhile.

Think about when you started playing how incredibly exciting it was: you had these cards, these chips, these other people at the table – and you wanted to get their chips. Think about how amazing it was when you were making these decisions for the first time: if I bet this or if I check here… Again, it’s all incredibly exciting. This is why most of us continue playing cards – it’s a riveting experience.

But after time goes by, you tend to forget that. And if you get unlucky, it’s very difficult to look at it and realize that maybe you didn’t do anything wrong. Instead, you end up adjusting your game and becoming less imaginative/less creative. It’s like getting beat holding a pair of Kings – that’s happened to me. Five major tournaments in a row, I got done with Kings. It’s easy to lose perspective when these things happen and not look at what you need to do to get on with it.

The elephant graveyard for poker players is to forget to look for the things that are missing. And you don’t notice them because they’re missing: maybe your not being aggressive enough, maybe your not being conservative enough – whatever it is; we could give the whole list of all things poker. But it’s so difficult to figure this out. As a result, you find yourself miserable and just grinding it out tournament after tournament. And you don’t realize that something is missing.

What’s even more dangerous, you might be unfortunate enough to win something playing badly, and then you are really screwed. Because then, you actually end up making the same mistakes for the rest of your life – and this does happen – just because that’s what “won that tournament” that one time.

No matter what, you’ve always got to maintain perspective. The thing that you have to do – and this is half of the battle – is admit to what’s going on: that something’s missing. For most people, in a sense, it can be the whole battle. You really have to admit to yourself that you need to make changes in how you play. And you have to admit that very deeply and realize that you’ll continually need to make changes. For me, the longer I play the more shifts I realize I need to make. I have to stop and look at it in terms of “I’m doing this well, but I could easily do it better. How do I make this happen?” You’ve got to be brutally honest with this without beating yourself up over everything. Once you’ve done that, the next question is: “What do I do next?”

There’s a great Buddhist story which I think applies to this – in Buddhism, it’s about getting out of the suffering in this world and on the path to enlightenment. But the story is this: you find yourself in a battle and somebody fires an arrow, and the arrow hits you in the eye. What do you want to do? What’s the thing to do now?

Most people start to ask “Why did someone fire the arrow? Where did it come from?”

This is absolutely wrong. The very first thing you’ve got to do is get the bloody arrow out. In a sense, bad beat stories are the same: “what the…why did…how did it happen?” That’s what a bad-beat story is. You need to get past that immediately and get the “arrow” out of your eye. And there are loads of people going around with “arrows in their eyes” – I’m doing this all of the time, and I don’t even know that it’s there.

You need to stop, figure out where you’re at and be honest with yourself. Admit that you need to adjust something, and start applying the necessary antidotes. This is where it all has to come from: realizing where you’re at. Otherwise you’ll end up all messed up in one way or another.

This is not a perfect process – for most people it’s quite clumsy. There are exceptions, like Phil Ivey or Patrick Antonius, who seem like they were designed to play poker – they never lose focus. Maybe they’ve even been playing poker for thousands of past lives. But, I’m not like that and you just don’t meet many people that are.

For the rest of us, we need to continually evaluate what needs to be done. When our actions are not in accordance with how things are, we suffer. Taking care of these things is a lifetime’s work and it’s very personal. From a Buddhist perspective, if there are 10 billion people on the planet, there are 10 billion routes to enlightenment. By that, if there are 10 million poker players out there, there are 10 million ways to become a great poker player.

And it’s easy to get lost if you limit the scope of your efforts to improve or remedy the problem. Limiting possible courses of action is a mistake. Figure out where you’re at/what’s wrong, look at what you need to do, and fill in what’s missing. Step back and look at how you do in a game or, even more so, how you run over a period of time. This will pretty much tell you where you’re at in the big picture.

Actually doing this can be extremely difficult, but it’s great as well. In the end, just try to keep an honest picture of things, continue to make the necessary adjustments, and don’t be too hard on yourself.

Post from: Poker From The Rail

The Pros Speak: Andy Black

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