Matt “All In At 420″ Stout | Poker From The Rail

Big Money Sunday – April 11th

Posted by AlCantHang | Filed under Uncategorized

It was a big weekend around the poker world both live and online. The live poker tournaments are starting to ramp themselves up as we move closer to the 2010 World Series of Poker. This weekend saw Vanessa Selbst hit the NAPT Mohegan Sun Main Event final table and go on to crush the entire table. She reached heads up play with an 18m to 3m chip lead and finished off her opponent in just seven hands. Her victory added $750,000 to her bankroll and put a jolt of energy through the community.

The Big Money Sunday tournaments had several big online pros run deep adding a little excitement to normal rail grinding. You can usually find Danny “The__D__RY” Ryan near the top of the big online tourmaments and he added another title to his resume when he won the Sunday Brawl in the first big result of the evening. That final table also featured Christian “da_professional” Iacobellis who finished in 7th.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: AlCantHang, Big Money Sunday, Bloggers on the Rail, Matt "All In At 420" Stout, Vanessa Selbst

Big Money Sunday – October 18th

Posted by AlCantHang | Filed under Bloggers on the Rail

It was one of the rare Big Money Sundays where the blog post almost writes itself. This week brought the monthly upgrade from the $750 Guarantee to the cool $1 Million Guarantee with a slightly smaller field and hugely larger prizepool. Big names were running deep all across the major tournaments and my little laptop screen was full of different tables as I attempted to capture some of the action.

My usual routine when keeping an eye on these tournaments is start at the beginning and move my way towards the big one, checking for red letter pros and big online runners, always looking for notables. When I took a quick look at the $1 Million Guarantee I saw two Full Tilt pros sitting together deep in the tournament. Both Vivek Rajkumar and Michael Craig (fresh off my having fun at his expense last week) were sitting together at one of the few remaining tables. Unfortunately Mister Craig busted out shortly after began railing him, getting out pipped when he 77 ran into 88 for 52nd place. Rajkumar, on the other hand, was a completely different story.

Once the field was down near 3 tables he picked up the lead and rarely released it. He started the final table with the chip lead and I sent an IM message to a friend saying “Vivek is running over the final table, he’ll have to be unlucky to lose.” I saw the exact same action in person when he took down the 2008 WPT Borgata Poker Open championship. He put his foot on their throat with constant pressure and never let up. In the end he chopped the prizepool heads up and took down the title for literally 1 penny short of $180,000. It was an impressive showing by the Full Tilt pro who also cashed in the Sunday Brawl. Also running deep in the $1 Million Guarantee were former FTOPS winner Jake “psutennis11” Toole, Brian Hastings, Phil “USCphildo” Collins, Brian “SN8WMAN” Hawkins, and Alex “AJKHoosier1” Kamberis.
All finishing in the top 100.

I also spent quite awhile railing the final few tables of the Sunday Mulligan that saw Matt “All In At 420″ Stout make a final table push along with FTOPS runner up Austin “The Quietwinner” McCormick, Dan “USCswimmer” White, Bruce “Not Michael” Buffer, and Rick “MookieBlaylock1″ Whittington. I have to give props to MookieBlaylock1 since he’s based in my home neighborhood. Stout battled the entire final table, eventually moving his way up into a 3rd place chip stack but ran into a big blind versus blind hand. His JackAce was no good against the small blind’s KQ. That put a hurt on his chances and the JackAce was his final undoing when it ran smack into Kings.

Matt Stout is a ton of fun, if you get a chance you should read his blog post about getting berated at the Borgata in a preliminary event. I was one of the bloggers who witnessed the hand and this guy would not let it go. Just laying into Stout while he calming stacked the poor Jersey gentleman’s chips. He got “scumbagged”.

Those were the two really interesting developments during the evening, the Brawl moved along quickly and I continue to only throw a mildly amused eye towards the $200k Double Deuce. Yet another situation developed as they moved towards the final table that me shaking my head in disbelief. Simple question for every poker player on the planet, except for maybe this one. You need to call here with any two cards.

It was a 5-handed table just short of the final 9 players. With blinds at 50k/100k/10k ante it folded around to totsev on the button who pushed for 1,085,351. slikone is the chip leader sitting in the small blind and flat calls the all-in bet. JetYourChips in the big blind reshoves for 1,508,393. How can a player possibly fold getting near 10 to 1 with over a million already invested? Here’s the math, slikeone only needed to call 423,042 to win a 4,152,137 pot. 9.8 to 1 odds with any two cards with a chance to knock out two players and hit the final table with a much larger chip lead. Needless to say, slikone folded or I wouldn’t be writing this. Don’t believe my account, here’s the screenprint before he folded. Don’t ask me why I grabbed it then, I just had a feeling he was going to fold.