Tuesday, May 31, 2011

...and so it begins

With the Casino Employees event already underway and the $25k HU NLHE starting in a few hours the 2011 WSOP is underway.

Who will win their first bracelet? Who will win more than one bracelet this year? What prop bets will be won and lost over the coming weeks? Will Black Friday have a significant impact on prelim event field sizes? How about the main event? Will a well known pro make the final table in the main event?

All this and more to be answered in the next six weeks...

I'll be updating at various points on interesting events, prop bets, results and anything else I find interesting. It's unlikely I'll be in Vegas this year due to work commitments so I'll be updating the blog to help me cope.

Sunday, May 29, 2011

BOOM - Poker Documentry Trailer

More great work from Ryan Firpo, Jay Rosenkrantz and Taylor Caby.

From what I understand there are a number of high stakes cash game players involved in the project, both in content and in financing.

You can see the trailer here:

They started producing/filming this before Black Friday, so my hat goes off to them for adjusting the content and coninuing with the project.

Thursday, May 05, 2011

AP/UB File For Bankruptcy

Well, I can't say I'm surprised.

I never really played at either site, mostly because when I first tried back in 2007 I didn't really like the software and beyond that everything that was widely reported on various news sites and forums put me off for good. Other sites had great software, great games and great support, so there was no reason to play at either.

I really don't think people should have been playing there. I understand that many of the players may not have known, and not everyone reads ITH/2+2 or other sites they would have seen the news and details on but many people played there simply because it was soft and the games were better than they were elsewhere.

I don't believe that these people deserve to lose thier money in any way, because nobody does, but if you were educated on the matter (and you have to assume that most people with big balances were) then you really should have known better.

Sadly, for those with large balances trying to sell at ~15c on the dollar: I don't even think your funds there are worth that.

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Wednesday, May 04, 2011

'Federated Sports' Poker League Season 1

The roster for the first season of the Annie Duke/Jeffrey Pollack has been announced and it's actually better than I expected.

While I still don't agree that someone can just decide to set this up and call it what they have, it's clear they have put a significant amount of effort into the writing the criteria to get the players they want.

Criteria as follows:

The 5 Year Card was awarded to 27 players who met the following criteria:
- At least $4.0 million in adjusted lifetime earnings, with the single largest win capped at $2.0 million
- At least 3 major lifetime titles
- At least 9 cashes since January 1, 2008, for a total of at least $600,000 won

The 3 Year Card was awarded to 55 players who met the following criteria:
- At least $2.5 million in adjusted lifetime earnings, with the single largest win capped at $1.5 million
- At least 1 major lifetime title
- At least 9 cashes since January 1, 2008, for a total of at least $500,000 won

The 2 Year Category A Card was awarded to 36 players who met the following criteria:
- At least $2 million in adjusted lifetime earnings, with the single largest win capped at $1 million
- At least 1 major lifetime title
- At least 6 cashes since January 1, 2008, for a total of at least $300,000 won

The 2 Year Category B Card was awarded to XX players who met the following criteria:
- At least $1.25 million in adjusted lifetime earnings, with the single largest win capped at $750,000
- At least 9 cashes since January 1, 2008, for a total of $600,000 won

It is of course a shame to see no consideration of cash game play or online tournament results but adding either of those means a lot more work (if it's even possible in the case of cash game play) so I can see why they have restricted it to live tournament results.

From the Bluff article:

'For a tournament to qualify it must have been an open tournament with a buy-in of at least $1,500 and the field had to be a minimum of 21 players. The event must also have been publicly announced for at least 30 days prior to starting.'

So none of those 18 man SNG's with $100k buy-ins that get announced a day before are going to count, which is definitely a good thing.

It will be interesting to see how many players will actually turn out to play in these tournaments. I think we can assume that a field of some of the best players in the world with none of the casual and non-professional players that make live tournaments actually worth playing might put some players off.

We may end up with fairly small field tournaments with someone like Mike Matusow or Men Nguyen able to claim to be the 'best in the world' after beating a field of 50 players, which would be a shame.

Personally I think the best talent sits in the '2 Year Category B Card' list which contains people like Christian Harder, Jimmy Fricke, Andrew Robl and Peter Jetten. I'll take them over the Phil Hellmuth/Howard Lederer type players any day.

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Seiborg (feat. Erik Seidel)

Just in case anyone hasn't seen this yet, excelent work from SrslySirius, DRybes and the team behind The Micros:

Seiborg

Looks like Erik Seidel has been a great sport in helping create this. I'm not sure if this is the only/main video but I'm surprised it's only been viewed 25,000 times since April 29th.

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