All Posts Tagged: Strategy Snapshots

With the latest two Main Event episodes airing last night, we're now down to the final two tables.

This week we saw Ivey looking ridiculously human mucking a flush with no action on the river (late night at Bobby's Room anyone?) and Nick Maimone looking Moneymakeresque, getting in bad and hitting every time.

We were also forced to suffer through more of Norman Chad's stupid jokes and awful poker commentary.

Side note: If I have to listen to Norman Chad tell one more person to "bet to see where he's at" I'm going to kill a kitten.

But I digress. This week's snapshot comes not from this week's broadcast but from last week's. It was a hand too good to pass up and we really didn't see any hands played to the river on the latest broadcasts.

Without further ado.

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Every year when the Main Event gets under 100 players, it still surprises me how many awful players have managed to get through.

From the last two episodes on ESPN there are two mind-numbingly horrible hands that come to mind.

In one, a player checks through fives full against two players that obviously don't have a better full house.

In the other, some random jock calls a raise with 8-2o out of the big blind vs. Phil Ivey only to flop a pair and fold. (Hoping for an 822 flop? Makes sense.)

Luckily, awful hands weren't the only thing featured.

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Tuesday during World Series of Poker season is quickly becoming one of my favorite days of the week.

Last night ESPN aired two more episodes on the road to this year's Main Event final table, getting us officially up to mid-way through Day 6. With just under 150 players left, it's now just a 15-table sit-and-go to the bracelet.

Today's snapshot features a a blind vs. blind hand involving CardPlayer's Jeff Shulman and the infamous Bertrand "ElkY" Grospellier

The Set-up:

With the blinds $6,000/$12,000, the hand kicks off with a raise to $35,000 in the small blind from Shulman.

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With ESPN airing two more episodes on Tuesday night we're now in the money and finished with Day 4.

The Day 4 coverage saw two story lines: people playing ridiculously - almost embarrassingly - tight on the money bubble, and the feature table donating chips to Phil Ivey.

In this hand we have the latter, post bubble bust.

The Setup:

With the blinds $3,000/$6,000, Phil Ivey raises it up to $16,000 in the cut-off. Bernhard Perner makes the call in the small blind and David Wickham calls in the big blind.

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ESPN just waxed off its Day 3 coverage of the 2009 Main Event last night and naturally we have another Main Event snapshot.

Last night's feature table had two notable Aussies: WSOP player of the year Jeffery Lisandro and 2005 Main Event winner Joe Hachem.

In this hand, it's Australia vs the world when Claus Nielsen gets not one but both to lay down better hands.

The Set Up:

With the blinds $1,000/$2,000, Claus Nielsen raises it up to $5,200 from middle position.

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With two Main Event episodes airing last night, we have another Main Event snapshot for you.

ESPN changed it up this year, adding a second episode for each Day 2, so rather than one episode of each Day 2 you now get two. More coverage means more interesting hands.

In this hand, 2004 World Champ Greg Raymer mixes it up with lacrosse-team owner Jamie Dawick.

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The second batch of WSOP Main Event episodes aired on ESPN this week, covering the final two Day 1 heats.

The latest feature tables see Daniel Negreanu, sick, sniffling and playing quite bad even by Daniel Negreanu standards, and the 2008 POY Erick Lindgren.

To say Lindgren was playing small ball would be an understatement. He was playing tiny ball, seemingly unwilling to risk any chips at all.

As Mike Matusow pointed out in episode one, the Main Event is a marathon, not a sprint, so playing small ball and avoiding big pots early is certainly a sound strategy.

When the tournament takes more than a week, you can't make Day 7 if you're knocked out in a big pot on Day 1.

The second episode opens with one of Erick's small ball hands.

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Episode one of the Main Event on ESPN featured one particularly uncomfortable, hard-to-watch story line:

How well Gus Hansen does with ladies of all shapes and sizes.

It also, however, featured a still relatively unknown Lex "RaSZi" Veldhuis absolutely running over the feature table, raising, re-raising and bluffing with ridiculous frequency - and no one seemingly able to adjust to it.

His most frequent whipping boy: young German player Simon Muenz.

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So they've rotated in the second group of players on High Stakes Poker Season 5, and they may not be quite as exciting as the first.

At times it hasn't even seemed like much of a poker show, as 75% of the table seems more intent on making prop bets than actually playing poker.

That said, Episode 8, which aired last night, wasn't completely devoid of poker content, as Daniel Negreanu and Patrik Antonius locked horns in a $72,000 pot that wound up being the most interesting hand of the episode.

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High Stakes Poker Season 5, Episode 6 aired last night and, as expected, upped the bar for television poker again - this time by shattering the record for the biggest pot ever on TV.

It should come as no surprise that Tom "durrrr" Dwan was involved, locking horns with PokerStars Team Pro Barry Greenstein in what would amount to almost a $1 million coin flip.

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Season 5 Episode 5 of High Stakes Poker aired last night, and the hand of the night featured a $200,000 bluff from Barry Greenstein that succeeded in getting his opponent to lay down top pair.

If you're a poker player you know where you'll be at nine o'clock Sunday night: plunked down in front of your TV watching eight of poker's best flinging money around like it's going out of style.

Without fail, each episode brings us at least one hand worth discussing in more detail, and Episode 5 was no different.

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Episode 4 of High Stakes Poker Season 5 brings us what we've come to expect from the best poker show on television: bluffs, suck-outs and sick value bets for more than your average American earns in an entire year.

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Episode 3 of High Stakes Poker Season 5 aired last night, and like the previous two episodes, it made for some solid TV. The storyline emerging from this episode was the implosion of Daniel Negreanu.

It's no secret that HSP has never been too kind to Kid Poker. We all remember the set-over-set, turned-quads-over-full-house hand that cost Daniel his stack against Gus Hansen a few years back.

The recurring theme seemed to be Daniel putting his opponent on a better hand and yet calling off his chips anyway.

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The second episode of Season 5 of High Stakes Poker aired on Sunday, and as you might have guessed, durrrr played another hand that had everyone talking.

This one saw a family pot. The online phenom turned his made top pair into a super sick deep-stacked bluff, successfully getting two players to fold better hands, to the tune of a $133,500 pot.

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Last Sunday, High Stakes Poker stormed back onto television screens nationwide with one of the most talked-about hands in its history.

The highlight of the first episode of the fifth season was clearly the $175,200 pot played between WSOP Main Event Champion Peter Eastgate and online dynamo Tom "durrrr" Dwan.

The hand, probably one of the most thought-provoking ones ever played on the show, had people arguing whether Eastgate missed out on value by playing the hand so passively.

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The action has been hot and heavy at the nosebleed stakes on Full Tilt Poker as of late. In this version of the snapshot we check out a hand in which Phil Ivey looks very human, donating a $401,919 pot to Finnish pro Sami "LarsLuzak" Kelopuro.

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Peter "Isser" Eastgate flexes some of his Main Event run-good muscle in this $48,366 pot won on PokerStars.

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In the biggest pot of the year thus far Phil Ivey teaches Finnish pro Sami "LarzLuzak" Kelopuro a $406,814 lesson about why he shouldn't put in 30BB pre-flop, out of position, with a potentially dominated hand.

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The action at the high-stakes tables has been sporadic thus far in the new year. Still, we didn't have to look too far to find an interesting hand from the $200/$400 tables in which $84,576 changes hands thanks to an ace kicker.

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Tom "durrrr" Dwan starts the new year off with a bang and shows us why he was one of the top money earners of 2008, with this $67,597 pot at luckexpress10's expense.

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Another hand brought to you by the good folks at Full Tilt Poker and their ever-popular $500/$1,000 game. Today's chapter involves another two heavyweights of the e-felt, Phil Galfond and Ariel Schneller. When the dust settles one will be $200,000 richer.

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This edition of the snapshot features two poker dynamos for some reason duking it out heads-up at the highest stakes available online. Makes sense, right?

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Very little time was wasted today as they went from 18 to six in less than three levels and the final table was set on Day 5 of the Doyle Brunson Five Diamond World Poker Classic.

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A gang of thieves and murderers filled the Bellagio's Fontana Room Tuesday for the third day of the Doyle Brunson Five Diamond World Poker Classic, with 84 people falling victim to a poker crime spree perpetrated by the 55 who now remain in contention for the crown.

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This edition of the snapshot features draws aplenty and a rare three-way all-in culminating in a $490k pot won by Urindanger.

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