PokerListings Blog

There’s been a lot of speculation about the psychology behind the folks who’ve been indicted in the Full Tilt Poker debacle.

A lot of the recent talk has been about the purported actions of Chris Ferguson and Howard Lederer, two of poker’s more respected long-time players.

Lederer is often referred to as “The Professor” because of his thoughtful manner and penchant for deep analysis and insightful questions. Chris is actually closer to this role in real life since he holds a Ph.D. and has spent more than a few hours in front of college classrooms.

Until now few have had anything but admiration and respect for them both.

Of course, we’re still in the classic “innocent until proven guilty” mode. I have no idea what the outcome will be. They may be found guilty; they may be exonerated. I am only interested here in the psychological issues.

The question raised most often is: How could these very smart dudes with position, money and prestige do the things they are accused of? It is a good question. It is also one that gets asked every time an odd-ball crime gets committed.

I wanted to write an entry with my thoughts about the Big Game.

In case you don’t already know, I was recently featured as a Loose Cannon in the second season of the PokerStars Big Game.

Go to the start of this blog to see a couple entries from February, back when the show was taped.

Courtney Gee is back from playing on the PokerStars Big Game in Las Vegas where she experienced the highest stakes and the toughest competition of her life!

Courtney's not allowed to tell us the profits/losses from the session (Damn you PokerStars) but she's got plenty to say about what it's like playing for big money against the best in the world.

We've had this project on the burner for a little while now and we're finally ready to start rolling out the free poker strategy!

Just before the new year we put out the virtual suggestion box to give our readers a chance to voice their biggest poker strategy concerns. The suggestions flooded in here on the site, as well as on Twitter and Facebook, and we picked the best ten.

We sent that list over to our friends at Cardrunners and they picked ten of their best coaches to tackle these weighty issues.

We've got the list of topics and the list of coaches for you right here, plus a link to the inaugural post which went up today!

Playing high-stakes cash on television for potentially life-changing money isn't something we all get a chance to do. That's why we're so jealous of Courtney Gee.

The PokerStars Big Game is taping a brand new episode this week and Courtney is the Loose Cannon.

She's getting staked $100,000 to play against some of the best players in the world and she'll be blogging about it right here on PokerListings.com!

Read on for Courtney's first post and check back early next week for her trip report!

It’s an interesting dynamic when you find yourself seated with a few friends at the same table in a poker tournament.

It’s like Mike said in Rounders, “We're not playing together, but then again, we're not playing against each other either. It's like the Nature Channel. You don't see piranhas eating each other, do you?"

That’s exactly the situation we’ve got here on Day 2 of the Aussie Millions main event. Howard Lederer and his Team Full Tilt cronies Phil Ivey and Patrik Antonius are all sitting at one end of the same table.

Poker is as much a game of emotion as it is of money. Poker is also more a game of emotional control than anything else. It isn't just the emotions that get stirred up during the course of a hand, a session, a year of play, it's the way in which you grasp those emotions, experience them, react to them.

I maintain that more money is lost at poker because of poor management of emotional highs and lows than any other factor, more than stupidity, more than bad game selection, more than bad luck.

We began this discussion with some history on the unsavory elements of poker.

Today, some case studies of "marginal" situations where these elements present themselves. Cases like these make nice "intuition pumps" - they get you thinking.

Blogs have many uses. One is to treat them like the classic soapboxes of the British parks, where you just stand up and start talking, talking about what you're thinking, why you're thinking it and why everyone else ought to start thinking about it too.

So, this will begin an off-and-on soapbox series looking at the "fine lines" in poker. The ones that we cross, sometimes because we didn't even know there was a line there in the first place.

Today's line is the one that divides the tricksters, the masters of deception and geniuses of artifice from the con artists, the scammers and the cheats. But this line isn't a clean one. It moves about and it's not always clear when it's been crossed.

Many choose to ignore this topic, claiming it isn't of any real importance. They are wrong.

A few days ago an ad appeared on ebay.com for TJ Cloutier's 2005 WSOP bracelet. Starting bid: $2,999.

Put aside the easy assumptions that Cloutier lost so much playing dice that he's forced to sell his hardware and the ad has actually sparked some interesting debate.

As a side note the ad says the bracelet was "acquired" from Cloutier, and the seller's name is planopawnshop. Draw your own conclusions.

David Sklansky started a thread on two plus two this morning posing the question, "At what price is a WSOP bracelet sale not tacky?"

This question on its own isn't of much import, considering that the bracelet in question is of no real historical significance. It's just one of the hundreds handed out over the last few decades.

But what if the bracelet for sale was noteworthy? What if it was the last Main Event bracelet Stu Ungar won before he passed away? What if it was the first Main Event bracelet won by Doyle Brunson?

Does poker memorabilia really exist and is there a group of people willing to pay top dollar for it? What does that say about poker's place in modern cultural history?

Personally I can't imagine a reason for wanting TJ Cloutier's 2005 bracelet but I have a feeling there would be a lot of interest if the piece played a big part in poker's shared heritage.

Sports are an immensly strong thread that ties a culture together and memorabilia is a way to own a part of it, to be able to hold it and touch it.

Despite the fact that poker has made it into the light only recently, for more than a century it's been there every step of the way. It shouldn't be surprising that people might want a part of it for themselves.

Life, like many things, has both a start and an end.

From our first breath to our last we're destined to play out the stories of our lives. Each one of us has a different story and we each live with varying degrees of uncertainty about what will happen next.

Our lives are like books. Each day is like a page and tells our story. Stories unravel in numerous ways and sometimes we neglect to question ourselves about how we are viewing it.

Ask yourself, objectively, who are you in the story of your life?

After what happened earlier today at EPT6 Barcelona Roland de Wolfe will back me up on this, don't let go of your cards!

If you missed it in the live updates from the event Roland bluffed at a river with king-high and got looked up. He flashed a king and threw both his cards in the muck. As it turned out his opponent had queen-high and since he was the only one holding cards he was awarded the pot.

Suspicion of angle-shooting aside, Roland's nemesis did one thing right - he did not let go of his cards.

This lesson extends to anytime you have cards in front of you. You must protect them! I've seen dealers muck people's cards while they're all-in, knocking them out of the tournament regardless of what their opponents are holding.

I've even seen players hurl their own cards at another player's unprotected cards out of spite during multi-way pots. If you don't have something protecting your cards it becomes a dead hand the second someone else's cards touch them.

Roland found out the hard way today so learn from his mistake and protect your hand.

There comes a time for every poker player when the only move they have left is to get up and leave the table. For me, this came on my first day in Vegas during the WSOP.

I sat at an empty seat at a $2/$5 No-Limit table and grabbed a rack of chips. The session started off ridiculously slow. I literally didn't have a single hand worth limping for close to an hour.

Any time I felt like raising a hand, such as #7s#9s, there would be a raise and a re-raise ahead of me. No big deal, just wait it out I thought.

With all the ego and trash talking between the degenerates at every poker table, it may seem odd to get upset over the phrase "I'm sorry."

Like any competitive sport or activity, poker is a game of respect. You can be a lot of things at a poker table, and how you act and play is entirely up to you.

But at the end of the day you need to have respect for the rules, other players and the house for the game to function.

To an outside observer, poker may seem like a rogue game full of social miscreants. Players are bluffing, goading, needling, angling and juicing the other players, all in an effort to take as much money from everyone else on the table as possible.

The other day I made a decent series of calls against an opponent for a nice pot. After the hand some of the other players asked me how I knew the other guy was bluffing.

I don't like talking strategy at the poker table, so I told them that I'd have to sit down and think about it to give them an answer.

Truth is, I knew exactly what I'd been doing, and why I'd been doing it. The only thinking I needed to do was how to put it into words.

Live poker is all about taking control of a table, and manipulating its play to suit your own needs.

Twice in my life I've been seated at a table with a player perpetually pushing. The game of poker completely changes when a player is all-in blind on every hand dealt.

I remember hearing about a hand in the WSOP Main Event a few years ago that really entertained me. Even now, with thousands more hands under my belt, this hand still makes me smile.

If you sleep all day and spend all night playing cards, the only ladies you're ever likely to meet as a single grinder will be at the table. Here, then, is a guide to help you pick up more than the pot.

Somewhere among the lewd jokes, angle shooting, bad beat stories and outrageous boasts, I've managed to come away from poker tables with some valuable words of wisdom.

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