Remko’s Run

Last summer I remember listening to an episode of the Dope Stories Podcast, the one featuring Shane “Shaniac” Schleger and Dr. Pauly. It was their “last” episode, actually, titled “This Is The End,” although they’d get together for another reunion ep. after that one.

On the show Pauly tells a funny story about working at the World Series of Poker several years back, with one of the story’s highlights (for me) having to do with our Dutch friend Remko Rinkema. I must’ve first met Remko at the 2008 WSOP when he was there reporting for PokerNews’ “NL” site, and we’ve had the chance to work together many times since then including most recently at the EPT Grand Final in Monaco.

I won’t rehearse all of Pauly’s story, but I will say it has to do with him having noticed something special about Remko. As the good doctor explains, his powers of perception had been heightened pharmaceutically, thereby enabling him to see more clearly than the rest of us Remko’s unrelentingly bright and positive aura. I’m remembering Remko back then often dressed in the orange jersey of his native country’s football squad, which I suppose only heightened the sunshiny effect Pauly was witnessing.

You can take Pauly’s story however you like, but anyone who knows Remko would readily agree that it is almost impossible not to pick up on the positive vibrations he consistently gives off. There are many others with whom I’ve had the good fortune to work at poker tournaments over the years who have also made my life brighter and funnier, and I’ll bet a lot of them -- like me -- would include Remko in that category of colleagues, too.

Thus was it especially fun to see Remko not only go deep in yesterday’s PokerStars’ Spring Championship of Online Poker Event #35-M, the $215 8-game mix, but actually come close to winning the sucker. He finished second out of 548, and in fact took away the largest share of the prize pool ($18,195.21) thanks to making a deal heads-up when he had the chip lead.

Even wilder, he outlasted both fourth-place finisher Dzmitry "Colisea" Urbanovich (who finished fourth) and Team PokerStars Pro Jason Mercier (who finished third), even knocking both of them out. Urbanovich is just coming off a series of European Poker Tour victories and earning EPT Player of the Year for Season 11, while Mercier has won three SCOOP titles over the last week-and-a-half. Seriously, what a barnburner!

When he and the eventual winner, a player named “Toby Work” from Denmark, were heads-up and getting the deal done, Remko’s opponent asked “u r journalist?” Remko didn’t hesitate before answering.

“I’m a top poker pro, I just write about poker so that the others have a chance to win,” he typed.

Remko’s many friends who were railing -- including both players and other poker media -- all laughed wherever they were around the world, each imagining hearing Remko delivering that line. (“Imagine how much funnier I am in Dutch,” Remko once told me. I believe it.)

I was glad a lot of us Remko fans got a chance last night to enjoy seeing him shine.

(EDIT [added 5/23/15]: To hear Remko tell the story of his run, check out the newest PokerNews podcast.)

Listening Back to Back in the Day

There’s a lot that’s interesting swirling around with regard to online poker and where it’s going these days. (Or not going, if you’re here in the U.S.)

But that’s standard -- that is, for there to be all sorts of stories, scoops, sensations, and scandals associated with the online version of the game. Has been the case ever since I started writing this blog more than eight-and-a-half years ago.

In fact today I took a break from reading the latest to look back a little at some of the issues being discussed not long after I started this sucker, thanks in part to my having randomly happened on a folder on an old computer full of poker podcasts.

The shows are all from late 2007 and early 2008, back when I remember having to download podcasts in order to hear them. That above is a crude screenshot of the folder -- if you’re curious you can click the pic to enlarge it. Looks like more than 40 different shows represented in the folder. Just by chance I decided to dial up one from exactly seven years ago today -- the 12/2/07 episode of “Big Poker Sundays” hosted by Scott Huff and Haralobos Voulgaris which aired on the now-defunct PokerRoad site.

The show covered various topics of the day, including a story about an infamous instance of “ghosting” involving the soon-to-be-let-go Managing Editor of BLUFF, Chris Vaughn, and Sorel Mizzi. Shane “shaniac” Schleger called in, too, to talk more about the state of online poker including current worries about multi-accounting, ghosting, and what was then a recent development regarding cheating on Absolute Poker. (I was even surprised to hear a quick reference to Hard-Boiled Poker in there, something I hadn’t remembered at all.)

Listening to the show sent me back to some articles online as well as some old posts here, including this post written the day after the BPS show that mentions some of what was discussed. Think I’ll probably next have to back up a few weeks with these and listen again to the first discussions of the Absolute Poker cheating scandal as it was just starting to break.

Speaking of, during my clicking around through some old HBP posts I landed on this one from February 2008 compiling lots of early articles about AP. Talk about a rabbit hole.

I’ll spare you all the little twists and turns I’ve been clicking my way through tonight, though will say I had a chuckle over this article (from mid-September ’07) from someone expressing utter disbelief that any cheating could have happened on the site, as well as this follow-up (written a week later) adamantly confirming that position, then adding the following:

“I've also spoken with an anonymous source who has had contact with individuals at Ultimate Bet and a few other sites, who notes that no such super user exists on those sites, either. Why, then, would Absolute Poker be the lone site that finds a need to create a super user?”

Big Money

Utterly fatigued today after sitting up until nearly dawn here on the east coast following the conclusion of the World Championship of Online Poker Main Event on PokerStars. Was a marathon final table lasting more than four hours and finally concluding with three German players -- PlayinWasted (who won), Daniel “Allanon85” Drescher, and SwissCantMis -- chopping at the end, all of whom took away more than a million dollars from the $5,200 buy-in event. Meawhile PokerStars Team Online member and blogger Shane “shaniac” Schleger took sixth in the event to earn a nifty $291K-plus payday.

The WCOOP Main Event has genuinely become one of the most significant poker tourneys during the calendar year, if one considers the attention it receives, the prestige given to those who do well in it, and, of course, the money. The big, big money.

This year 2,133 entered to create a prize pool of $10,665,000. The buy-in for the WCOOP ME has remained steady over the last few years, with the prize pool peaking back in the last pre-Black Friday year of 2010 at $12,215,000 when Tyson “POTTERPOKER” Marks won an incredible $2,278,097.50 first prize when there was no final table deal.

In 2011 the WCOOP ME prize pool dipped to $8,135,000, then increased to $9,125,000 in 2012. This year it again topped the $10 milly mark, and like most other online tournament series on PokerStars the overall numbers are edging back toward (or even surpassing) the pre-2011 totals when Americans could play on the site.

Over on Wikipedia one can find a list ranking the largest ever poker tournaments (by prize pool). The list looks reasonably well maintained (although I haven’t tried to verify its accuracy).

Of the 30 tournaments listed, the last 10 World Series of Poker Main Events crowd the top part of the list. The 2003 WSOP ME won by Chris Moneymaker doesn’t make the list, as its total prize pool was “only” $7,802,700.

Meanwhile the 2008-2010 WCOOP Main Events sneak into the bottom part of the list. This 2013 WCOOP Main Event should earn a spot on there as well just behind those earlier WCOOP MEs. That’ll make six online events among the top 30 of all time.

How big can the WCOOP Main Event and/or other online tournaments get? It appears their potential for further growth is less limited than that of live events, although it doesn’t seem as though an online tourney could ever reach the heights of the biggest WSOP MEs with prize pools these days usually around $60 million. (The biggest ever in 2006 was $82,512,162.)

Was reading David Schwartz's article a couple of days ago in which he looked back five years to “The Day Wall Street Went Bust” and snuck in a subtle allusion to a Rush song along the way. And so with Rush on the brain -- and big money -- I much more lazily titled this post. Hey... I said I was tired.

2011 PokerStars WCOOP Rolling Along

The World Championship of Online Poker continues to roll along over on PokerStars. They’ve already crossed the halfway point for the 62-tournament series, with turnouts continuing to be big, routinely crushing the scaled back guarantees for the tourneys.

Shortly after this year’s WCOOP started, I wrote a post noting how the first few events seemed to be attracting healthy numbers despite the fact that Americans couldn’t participate.

A few days after that I noticed how one event -- the $215 Deuce-to-Seven No-Limit Draw (Event No. 17) -- actually had a larger field this time around when compared to 2010. A total of 390 played this time, up from last year’s 367. The guarantee had been halved, actually, from last year’s $50K to $25K this time around, meaning the $78,000 prize pool was more than triple the guarantee.

Thought it might be interesting to see how the numbers are comparing across the board, so here’s a quick look at how the first 31 events in this year’s WCOOP are comparing to the same events/buy-ins in 2010:



Almost all of the first half of the WCOOP schedule featured events with identical games/buy-ins to 2010. Just two did not, with one other (Event No. 14) having a only slightly different buy-in ($260 last year, $265 this). (Any mistakes here are mine, obviously.)

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago when the WCOOP first started how last year a little over a third of all entrants (34.7%) were from the United States. In only a few cases among the first 31 events this time around did the overall total number of entrants drop by as much as that, and in most cases the declines have been considerably less.

I also was talking a little in that earlier post about the American players relocating to play, including Shane “shaniac” Schleger who moved to Vancouver. In fact, Schleger won a WCOOP bracelet last night, taking down Event No. 34, the $320 2-7 Triple Draw. That’ll probably help with those moving expenses.

Still believe we’re talking about a very small number of players -- relatively speaking -- who’ve made that same move. Nonetheless, it is interesting to see how PokerStars has filled the void among its player base following Black Friday and the site’s leaving the U.S.

Speaking of following the WCOOP, Joe Stapleton and Nick Wealthall are back again, bringing the funny with daily “Radio WCOOP” shows. Kind of tough hearing about giveaways and other stuff not available to those of us here in the states, but the hosts are consistently hilarious and the interviews genuinely interesting. They are also posting shows daily in Russian, German, and Spanish, further proving that poker reaches well beyond the English-speaking world.

PokerStars’ 2011 World Championship of Online Poker Kicks Off

Might have titled that differently. Said the “Not-Quite-the-World Championship” or something.

As a lot of us surely noticed on our Twitter feeds yesterday, PokerStars’ World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) kicked off on Sunday. This marks the 10th year of the WCOOP, which began as a modest nine-event series of tourneys back in July 2002 and has grown to a three-plus week, 62-tourney spectacle.

Saw numerous instances of pros I follow talking about how they’d joined the exodus and moved to Canada or elsewhere to play the WCOOP. “First Sunday back, kind of surreal,” tweeted Shane “Shaniac” Schleger early yesterday, having newly settled in Vancouver in order to play. “Feels really weird that my friends can't play because they are in America.”

Since its inception, the WCOOP has consistently remained the largest online tournament series in poker. And while the numbers will surely be down this fall from last year thanks to the non-involvement of U.S. players, yesterday’s turnouts prove that PokerStars and online poker is doing just fine without America.

Last year the WCOOP had the same number of events (62), with pretty much the same schedule of buy-ins and games being offered again this time around, although the guarantees have all been lowered.

Those events in 2010 saw a total of 141,126 entrants, with 48,978 of them (34.7%) from the United States. U.S. players won 33 of the 62 tournaments, and overall players from America claimed just over $28 million of the $63,157,150 in prize money that was awarded. Canada was the next closest in terms of total cashes with about $3.93 million.

The first three events of the 2011 WCOOP began yesterday, featuring the same stakes/games as the ones offered on Day 1 of the 2010 WCOOP.

Event No. 1, a $215 buy-in, six-handed no-limit hold’em event attracted an even 7,500 entrants yesterday. Last year the same event drew 9,001 players, meaning a dip of 16.7%.

Event No. 2, the $10,300 NLHE “High Roller” event, saw exactly 200 sign up on Sunday. That’s down a bit from last year’s 313 (36.1%).

And Event No. 3, a $215 full-ring NLHE tourney, had 10,107 turn out yesterday, compared to last year’s 12,066, a decline of 16.2% (similar to Event No. 1).

The majority of the events on the WCOOP schedule are in the $215-$530 buy-in range, and I’m going to guess the numbers for those will probably remain similar throughout the three weeks, with around a 15-20% drop in participation those events from 2010.

So while Americans comprised a little over a third of the entrants a year ago, it looks like for many events about half of those missing U.S. players were made up for with players from other countries. Or Full Tilt Poker players who’ve secured other funds with which to play.

Or folks like Schleger who’ve moved on.

Daniel Negreanu -- another player who has relocated from Las Vegas to Canada to play the WCOOP -- played in all three events yesterday. He tweeted early on regarding the turnout in Event No. 3.

“Poker is flourishing all over the globe,” he wrote. “10,107 entries in the $215 PokerStars tournament If you love online poker and can do it #MoveoutofUS.”

A pretty huge “if” there at the end. For most, anyway. Still, for the serious online tourney grinder, it isn’t hard to see why they’re making the move.

My Mind Is Going... I Can Feel It...

It has been over two weeks since I’ve played any real money games online. Have been too busy to fuss with depositing on a new site just yet. Carbon seems like the most likely choice for me, once I do. Or I could put something back on Bodog where I already have an account.

Meanwhile, I have jumped on a couple of times to play freerolls or play money games. On Carbon they run five or so freerolls every day which usually attract 2,500 or more players. The top 24 finishers win tourney tickets and/or cash. Over the weekend I played a H.O.R.S.E. one and managed to squeak through with just a few antes left to finish 23rd.

Was a little disappointed after to learn that the only event I can play with my $2.20 ticket is a six-max. SNG for which the winner gets another tourney ticket (for $11) and the second-place finisher a buck in cash. I’d hoped to be able to play another MTT, where the chances of making some kind of cash -- and thus starting a bankroll -- would be greater, I think.

But really, in these freerolls and the occasional play money game at which I’ve sat, my focus is not nearly what it was a few weeks ago. Was sitting at a PLO play money table for a short while yesterday, and realized in a slightly worried way that I’d perhaps lost a step or two when it came even to simple stuff like evaluating starting hands. Not to mention more complicated matters like interpreting the significance of others’ bets and raises.

You’ve experienced something similar, I’m sure. You’re away from the game for a period, then upon your return find you have to “relearn” things. Poker really is a skill game, and like any other pursuit that requires the learning and development of certain skills (intellectual and/or physical), not playing for extended periods can lead to a kind of “atrophy” or wasting away of those skills.

When I signed off, I couldn’t help but think of HAL 9000’s final speech in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Was mainly thinking of those lines near the very end, after Dave has begun the laborious process of disconnecting everything in HAL’s “Logic Memory Center.” That is, after HAL’s pleading (“Dave, stop. Stop, will you?”) is over and he realizes the effects of what is happening.

“Dave, my mind is going,” says HAL, as always using that uncannily unaffected-sounding monotone. “There is no question about it. I can feel it.”

I think the line might occurred to me because I believe I saw Shane “Shaniac” Schleger toss it out amid his tweets at some point during the last few days. It might have been Schleger, or it might have been someone else in my feed (could be someone is fiddling with my “Logic Memory Center”). Incidentally, Schleger penned a smart, thoughtful piece for Slate over the weekend addressing "Black Friday" and its impact on him personally. Check it out.

I wonder if full-time online grinders like Shaniac, many of whom have spent a couple of weeks unable to put in their usual heavy sessions of SNG or MTT play, are starting to feel like HAL a little.

I was inspired to watch that clip of HAL’s final moments over on YouTube again. Here it is:



Such a weirdly moving scene. Kubrick’s films, as much as I enjoy and appreciate them, are uniformly very cold (in my opinion). Thus I’m always caught off-guard when I find myself becoming at all emotionally involved when watching them. (Never mind the obvious peculiarity of feeling sympathy for a computer.)

Rewatching this clip, I found myself making some other associations, too, also involving online poker. Early on (around 45 seconds into the clip), HAL’s suspicions have been aroused, and he starts to try to convince Dave not to do what he thinks he’s about to do.

I was imagining some of these early lines as having been spoken by “online poker” itself, post-Black Friday:

“I know everything hasn’t been quite right with me, but I can assure you now, very confidently, that it’s going to be all right again.”

“I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.”

“I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal.”

Then comes the pleading. And again, I imagined HAL’s question taking on a different significance. As though online poker was addressing me and many other Americans currently on a hiatus from playing...

“Will you stop?”

The Chicken or the Egg?

Was unable to catch ESPN’s coverage last night of the $10,000 pot-limit Omaha World Championship (Event No. 50), though I’ll probably try to pick it up later in the week. While I worked several PLO events at this year’s World Series of Poker, that was one I did not. Still, I am always curious to see how non-hold’em games get presented. Coverage of the Main Event begins next week.

Speaking of ESPN, for those still interested in further context and/or analysis of Scotty Nguyen’s “performance” at the $50,000 H.O.R.S.E. event (Event No. 45), first aired on ESPN last week, tournament director Matt Savage provides a response over on PokerNews centering on the various rules that were violated that night. Also, there have been a couple more podcasts of late concerning the final table and/or ESPN’s coverage that are worth checking out.

One was Gary Wise’s Wise Hand Poker podcast (the 8/20/08 episode), which features an interview with Event No. 50 runner-up and primary Nguyen antagonist Michael DeMichele. DeMichele does a good job explaining his perspective of the various goings-on from that evening, candidly answering all Wise’s well-chosen questions. (Looks like DeMichele is also on the newest episode of the TwoPlusTwo Pokercast, which I have yet to hear.) Incidentally, that show also features an interview with current Main Event chip leader Dennis Phillips, in which Phillips again proves himself an interesting, likable, “everyman.”

The other was the most recent installment of Big Poker Sundays (8/24/08), on which the always thoughtful Shane “Shaniac” Schleger joined Scott Huff. They spent an entire hour discussing the H.O.R.S.E. final table, Nguyen’s antics, ESPN’s manner of packaging the program, Norman Chad’s editorializing, and other, more general topics related to etiquette, rules enforcement, and the ol’ “good of the game” issue.

Toward the end of the Big Poker Sundays show, Huff and Schleger talk about the effect of television and the potential rewards it brings to professional poker players, as well as the impact the prospect of such rewards sometimes has on how they behave. Says Huff, “It’s gotten to the point now in poker that some of these guys who are quote-unquote ‘stars of the game’ have really gone off the deep end” in terms of how they present themselves to the public -- especially when the television cameras are around. To Huff, it appears that “promoting yourself has become [such] a big deal for some of these guys to the point where they’ve totally lost it.”

Schleger’s response made me think a little of what I had written last Friday about the incident, particularly those observations of Tommy Angelo’s I shared concerning the stressful nature of poker. Schleger half-jokingly observed that sometime during this year’s WSOP he’d concluded that “95 to 99% of all full-time poker players have some kind of, you know, clear mental disease... clear mental illness... myself included,” listing traits such as an “extreme level of self-absorption,” “paranoid delusions,” and “manic depressive psychosis” as evidence that “we’re all messed up in the head, severely.” Circling back to Nguyen and the H.O.R.S.E. event, Schleger concluded “you add television cameras, you add alcohol, and this is what you get.”

As I say, Schleger is half-kidding around here, but he makes an interesting observation (I think) about the kind of person who gravitates towards poker/gambling in general, and professional tournament poker in particular.

Angelo spoke on that TwoPlusTwo Pokercast (the 8/18/08 episode) of how poker “tests us,” presenting numerous stressors (all at once) that are very similar those we encounter away from the poker tables, kind of like a “little microcosm” of the larger world.

In other words -- and I’m overgeneralizing points made by Angelo and Schleger just a bit here -- Angelo is talking about how poker makes us crazy, while Schleger is suggesting it is the crazy ones who find poker. “We’re diseased, screwed-up individuals,” says Schleger, “who are very lucky something that something like gambling came along that we can make a living at.”

So which came first? Were we crazy before we found poker? Or did poker make us that way?

2008 WSOP, Day 38: Living the Dream

Woke up this morning and it took me at least ten minutes to realize I was off today. Was just laying there, trying (with considerable difficulty) to calculate precisely how much longer I had available to me for snoozing before I absolutely had to get out of bed and get going. It wouldn’t add up.

Finally I realized why. I’m not working. No one is. The World Series of Poker takes its first day off since it began on May 30, giving everyone a chance to regroup before we get back to it with Tuesday’s Day 2a. Gonna be a lot to deal with when we come back. Unlike was the case on the Day Ones, we will know everyone going in on the Day Twos, and so will potentially have a ton to cover as we move forward.

I’ve worked the last five days in a row, the longest streak of the Series for me. The last of the Day Ones went fairly smoothly. Over 2,400 runners came out for this one, pushing the overall total past 2007’s and up to 6,844. A few more than expected, I think. I’d spoken with Nolan Dalla, WSOP Media Director, during the dinner break on Day 1c, and he’d thought then it would be a tight race versus last year’s 6,358. So I’m sure the WSOP brass are all happy how things turned out registration-wise.

It was also announced yesterday how the total prize pool exceeded $64 million and how the winner would be taking home something in the neighborhood of $9.1 million. Of course, the winner should be getting more than that as they’re putting the moneys in an interest-bearing account between now and November. (I would think the WSOP would do a little math and spin that prize number upwards a bit right now.)

I was in the Brasilia room this time, where I was responsible for reporting on the back half of the room, about 30-some tables. We had some name pros in our section, including Layne Flack and Antonio Esfandiari who drew seats right next to one another. Those two provided a lot of color, including a renewal of the “how best to kill a bear” debate Flack had begun in an earlier tourney (and which I had reported on then, too, both at PokerNews and here). Flack never did seem to be able to build too much of a stack, and late in the day, after he was moved from our section, he busted. Esfandiari, on the other hand, added to his stack at every level. He ended up near 100,000 by day’s end.

Tom Schneider was in my section as well, and I got to talk to him briefly and watch a few hands. I wrote up one I saw, kind of a minor one from early on that made it to showdown. Then I ended up reporting on two more of his hands that my reporters brought me, neither of which went well for Tom. In both cases he’d gotten his money in good, then his opponent hit a draw to take the hand. The first depleted his stack and the other knocked him out.

Had Shane “Shaniac” Schleger and Joe Pelton in my section, too. After the first 2 p.m. break, Schleger had rushed back in just in time for the first hand dealt, and told the table about Phil Hellmuth’s ridiculous arrival at the Rio dressed as General Patton. Trapped in the Brasilia as I was, I hadn’t seen any of that, so I was as interested as the table was in hearing Schleger explain how the vehicles and whatnot had the “US Army” logo changed to read “UB Army.” “Kind of clever, actually” said Schleger, “but must have cost a lot.” Then, after pausing a beat, he added “I wonder if they had enough left after paying people back for the super-users?” (Good question.)

Schleger had Joe Pelton two seats to his left, and he eventually busted Pelton when he flopped a nut flush. Schleger appeared to be holding steady throughout the day, and when he finally was moved he still had 33,000. But it looks like he didn’t make it through the end of the day, either.

Also covered Allen Cunningham, whom I witnessed (and reported on) dealing with some drunk railbirds very graciously. Cunningham is one cool cat. He made it through Day 1 with about 50,000.

I stayed on after the dinner break yesterday even though I wasn’t scheduled to stay, mainly because I wanted to be there to help the others cover the massive field. Most of our tables ended up breaking by the end of the night, so Matt (my reporter) and I were helping out here and there to try and get chip counts and other occasional hands. So kind of a low stress day for me, overall.

Being in the Brasilia, I missed the whole Phil Laak spectacle over in the Amazon room, too. Although it sounds like everyone did. If you haven’t heard, Laak apparently played yesterday wearing some sort of latex mask and fake mustache, and somehow managed to play the tourney without anyone realizing who he was. Might have been the result of some sort of prop bet, I don’t know. Garry Gates wrote up the story over on Poker News at the end of the night in a post titled “The Amazing Phil Laak,” if yr curious.

Figured out at the dinner break yesterday I’d completely missed the damned Gaming Life Expo. The thing ran all four Day Ones, I believe, and I never did get a chance to hop over there to see what was what. Missed out on all of the freebies, too.

That post title is from something my brother keeps telling me when we have chatted this summer. Kind of an inside joke, with him repeatedly referring -- with some sincerity, actually -- to what I am doing here with that phrase. Am still enjoying the whole deal, but I am definitely looking forward to a couple of weeks from now when I won’t be so busy that days pass without my realizing it.

Various activities on the schedule today, including a get together with PN staff this afternoon (in which soccer is the focus, although I’m hoping to shoot a few hoops), a freeroll tournament for us all at dinner time (where I’ll be dead money, no doubt), and a PokerStars party over at the Palms later tonight.

Don’t plan on too late of an evening. Am sincerely aiming for a shorter response time when I wake tomorrow.

“If it’s buzz they were looking for, mission accomplished”

Been trolling through the ever-growing Two Plus Two thread regarding the announcement by ESPN and Harrah’s that the final table of this year’s WSOP Main Event will be delayed until November. Lotta hysteria there, as one would expect. A few interesting nuggets along the way, though. So you don’t have to read through all 567 posts, I thought I’d pull out five excerpts I found particularly interesting:

1. Two-time WPT champ Alan Goehring weighed in early on to voice his displeasure at the decision. “I love the WSOP ME (well, at least until now),” writes Goehring, “but if FT players’ participation in a reality show is required to play in the event, I will probably not play the event.”

Shortly afterward, responding to an earlier poster’s comment that “the real business here is not poker, it’s show business,” Goehring added the following: “My problem is I enjoy playing poker, but I don’t care about show business. What should I do?”

2. Tourney reporter B.J. Nemeth came on a little while later to respond to the many negative comments as well as point out some of the inaccuracies regarding the proposal that were being passed around. Nemeth has already outlined his support on the idea on Tao of Poker and elsewhere.

Nemeth predicts that “some of you will just be clinging to your initial negative reactions long after the potential benefits become clear.” He also says he’d “love for everyone to reread this thread in 18 months, after this ‘experiment’ has happened twice (the 2008 and 2009 WSOP).” Nemeth thinks that then “most people will laugh at all the negativity and misinformation in this thread.”

3. About 180 posts into the thread, Oliver Tse, a well-known poker player agent, shares some thoughts similar to those he’d previously aired over in the Pokerati comment section a few weeks ago. Tse notes the abysmal ratings for WPT’s Week 1 premiere over on GSN and the NBC Heads-Up Poker Championship, concluding that “the WSOP organization had NO CHOICE but to announce the ‘plausibly live’ WSOP ME FT presentation as soon as possible in order to put a stop to the negative sentiment surrounding the televised poker industry in the U.S. market.” In other words, says Tse, the poor ratings “forced Jeffrey Pollack’s hand.”

Tse goes on to clarify just how high the stakes are here, in his opinion: “If the ‘plausibly live’ implementation were to make no difference in the ratings, then the whole idea of televised poker as a rights fee TV property with multiple product sponsorships would break down completely. Televised poker would then be nothing more than infomercials for casinos and online poker websites. Dozens of people, including myself, will then be looking for new careers outside poker.”

4. Professional player Shane “Shaniac” Schleger has made several contributions to the thread voicing his profound displeasure with the plan. He makes several different points throughout the discussion, one of the more convincing (to me) concerning how the four-month delay utterly changes the whole concept of tournament poker.

“How are we supposed to keep the integrity of the game and the safety of the players intact under this new ‘experiment,’” asks Schleger. “Please tell me why poker players should be content to see the format of their beloved poker game bastardized and twisted around in order to (maybe) generate more tv ratings.”

5. Finally, Daniel Negreanu, a proponent of the move, chimed with Post No. 440 in the thread. “Judging by the length of this thread,” he says, “if it's buzz they were looking for, mission accomplished. It appears the majority of the buzz is negative, but buzz is buzz.”

He then goes on to say that he thinks “what most people are missing is that this change will effect less than 1% of the entrants. Getting hot and bothered about a change that will likely have no negative impact on you in your lifetime seems to be a bit unnecessary.” A curious observation, actually, since I think we can all agree -- no matter how we feel about the decision to delay the final table -- the change most certainly affects more than nine people.

He then points out that what we’re having here is a one-time trial which will be abandoned if it doesn’t work out. He says the final nine “will all get a minimum of a million dollars” (not quite sure that’s true, actually). After making a couple of other points, Negreanu concludes by saying how good he thinks the change will be for televised poker. “Reality TV is very powerful and draws in a wide spectrum of viewers,” says Negreanu. “Giving the main event a bit of a boost by copying a formula that clearly works with viewers in the U.S. is worth the risks of delaying the final table, IMO.”

Ween Rocks

A few weeks back Vera Valmore and I went to see Ween. First real rock concert I’d been to in a good while. Am thinking the last one had to have been Todd Rundgren (about 4-5 yrs. back), although that was a fairly laid back show. (Hell, he had the ukulele out for “Bang on the Drums.”)

Have long been a Ween fan, though never had had a chance to see ’em live. They were supporting their latest, La Cucaracha -- not the greatest Ween album, but fun nonetheless. The band rocked out for three solid hours. Went with some others who had seen Ween several times, and they declared it the best show they’d seen.

Ween is hard to describe, really. They are a pop/rock act, technically, though each of their albums tend to run through several different styles, with tracks often sounding like a parody of a given genre or group. Thus any given album tends to come off as some weird-ass mix tape compiling, say, the Beatles, the Doors, Curtis Mayfield, Hank Williams, Motörhead, Marty Robbins, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Steely Dan, Queen, Prince, Jimmy Buffett, Led Zeppelin, 10cc, David Bowie, and/or someone Dr. Demento might regularly play.

But it works. In the end the albums always tend to hang together, forming surprisingly coherent “narratives” (of sorts). And in Zappa-like fashion, they’ll invariably try at least once per disc to sabotage the whole kaboodle with some sort of unsavory scatalogical reference that’ll make the disc all but impossible to recommend to yr more uptight colleagues.

Happen to be killing some time railing the Sunday Million on Stars yesterday and was reminded that erstwhile-blogger and poker pro Shane “Shaniac” Schleger was a Ween fan, too. How do I know? ’Cos he’s got the Ween logo -- a.k.a., the “Boognish” -- as his avatar (see pic).

Can’t remember when I’d heard Schleger was a Ween fan, but when I did I was instantly predisposed toward liking the guy. Yr average Ween fan -- according to my take, anyhow -- probably has some smarts about him or her, isn’t satisfied with predictability, and definitely possesses a sense of humor (be it dark and/or juvenile). Good qualities, all.

Of course, as I say, that’s just my take. Others might categorize all Ween fans as unrepentant crazies.

Yes, learning a person’s musical tastes does tend to give some idea of his or her personality. I remember long ago getting to the end of Phil Hellmuth’s Play Poker Like the Pros where, on the last page, he says how if we happen to see any WSOP videos from 1988-2000, we’ll see him with “headphones on, probably listening to Pearl Jam, Hootie and the Blowfish, Alanis Morissette, Snoop Doggy Dogg, the Rolling Stones, or some group of the 1980s.”

I think Hellmuth might’ve been trying to sound cool there with his sign-off. Let’s just say it didn’t quite land with this reader . . . .

Still, I always enjoy hearing about folks’ fave groups/music. Ever since I started the blog, I’ve been listing what I’m “currently spinning” down there on the lower right-hand column. Recently I added that widget from the Poker Players Social Network where you can actually tune into a few tracks from the week’s selection. And if you click on the “Hard-Boiled Poker Record Shop” you can see all of the records I’ve ever listed down there. (Closing in on one hundred titles.)

Now, theoretically, once you get to the Record Shop you might click through that page to Amazon and buy something, which would throw a couple of pennies my way. But I know almost nobody actually buys music that way these days, so it ain’t like I’ve got a true money-making scheme in the works here.

No, the Record Shop is mainly just for fun. (Am planning before too long to try to set up something similar with the “HBP Bookstore” as well.) Dunno what all those records I’ve listed might say about me, exactly. Probably depends on yr tastes whether or not they add up to anything meaningful.

Take a peek, though, and let me know if you like any of them titles, too. And if you have anything to recommend.

You Have Options at Gamefisher Table!

Been kind of a manic couple of weeks here. Looking back, I’m actually up about 40 BB total over the last fourteen days, although it doesn’t feel like such a triumph. The swings over that period have been dizzy enough to make a small-timer’s head swim (as much as 100 BB down & 80 BB up from where I presently sit). Normally don’t experience quite so much variance. Don’t like it too well . . . prefer to keep the heart pumping at its usual below-average rate.

Why all the riot? I might plead extenuating circumstances. Was dealt aces no less than five times in a single (admittedly lengthy) session last weekend and had ’em cracked all five times. I knew it was happening, but had to check Poker Tracker later to confirm. In four of the five I was heads-up before the flop, including one where I lost to on a board of . . . . Dropped over 30 BB in those hands alone, plus probably suffered some tilty carry-over, I imagine. So maybe it was the cards. Another factor could well be fatigue -- I’ve been playing more (and longer) than usual lately while working off some of these summer bonuses, so perhaps the concentration is coming and going, thus increasing the likelihood of swings.

Multitabling more often than usual may also be something to consider here. Being of limited intellectual powers, I generally can manage two tables, but tend to break down at three or more. There are several pros and cons to multitabling, and I’m not going to reiterate them all. I will mention one potential con, though, that occurred to me yesterday as I was sitting at one table debating whether to limp with A8-off from middle position (in a $1.00/$2.00 limit game) when I was simultaneously dealt AK-off in the big blind of the other (also $1/$2 limit). I was playing on Party Poker, where the countdown clocks, flashing screens, and “You Have Options . . . ” messages can scramble one’s thoughts when needing to make two decisions at once. I did what on the surface seems reasonable, folding the A8 and raising the AK, thinking at the time that I’d rather devote all my wits to the big slick hand than have to worry about other things while I did.

I realized a hand or two later that it could well have been a mistake not to have played the A8 given the current table situation there (lots of tight players who did little preraising, who tended not to chase, and who would readily fold hands on the flop or turn). The AK hand had not been raised when it got to me in the big blind, but there were five limpers, all of whom called the raise. A flop of baby cards brought a raise and reraise that forced me to let the hand go. As it turned out, it was actually a simple hand to play, requiring very little brain power. Meanwhile I may have missed an opportunity on the other table (although I cannot recall how that particular hand played out without me).

Even the Einsteins who can run over several tables at once will admit that multitabling invariably lessens one’s ability to gather information and make correct decisions. Doing so also subtly affects the criteria by which you select starting hands, even if you don’t necessarily realize it’s happening. A lot of young gunners talk about being on “autopilot” when playing on several tables online. Indeed, during today’s installment of CardPlayer’s The Circuit, online-poker phenom Shane Schleger used the term to describe his online play (while contrasting it with his approach to brick-and-mortar poker).

“Autopilot” surely works well for some, perhaps including the capacity to vary one’s decisions according to situational differences. Not so much for the feeble-minded like yours truly, though. Too many miles on this old jalopy. As the Firesign Theatre once famously asked, how can you be in two places at once when you’re not anywhere at all?