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Poker Tournaments for You This Week
There is never a dull moment in a poker player’s life. Obviously, the main reason for that is the constant existence of poker tournaments and poker events that one can participate in. These events are not just for making money, but also to have some fun and get better at the game in the process. Several live poker tourneys are lined up for this week and the coming weeks. Here is a note on some of the tournaments you can … Read the rest
2012 PokerStars Macau Poker Championships Announced
PokerStars is one online poker room that never takes a break from hosting tournaments. The poker room recently released details about its upcoming event, the PokerStars Macau Live Tournaments. The Macau tournaments hosted by PokerStars is one of the biggest and richest poker events held in Asia. It includes 4 major poker series – Macau Poker Cup (MPC) Red Dragon, Asia Championship of Poker, Macau Poker Cup Championship or MPCC and the yearly Asia Pacific Poker Tour event at Macau. … Read the rest
The $30,000 Winner Wednesday Dozen Unveiled
Winner Poker has partnered with pokernews.com to bring a new promotion to its new members. The online poker room announced its new promotion called Winner’s Wednesday Dozen Freerolls, which literally lets you win free money. The new promotion is open to all the new players who register with Winner Poker and make a deposit. The promo will run for three months, and all you need to do is play poker and earn as many Winner Points as you can. Here … Read the rest
What Pleases Poker Farce
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 by Phil
Phil Ivey is one of my favorite poker players. I could go on all day about why I like the guy, but the bottom line is that I am glad he didn’t win the world series of poker this year. It was pretty amazing that he got as far as he did, the odds of a well known player getting that far a just not good.
Sure; it would have been good for Full Tilt, maybe good for poker in general, but it would have sucked for me; this is for sure. Already Phil Ivey is considered to be one of the best poker players alive… if he took this event down we never would have heard the end of it.
The declaration of any poker player as “The best” is just a silly statement. If you give me any tournament poker player, I could likely trace the majority of their profits back to 10 or 20 key hands that they have won throughout the years. By the same accord… most good players who are not successful can trace their demise back to 10 or 20 suckouts that happened in crucial spots during tournaments.
This is not an argument of skill, it is an argument of statistics. The # of tournaments that would need to be played to have a statistically significant figure is higher than anyone can ever be expected to play in my opinion. This is not true in online poker, but in live poker – the expected # of tournaments needed for the cards to actually break even (bad timing included) is not likely to be achieved by any 1 person in their lifetime.
Let’s face it… if it wasn’t for 1 nasty suckout (and I mean real nasty) Greg Raymer could possibly be considered to be the best poker player in history. His WSOP accomplishments are still unprecedented in my opinion… and they are dwarfed incomparison to the possibilities in retrospect.
I’m guessing that 50% of the people reading this blog entry will not understand my feelings correctly. I don’t hate Phil Ivey and I don’t think that poker is all luck. I simply think that the following fact needs to be acknowledged; The greatest poker player ever is likely a guy who plays at his homegame on the weekends and hoes to work on Monday. He doesn’t have the passion for poker and he makes more money doing other things than he ever could in poker (yes, you can make more than 10-20 million elsewhere in the world, the WSOP is not the pinnacle in life). The best poker players ever likely is just not in a position where he is able or he wants to succeed in poker.
