A little reminder that The Maven Training boot camp gets underway next weekend … and Pokerati readers get a discounted price. By all means it’s an investment of time and money … that’s why they call it boot camp! No push ups, but otherwise rather intense. If you don’t see the proven ROI in being a Maven graduate, well then you’re probably not ready to step up your game.
Real life training for poker live and online, with a community of continued support and education. Click here for the Pokerati discount, and otherwise just be sure to tell ‘em we sent you.
CardRunners, as you know, recently celebrated their 5th birthday … quite a milestone when you consider that means Jungleman couldn’t even drive yet when they first came into being.
As a reminder of where you can go for the best ROI on your gifted holiday monies, here’s a peek at poker in the old days, with CR honcho Taylor Caby showing how the poker skills they teach you at CardRunners played out in a different era:
And if you’re still too cheap/broke to pony up real bucks for education, they still have financial aid available allowing you to earn CardRunners credits through Truly Free Poker Training … TFPT is for current CardRunners members as well as those newbies who have yet to take seriously their resolution to be a winning poker player.
Check it out … a new show from Jay Rosenkrantz and John Wray, aka KRANTZ of 2 Months 2 Million “fame” and JimmyLegs, CardRunners’ chief filmmaker. Their web-video series promises “high stakes, low comedy” … and as seen in the pilot episode here, it may be the most accurate (and funny) look at the degenerate side of online poker yet.
Seriously, LOLed for real multiple times. And more than 90,000 views after being up for just a couple weeks? Not even Durrrr and Jungleman draw those kinda numbers right out the gate. Might this be the show about poker (online poker specifically) that transcends Norman Chad and 2+2?
Check it out, our good sponsored friends at CardRunners like to get a little creative sometimes — making poker training videos that hardly show cards. This one will be extra entertaining for those of you who recognize the name Ernest Thayer.
It’s easy to see why Nikachu won CardRunners’ Video Challenge. Seriously, not bullshitting … call me under-educated in the new math of online poker, but this may be the best poker schooling vid I’ve seen. It’s certainly different, as a matter of both style and substance, and this player I was pretty sure was something out of Pokemon got me thinking about poker in new ways … yet ways that seem to make simple sense. (We’ll see how it all applies next time I sit down.)
Sometimes funny, too!
Am I right? Don’t he rabbits make it so much easier?!?And who knew it could be so easy to fold such monsters early in a hand. You can get more from Nikachu’s poker training at CardRunners for free via Truly Free Poker Training, which takes your standard online play to accumulate access to CR’s library of more than 2,000 training videos by the only players who consistently seem to be winning these days.
Matt Jarvis, Fillipo Candio, and John Racener were CR’s table reps — though Racener did switch to Full Tilt-branded gear for heads-up play. No surprise that his original primary patch sponsor would want back in as rules permitted, but it is somewhat unusual (perhaps even unprecedented?) to see ESPN production crews relent to online poker patch-interests over matters of television continuity in a single episode.
But sure enough, with Racener surviving to be the last CardRunner standing, something looked different to TV viewers once they got down to heads-up. Maybe just big money on the table?
Also interesting to note: Full Tilt has produced and/or patched up only one WSOP main event champion — Jerry Yang.
There’s a reason we media folk love us some Nolan Dalla … not only does he understand what’s really at stake every step of the poker way, but also he knows how to bring out the best in the game … and here at the Penn & Teller Theater, introducing tonight’s heads-up match, he seems to recognize, hey, I’m on a stage, we’ve got flashing lights, and there’s a poker-loving hairy manbeast behind me — might as well have some fun!
So that’s the fight …
Racener vs. Duhamel
John vs. Jon
Full Tilt vs. PokerStars
Florida vs. Canada
RCNR T-shirts vs. Montreal Sweaters
30.7 million vs. 189 million
(blinds at 600k/1.2m)
#
One difference, however … Racener has the Sam Chauhan rubber band, while Duhamel … is from Canada, eh?
Episode 22
SpartanFox is back in the host seat with Tyresias to talk about the first three days of WPT-Festa al Lago, Full Tilt’s mobile Rush Poker app, Deliverance Poker unsuing Full Tilt, and Scott Montgomery’s getting robbed at Bellagio … on this week’s edition of the Rabbit Hunt.
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CardRunners hired Nicolak because their other pros needed someone who could buy beer.
Finally … a new pro at CardRunners I can relate to. The kids at CR are smart and all — and really do offer probably the very best poker training available on the internet — but as I’m sure many of you who’ve signed up for TrulyFreePokerTraining have discovered, they also can be a reminder of the life hard-working poker players over 32 will never live no matter how many MTTs you take down.
Something about John Kim, aka Nicolak, the newest CardRunners instructor, connects with the aggressively balding. Not sure if it’s because he can remember a day when Atari was our internet, or because his scores have come in tournaments that seem a little more realistic to a lower-stakes player. Check out his Hendon Mob stats. He also recently began cohosting Cash Plays on PokerRoad, with Jeremiah Smith, a skill-based show I don’t listen to enough.
I’ve played with Nicolak once, at Detox, and he certainly doesn’t fit the mold of your typical high-stakes online aggro-baller. In fact, he seems way too mentally fit and life-steady to be a truly successful poker pro. But he must be doing something right …
Check out his personal blog, where he writes about balancing the game as a career while supporting a loving family and fantasy football team. He’s been publicly chasing a $1million bankroll goal all year, and is only about a quarter of the way there so far. You can just see his pursuits are a more familiar grind to many, whereas I’m not so sure they are yet for Jungleman.
Today’s CardRunner’s instruction comes from utility coach PoorUser, who comes to high-level poker with an advanced degree in Starcraft, a military science fiction strategy video game. Clearly CR is assembling an ever-expansive crew of instructors comprised of the coolest party animals on campus.
Kinda interesting here to watch his heads-up thinking giving lessons while playing ZeeJustin:
That’s probably a stretch, referring to any Razz player as Jungleman … but hey, as of this moment he’s the most skilled and accomplished Razz player I’ve ever met studied on a training video. Or actually, maybe his sidekick, Brandon Shack (aka Oscillator) is the better player. It’s hard to say, but they seem to have rather different philosophies on playing the game that most of us got to know from a single Final Table hand in 2004 — you know, the one where Howard Lederer and TJ Cloutier taught us that Razz could indeed be a painful game?
(That hand, of course — they had the same low until the river — led me to my first and only bracelet, in Razz, in the 2005 $1,500 event on the PlayStation. I should clearly be in the TOC!)
Anyhow, that’s why I liked this video. And though I still have no plans to ever add Razz to any 1/2 NLH/PLO game I’m pimping, getting in the middle of an intense poker convo about the nuances of Razz does leave me feeling a bit better prepared should I ever end up in the game Vegas-local aggro-nit Rex really wants to host – NLH/PLO/Razz:
Albini, btw, is a rather interesting dude — a guy who comes to poker from the music biz. He worked as a producer on albums by Nirvana, Bush, the Pixies, Flogging Molly, the Jesus Lizard (Chris Ferguson, lol?), Helmet, Cheap Trick, and Robert Plant. Apparently he became quite the badass legend amongst producers in the underground-alt scene. Neato.
Mickey Petersen: could be the Lebron James of Poker.
Quick lesson today — from another 20-year-old kid who seems decidedly anti-baller despite going on a hella baller tear since he began his “career” two-and-a-half years ago. Now a CardRunners instructor after turning pro fresh outta high school, Mickey Petersen, known among avid onliners as Mement_mori, is in the running for CardPlayer’s Online Player of the Year at #13 … and ranks 2nd in the world over at 5+5, with qualifying results spread across 18 pages.
Though CardPlayer’s OPOY counts only $1.05 million earned with 18 final tables and two wins in the past year, Pocket Fives totals his wins at $2.7 million. But the stat I find most mind-blowing with this Gen-Z Magic player (inspired by the likes of David Williams, Eric Froehlich, and Dario Minieri to make the crossover into poker, he tells CardPlayer) … Petersen’s average cash is $1,527 … in 1,778 money finishes! Gotta think Phil Hellmuth couldn’t claim more than double that (live and online) over his entire life even if he included cash games … which says a lot because Hellmuth had already won the main event before Peterson was even born.
With Peter Eastgate retired and Gus Hansen one of the losingest players of the year (even if he takes down a WSOPE bracelet today ), seems like Mement_mori (Latin for “Remember you will die”) has easy claim as the best player in Denmark even though he has yet to cash in a live event. It doesn’t cost online players a thing to get their Cardrunners schooling with financial aid from Truly Free Poker Training. (Sign up here – promise you’ll qualify.)
More CardRunners training … this time from Jimmy Ackerman, known as JBaller88, one of CR’s low-stakes 6-max NLH coaches. I think he’s like a poor man’s Jungleman. Watching his lessons, I hear things pulled from a poker glossary I musta missed in the back of Super/System.
In this little snippet alone you’ve got advanced progressive poker thinking that can include 3-barrel bluffs, value-bluffs, wet boards, dry boards, and how to counter the “3-bet” you hear so much about these days … not to mention situations for optimal 3-draws. It’s the kinda stuff that frustrates the hell outta old-dog poker traditionalists (I think) and yet for a generational poker tweener like yours truly, JBaller’s explanations all somehow make sense.
Sorry, meant to get this out to y’all earlier … occurred to me tunes might work better than video for the holiday weekend, and poker podcasts better than that … so here’s some stuff that caught my ear for an extended period of time in recent days/weeks … I’m gonna presume you already listen to, and probably subscribe to The Poker Beat, the definitively #1 podcast in poker, you know, according to the readers of Bluff Magazine and WPT-Poker, which is the official magazine of the World Poker Tour in Europe. But if you can handle more than that, you might wanna perma-connect with these shows, too — via iTunes, RSS, or muscle memory:
Donkdown vs. Coolio
Donkdown Radio :: The always-NSFW working-class Vegas grinders at Donkdown went to war with Coolio last month before moving on to better things (like hunting down @asianspa). This feud started a few weeks back with an on-air story about how the aging rap star, a recent relo to Vegas, showed up at Binion’s during BARGE … allegedly to buy drugs from a player attending Barry Tanenbaum’s keynote address … only to end up with pictures of himself passed out butt-naked (literally) on the Donkdown forum. Coolio even came on their show and sang a few bars of Gangsta’s Paradise before getting hip to Brandon and Micon’s game a few days later, at which point they allege he began threatening to retaliate … right after the next season of Ultimate Big Brother. [Link]
Laak Extra-Whack
The Strip Podcast :: A worthy leftover from the summertime WSOP … Vegas culture blogger and New York Times stringer Steve Freiss’ talking to Phil Laak 114 hours into his record 115-hour poker-endurance run. If you thought Laak ever said weird shit before, listen to the twisted gems Freiss pulls out of him (or stumbles into) tableside during his final hands. [Link]
