September 11, 2008
Just watched this week’s episode of the WSOP … and saw Phil Laak in the Old Man disguise for the first time. Couldn’t help but think, as pointed out by a commenter, how is this any different than someone’s having two different accounts online?
He gave an interview in July to CardPlayer* where he talks about the stunt sociological poker experiment, the benefits of anonymity, and how players can change their live persona at the table over the years.
*CardPlayer goes embeddable!?! Great, now what’ll we bitch about? Nice!
Best pic of Phil in disguise here.
Posted by
DanM at 1:34 am
July 12, 2008
With 92 players remaining, Phil Hellmuth is in about dead-middle of the pack, with 1.28 million chips. He had climbed up from near the bottom of the pack some two hours earlier, where he had to fight off some major steam after some bad beats/21st century plays. On break, Hellmuth asked if he could stay in the Amazon Room just to pace, but tournament staff said sorry, they couldn’t make any special exceptions (even for him), which conceivably added to his steam factor … so he went outside into the hot Vegas sun (actually, it was a relatively cool, humid 94 degrees) and paced back and forth along a straight line for the full 20 minutes.
Posted by
DanM at 9:20 pm
June 23, 2008
There haven’t been too many difficult floor decisions this year. There was supposedly a confusing situation during the heads-up tourney where two players took the wrong seats after the break and played out a few hands before the mistake was realized … but other than that, the most difficult theoretical situation was handled rather quickly and decisively without much alteration to tournament purity:
The event was one of last week’s big-field $1,500 NLHs … and the problem began with a single table in which every player started with an extra 1k in chips. Conclude what you will about donkament ethics and how the “prisoner’s dilemma” applies to poker … but no one said a word, and cards went in the air with every player at one table given a 33 percent starting-stack advantage.
It was supposedly about 20 minutes into play when a dealer recognized the problem. Floor supervisor Jimmy Sommerfield made the quick decision to rectify things by removing 1,000 chips from each player’s stack. Sounds simple enough, and in this situation it really was — very few chips had moved around, and not many decisions affected by falsified stack sizes. And besides, every one of them at the table was technically a dishonest bastard, so what are they gonna say?
But what if a few more hands had passed, and one of the players had only 900 chips remaining?
More…
Posted by
DanM at 9:53 am
