The GPI has made tweaks to their ranking system for the new year — primarily by expanding the tournaments that count to include events with buy-ins as low as $1,000.

UPDATE: These changes will apply retroactively for the multiyear GPI, and they started on Jan 1 for the new 2013 POY.

Calling the Global Poker Index the Nate Silver of Poker is probably stretching a bit, but as CardPlayer, Bluff, and all the others release their final tallies of tournament prowess, GPI relies on arguably the most evolved algorithm … and with that, here’s a look at the 20 players who had the best 2012s, even if you didn’t see them on ESPN or FoxSports:

POY 2012			PLAYER	TEAM	SCORE
#1	—		Dan Smith		1158.27
#2	—		Marvin Guido Rettenmaier	PartyPoker	1077.09
#3	—		Bertrand Grospellier	Pokerstars	913.35
#4	—		Kyle Julius		906.02
#5	—		Andrew Lichtenberger		889.57
#6	—		Joseph Cheong		848.91
#7	—		Phil Hellmuth		846.83
#8	—		Jonathan Duhamel	Pokerstars	812.46
#9	—		Jason Mercier	Pokerstars	810.89
#10	—		Stephen O’Dwyer		800.00
#11	—		Justin Bonomo		798.34
#12	—		David Baker		790.71
#13	—		Mohsin Charania		788.15
#14	—		Daniel Negreanu	Pokerstars	768.40
#15	—		Roberto Romanello		752.61
#16	—		Michael Watson		739.40
#17	—		David Sands		736.20
#18	—		Christopher Brammer		723.78
#19	—		John Juanda		714.42
#20	—		Phil Ivey	Ivey Poker	713.44

Before Black Friday, the poker world seemed to avoid the economic calamities faced by the rest of the world. I’m sure that made the ROW just love all those players seen on ESPN Full Tilt & PokerStars TV. Now, lest we be seen in the same way as the rest of the world when it comes to money, we have One Drop — that holy fugk big event that arguably changes multiple paradigms in the poker world moving forward.

Here’s Alexandra from the Wall Street Journal trying to explain the concept to people who have a hard time thinking of even a $1,500 buy-in as a small event:

Phil Collins is no longer at the WSOP Main Event final table, but that doesn’t stop me or many others from breaking out a classic Genesis album from the 1970’s. Around 5:50pm PT tonight (8:50pm ET, 2:50pm in the UK) Pius Heinz, Ben Lamb and Martin Staszko will return to the Penn & Teller Theatre in a battle where the winner earns $8.7 million while second and third place will have to settle for $5.4 million and $4.0m respectively.

Here’s the chip counts when action kicks off again tonight with the blinds starting at 600,000/1,200,000 with an ante of 200,000:

Seat 1: Pius Heinz – 107,800,000
Seat 2: Ben Lamb – 55,400,000
Seat 3: Martin Staszko – 42,700,000

Hand for hand updates at PokerNews and WSOP.com. PokerNews also has a chat going off the ESPN broadcast here.

ESPN will start their 15-minutes delayed coverage at 6:00pm PT, 9:00 ET. Streaming will be available at www.watchespn.com as well as the WSOP.com site.

Some twitterers to follow tonight for live updating:

@taopauly, @oskargarcia @howardstutz @casekeefer @pokernews @jesswelman @bluffmagazine @pokerlistings @lance_bradley @eric_ramsey @donnie_peters @avpoker

Live blogging from Pauly while Shamus will be blogging a few minutes behind the coverage.

Expect Tao of Pokerati episodes throughout the night.

6:35pm UPDATE: Ben Lamb was eliminated on the 4th hand after Staszko doubled up on the first hand: 77 >KJ to become crippled. Lamb shoved with Q6 into Staszko’sJJ and didn’t improve to earn $4,021,138 as Staszko takes the chip lead.  Here’s what Lamb got shortly after being eliminated:

Ben Lamb gets punk'd (photo courtesy @BenbaLamb

6:50pm UPDATE: Heinz has dominated the early action heads-up to regain the lead with 132 million chips to Staszko’s 73 million.

7:40pm UPDATE: Staszko has gone on a rush as the blinds are now at 800,000/1,600,000/200,000 to retake the lead 110.65m – 95.25m

8:30pm UPDATE: Staszko gave up his lead, but turned up the aggression once again to hold a 113.6m – 92.3m chip lead. Heinz appears tired while Staszko has renewed confidence.

9:25pm UPDATE: The lead has now changed hands for a seventh time heads-up as Heinz wins several hands in a row to hold a 116.9m to 89m chip lead as the blinds go up to 1,000,000/2,000,000 with a 300,000 ante.

10:20 UPDATE: Now Staszko takes the lead once again as he wins several hands in a row as he now takes a commanding lead again: 146.6m to 59.3m.

11:30pm UPDATE: The poker media is getting restless as the heads-up battle rages on. Staszko had Heinz under 45m in chips, but the gap has been narrowed. Staszko leads 132.8m to 73.1m for Heinz.

12:00am UPDATE: Over 100 hands of heads-up play and not a single hand featured an all-in and call. That would change shortly after the blinds went up to 1,200,000/2,400,000 with an ante of 300,000. Heinz shoved with Ah Qh on a Ks Tc 7c flop. Staszko called with Qc 9c. The turn and river bricked out and Heinz now leads with 161.5m chips to Staszko’s 44.4m.

Good times at the WSOP … thanks for hanging with Pauly and me as we use this opportunity to try out some newfangled podcast technology. You know, kinda like ESPN and the WSOP (and NGCB) are trying out newfangled technology with this whole “live” broadcast thing. (Once upon a time we used those “quotes” around the word “live” for mockery. But now, at just 15 minutes off of reality, no less sarcasm intended.)

Episode numbering seems to be the only tricky thing … and maybe using the geo-locator toggle. But it didn’t seem to matter as we sought the best way to insta-podcast the exciting highlights “semi-live” as the November Nine whittled down to the three that ultimately would matter tonight, in a few hours, live from the Penn & Teller Theater, and “live” on ESPN and possibly in your pocket:

Nov. Nine – Giannetti Lives (Ep 5) by taopokerati

Dan and Pauly are ringside for a decisive hand between Matt Giannetti and Martin Staszko. Giannetti was crippled on the previous hand and moved all-in. Staszko called with a dominated hand. Dan and Pauly call the action….

Tao of Pokerati: Quad Lambs by Pokerati

Tao of Pokerati: Non-silence of the Lamb at Penn & Teller Theater by Pokerati

Phil Ivey recently dropped off ESPN’s admittedly subjective player rankings, The Nuts. ESPN’s was the last of such lists to still include the self-exiled Full Tilt Pro in their Top 10. (Homers.)

I found this out via PartTime Poker, which seems to be doing a pretty cool monthly bit over there — breaking down player standings across four different ranking systems, each with their own calculation biases and level of subjectivity in determining the best poker players in the world.

Perhaps surprisingly, I still recognize most at least half of the 21 names comprising the four different Top 10s … but I’ll bet the rest of the world surely doesn’t. There’s a reason, after all, Jason Mercier doesn’t even have a Q-score.

So with subjectivity in mind … best player, winningest player, field strength, skill measurement, tournament luck, run-good ratios, late position likability, backer’s credit score …

Matt Savage

---

OP-ED

My dedication to poker tournaments and the game itself is two decades old. Starting with my first foray into the role of tournament director in 1997 and through my founding of the Tournament Directors Association (TDA) with Linda Johnson, Jan Fisher, and Dave Lamb in 2001, I have worked tirelessly to standardize tournament rules and to make poker a better game for everyone involved.

This is the reason that we host the website www.PokerTDA.com, open the TDA to all interested parties, and make myself available on Twitter and other social media outlets. My passion for poker only grows when I share it with others.

The rule is not new, and does not ban table talk by any means … A recreational player may not understand, nor even care to know all the rules, but professionals who make a living at the game should.

During the 2011 World Series of Poker “nearly live” telecast from the Rio, I became aware of comments from Daniel Negreanu (@RealKidPoker) through my own Twitter feed (@SavagePoker). He said that the TDA created a “new” rule that banned table talk. This certainly is not the case and in hindsight, it was learned that he had received an incorrect ruling at the table that had nothing to do with TDA rules. Since social media has limited words with which to sufficiently explain the rule and its longtime existence, this clarification seems necessary.

The TDA board, in conjunction with tournament directors and card room managers, has donated thousands of hours to standardize rules in the best interest of the game.  When well-known poker players like Negreanu and Phil Hellmuth choose to say on national television that “the TDA has it wrong” and “does not care about what the players want,” it becomes personal.

More…

The numbers for Live-minus-30 coverage of the WSOP on ESPN are in. About a half million viewers on ESPN 2, 23 million minutes of click-friendly eyeball time on ESPN 3, and a “cute” little 646,00 viewers for two hours during prime time on ESPN 1.

Clearly poker is no women’s soccer, but still … those returns seem high enough that ESPN will probably do it again — though nothing in the ESPN press release assures as much — and low enough that next year ESPN and the WSOP will easily be able to report massive growth in whatever numbers prove most beneficial for them to deliver.

It’s hard to determine a success with a new type of coverage … but these numbers do set a certain bar, and at a minimum dohelp quantify the size of the true-poker-geek market. And thus, with results of the Pokerati love-it-or-hate-it poll, combined with the television numbers, I’m relatively convinced that if ESPN doesn’t expand their “live” poker coverage in the future … somebody else will.

(It really is all in the announcing.)

Read below for the official Nielsen data presented by Jack Link’s Beef Jerky, er … I mean:
More…

With the live coverage of the WSOP main event on ESPN2 and ESPN3, live poker coverage really has been taken to a new level — that much is certain. In fact, now that they are down to 14 players, the WSOP Live is about to move over for a couple hours to ESPN1. But there seems to be a rift over it all that frankly, I find kinda surprising.

While I think it’s been friggin awesome and indeed downright historic, a cadre of Pokerati commenters seem to have a vitriolic distaste for the live coverage that goes far beyond a typical poker whine. (I’m very disappointed in them, obv.) Not much in-between … it seems a love-it-or-hate-it affair.

So at Marvin in Bedford’s recommendation — though I did try to remove bias by not calling the live coverage “phony” — I put it to the readers of Pokerati with a simple multiple choice question asking your quick gun-to-the-head take on how ESPN has elected to bring us the 2011 WSOP:

2011 WSOP – Episode 34: Tent City (5:01) – Dan and Pauly went outside and wandered around tent city, where all of the ESPN live feed production trucks and Poker PROductions trailers were located. Pauly hasn’t seen much of the semi-live coverage on ESPN and Dan clues him in on what he’s been missing…

For more episodes, visit the Tao of Pokerati archives.

I couldn’t help but switch over from ESPN3 and ESPN2 to ESPN1 … and wow, what a game. I’m curious to see how TV numbers compare for what is essentially the FIFA Ladies Event vs. those for the November Nine.

Anyhow, check out Adidas’s new ad campaign on display around the rails at the 2011 Women’s World Cup in Germany — targeting fans of international women’s soccer with phrasing that may or may not have been grifted from poker:

“adidas is all in”

BTW, go USA still, but really, seriously, gg Japan.

UPDATE: Apparently the “adidas is all in” campaign launched back in March. Click here to see the multimillion-dollar YouTube commercials wrapped around a distinctly poker phrase … as interpreted by the world of sports.

Marvin in Somewhere — shoot, I forget where he’s from, but somewhere in America, I know — writes in to complain:

I’m watching the “Live” ESPN coverage and it sucks. It’s like it was before the cameras. Not only don’t we see all the hands, but we don’t know whether the better has the “Nuts” or is bluffing. Since they are afraid of people telling what the other players have, how about a one hand delay?

Marvin, Marvin, Marvin … c’mon, can’t you see the positives at all? This is semi-monumental … not the kinda Poker TV you see on Versus, ya know? Though not perfect yet, they gotta start somewhere, right? You bring up some good points that I’m sure they’ll consider in the future … but really, remember, while not necessarily “alpha” version of live coverage, it is rather “beta”.

In an ideal world — according to Pokerati — all cards and chips would be RFID’d worldwide and you could watch all poker anywhere in any place at any time, as live as possible as permissible by gaming jurisdiction, and decide for yourself whether or not you wanna see hole cards. (I tend to enjoy guessing sometimes.) With super-duper extra-HD All-360 technology, of course … on my iphone should I so choose. But we’re just not quite there yet!

From the Rio sportsbook: For people not glued to Twitter, "live enough" coverage is ... um ... not too different from reruns usually airing on screens in many sports bars.

Not sure how it would work with exposed hole cards and future "in-game betting" on the WSOP. (Seen at the sportsbook in the Palms, where you can't yet bet that way.)

And remember, one other factor complicating matters here is approval by Nevada Gaming. Even just allowing twitpics in casinos and cell phones in sports books is relatively new territory for them. And there are some people who don’t believe you should be able to know a players cards a half-hour later when your buddy — or even the players themselves — can find out if that key tell thy picked up goes along with the nuts or nothing.

Click the promo banner to watch things as live as we’re gonna get them for now.

Dan and Pauly recorded an episode while standing on the fringe of the featured TV table…

2011 WSOP – Episode 5: Norman Invasion – Dan and Pauly try to hang out at the final table of the $25,000 Heads-Up Championship between Jake Cody and Yevgeniy “JovialGent” Timoshenko. However, they got stuck around a gaggle of drunken Brits supporting Jake Cody and then find themselves getting in the way of ESPN’s camera crew while they taped a stand-up for Lon McEachern and Norman Chad.

For more episodes, visit the Tao of Pokerati archives or subscribe to the Tao of Pokerati feed.

The HPT Soaring Eagle Six took to the TV felt circa 6:45p EST/3:45 LV last night.  There were a number of notables sweating this final table – Darvin and Wendy Moon were on the rail for the entire evening, and Scotty Nguyen made a (brief) appearance.

Though none of the eleven Season VI HPT Champs ran deep to the Six, many of them stuck around the extra night to sweat the final table including HPT POY Bryan Reisner, Las Vegas grinder Kimbo Ung, US Army Staff Sergeant Jason Fennel, aspiring American Idol singer Kurt Fraser, and an extremely personable Matt “MyTmase” Mason (who was diligently counting chipstacks all throughout Day 2.)

Here are the results:

HPT Soaring Eagle Season VI ->$1500 +$150 Main Event
1st: $176,865 Ahmed Harajli
2nd: $88,434 Joey Brown
3rd: $53,060 Jordan Rowan
4th: $41,269 Dean Hamrick
5th: $35,374 Bernard Lee
6th: $29,478 Chuck Earl

The taping of the final table lasted about 5 hours. Chuck Earl was the first to exit the taping area when Dean Hamrick’s big slick & ace-on-the-river combo beat Earl’s Queens.  Pros Dean Hamrick and Bernard Lee busted out 4th and 5th place, respectively.  Early on, Bernard went on a heater, shoving four consecutive times, while everyone folded and urged him to knock it off until on the last hand he showed kings.

Cowboys were not good to him in the endgame – he took a particularly nasty beat when his pockets fell short to 10s, when the case 10 hit the turn (another player revealed after the hand he was holding the other out), ending his tournament life.  Shortly thereafter, Hamrick ran his 33s into QQs, leaving him on the shortstack.  In the next hand, he pushed allin with K-rag vs. AQ, but it did not get there, and he left with fourth place money.

I happened upon the pair conversing during the break just after Lee’s shove-shove-shove-and-shove fest at the FT.

Here is the link to the interview where they discuss running deep together in the $1500 2010 WSOP Main Event where Hamrick won his first bracelet-> rungood.tv| ESPN Inside Deal Host Bernard Lee and Dean Hamrick Square Off at Heartland Poker Tour TV Table

Jordan Rowan cashed out soon after at 3rd, leaving headups to Joey Brown and Ahmed Harajli.  I’m interested to watch the broadcast of this matchup, because without seeing the hole cards, it still was more entertaining to me than watching the Duhamel-Racener matchup streaming on XBox Live. In the end, Joey went all in shortstacked with K5 against Ahmed 10s.  Ahmed’s hand held up, making him champ of the HPT Season VI Finale, surviving a field of 413 players.

Maria Ho and Tiffany Michelle, patched in UB, presented the Michigan native with his $176,865.  I overheard the floor saying that Ahmed, showing some real class, requested to donate a portion of his winnings to the Disabled American Veterans charity.

The final TV table of six players has been reached at the Heartland Poker Tour “Championship Open” $1500 +$150 Main Event at the Soaring Eagle Casino in Mt. Pleasant, MI. Six major names in poker played in this two-day event. Scotty Nguyen was eliminated mid Day 1, while Darvin Moon exited the tournament area in the final levels of that day.  Maria Ho finished in the cash earlier today on Day 2.

Tiffany Michelle was TV table “bubble girl”, eliminated by big stack Joey Brown, finishing 7th of 413 entrants and taking home $19,927.

Making the final six was ESPN Inside Deal host and poker pro Bernard Lee, who decided to enter in the tourney at the last minute. Another pro at the table, who has played Bernard previously, is WSOP 2008 Main Event bubble boy Dean Hamrick.  Dean won his first bracelet this year at a $1500 WSOP 2010 NLHE event, and cashed in two others.

Seat Assignments/Chip Counts
Seat 1: Dean Hamrick 715,000
Seat 2: Joey Brown 2,020,000
Seat 3: Bernard Lee 680,000
Seat 4: Chuck Earl 450,000
Seat 5: Jordan Rowan 850,000
Seat 6: Ahmed Harajli 1,520,000

Payouts
1st: $176, 865
2nd: $88,434
3rd: $53,060
4th: $41,269
5th: $35,374
6th: $29,478

Blinds will be set according to the *secret* HPT TV Table magic formula (??) and will last 40 minutes. Cards will be in the air shortly at approximately 6:45p EST/3:45p Vegas.

Follow me @scarlet_lv today for live-tweets from the rail.

Day 1 of the Heartland Poker Tour “Championship Open” $1500 +$150 Main Event tagged-and-bagged @ around midnight at the Soaring Eagle Casino in Mt. Pleasant, MI with 60 players remaining of the original field of 413 (*huge* for HPT.)  This is the finale for season VI of the TV show, and tour regulars comment that it is by far the most star-studded event in their history.

There were five notable pros playing the Main, who attending the PPA-sponsored charity bounty tourney benefiting the Disabled American Veterans on Thursday.

Tiffany Michelle & Maria Ho = future USO?

@TheScottyNguyen was the first of them to fall on D1, with his aces cracked in Level 6 (see rungood.tv|bustout interview vid.)  Darvin Moon’s 99’s pre-flop shortshack jam fell to 77’s set late in Level 11.  @TiffnyMichelle and ESPN Poker’s @BernardLeePoker are healthy; @MariaHo has just over 10BBs.

Play for D2 resumes shortly after 10a EST/7a Vegas today at L13 (40 min levels), playing to 6.  The final TV table of the “HPT Six” is scheduled to begin taping @ 5p EST/2p Vegas.

POI (person-o-interest) Chip Counts:

Tiffany Michelle: 162.5k
Brandon Dosch: (HPT Champ & POY Contender): 162.5k
Matt Alexander: (HPT Champ & POY Contender): 136.5k
Bernard Lee: 118k
Maria Ho: 68.5k

Average Stack = 103,250
Big Stack ~ 230k

Day 2 -> L13 Antes/Blinds = 500/3k/6k

Cash bubble @ 41 players today, and the winner will take down an estimated ~ $177k. (hey, I’m not @KevMath y’all, even *inside* the tourney room.)

Follow @TiffnyMichelle, @BernardLeePoker, @MariaHo for table-twitfeed.
Follow me @scarlet_lv today for live-tweets from the rail.