BJ disappeared to somewhere near the Arctic Circle, leaving Huff to moderate an imaginarily bloody tete-a-tete between me (representing the down-and-dirty side of poker) and G-Wise (representing “big slick”). Bernard Lee also stepped into the fray briefly to discuss his new deal with Foxwoods and offer up his services as a stand-in panelist. (Doesn’t the ESPN analyst and Boston Globe columnist know we can’t let any ole riff-raff into our shtick!)
In addition to a slew of newsbriefs and snoozing through the segment on the Durrrr Challenge, we discuss Lee’s signing with Foxwoods as well as the Forbes’ laying the online poker cards on the table/cover for all to clearly see.
For those who missed our debut special-for-the-WSOP Monday episode live, here’s the podcast … where The Poker Beat crew waxes poetic about Phil Ivey’s bracelet, Daniel Negreanu’s non-bracelet, non-Finnish national anthems, Ladies events, what makes an “online” player, and Joe Sebok’s lie detector prop bet over his knowledge of Beth Shak’s marital status or lack thereof. Also, Chops shows up to declare this World Series the “Year of the Brother” … or maybe it’s the Year of “tha Brothah” … but either way, leave it to the Entities to celebrate poker in all its multicultural greatness.
This episode, btw, marks my personal umpteenth appearance on The Poker Beat — making me the “last man standing” amongst hosts and panelists (Go free labor!) and the only guy to appear on every episode since the show’s inception. While that factoid may mark a certain pathos, I’d also like to point out that I am the only one — even with all those extra minutes — who has yet to be called out by the Insider for a factual misstatement.
That’s not to say I haven’t made any errors — made a big one about something really important a month ago, but I guess it just slipped by our wheezey, phlegmy ombudsman.
Pretty cool … our pals at Poker Road have hooked something up with the NBC Sports web peeps to get their videos airing on sports.msnbc.com. So now the rest of the world can enjoy such quality programming as “Life of Ivey”:
In this episode, I think Phil is headed to the next stop on the WPT Craps Tour (inside joke, or is that just something I didn’t know existed?) on Donald Trump’s helicopter … it’s a little hard to follow, but that’s probably the point … kinda like Lost.
Dr. Pauly joins the mix today … and he and I will be talking about the all-important topic of Celebrity Apprentice. Gary and BJ will be talking about the less important 38 percent drop in field size for the WPT Championship:
For those of you who didn’t know Shronk — or perhaps even more so for those who did — Matt over at Life’s a Bluff has dug up a not-too-old “Random Questions” video out of the archives that really tells you a lot about our friend from PokerRoad … who all of us in the poker media will still be thinking about for quite a while as we go about our daily tasks:
And that limit event he busted out of yesterday … Erick Lindgren just missed the final table, which is now set with some interesting players, including Teddy Munroe, Ali Eslami, and Vinny Vinh. (Teddy and I go way back — last year I’d be typing outside and “The Iceman” would fill me in on the $100-$200 cash action while taking a piss on the tournament tent air conditioners. “Makin’ money, baby!” he’d say before shaking himself dry and heading back to the table.)
Even the $10k 7-Stud World Championship is getting interesting … with Doyle still alive and both Bob and Maureen Feduniak with the potential to become the first ever husband-wife presumably non-collusive team at the final table. Never mind. Since typing this, all the above-mentioned have been eliminated.
I learned about this 7-Stud shape-up from the a WSOP-TV vid. And though I tend to detest any lack of imbeddability, I gotta say I like a lot of what this ESPN/WSOP/Bluff (?) crew has got going here. For example, Harmonie Krieger does a basic feature video interview set on the different jobs people come to the WSOP from. Nice enough, right? — but very real when one of the guys she talks with is Jay Columbo, who ran the legendary Mayfair and Playstation poker clubs in New York City, legally questionable status notwithstanding.
And then, perhaps most shocking to me, I enjoyed Jean-Robert Bellande’s “Surviving the WSOP” — where the young, aspiring Eskimo Clark chronicles his ups and downs at the World Series while his video-podcast editors comment Pop-up Video-style — follow along as he hustles high-rollers for buy-ins.
Even learned something from Phil Ivey’s less exciting V-log … and that is that he’s playing so many big-field, low-buy-in donkfests because he has a lot of side action pending on whether or not he’ll win a bracelet this year. We’ll see if we can’t find out more about this.
Speaking of donkfests, the Ladies Event has already lost 2/3 of its starting field, and of those still remaining, at least three of them are Pokerati MySpace friends: Lacey Jones, Kathy Liebert, and Mandy Baker are looking strong and pretty much representing the spectrum of all that is good about women. Go girls! I mean chicks … er babes .. uh bitches?
UPDATE: Lacey is nursing a short stack. Poker Roadie Amanda Leatherman has come on strong, however, and picked up the aggressive pace. Michele Lewis, Tiffany Michele, and PokerNews editrix Haley Hintze are all out.
In the meantime, primarily because it is awesomely embeddable, check out the debut episode of The Degenerate Report, from Neverwin Poker:
The BTT crew: Poker talk fused with gay jokes and fat commentary was all the rage in 2007.
Some of you have been wondering, why no new episodes of Beyond the Table? Tom, Karridy, and I have been wondering the same thing. It’s been a good run, and with drinks in the air, three guys who clearly love/hate the sounds of their own voices are calling it podcast quits.
Back when we started, our show about poker but not really about poker stood out as revolutionary in a sea of lame poker interviewcasts with questionable audio quality. Soon after iPod sales were booming as more and more of the world got hooked on downloading poker audio with funny intros and Angry Julie cameos. But Tom couldn’t handle the celebrity and Karridy developed a crack addiction lives got busy and producers for Beyond the Table fared about as well as drummers for Spinal Tap. The show hired Shamus at a fraction of a Cambodian farmer’s wage to pump up our numbers — did he ever get his T-shirt? — but with a new generation of poker podcasts getting better and stronger (Lou Kreiger, Gary Wise, 2+2, Pocket Fives, Ante Up, Poker Road, et al) old-school payola wasn’t enough to save us from going out on the podcast bubble.
Listen below to a heretofore unpublished episode (recorded on 2-27, my dream flop) as your favorite semi-amateur yammerers phone it in for the last and final-ish time:
[audio:http://www.pokerroad.com/upload/radio/23/audio/TPB21110.mp3]
