After getting back from the World Series in July I suffered a pretty nice case of poker burnout.  I went to a couple of local tournaments and would find myself a level or two into play and not wanting to so much as look at a chip.  I needed a break from live poker and took one.

Of course, I've got the itch again.  Perhaps that can be credited to the start of the football season, which has resurrected my appetite for gambling (by the way, I'm 20-9 with the NFL through week 3 /brag).  Either way, I had the opportunity to sign up for a local heads-up tournament.  It's set to take place tonight and it can't come soon enough.  It's a crowd I've played with a few times in the past, always with some success.  It's mostly older guys who drink a lot and won't open with anything worse than jacks.  Mixed in are a few guys in their mid to late twenties who play a bit more aggressively and understand the value of position.  I'm curious to see how they adapt to heads-up play.  Recreational players - guys who play tournaments in garages every couple of weeks - don't have a lot of experience in heads-up play.  Mind you, what's likely to happen is that I'll get there and find out that those players weren't interested in playing a heads-up tournament and that it'll be filled with other people who were looking to exploit the inexperience of the regulars.  Either way, I'll let you know how it worked out next week.

Anyone who pays attention to the tournament circuit knows that the poker world moved to London, England for the last month.  With stops from the WPT and EPT as well as the WSOPE, there was a ton of money to be won, and a lot of players were looking to grab it.  For a while it looked as though the WSOPE Main Event was going to have one of the most exciting final tables in recent memory.  Viktor Blom and Phil Ivey were amongst the event's chip leaders for much of the tournament, but they both exited before the final table was set. That's not to say that it won't be exciting television (the five-hour delay streamed by ESPN was great), but it could have been huge had Ivey once again made a final table with Isildur1 right there with him.

Liv Boeree was the source of one of the month's other big stories after leaving the Ultimate Bet team and signing on with PokerStars as a Team Pro.  There's been a lot of shuffling in the PokerStars roster as of late.  Gavin Griffin and Hevad Khan recently had their contracts expire without renewal while David Williams joined the team this summer.  Boeree might not have as strong a resume as some of her peers, but it would be hard to argue that it was a poor business decision for either party.  Boeree gets to shed the Ultimate Bet patches she had to wear in her previous sponsorship agreement, along with any of the negative publicity that comes with it.  Meanwhile, PokerStars gets a young, attractive, English-speaking pro to add to the roster. Now all Boeree has to do is chalk up some wins so she can get that contract renewed when the time comes.

The rumour mill is buzzing about the Durrr Challenge’s upcoming match between Tom Dwan and Daniel "Jungleman12" Cates.  The first series in the challenge saw Dwan squaring off against Patrik Antonius, and those two have been taking a painfully long time to finish the series, and are still about 10,000 hands away from its conclusion (unless Antonius decides to buy out of the contest, which isn't an absurd possibility, seeing as how he's over $2 million in the hole to Dwan).

While the Dwan/Antonius match has taken well over a year to play just 80% of the required hands, the match between Dwan and Cates should take much less time.  It's obvious that this will go a long way towards making it a much more interesting match.  Aside from the fact that a faster timeframe will be more interesting, there's also the possibility in larger swings and tilted play that can come from long and numerous sessions.

Dwan is well known as one of the best cash game players in the world.  The pots he wins in an average hand can rival the lifetime savings of many retirees.  While Cates may not enjoy as high a public profile as his opponent, those who are familiar with him know that his resume is nothing to laugh at.  Cates has quickly risen to the top of the nosebleed cash game world, and is thought to be one of the few players to match up extremely well against Dwan.  Mind you, the same had been said about Antonius.

Poker message boards have been awash with talk about when the Jungleman/Durrr match will start (any day now) and how much of an edge, if any, either player has.  There are those who say that 50,000 hands isn't enough to really see which player is better, or that 50,000 hands isn't enough for either player to overcome the variance that goes along with heads-up poker, especially when Dwan is offering up 3:1 odds on turning a profit at the end of the match.  At the risk of sounding like a varsity bully from high school, I've gotta call "nerd" on this one.  I know that as poker has become increasingly popular, there has been an increase in the number of people who think of the game in an advanced manner.  And I know that poker is a game of skill, but that skill is offset by luck (variance).  And yes, I understand that to truly find out who the better player is, they would have to play out much more than 50,000 hands. But knowing all that, I still ask "who cares?"  Let's let the gambling speak for itself.  We don't need to overanalyze whether Durrr is giving too much action to his opponents.  Let's just enjoy the ride.  But then again, I'm a degenerate who will gamble on most things, and I am more than willing to take the worst of it in many cases. 

Post-WSOP observations of the poker world

Now that the World Series of Poker has all but come to a close, the poker world is settling back into its usual routine of high stakes cash games and weird behavior.

Joe Cada recently learned the hard way what Biggie Smalls has been telling us for years – mo’ money, mo’ problems.  The 2009 WSOP Main Event Champ posted on his facebook page that a friend had stolen his checkbook four months ago and has since been forging checks in the champ’s name for large amounts of money.  My advice to Cada – either check your account more often or get a new accountant (and maybe lose the friend).

Poker After Dark is back this week with a new theme. “Lonesome Shark” week includes six players who are unmarried, including Mike Matusow, who is living proof that wearing sweatpants and a fanny pack around in public aren’t guaranteed to get you laid.  Also appearing is “Yukon” Brad Booth.  I’m not sure how many readers are old enough to remember when he used to be a high stakes cash player with enough money to buy in for a “cool million.”  I don’t know where they dug him up, but welcome back I suppose.

Jean-Robert Bellande hasn’t let up on his Twitter campaign, which I imagine is some kind of pre-emptive promotion for his supposedly in-the-works reality show, Broke and Living Like a Millionaire.  Just today he tweeted that “True story: Just yesterday I drafted an email to my backer recommending that he drop me until I got out of my tailspin. Heavy stress.”  So this means that Bellande’s backer needs to be reminded that Bellande is a bad investment?  If anyone has his name, let me know.  I’ve got a great proposition for staking me.

Despite Poker After Dark, things are looking good for fans of televised poker.  ESPN’s coverage of the World Series of Poker Main Events starts tonight.  It should be our chance to see more than all in shoves and shots of the family Mizrachi (for now).  We’ve also got a new set of shows from the PokerStars Big Game, which has filled the void left by the end of the latest season of High Stakes Poker.  The addition of the loose cannon to televised poker in the Big Game has made for fantastic television.

In personal news, my quest to reach SilverStar on PokerStars has gotten off to a great start.  I’ve only been logging about an hour of play each day, but I’ve accumulated 191 VPPs in that time.  I was away for the first two weekends of the month, which took out a ton of playing time.  I expect that being home this weekend I could make SilverStar before the weekend is up.  My approach has been to play 7-10 full ring tables of .05/.10 NHE.  So far I am down $30 for the month, which I’m not happy about.  However, I was running about a $20 profit on the year with the limited cash games I was playing and am only down $10 for the year with this month’s loss.  I’ve noticed a few leaks in my game and am working to plug those, so I expect to see things turn around soon. I’ll hopefully be back next week with a report on making SilverStar as well as a chart of my progress.

In the years immediately following Chris Moneymaker’s World Series of Poker win, it seemed as though there might be no bottom to the well of poker shows being conjured up by television executives.  For a while, it seemed as though television producers had absolutely no idea of how poker was played and would gladly throw any C-Lister behind a mic while some haphazardly collected group of people attempted to play.

While a few shows went to establish themselves as great television, many more fell to the ratings wayside.  But as is the case in many forms of media (see “I’m Too Sexy” by Right Said Fred), the best of the worst is pure gold.  In the world of televised poker, the measuring stick might just be Celebrity Poker Showdown, which ran from 2003 to 2006.

The format for the show saw five heats of five players (that’s right, it was five-handed) with every place paying out anywhere from $7,500 for fifth place to $100,000 for first.  The winner of each heat went on to play in a championship where even more money for charity was on the line.  Keep in mind that a good chunk of the actors in the show hadn’t worked in some time and could probably be accepted as registered charities themselves.  One lineup consisted of Rosie O’Donnell, Penny Marshall (of Laverne and Shirley), singer Travis Tritt, Eddie Cibrian (who starred in Vanished at the time) and comedian Mo Gaffney. As you might imagine, it provided for a ton of flat-calls and on-the-fly learning of the game by its contestants.

For the bulk of the show’s existence we were treated to commentary from the usually funny Dave Foley as well as Phil Gordon, who tried to keep up with the often circus-like antics of the players.  You can imagine how great Gordon’s expert opinions on the game meshed with Foley’s ability to make poker-related jokes about playing poker.

But don’t let the smack-talk stop you from re-visiting the show.  I certainly wouldn’t recommend picking up the DVD box set, but I wouldn’t ever miss the chance to watch Neil Patrick Harris recreating scenes from Doogie Howser or some some fantastic slow rolls. David Cross appeared in the first season and provided a few laughs, actually working in real jokes.  Unfortunately Dave Navarro and an unusually quiet Seth Meyers didn’t provide a whole lot of backup.

Celebrity Poker Showdown disappeared in the summer of 2006 with Jason Alexander taking down the final championship game

Of course, poor televised poker wasn’t restricted to the years immediately following the poker boom.  After all, we’ve still got Face the Ace and non-cash game episodes of Poker After Dark to contend with.  If I have to watch Chris Ferguson play one more hand in a six-handed sit-n-go, I’m going to rip my hair out.

Believe it or not, I’ve actually found some time to play some small stakes cash games online when I wasn’t trying to dig up highlights of Celebrity Poker Showdown.  In that time I’ve managed to get myself on track to make Silver Star at PokerStars by the middle of the month, something I’ve been meaning to do for the last few months, but hadn’t had time for.  If I can turn a profit while doing so, I’d like to make Gold Star in September.  However, if I run the way I’ve been running lately, I won’t have to worry about the added pressure.