Most of you reading this probably have a good idea who I am, but for those of you who don’t, please allow me to introduce myself. To my family I’m known as Kevin Saul, but to most of the poker world I’m “BeL0WaB0Ve.” I’ve been playing poker professionally for almost 3 years, the majority of which has been online.
After busting from the WSOP main event this year, I headed over to the Bellagio to play the Bellagio Cup III World Poker Tour event. I somehow managed to keep my luckbox working for 4 days straight, and went wire to wire ending each day as the chipleader and eventually defeating Mike Matusow to become a WPT Champion. My proudest poker moment ever.
So as I write this, we are almost 3 weeks into October and I’m on an airplane to Vegas to pretty much play poker seriously for the 1st time all month. The World championships of online poker (better known as WCOOP) ended with the main Event on September 30th, and I’ve pretty much been taking a break since.
The WCOOP is a long 2 week series of tournaments with awesome prize pools and awesome structures that fatigues the hell out of some players and personally just frustrates the shit out of me. I just decided after finishing September that I was going to take the majority of October off, in hopes of being fresher when I return.
I’ve played online a total of 3 times all month, and only one of those days did I play a full session for me. I’ve been taking one of my longest breaks since I started doing this for a living almost 3 years ago, and to be honest it feels kind of weird.
For someone who plays as much poker as myself, an average of 60 hours a week might be a little on the low side, you would think that I would miss poker at least a little bit. I’ve actually been going out a lot and enjoying my new car that I just recently purchased, along with enjoying my favorite sport season of the year…October Baseball (This is where I will not mention the disappearing act of my Cubbies R.I.P.).
I’m heading to Vegas for the Pokerbowl, and quite frankly I have no idea what I’m in for. I was asked if I wanted to play, the other players on the team are pretty sick players so I figured why the heck not. Yeah, that’s right…this is a TEAM poker tournament.
From what I understand, there are 5 different tournaments over 3 days, with 5 teams of 6 players in each tournament, which consists of 3 10-person tables where 2 teammates will try to somehow make the final table though I’m not sure how we get there.
I thought they were going to encourage collusion and signaling your teammate like a baseball game, but apparently cheating amongst partners is not going to be permitted, you just have to do your best not to intentionally bust your partner.
I kind of feel like a traitor, as I’m playing for team New York and am actually from Chicago, but the team owner, Eric “sheets” Haber is from New York so I guess it’s ok. I actually don’t mind, because we all know that East Coast players suck, and to be honest after looking over the teams in the Eastern Conference I have to say I love our chances.
The team was originally supposed to be Gavin Griffin and myself as partners, Danny Ale, Darell “gigabet” Dicken, Cliff “JohnnyBax” Josephy and Eric “sheets” Haber. Eric and Cliff backed out at the last minute due to some kind of family commitments, but have been replaced by 2 very good players, Victor Ramdin and John D’Agostino. Apparently this will be a televised event too, which always makes things more fun and adds different elements to the tournament.
This should be a fun experience, and after the pokerbowl I will begin traveling more on the tour, with my 1st WPT tournament since my win, in the Bellagio Cup III in July, being Foxwoods in November.
I look forward to sharing my experiences in the pokerbowl in the near future, along with a couple of blogs about my WPT win that I have been promising forever in my old blog. If you are interested in checking out some old blogs, you can find it at http://www.bel0wab0ve.blogspot.com/.
Until then-
BeL0W