The $25,000 WPT Championship has begun at Bellagio. As I am writing this, we have completed both heats of day one. Because there were 450 players, the opening day of the tournament was split into two days. Heat A started on Monday and Heat B was held on Tuesday.
Keep in mind that just because a player may raise with a hand worse than yours doesn't mean he wouldn't raise with better hands than yours, and still may hold a superior holding to yours. (One of my favorite poker maxims is: Even idiots pick up their share of aces!) In such situations, you need to weigh approximately the range of hands your opponent may hold and how your hand plays against those hands. In order to accurately assess the situation, you need to know your opponents, so focus in between hands on how they play.
It's 4 o'clock in the morning, and the buildup of glue on your chair is roughly equivalent to the buildup of chips that were formerly yours in your opponents' stacks. Under the gun, you limp in with the A◆ 2♥, which you know isn't a good idea, but you're stuck and antsy, and hoping the pot won't get raised. Those hopes are dashed when the rock in the cutoff seat makes it two bets to go, losing both the button and small blind.
If you divided all poker players in the world into winners and losers, you would find virtually no long-term loser who tracks results. That doesn't mean that all winners do track results, but it sure helps. Poker players ought to keep track of their results for two fundamental reasons: for tax purposes and for analytical purposes.
The PartyPoker Million IV took place aboard Holland America's Oosterdam in late March. A total of 735 players vied for a prize pool of $7,207,108, guaranteeing two skillful players a shot at $1 million each in this limit hold'em event.
Of all the poker areas regulated by poker rules, the showdown is the most important. It is the point where the players show their hands and the pot is awarded. In this column, I would like to address the first part of that first sentence, the rules that involve the showing of hands.
Legalizing gambling is not the same as decriminalizing it. When a state's lawmakers decide to make gaming legal, they never repeal the state's criminal anti-gambling statutes.
Everywhere you turn, there is poker. There are poker billboards, poker games and cards, chip sets, coffee cups with logos and suits of cards. There are playing cards embedded in toilet seats, Harley-Davidson's with royal flushes and A-A-2-3 detailed on them. You see poker sayings on T-shirts and posters, and hear them in songs and casual conversation in the elevator. Everywhere you turn, poker is in your face.
Sometimes, big revelations come from small insights and occur so quickly that you don't even notice them until they spring, fully blossomed, like an oak tree from an acorn. "I'm losing on the river most of the time when I call," I was told by someone.
My involvement with poker has taken me to some interesting locales, such as St. Maarten in the Caribbean, where I've done tournament writeups the past couple of years, Jamaica for the National Lampoon's Strip Poker filming, and, of course, the most exotic location of all, Barstow. It had never gotten me to Europe, though.
