It didn't seem like Harrah's could pack any more tournaments into the month-and-a-half poker festival that is known as the World Series of Poker, but it managed to do so with nine more events than last year, which shattered all attendance records and had people waiting in lines outside the Rio's Amazon room just to get a peek at the action. This year, 55 bracelets will be won, and it will cost $214,500 to play in all of the events, without any rebuys.
In a year that saw World Series of Poker records shattered, and Internet poker branded with the label "unlawful gaming," 2006 came to a close with a tournament that honored one of poker's few consistent forces - Doyle Brunson. The Doyle Brunson North American Poker Classic (DBNAPC) at Bellagio Hotel and Casino, a World Poker Tour event, was the last major tournament of the calendar year.
In March 2003, attempting to enlist allies in our war with Iraq, President Bush implied he would call France's bluff in a Security Council vote on whether to support an invasion. "It's time," he said, "for people to show their cards."
Many skeptics predicted that online poker would dry up because of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. But, what took place at the Atlantis Resort Casino on the tropical island of Grand Bahamas during the second week of January proves otherwise.
Over Christmas in Madison, Wisconsin, we had the annual holiday poker game. It was pot-limit hold'em with $5-$5 blinds, a $1,000 buy-in, and $500 rebuys. This was a hefty-sized poker game for Madison! After years of winning during my Madison trips, in 2004 I set the record loss of $14,000. Word of my huge loss spread throughout the state, and my poker friends talked about it for a year.
I felt great about my chances going into the final event of 2006, for a few reasons: (1) I'd won this event before, in 2004; (2) we started with $30,000 in chips; and (3) I had just come off an important 27th-place finish in my last event at Foxwoods. My confidence was at an all-time high, and I couldn't wait for this tournament.
Chip and Doyle can be heard more often in a poker room than chips and salsa in a Mexican restaurant. When not trying to cut each other's throat at the table, these two have been the best of friends for more than 30 years now. Besides playing literally thousands of hours of poker together, these guys have gambled on most anything imaginable.
When playing large pots in limit hold'em games, unless your hand is virtually unbeatable, the most important concept is to give yourself as great a chance to win the pot as possible. When the pot is large, even hands with a small chance of winning are often correct in calling because of the great odds the large pot is offering. And when your opponent is correct in calling, your hand will have stronger edge if he folds.
You may remember the old Andre Agassi commercials from the 1980s with the tag line, "Image is Everything." At the time, he was trying to sell Canon cameras, and I'm sure that he had no intention of talking about poker, but that tag line could be as easily about poker as it was a young hotshot tennis star with a mullet, back when neon was cool and it was OK for men to wear short shorts.
If someone said he'd gone to Giants Stadium wearing Dallas Cowboys gear, and then wanted to know what to do when some of the fans started threatening him, what would you tell him? I'd probably tell him that he shouldn't have worn his Dallas Cowboys gear to Giants Stadium in the first place.
