White Belt Poker » Tournaments

Joe Beevers wins Poker Million VI

Dave — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 22:00:19 +0000

Congratulations to Joe Beevers, who won the Poker Million VI tournament on Friday night/Saturday morning and claimed the one million dollar prize after beating a high quality final table that included Liam Flood, Julian Gardner, Howard Lederer, Marty Smyth and Ian Cox.

The tournament was shown live in the UK on Sky Sports. It’s unusual to see a live tournament on television these days and there’s a reason for that. The pace of play over the first few hours could best be described as ‘glacial’, with only three flops seen in the first two hours. Pretty much every hand was taken down by the first raise. Some time after midnight Julian Gardner joked to Howard Lederer that they hadn’t seen a turn card yet. That was over three hours into the tournament. I’d got back from a Christmas party and I fell asleep not long afterwards, so I missed the end. There’s a reason why they edit these things down folks.

Anyway, congratulations to Joe. And a nice job by commentators Jesse May and Roy Brindley, who kept the broadcast entertaining despite the slow pace early on.

EPT Season 3 on Challenge TV

Dave — Fri, 25 May 2007 14:21:20 +0000

For the next seven weekends, Challenge TV (the UK satellite/cable channel) will be showing highlights of each of the rounds of the third season of the European Poker Tour.

Each week there are three shows. One each on a Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

It all kicks off at 11pm tonight (Friday 25th May) with the Barcelona event.

Disappointingly, the production company has decided to persist with presenter Colin Murray for the third season, but at least we get to hear EPT boss John Duthie regularly exposing Murray’s complete lack of poker knowledge with the odd well-timed, withering comment.

I often bemoan the lack of top quality play on British TV (well, not on this blog – not in the last year anyway) so it’ll be good to see some top class European players up close. With three hours of coverage per event we should get to see more than just the final table too.

Full schedule is listed here.

Update: An hour after I published this post, I got an email from PokerStars giving more info. It mentions expert analysis from Greg Raymer, John Duthie and Lee Jones – and there’s no mention of Colin Murray. Okay, I won’t get my hopes up just yet.

WWdN – Euro tourney report

Dave — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 18:01:46 +0000

My run of good results in WWdN Eurofriendly tournaments at PokerStars continued on Friday. After driving like a maniac to get home in time for the start (and getting back a few minutes late), I was there until the bitter end again, this time finishing in second place after I won the first one back in February.

Obviously you have to be delighted with such a good result, but I was still a little bit disappointed not to win it again. There were a couple of occasions when I had big chip leads at the final table – double the number of chips that anyone else had when we were down to seven, and more significantly, having 30k of the 55k in play when we were down to three. But perhaps that’s being super picky. I thought I played really well, but just got out-played heads-up by fellow British poker blogger TanOrpheus.

I’m really taking a liking to tournaments with longer blind intervals, so I should probably make more of an effort to look for non-WWdN tournaments with similar blind structures to play in.

As I said, I got home a few minutes late so I missed the first couple of hands at my table. That was long enough for Pauly to bust out though, although I didn’t see quite how he managed it. I don’t suppose he’s going to mention it now that he’s out in Vegas at the WPT Championship either, so if anybody was on that table and saw what happened, let me know. All I saw was the aftermath – somebody saying, “wow, that was a brave call” in the chat window.

Incidently, if I ever come across ‘Jemad19′ at the tables again, dude, I’ll be giving you more than the $1 you asked me and Tan to lend you while we were trying to concentrate on playing heads-up. How anybody has the nerve to just walk in like that at the end of a tournament and ask to borrow money is just beyond me.

As ever though, it was a fun tournament to play in. Thanks again to Wil for setting it up. Somehow, I managed to avoid playing at the same table as him again though. Never mind, one of these days.

Google Calendar – WSOP 2006

Dave — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 00:12:34 +0000

All of the cool kids are using Google Calendar these days, and frankly if you’re not then you’re different and strange and people will not be attracted to you.

One of the many good things about Google Calendar is the ability to share calendars with friends or with other users. In fact, Google have used the iCal format popularised by recent MacOSs, so you don’t even have to be using Google Calendar in order to view a calendar created in Google Calendar.

So anyway, a bit of easter weekend boredom prompted me to create a calendar that contains all of the events at the 2006 World Series of Poker which I’d like to share with all of you, so that you too will now be able to locate the lone Stud event in amongst the dozens of NL Hold’em tournaments.

If you’re already using Google Calendar, then the easiest way to add my WSOP calendar is to do a search for ‘poker’ and you should find it on the first page of results.

Otherwise you can click on either of the two links below to get an RSS feed or iCal calendar instead, although I’ve tried the RSS feed in Bloglines and it looks, well… rubbish.

Frankly, given the eight hour time difference between my house and Vegas, I’m not sure how much notice I’ll be taking of the live updates, unless of course the final table takes like three days to finish like it did last year, prompting runner-up Steve Dannenman to admit later that he was happy to give up the $7.5m first prize because he was bored of playing.

At some point I’ll probably do some other calendars for major tournaments in Europe and the US.

If anyone has any trouble with this particular calendar (either finding it or using it) then leave a comment or mail me and I’ll see what I can do.

EPT Final won by American Jeff Williams

Dave — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 21:49:13 +0000

So the second season of the European Poker Tour ended over the weekend with the Final in Monte Carlo, and despite a European-dominated final table, the winner of the €900,000 prize was 19 year-old American college student and young Bobby Baldwin look-alike (according to Lee Jones) Jeff Williams.

Brad Willis has a great write up of the event at the Poker Stars blog.

Marcel Luske was an 11/4 favourite going in to the final table, but didn’t have any luck, eventually going out 7th when his pocket 8s were beaten by Marc Karam’s J7 after Karam hit runner-runner 7s on turn and river.

The prize pool of almost €3m was the biggest in European poker history and eleven of the twenty-seven players who finished in the money were British. Best story may be Irish Frequent Player Points qualifier Matthew Davey who went from second to last in chips on the final day to finish 12th, giving him a €33,500 pay day and giving the rest of us hope for next year.

“Be water, my friend”

Dave — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 22:44:49 +0000

“Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless. Like water. Now, you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle… now water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

Bruce Lee, from “The Lost Interview” *, quoting a line that his character spoke in the US TV show “Longstreet” in 1971.

On Wednesday nights, channel five (here in Britain) have been showing an event known as the Party Poker European Open. The format is the now-traditional six-handed no-limit hold’em tournament where the winner of each heat goes through to a semi-final and subsequent final.

These have been running for almost two months now and occasionally one of the episodes is fun to watch. My favourite so far featured Dave Colclough being driven nuts by a (possibly Turkish) guy he didn’t know who was frequently going all-in whenever he entered a pot. Somehow they ended up heads-up at the end. Colclough had had enough at that point and on the first hand he called the inevitable all-in bet without even looking at his cards because he just wanted to get it over with. He turned over one seven then another seven, smiled at his opponent, who turned over Q8 offsuit which didn’t improve and Colclough took the win. After his opponent had left the table, Colclough sat with his elbows on the felt and his head in his hands and told the dealer that he didn’t think he could get up at the moment because his legs had gone.

They’re not usually that interesting though. Often, I end up sitting there wincing at the bonehead plays that the amateurs make, wondering how the hell some of these people qualified in the first place. Okay, so it’s easy for me to criticise people when I’ve never qualified for one of these events and I’ve never been in that game situation – under the hot studio lights, against pro players – but really, there are only so many times that you can watch people re-raising with QT offsuit before the flop at a full table before you flip out and start shouting at the TV, just like you do at a game show contestant who doesn’t know a really obvious answer.

The player who does this crazy kind of thing though is typically a bar manager or sales manager from the Midlands with one or two years experience in the game, who has been successful in his field and who sits there desperately trying to look casual in wraparound shades. And boy has he taken to heart the idea that aggression is rewarded in poker. I mean, god help you if he thinks you’re trying to bully him, because he WILL instantly call an all-in bet before the flop with say, Ah Qh on the first hand of the tournament (yeah, that’s a real-life example from a few weeks ago which backfired spectacularly). Because he is NOT going to be bullied. Hell no!

Okay, here’s what makes me laugh about these guys though. Last week, in the brief player interviews they show between hands to pad out the production, one of these guys described himself as an “aggressive” player, then went on to say how these tournaments were “anybody’s game”, blah, blah, etc. Clearly it’s very fashionable these days to be seen as an aggressive player. (That’s an understatement really). After all, it’s the way Phil Ivey, Gus Hansen and Layne Flack play and they are all winners right? But personally, I think it’s crazy to voluntarily label yourself like that. Ivey, Hansen, Flack et al like to promote the idea that they are aggressive players to intimidate people, because it makes less experienced players believe that they could be playing any two cards at any time – although sometimes they are, of course. The truth is that they do play aggressively… some of the time. But what makes them such good players is their ability to be selectively aggressive; to understand the flow of the game around them; to thrust or parry at exactly the appropriate time. All Joe Bloggs is doing by labelling himself as “aggressive” is putting up a facade. He’s trying to pretend that he’s just like the big boys, as if aggression by itself will be enough and as long as he plays aggressively, he can negate the gap in skill level between himself and his opponents. It’s really an admission that he can’t outplay good players but he’s still trying to convince everyone (most of all, himself) that at least he won’t go down without a fight. But really, what’s so wrong with waiting and giving yourself time to outplay people, rather than going all-in on the first hand when you’re 50/50 at best, thereby letting luck decide your fate? For me, there is much more merit in being adaptable, being fluid and picking your spots if the situation allows you to. I read a magazine interview with Scott Fischman the other day that described his style as “adaptive”. That’s how I would want my game to be described (if I ever got interviewed by a magazine – like that’s going to happen any time soon), or perhaps just as “Style: not applicable”. As Bruce Lee said, “Be water, my friend.”

* Bruce Lee – The Lost Interview:

Partial interview here:

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/23744/bruce_lee_lost_interview/

Available on VHS from Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/6303320279/sr=8-1/qid=1140126552/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-0543860-9272664?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance

First WWdN Euro-Friendly Tourney report

Dave — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 12:46:00 +0000

The first ever Wil Wheaton-sponsored Euro-friendly Friday tournament was played yesterday at Poker Stars and I’m delighted to say that I was fortunate enough to win it. “Over the moon” may not be the right phrase, but it’s the first one that comes to mind.

I’ll spare you all an in-depth analysis of the big hands. Instead, you can read Wil’s roundup of the tournament on the Card Squad website here:

http://www.cardsquad.com/2006/02/10/results-for-eurofriendly-friday

I was really pleased with the way I played, particularly when I was heads-up with Change100 and I came back from almost a 6 to 1 chip deficit (34k to 6k) to eventually win after a tense thirty minute battle. It was pretty surreal for me to play against other bloggers like CJ whose work I’ve been an admirer of for quite a while, as well as having Pauly and Wil in there commenting at the end and asking me where I was from. That was really cool actually!

Thanks to Wil for putting the tourney on at a time when I could play and for creating a blind structure that rewarded good, patient play. Thanks to the other European players for supporting me at the end too, especially Sires (even though the talk of Chili was making me very hungry after almost three hours of playing on an empty stomach.)

See you all next time,
Dave

Wil Wheaton European Tourney – tonight!

Dave — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 14:08:55 +0000

Wil Wheaton has set up a European tournament for those of us who can’t turn up at 3am on a school night for the usual weekly tournament.

Here are the details from Wil’s site:

If you’re interested in playing, head over to PokerStars, and from the lobby go to tourneys -> private, and look for tourney number 19345283. The buy-in is $10 +1, and the game starts at 1:30 PM EST (6:30 PM GMT) which should make it “friendly” for the bulk of European players.

Note that Wil’s post actually says that the tournament starts at 5.30pm GMT(rather than 6.30pm), but GMT is actually five hours ahead of EST and eight ahead of the west coast, as several people have mentioned. I hope it is 6.30 and not 5.30, otherwise I’ll still be in traffic on the way home from work, which would suck.

So, unless I get stuck in horrendous traffic on the way home, I’ll be there. Cool.