Poker Blog Round-Up: 2 February

Setting the forums ablaze at the moment is a load of gossip about Phil Ivey’s golf game. Started at 2 2 and then soon spreading to Blonde and The Hendon Mob forums is a story about Phil winning about $900,000 off Marc Goodwin and Ram Vaswani at golf. Whilst in Australia for the Aussie Millions the boys set up a golf game, but as they hadn’t played for a while the usual negotiating was done. Marc and Ram asked Phil if he still gets ten shots off Eric Lindgren to which Phil replied yes.

900 grand later and Marc and Ram are left scratching their heads. A chance meeting with Lindgren later leads them to find out that Phil, in fact, gets no shots off Eric at all - and that they've been rolled by Ivey. Various posters claimed Marc stormed off the course saying he would refuse to pay. Goodwin himself has posted on the matter at Blonde where he says he played the whole round, but admits that he and Ram do feel a bit aggrieved about it. Further negotiations will be made during their next visit to Vegas in April.

What has gotten various forum members all riled up is the question of whether Ivey cheated or not. It seems to be a 50% split down the middle as to yes, Ivey lied about his abilities so therefore he cheated or yes, he lied, but so what, the hustlers got hustled. Poker Verdict is going to sit on the fence on this one - all parties concerned are gentlemen so we’re sure it will all get settled amicably at the 19th hole.

Enough about all of that, let’s get some poker content and Chris Fargis at Twenty One Outs Twice has not let us down. A few weeks ago he had been talking about giving up the game, but as we all know poker is a harsh mistress who does not let you go so easily and his most recent posting finds him musing on some hands from the WPT event at the Borgata in Atlantic City.

Chris gives details on three wild hands and questions the motives and thought processes of the players who played them. His blog is peppered with sentences like, “In my opinion he played the hand clearly wrong on all four streets. But hey, what do I know". And “Check-calling a big bet on the turn to set up a kamikaze bluff on the river is not in my arsenal. Maybe it should be".

Naturally he is right to do this, but he has forgotten a key element in all this excellent analysis - it’s a donkament, so there really is no point wasting your energy on why somebody has played a hand seemingly badly. We all know that the correct strategy is to completely over-value and over-bet your hands and basically play like a total lunatic...

Speaking of lunatics, Emil Patel aka whitelime has an entertaining blog at cardrunners.com. There’s an especially good post where he writes about how buying the wrong book ends up costing him $45,000. Due to laziness he can’t face going back to the store and waiting in line to change it so he orders the correct book on Amazon. “To recoup the $100 the book cost, I decided to steal a blind at a high stakes table. I raise button, get reraised, decide to 4-bet and he shoves. Bam, down $3k already. End up dropping 7 more as I'm in absolutely no shape to play good poker,” he tells us. A downward spiral ensues which is not helped by the fact that the newest degenerate to grace our Blog Round-up likes flipping coins for 10 large a time.

card runners.com appears to be a website set up by our favourite type of poker player - the genus known as the American college kid. It seems they charge people to download videos of online hands and sit 'n' gos played by “ballas” such as ActionJeff. I guess some people would be willing to pay for that, but otherwise good luck with that boys.

The site has many bloggers although most are not as entertaining as whitelime. At least two of these bloggers have posted up photos of the flashy cars they have bought with their online winnings and one of them hopes to be so rich that one day he’ll be able to buy himself a Salvador Dali painting. Nice to see the American Dream is still alive and well. Honourable mention must be given to cts who writes about a big hand he won online off "CaseyAtTheBat", aka living legend Chip Reese.

As all you regular readers know the Quiet Lion has been in Thailand for some well-earned rest. Full Tilt player Richard Brodie, who used to be Bill Gates' assistant, has surpassed himself with possibly his best post yet. Whilst hanging out in a bar he befriends Kitty, a Californian nympho who decided she likes having sex so much she might as well get paid for it. Not only that, but it turns out Kitty used to be a computer technician in Silicon Valley. Wow, this could be Brodie’s dream girl.

Whilst smoking a bunch of his cigars and drinking a load of champagne (his tab, of course, several times the Lion notes that Kitty finds him “gentlemanly”) Kitty persuades Rick to take her back to his room.

"She looked down at her empty glass. “Is there somewhere else we can keep drinking?" Oh, dear reader. I want you to know that it is only for your sake – the sake of the story - that I swallowed hard and suggested we go back to my room to partake of my complimentary minibar," he writes.

It’s nice to know that Dick was thinking of his readers at this point. Once in the room Kitty wastes no time in showing Richie-Rich a “tasteful nude spread” of herself on the internet.

“The idea of this pretty Jewish California girl plying her trade in Chiang Mai was jaw-droppingly fascinating to me”, he writes. Oh Dicky, are we being slightly coy? Surely something steamy would happen in the confines of his palatial suite now?

Instead he writes: “My feet are cold,” she said. “Do you have an extra pair of socks?” I went inside, taking my laptop with me so the Mensa nymphomaniac couldn’t surreptitiously install a Trojan on it while I wasn’t looking, and returned with a pair of black Jhane Barnes dress socks. I expected never to see them again.”

To be fair to Brodie, lions are normally predators, and he certainly seems uncomfortable being the prey. The evening seems to end suddenly when she turns to him and says: “I really like anal sex...Do you?” At this point our humble narrator bundles her into a taxi or tuk tuk. “How much is the fare?” I asked. 300 baht. I pulled it out and gave it to her. It was worth $8.” He might have bottled it but at least he wasn’t taken for a ride by this femme fatale.

Kitty does get a brief mention in his next posting which is back to usual details about the food and drink and hotels and limos on his journey back to the States. As usual, he flew first class.

Speaking of fine wine and dining Shaniac’s most recent post has taken a leaf out of the Quiet Lion’s book and finds him going on and on about various restaurants he has eaten at. In true Brodie style Shaniac critiques various dishes he has eaten and lets us know how much each bill came to. Seeing as his blog is usually pretty good I’m going to give Shane the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s a parody of our boy Dicky’s blog. I mean, virtually every poker player I know thinks of themselves as gourmets (just spend a couple of hours in the dealer’s choice game at the Vic and all you hear them talk about is what such and such restaurant is like - each opinion given more vociferously than the last, don’t you worry ‘bout that!) but Shaniac is still only in his twenties so there is no need to become a boring food/wine snob. Don’t do it Shane!

I Had Outs is an amusing blog by two lady poker players (read that in your best Alan Partridge voice). Karol and Dawn take turns blogging their various adventures playing poker amidst the murky world of underground clubs in New York and casinos in Atlantic City. Dawn relates a recent poker outing to Resorts in AC and hilariously captures the feeling of doing your brains in a low limit no limit holdem game. Whilst suffering the inevitable bad beats she thinks of a new way to ease the pain. “To amuse myself in the interim, I began to devise a poker penal system. For instance, I decided that if someone won a huge pot through god awful play, you should be allowed to vomit on them. Obviously, rights of first regurgitation would go to the person who entered the hand most favored to win”, she writes. Poker Verdict likes it and looks forward to future posts.

Hugo 'Chimney Sweep' Martin

2 February 2007

OTHER BLOGS BY HUGO 'CHIMNEY SWEEP' MARTIN

POKER VERDICT BLOG INDEX

Blogs by David 'TheKid08' Gross

Blogs By James 'Slicker66' Hipwell

Blogs By Hugo 'Chimney Sweep' Martin

Blogs By Phil 'Jackal69' Shaw

Blogs By Jeff 'Lord Neil' Israel

Blogs By Neil 'Bad Beat' Channing

Blogs By The Hendon Mob