There’s an awesome clip of WSOP 2009 Main Event footage floating around.  The clip is from about the half way point in the tournament and includes Andrew Black, Phil Ivey, and the original coin flip.
Andrew Black makes a really bad call for about half his chip stack with AJ.  On a scale of 1-10, it’s probably a 7.3.  He had to have put his opponent on an underpair, but still if the pusher has just AQ, he’s sunk.  Way too risky for my taste.
Phil Ivey actually suffered a lapse of a lack of aggressiveness.  In a no doubt rare clip, …read more

Lex Veldhuis was running over the field in 2009 ESPN WSOP action. One player he was particularly dominating was Simon Muenz. Muenz’s problem was he was never the aggressor against Veldhuis because he was completely scared of the hyper aggressive pro.
Even in a situation where Muenz was dominate (for example flopping two pair), he only called Veldhuis’s bets on the flop and turn which set him up for river scare cards or outright being beat in the hand. I’m not sure what happened to Muenz, but Veldhuis took his poker soul from him because the guy would …read more

I watched a slick bluff today on ESPN when top pro Eli Elezra went against the talented newcomer Lex Veldhuis. This was one of those hands where there was no real bad play. Veldhuis just made a good play at the right time.
Elezra raises to 600 with pocket 4s and then Veldhuis raises to 2,300 with 97o. Eli calls.
Lex makes an interesting comment that, “I can make you chip leader of the whole tournament.”
The flop comes out A65o and Lex comes out with 3,300.
Eli comments that he likes the speech and shows pocket 4s as he folds. …read more

We’re down to the final 1071 and Julius Caesar is at #4! Caesar of course represents Phil Hellmuth who arrived at the WSOP dressed as the Roman leader. If Hellmuth actually won the WSOP, nobody would ever hear the end of it. His big pot that got him to such as huge chip count of 595,000 was a 400,000 pot in which he held pocket kings and flopped trips.
From Twitter.com/phil_hellmuth:
Just won 400k plus pot! my K-K!, i raise to 7k pre!-flop, c callers. Flop A-K,Q i bet 6k, 1 caller w 9-9, turn 9! He all in…
There …read more