WSOP, WPX and a new goal
Monday July 31st 2006, 2:41 am
Filed under: No-Limit Hold'em,Poker Stuff,PokerStars,S&G,Shorthanded,Tournaments,WPX

First of all I would like to remind you all that the main event of this year’s WSOP has started. Some pros are already out, some others are still in contention.

My ups and downs of the WSOP so far:

Ups:

1. There are more and more “amateurs” (aka online players, online (semi-)professionals, …) every year. I don’t have the exact number, but it’s safe to assume that they’re making up the majority of this year’s events and it’s already more than likely that yet another amateur will rise to WSOP championship glory this year – any bets on the online poker room they qualified on (it seems that PokerStars is having the biggest number of runners so they might have their fourth WSOP ME Champion in a row, although I wouldn’t underestimate some other poker rooms’ incentives, which could be the extra motivation – as if anyone needed extra motivation with 10.000.000$ up for grabs along with the fame (although 10+10mil sounds even better – the FullTilt deal))?

2. At least some people are still trying to work their butts off to bring you interesting stories, updates and recounts as the “we sold exclusive rights, so not all goes”-approach allows. Quick reminder: Otis, Wil, Dr. Pauly, CJ and some other guys are delivering some awesome content over at the official pokerstarsblog. Dr. Pauly delivers some more of his wsop goodness, especially blogger updates over at the Tao of Poker – although the frequency of the “Last 5 Pros I Pissed Next to…” segments is steadily declining.

3. Phil Hellmuth won his record-tying 10th WSOP bracelet. While this might be a surprise, I gotta say that this is truely an up for me. He’s on of my favourite players: he’s not only one of the greatest when it comes to tournament poker, but I really enjoy watching his rants at the tables, especially when another donkey “who can’t even spell poker” sucks out on him…

4. Daniel Negreanu’s video blog…I really enjoy watching his updates.

5. Some video updates from cardplayer were quite interesting. The regular coverage mostly sucks though, so no link love for you.

Downs:

1. Coverage. While some bloggers are trying their best (see above), their efforts are still undermined by the official and exclusive coverage (chipcounts, etc). Sorry, but an update here and there with numerous errors (e.g. hand history posted smack in the middle of an update shows that someone won with a boat, yet the text says he won with a flush, etc etc etc) and delays is just not good enough (although the situation has slightly improved since the start of the WSOP).

2. TV coverage. While this is the “biggest event in sports”, there’s no coverage to be found anywhere around here. Some stations are having a poker summer and showing the WSOP – the bad thing though: that’s the WSOP 2004, yawn.

…but enough of the WSOP and off to my own playing. I decided to consolidate my bankroll by transferring money from numerous poker rooms to a select few poker rooms. It’s just not good to spread out the roll over many rooms. So I pulled the plug on mansion (too little traffic atm, I might had back sometime later) and UltimateBet (haven’t played there in ages anyway). Before I fire up the roll at Stars though I wanted to give a “newer” room a shot. WorldPokerExchange is the only poker room offering rake free play. It would be better to call it 100% rakeback as you pay the normal rake and then you get it all back after some days (once a week as far as I can tell). While traffic isn’t great (the times I played so far the numbers were something like 1-2k players), the prospect of saving all the juice is groovy though. After going through my logs of different rooms I found that what many already said is true: it’s hard to stay ahead of the rake at the low limits, especially when you count normal variance. So I’m going to play most of my SnGs on WPX for a while and see what that adds up to – I’m sure it’s going to be quite a lot as the usual rake per SnG is a flat fee of 10% which adds up, especially if you’re playing SnGs almost every day.

I mentioned firing up the roll at Stars earlier on. This is due to the fact that I set a new goal for myself. I want to take the game to the next level and out of the online poker realm. While the home game series I play in is getting better and better as we bought casino style poker tables and just started a championship race which will determine the best player over the course of a year, I would love to get in some real (casino) tournament live action. So I’ll try to qualify for one of the EPT events! I don’t know which one it’ll be, but my current favourites are London and Baden, Austria. I don’t know which qualifying route to take yet as there seems to be a lack of double shootouts, which would have been my preferred option. I’ll keep you posted on the status of my qualification…


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