Posts Tagged ‘doyle brunson’

There’s a full trip report in the works, but for now, here’s my favorite hand that I played in the EPT Madrid main event:

Blinds are 150/300/25. The UTG is a very aggressive young Scandinavian with a huge stack. He opens to 750, and I call in the CO with 66 and 45K in my stack. Action folds to the BB, who calls. This is no surprise, as his VP$IP is about 50%.

The flop comes 732r. UTG bets about half the pot, I call, and the BB overcalls. Fish though he is, I don’t think he has many 2′s or 3′s in his range. I did once see him peel the flop with AQ unimproved, so he could just have overs, but I thought there was a good chance he had a 7.

The turn was a 9, and my opponents checked to me. There was nothing for me to do but check behind. The BB wasn’t the sort of guy you try to bluff off of a decent pair, so I had pretty much given up after his flop call. As this hand will demonstrate, though, you should always be paying attention and considering your options, even when you think the result is a foregone conclusion.  Read the complete post...

Michael Craig’s The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King takes readers on a behind-the-scenes tour of (at the time) the highest stakes poker game ever played. In search of a new challenge, banking prodigy Andy Beal challenges the best poker players in the world to play for stakes so high that millions of dollars change hands in a session and even these seasoned veterans can barely handle the swings.

As a poker player, I found PBSK fascinating for a number of reasons. For one thing, there were a lot of little details about Bobby’s Room (the high-stakes section of the Bellagio poker room, named for Bobby Baldwin) and the people who play there that I didn’t know. Craig writes for a broad audience, but even as someone who is relatively in-the-know about the poker world, I came away with a much better sense of the culture and traditions of that game. There were even a few regulars I hadn’t heard of, which I suppose is in itself a statement about the nature of the game.

Title notwithstanding, the book’s truly central characters are Beal and Doyle Brunson, not Beal and Howard Lederer. Craig chronicles the two men’s parallel struggles, Brunson’s to herd a team of notoriously stubborn and independent poker players into a functioning team with a 10-figure bankroll, and Beal’s to find an edge against the game’s greatest.  Read the complete post...

Doyle Brunson’s Super/System was the first poker book I ever read, and one part that has always stuck out in my mind is a play that he suggests to bluff an opponent off of a chop when you both a one-card straight. Essentially, he suggests that if your opponent makes a bet or raise and you are sure he has the straight, and you also have it, you can just call (Brunson suggests some drama but it’s hard to do that online) and then try to represent a full house if the board pairs on the river. You’ve got nothing to lose, since even if he calls you still chop the pot.

Full Tilt Poker, $2/$4 NL Hold’em Cash Game, 4 Players
LeggoPoker.com – Hand History Converter

SB: $784.80
Hero (BB): $800
UTG: $1,563.55
BTN: $824

Pre-Flop: 5 A dealt to Hero (BB)
2 folds, SB raises to $14, Hero calls $10

Flop: ($28) K Q T (2 Players)
SB checks, Hero checks

Turn: ($28) J (2 Players)
SB bets $24, Hero calls $24

River: ($76) K (2 Players)
SB bets $50, Hero raises to $262, SB folds

Results: $176 Pot ($2 Rake)
Hero mucked 5 A and WON $174 (+$86 NET)  Read the complete post...