Posts Tagged ‘Joe Sebok’

From Annie Duke’s website:

It’s bittersweet, but I’ve decided to leave UB.

I have nothing but positive things to say about UB and my experiences with the brand, management team, and dedicated employees who work hard every day to deliver a terrific online poker experience for players like you.

I’ve sincerely enjoyed wearing the UB patch, but it’s time for me to move on.

So why am I leaving UB? In a nutshell, professional and personal growth.

Translation: “They can’t afford to pay me and/or I don’t want to go to jail.” There’s been some speculation that perhaps Annie no longer wants to be associated with some of the biggest scumbags in the industry, but she’s stood by them for some time through a huge cheating scandal and repeated attempts to cover it up. Something has changed, and I’m guessing it’s their willingness or ability to pay her.

From Phil Hellmuth’s Twitter:

Making a BIG move…leaving UB. Truly lots of great memories, but it’s time to move on…Mutual decision…Looking forward to BRIGHT future!

The future’s so bright he has to wear shades… everywhere he goes… even indoors.

This one is less of a surprise. Phil was never as public in addressing UB’s problems as Annie was, and recently he’d stopped appearing in public with the UB logo.  Read the complete post...

Yesterday’s New York Times ran an article about how poker players are using Twitter. I can’t say it’s particularly thorough and insightful, in fact it seems to be based almost entirely on an interview with Joe Sebok of Poker Road, it’s neat to see our little world getting some mainstream attention.

As reporter Marshall Kirkpatrick notes, “Big name players are Tweeting but small timers at the big show are too. Traditional poker reporting didn’t shed much light on the experiences of amateurs, but Sebok says those players on the margins can now tell their families and friends to check Twitter for play by play accounts of their experiences in Vegas.”

As it happens, I myself will be Tweeting from the WSOP on @thinkingpoker. So follow along!

Edit: Important correction here. The non-bountied live pro I busted was not Bill Gazes but rather Bill Edler.

I decided to play the Bay 101 because of the combination of a nice location, great structure/tournament director (thanks Matt Savage!), and interesting people I thought it would attract, both because of the area and the number of pros who play as “shooting stars” with $5000 bounties on their heads.

At the outset, they distributed the bounties evenly, with one or two at every table in the 5 and/or 7 seats. I was fortunate to get probably the single softest bounty in the field at my table: 2007 WSOP main event champion Jerry Yang was seated to my immediate left. He was very quiet, but friendly enough. To my surprise, he made a lot of hopeless bluffs, especially in the early stages of the tournament. That’s not exactly how I expected him to play, which is maybe what he was going for. I called him down correctly once with 8s 4s on a Js 8h 3s Qd 3d board.  Read the complete post...

Day started with something like 136 players and 20,000 chips each. I spend most of the day in good shape, never amassing a huge stack but maintaining near or above the average. Then I made a big move on Joe Sebok on the very last hand of the night:

Daniel Alaei was on my immediate right, with Joe seated to his right. The two had been openly joking about how ridiculously tight a youngish Asian player across the table from us was. That player caught the big blind on the last hand of the night. Joe made a joke about going all in blind pre-flop to steal from him.

Blinds were 400/800/100, and Sebok open raised to 2200 with 30K behind. I thought that especially on the last hand of the night with a super tight player in the BB he could have almost anything here. Alaei called, and I was pretty sure that since he knew Sebok knew he knew the guy was tight, he didn’t have a huge hand and didn’t want to get into a pre-flop leveling war. He was just calling to use his position and knowledge of Joe’s wide range post-flop.  Read the complete post...