Monday, December 19, 2005

Has It Gone Too Far?

Carl Denham: Fay! Fay! What about Fay? She would be perfect!
Preston: She's already filming something for RKO.
”King Kong”

So we went and saw Kong last night. I had two of my friends give me polar opposite reviews of the movie, and just like I suspected I fell somewhere in between. It was good, but did it have to be three hours?

I am left with spare change only in my Titan poker account. I got bored with playing 1c/2c no limit, and decided to put everything into a $10 SNG. I have done the same thing about 5 times now, put a diminished all on the line in one SNG and it always ends the same – a bad beat bubble story. But this time was different. I finished fifth instead of forth.

Long story short, I went all-in on a flop of 7s5c5s with 99. One player called with KsQc for 2/3 of his stack. Running spades was good enough for me to say goodnight. I thought it was the right move at the time, but what can you do?

We were at a Christmas party last Saturday night, the Distraction and I, and before long we found out how many people were interested in poker. I think our home game circle just grew slightly…

I’m going to add a few new things to the site over the new year period. At one stage I was updating every Wednesday with “Know Your Australian”, but quickly I got bored of this and run out of things to mention that would take more than 2 lines. However, I liked having a regular feature on the site, so I will be trying something I have had my mind for a while come this Wednesday. Please, hold your breath for it.

I see that there is planned a $80M poker tournament next year, that will grow to $100M first place pay out by 2008. You can find out more about it right
here. At first, I thought this was just a prank but it does look legit now.

Is this too much? I mean, where does it end? The players I assume will be entering with sponsorship dollars mostly, and quite likely a deal will be done between them for such a staggering amount of money. How could you say no to a $13M chop?

To me, it sounds like a bit of a farce. Just because there is that much money on the line, it isn’t going to make the play any better or more exciting. Look at the $2M champions game last year won by Annie Duke. Sure, it was good seeing all those pros at the one table, but it didn’t really have much intensity until it was heads up. Anyways, I just think it won’t be the greatest thing to poker.

I don’t know if there are farther updates on this available around the net, but apparently one of the “confirmed” players (apart from Joe Haschem, who is mentioned in the article) is Phil Ivey.

Something stops me from getting too excited about this event. I just can’t see it being a success for some reason.

1 comment:

skitch said...

"I just can’t see it being a success for some reason."

Probably because a $13.3 million entry fee is beyond the scope of the Average TV-Poker Watching Joe. At least with the WSOP, there are Cinderella stories, and someone who can spare a paycheck can play in a smaller event or win a satellite and have a shot at playing with and against the pros.

So it's gonna be an invitational for a bunch of pros that aren't even putting up their own money. The sponsors are relying on garnering a large TV audience, but audience watches because they want to see themselves in that spot someday... how many of us would really even dream of throwing $13.3M on the line for a poker game?