PokerRoad Radio Follow-Up

I'd like to thank everybody who expressed support for me in light of my last post. If you click on the comment thread you'll see that Bryan Devonshire pops up in there posting as "Devo" with some thoughts on the whole matter. He also apologized on PokerRoad Radio's 2010 LAPC Main Event Day 2 broadcast last night for, as he put it, "talking out of my ass". I'd like to thank Devonshire for acknowledging his error and apologizing -- I know that can be a difficult thing to do.

Neither Court Harrington nor Jimmy Fricke were on yesterday's broadcast of PokerRoad Radio and neither one has to my knowledge responded in any way to my previous post.

[Edited at 10:28pm to add: Court Harrington has now responded by leaving a comment to my previous post and apologizing for the whole thing. His apology is accepted and greatly appreciated.]

As I said on Friday, reasonable people can disagree about things: the function of tournament reporters, whether someone deserves more credit for a victory or a loss, and even the analysis of a particular hand of poker. I took no real issue with that. What I objected to most was the besmirching of my name in a very public forum on the basis of incorrect facts (Fricke was just as guilty of this as Devonshire was by badly misquoting my writing). If someone doesn't have their reputation, they don't have anything.

Unless I hear anything from Fricke or Harrington I'll have nothing further to say on this incident. Best of luck to Devonshire at the LAPC Main Event Day 3 today.

Read more...

Open Response to PokerRoad Radio's "B Team"

A reporter is only as good as his facts. Get the facts wrong, and everything that follows makes the reporter look foolish.

During the February 25 broadcast of the Poker Road Radio "B Team" program Court Harrington, Bryan Devonshire and Jimmy Fricke took me to task for a few sentences -- six total out of everything that I wrote over five days -- that I wrote near the conclusion of the NAPT Venetian Main Event. Normally I'd let it roll off my back. Everyone has opinions and far more people criticize poker coverage than praise it. It's not the first time someone has taken a shot at me and it surely won't be the last. The problem this time is two-fold: (a) PokerRoad is poker media, so the B Team's comments pack more punch with me than the comments of a random player, and (b) the "facts" cited in support of my woodshedding by the B Team were completely wrong. Because of those two things and because the B Team calls me out personally by name I feel the need to set the record straight.

Fricke opens the topic by saying that he thought I "acted very unprofessional in the report". Devonshire then chimes in by saying "Isn't F-Train the dickwad that wrote all the bullshit a while ago, the one about Daniel being busto or something? That one article that was completely hypothetical that was not based on fact?" Fricke says he's not sure but Devonshire continues with, "The one that was supposed to be a joke and nobody got it and got all pissed. I think it was that same person."

Rule number one of character assassination: if you're going to smear someone's name you damn well better be 100% certain of your facts. The article that Devonshire is referring to (which is no longer on PokerNews) was written by Dutch reporter Frank Op de Woerd, aka "webjoker". It was a series of completely unsubstantiated claims about several poker personalities, including a claim that Daniel Negreanu was busto. Op de Woerd later said the claims were intended to be tongue-in-cheek. The problem was that nobody got the joke.

The article caused quite a flap at the time and was a real black eye for both PokerNews and Op de Woerd. I, on the other hand, had absolutely nothing to do with it. I didn't write it, I didn't green-light it, I didn't have my name on it, and in fact I was as surprised as anyone to see it on PokerNews.

Here's the problem from my end: unless JoeListener KNOWS that Devonshire is flat-out wrong, in JoeListener's mind I'm now in an extremely negative light. It gives JoeListener a wildly incorrect, extremely negative and unflattering context about me for the segment that Fricke's going to delve into.

Fricke continues,

the first big pot the guy shoves the river of K-6-5-4-10 or whatever. With K-9. And Sam tanks forever and calls with like fourth pair. And the reporter says something like "He couldn't have thought that his pair of kings was good but apparently he was as happy as can be as soon as his opponent mucked." For one that seemed kind of retarded to me.

Pause the tape. Here's what I actually wrote: "Marchese couldn't have felt good about turning over Ks9h for a pair of kings. But it turned out that was the best hand -- Stein showed Jd5d for just a pair of fives."

There's a huge difference between what I wrote and the way Fricke presented it. I can sort of understand what he's trying to get at. K-9 is fairly strong in that spot because if Stein had a bigger king or a hand better than a pair he probably wouldn't have check-called all three streets. However, Stein hadn't made many river mistakes to that point in the tournament. If you're Marchese and Stein calls, you have to wonder what Stein's calling such a huge river bet with, don't you? And at that point one pair -- even a strong one pair -- starts to look weaker. To me that's one of those bets where you're not really sure if you want a call or not.

I admit that the two sentences quoted above are sloppy writing on my part. I'm not proud of it but it happens. The need for speed when covering final tables often means the product is not going to be as polished as people would like it to be. But by mis-quoting those sentences Fricke grossly distorts them to the point of completely demolishing their obvious context.

Back to the broadcast. Fricke also takes issue with a few short sentences I put in the wrap post after the final table was over but again he gets them wrong. He calls it "unprofessional" for me to have written in the wrap post "Sam Stein simply doesn't like to fold so he exploited his opponent's big weakness and liked to make big value bets on the river because he was willing to put all his chips at risk." What I actually wrote:

But one thing we noticed about Stein was that he just doesn't like to fold. Marchese used that tendency to his advantage to get maximum value for strong but vulnerable hands during the heads-up portion of the final table. It was Marchese's willingness to put all of his chips in the pot that proved Stein's undoing. Stein tried to make two massive hero calls against Marchese but each time Marchese showed up with the goods.

Anyone watching that tournament for five days couldn't help but see that Stein liked to play lots of pots and he liked to play them to lots of streets. Whether he was the aggressor or the caller, Stein did not easily go away on the flop or even on the turn. That was his tendency. Marchese's willingness to adjust his bet-sizing when he felt he might be value-betting and when he felt Stein was unwilling to fold helped Marchese attain the victory.

I'm told that the NAPT live webcast announcers noticed the same thing that I did -- which was that Marchese seemed to be making overly large bets when he had any kind of made hand as compared to his bet sizing during other heads-up hands. To me that's playing to your opponent's tendencies and apparently it was the same to the NAPT Live announcers. That's not to say that the NAPT live webcast announcers were "right", but I don't see the B Team taking the NAPT Live announcers to task they way they took me to task.

Fricke then adds that I didn't "give credit to how good a player Sam Stein is by saying that kind of shit". But the paragraph isn't about Stein at all. It's about Marchese and trying to give Marchese some credit for his victory. Just a few minutes earlier in the broadcast all three of Fricke, Devonshire and Harrington said that Stein "punted" on the heads-up portion of the final table. Stein made mistakes. Nobody is going to argue that. But the B Team doesn't give any credit to how good a player Marchese might be. They seem to suggest that the only reason Stein lost is because he faltered at the finish line.

Differing people can have differing views about where the credit (or blame) for a victory or loss should go. If the B Team feels it was more Stein's loss than Marchese's victory, they're entitled to that opinion -- but that doesn't make me "unprofessional". Especially not when the basis for applying that label is a gross mis-characterization and mis-quoting of what I've written, along with a mis-identification of something that I didn't write. Those facts are so simple and easy to verify, but Devonshire, Fricke and Harrington didn't do it.

In my wrap post at the end of the tournament I drew a handful of brief conclusions based on what I witnessed in the tournament room for five days. Devonshire suggests that as a tournament reporter I should just stick to "the facts". I disagree. I believe that my job as a tournament reporter, at times, is to bring people into the room with me. If I reduced all of live reporting to a series of flat hand histories, few people would read the coverage. It wouldn't be interesting. Some context is required to capture the reader's attention. Generally the best spot for that context is at the beginning or end of a tournament day -- which is where the paragraph that offended the B Team was written. The B Team may not agree with me but there's not a color commentator in any industry that doesn't have detractors.

Fricke opened the segment by complaining that I was unprofessional. Devonshire closed it by saying, "F-Train, fuck you. You're a poker fish and a reporting fish." I guess he's entitled to his opinion. But if he's going to spout off on a radio program he could at least get his facts right. Then his listeners can form opinions for themselves on the basis of the truth instead of whatever distorted version he, Fricke and Harrington present.

I've always been a big fan of PokerRoad but the utter unprofessionalism of this short segment -- not to mention how it's just flat out wrong -- has deeply disappointed me.

Read more...

We Don't Need Another Hero

Last night Andrew Feldman of ESPN dragged a couple of us into the hallway outside the NAPT Venetian Main Event final table to tape a quick segment for ESPN's Inside Deal. Basically we just had to ask Daniel Negreanu questions about anything. Otis set the bar so high that the rest of us, I think, failed miserably.

Negreanu has always struck me as a player in love with the hero call. Given the way the Main Event ended, I might have asked Negreanu a question about hero calls. Sam Stein, the player who had been in control of NAPT Venetian for days, took a big chip lead into heads-up, and had all the momentum. Then twice in twenty minutes he tried to make huge hero calls with fourth pair and both times he was wrong. Those calls ended his tournament and cost him about $300,000.

What is it about the hero call that makes it so alluring? Is it the need to show the world how smart we are? To prove to our opponents that they are not able to run us over? Some sort of misguided desire to squeeze every last drop of value out of even the most marginal hands?

And more to the point, how often does the hero call really work out? It can't be often enough to offset the cost (in Stein's case, $300,000) of the times that it doesn't. But at the Main Event final table, Stein's image was already well-established in the mind of his opponent, Tom Marchese. How can it ever be worth your whole tournament -- especially at that stage! -- to make that kind of call with fourth pair, deuce kicker?

Maybe that's just my inner nit asserting itself. But after a night to sleep on it, I'd bet Sam Stein agrees with me.

Read more...

One More Day

It was a relatively painless Day 4 at NAPT Venetian yesterday. 24 played down to 8 in an orderly fashion over a total of about eight hours. I was home watching High Stakes Poker by 10:30.

Overall the event has been great. I think Venetian learned a few things about some chip issues, and if the event grows in the slightest bit next year they're going to have to move it to one of the convention rooms. There simply wasn't any more space around the poker room and I doubt Venetian management is all that thrilled that valuable floor space is being taken up by poker tables.

After today's final table it looks like the next gig on my calendar is the NBC Heads-Up Championship. It's a fun event to cover, attracting lots of poker luminaries. Oddly enough it also marks a sad and disappointing personal milestone, one of those mile markers I still wish I had never passed and didn't think or hope I was ever meant to pass.

But like in poker and most other things in life, there's only so much that's in your control. You do what you can and if life takes you past one of those mile markers, so be it. My grandmother would say, "That's the way the cookie crumbles."

Read more...

NBC Heads-Up Field Announced - Finally!

Today is Day 4 of the NAPT Venetian Main Event. 24 players remain, with Eric Blair leading the field. It's also Day 1 of the $25K High Roller Bounty Shootout. Follow all the coverage over on PokerNews.

With all of this poker action going on, NBC and Caesars finally announced the line-up of players for the NBC National Heads-Up Championship, taking place in a week and a half. Here's a link to the list of players.

The first thing I noticed is that the number of qualifers has increased this year to 7. Last year I believe there were only 4 (2 online qualifiers and 2 live qualifiers from Caesars). While I understand the impetus behing putting random, unknown players into the field, this is a made-for-tv tournament. Television viewers won't really care about a random qualifier. That number probably should have been kept at 4, assuming that enough "brand name" professionals could be found to fill the field.

The rest of the field seems to have been chosen for a combination of recognition potential and poker ability. Again, since this is a made-for-tv tournament, it's not surprising that some highly talented, but relatively unknown-outside-poker-circles internet players didn't make the cut. It's also not surprising that some players whose results are not as strong as others did make the cut, simply for their marketing and ratings potential. And some of the slots are mandatory exemptions for being a previous winner of certain tournaments. Fine.

But there are a few surprising inclusions on the list (Johnny Chan and Darvin Moon come to mind) and I have to wonder if they were "first choice" invitations or replacements for other people who opted not to play. The field generally seems chosen for a combination of markteting potential, table chatter and poker results, and I think you'd be hard pressed to make a solid case for the inclusion of Chan and Moon.

Generally, though, I'm not one to quibble about such things. I'll leave that to the talking heads and the forum kids. I'm more interested to see how it all plays out.

Read more...

Knee-Deep at the NAPT

NAPT Venetian started on Saturday. You want to know how big the field was? Nobody in the media spotted Steve Billirakis until Day 2. Admittedly, Billirakis has changed his look a bit...


It's been an interesting experience stretching my tournament-reporting legs for the first time in three months. The weirdest part is going home every night after the action is done. Sure, I did that for all of the 2008 WSOP and 2009 WSOP. But the WSOP is just... different. It has something to do with the energy of the Amazon Room.

That's no slight on the NAPT though. By every measure NAPT Venetian is a success. It's really nice to see non-WSOP tournament poker show such a promising rebound in the United States.

Read more...

Blame It on T-Pain

If you believe Twitter, a good chunk of the poker world is it on its way to this little desert gambling mecca today. But then again if you believe Twitter "love" is actually an acronym for Legs Open Very Easily, so who really knows.

NAPT Venetian is finally here. Things start tonight with one of those infamous PokerStars Welcome Parties at TAO in Venetian. Somebody named "T-Pain" is supposed to perform. What exactly he is performing, I have no idea. I'm more interested in his name.

T-Pain? Really? What does the T stand for? Testicle? If that's the case T-Pain might want to come up with a name change pronto. Testicle pain really sucks.

Why T-Pain, exactly? It doesn't roll off the tongue. In fact if you say it quickly, it sounds kinda like "TP". Nothing sexy about TP. Not only that but "T-Pain" is blatantly derivative of F-Train. And then he goes and sets up shop in TAO? It's like he's trying to be me -- full of bad-assery, irreverence, and adored by Asian ladies internationally. I see a bad David Letterman joke coming out of all of this.

I'll have a further update on Monday after I speak with this "T-Pain" tonight. Chances are that my lawyers are going to be contacting his lawyers.

For now I need to go polish my bling.

Read more...

(Not) Seeing Red

I was in a limousine recently with Shaun Deeb, two of my female friends, and a few random not-known-to-me male internet poker players. As you would expect when young guys with limited social outlets find themselves in the orbit of pretty girls, one of the guys started ham-handedly chatting up one of the girls. He went for the overt flattery route. When my friend mentioned how much poker she plays, her suitor's response was, "Oh, are you a Red Pro?"

We all had a good laugh (her most of all).

Red Pro was one of Full Tilt's brilliant marketing innovations. FTP conceived and built its poker site around the idea that you could play with "brand-name" pros like Howard Lederer and Chris Ferguson. Each of those pros played on the site under his or her own name. The pros' names and tables they sat at were highlighted in red to make them easier to spot. Full Tilt launched in 2003, just in time to catch the rising tide of the online poker boom. The Red Pros helped launch Full Tilt to the top of the market.

The Red Pro idea was such a success that when sponsoring players became the norm, it only made sense to make FTP's sponsored players Red Pros. Once upon a time Red Pro was a coveted status. It meant that you had made it to the top of the poker world and had proven yourself enough to secure a sponsorship from one of the biggest, most prestigious online poker sites in the world. With Red Pro status came a salary, paid-for tournament entries, 100% rakeback, and the awe and jealousy of most of the poker world.

In 2010 Red Pro status has been watered down almost beyond recognition. The stable of Red Pros has grown so huge that many in the industry joke that it's given out like candy. If the FTP web site is to be believed, there are 14 members of "Team Full Tilt", 4 Hendon Mobbers, 12 CardRunners Pros, and almost 130 "Full Tilt Pros". All of them have "red" status. Red Pros are chosen now not mainly for ability, but more for a combination of ability and marketing potential in regions largely untapped by the poker boom. Red Pro salaries were eliminated (hey, when you have that many Red Pros it's just not feasible to pay them all) and now comes word that Red Pros are being blocked from playing certain live events.

I first got wind of this decision at the Victory Poker charity tournament / launch party held at the Hard Rock a few weeks ago. Sources said that Red Pros had been blocked from playing the event by management at FTP (Ray Bitar?). Presumably this decision was made because the event was to the benefit of a rival online poker site and not, say, because Ray Bitar has something against the Sharon Osbourne Foundation's efforts to fund colon cancer research.

It was a curious turn for FTP to take but one that went largely unnoticed at the time. The Victory Poker launch didn't get much media exposure and so it was easy to overlook the absence of any local FTP Red Pros.

The next event on the calendar was the Party Poker Premier League IV, a made-for-TV poker tournament involving 12 well-known poker professionals. Despite the fact that Party Poker was the headline sponsor of this event, at least two Red Pros were among the participants: David Benyamine and Roland de Wolfe.

Now word has come out that FTP is blocking Red Pros from playing in this weekend's Deep Stack Extravaganza Main Event at the Venetian -- presumably because it is the initial tournament for the newly launched North American Poker Tour, sponsored by FTP's online poker rival, PokerStars. It's a move that makes no sense to me. The NAPT announced this week that they had secured a television deal with ESPN2 to broadcast 16 hours of NAPT coverage. Surely the television exposure that FTP could get from putting branded pros into this event outweighs any potential harm FTP could do to the tournament by refusing to allow its pros to attend.

And if Red Pros aren't allowed to attend NAPT events, what comes next? Will they be banned from WPT events also because WPT is owned now by PartyGaming? Or is PartyGaming on the "approved" list, as evidenced by Benyamine's and de Wolfe's participation in the Premier League IV? What happens when Harrah's launches it's own online poker site, as many believe will happen as soon as the UIGEA is overturned? Will the World Series be off-limits to Red Pros?

And if Red Pros really ARE banned from events sponsored by competing rooms, what does that leave them? They don't get salaries anymore; they can't attend high-visibility tournaments sponsored by competing sites; and FTP doesn't have many (any?) sponsored tournaments of its own. Even the status of being a Red Pro has been watered down by the fact that there are almost 160 of them. It's now a joke for the backs of limousines. All that leaves Red Pros is 100% rakeback and FTOPS. I guess it's a good thing FTOPS goes off so many times a year...

I'm sure FTP has some brilliant marketing scheme behind what appears to be a pig-headed decision. Maybe with the success of the "nosebleed" games they've decided to position themselves as the premier cash game online poker site and are conceding the tournament ground to PokerStars. Anything's possible.

But for now it just looks like FTP is cutting off its own nose to spite its face. That's usually bad for business.

Read more...

PLOL

I've found a good use for the Rush Poker games on Full Tilt, one that hadn't occurred to me when FTP first launched Rush Poker.

I initially thought Rush Poker users would primarily be action junkies, people with small amounts of time to kill (say, 15 minutes), and low-limit grinders that play four or fewer tables at a time (Rush Poker would allow them to significantly increase their volume). Other than that, Rush Poker would primarily be a novelty, especially since there are no tables bigger than $1-$2.

Then I started dabbling in PLO.

PLO. Despite winning a PLO BBT tournament last year, PLO is not my strongest game. I tried to play Pokerati's two-way game ($1-$2 H.A.) at Hard Rock a few times and each time the PLO part went badly. But as part of some work that I regularly do I've had to watch a few PLO training videos and it gave me the itch to sit down and see if I'd learned anything.

Enter Rush Poker. Rush Poker takes the learning curve for a new game and compresses it significantly because of the high volume of hands you can play in a short time. Of course you do lose a little something. If you quick-fold you don't get to see how the hand plays out without going back over every hand history in your database. The result is that you don't learn anything unless you actually play the hand. But given that more hands end without a showdown than do with a showdown, I don't think you're losing much. If you never get to see your opponents' cards it's hard to draw any useful lessons from the way they played the hand. It's easier and more beneficial to focus on your own hands, which is Rush Poker's big advantage -- your volume is significantly higher than at any other kind of table.

I like learning, I like poker and so far I've been profitable. I'll grant that the stakes I've been playing (0.05-0.10 and 0.10-0.25) are not populated with the savviest players. They make some egregious mistakes. But that's fine with me.

Read more...

If You've Got What It Takes

I watched the first episode of High Stakes Poker's Season 6. It did not disappoint, with everyone's most despised player named Phil getting posterized by everyone's favorite player named Phil. A good time was had by all -- except for the former Phil.

The format for High Stakes Poker is slightly different this season then it's been in the past. Co-host A.J. Benza is gone. Gabe Kaplan now provides voice-over commentary on his own, with Kara Scott on the floor to conduct spot interviews. This format follows the lead established by other successful poker programs like Poker After Dark and, to a lesser extent, the NBC Heads-Up Championship.

Kaplan performs admirably carrying the torch on his own. Most of the best lines in previous seasons were written for him anyway, with Benza just providing play-by-play and some yuk yuk as Kaplan's foil. Poker play-by-play isn't too difficult, and when Kaplan's not calling the action or getting in a zing, he keeps his analysis mercifully brief. (Analysis was always the show's weak point.) That allows the table talk, one of the biggest draws of the show beyond seeing elite players play six-figure pots, to take center stage.

Scott provides the other component by taking interviews from players on the floor during the action. At least, that's how it's portrayed -- it's difficult to determine if the interviews are actually during play or after the fact. This is a role Scott is quite accustomed to and quite adept at, having served as host of the EPT for many years.

Overall I like the new format. I was a bit worried that Kaplan was going to seem adrift without having Benza to talk to but that concern evaporated within the first ten minutes. He's got what it takes to play high stakes.

Plus it didn't hurt seeing Phil Hellmuth play poorly and get coolered a few times.

Read more...

My Name's Not Kotter

After a two-week hiatus let's ease back into things. We'll use the writer's crutch of an "odds and ends edition". Not quite a "clip show" but pretty close:

* High Stakes Poker Season 6 premiered last night. I didn't realize it until after the broadcast (lemon). At least GSN has joined the 21st century with its own YouTube channel where, presumably, the episode will be made available.

* To that end I also missed the fourth episode of the 2009 WSOP Europe. I'm not as interested in WSOP-E as I am in HSP but given that it's my industry I should probably watch the coverage. To the internet! (said a la Adam West's "To the Bat Cave!" in the 60s TV version of Batman).

* If you really want to frustrate yourself -- and I don't know why you'd want to do that but hey, it's your life -- play fifteen minutes of $0.05-$0.10 Rush Poker NLHE on Full Tilt. When you've done that immediately play fifteen minutes of $0.05-$0.10 NLHE on PokerStars during the 40 Billionth Hand Promotion (where everyone at your table is likely 10-tabling in hopes of hitting a milestone hand). By the end of that half hour you'll be ruined for ever playing live poker again. If playing on Stars feels slow, how can you handle seeing only 30 hands an hour?

* NAPT Venetian is a few days away. This is the first major test of the new NAPT. All eyes will be watching to see not only how the tournament goes off, but what impact it has on the WPT's Celebrity Invitational, scheduled for the same weekend at Commerce Casino in Los Angeles.

* Victory Poker launched two weeks ago. It's the latest attempt at an online poker site and is a skin on the Everleaf Network. Victory has a stable of a dozen team pros (Antonio Esfandiari the most recognizable name among them). Given what I've seen of the marketing efforts in the first few weeks, I don't expect the site to generate much traffic.

Read more...