Vindication ! Half A Time !
The new series of High Stakes Poker is off to a slow start. It's probably unfair to judge by the standards of the first series, because watching Hellmuth being pwned was the best TV poker ever. This one is suffering a little bit because almost everyone has bought in for the minimum $100K (wusses) and so there's not so much deep stack poker. Also the banter isn't as high quality for the simple reason that Matusow's on, he won't shut up and he isn't funny.
They're also running it twice too often for my liking. Sure, it's the players' money, and they're perfectly entitled to do it, but I have more respect for the ones who don't. Either play the big game, or don't. Don't play it half-arsed (or twice-arsed). So anyway all these themes come together when Farha is all in with Aces against Matusow's Tens. They run it twice, Matusow flops a draw on the first one and misses, then flops nothing on the second one and rivers a Ten. Once's he's stopped dancing around with the sheer joy of breaking even on the pot, he starts going on and on and on about how he was sure when he didn't win the first one that he wouldn't win the second, and at one point he even says "it was fair enough, I should have won the first one and he should have won the second one". This is just nonsense. For someone who thinks he's one of the best in the world, he's talking like a £20 player in Luton. The fact that he insta-called pre-flop as a 4-1 dog is forgotten ; he "should" have won the first one because he flopped a draw, even though he was still an underdog at that point. It's always a sign, in my opinion, of someone who isn't quite (or nearly) at the top level, when they talk about what happens with the cards after the money's all in. At the point when it goes in, you're 60-40 or 80-20 or whatever, and what happens after that is just rolling a dice, however many times it bounces or looks like it's going to land your way.
Anyway Matusow's still banging on when Fred "The Value" Chamanara puts his last chips in with A7 against a real player's Kings. Up pipes the Unabomber "you wanna run it seven times ?". That did make me laugh. Like a lot of these jokey comments, I suspect that some of the other players aren't happy about the time it takes to negotiate these deals. Can you imagine if insurance and running it twice came into fashion in Luton and the Vic ? You'd be down to about 10 hands an hour ! Viva El Internet.
They're also running it twice too often for my liking. Sure, it's the players' money, and they're perfectly entitled to do it, but I have more respect for the ones who don't. Either play the big game, or don't. Don't play it half-arsed (or twice-arsed). So anyway all these themes come together when Farha is all in with Aces against Matusow's Tens. They run it twice, Matusow flops a draw on the first one and misses, then flops nothing on the second one and rivers a Ten. Once's he's stopped dancing around with the sheer joy of breaking even on the pot, he starts going on and on and on about how he was sure when he didn't win the first one that he wouldn't win the second, and at one point he even says "it was fair enough, I should have won the first one and he should have won the second one". This is just nonsense. For someone who thinks he's one of the best in the world, he's talking like a £20 player in Luton. The fact that he insta-called pre-flop as a 4-1 dog is forgotten ; he "should" have won the first one because he flopped a draw, even though he was still an underdog at that point. It's always a sign, in my opinion, of someone who isn't quite (or nearly) at the top level, when they talk about what happens with the cards after the money's all in. At the point when it goes in, you're 60-40 or 80-20 or whatever, and what happens after that is just rolling a dice, however many times it bounces or looks like it's going to land your way.
Anyway Matusow's still banging on when Fred "The Value" Chamanara puts his last chips in with A7 against a real player's Kings. Up pipes the Unabomber "you wanna run it seven times ?". That did make me laugh. Like a lot of these jokey comments, I suspect that some of the other players aren't happy about the time it takes to negotiate these deals. Can you imagine if insurance and running it twice came into fashion in Luton and the Vic ? You'd be down to about 10 hands an hour ! Viva El Internet.
1 Comments:
"it was fair enough, I should have won the first one and he should have won the second one"
I think he was referring to a previous hand where his aces got outdrawn by 74 suited or something (can't remember the exact hand). He was saying he "should" have won that pot and that Farha "should" have won this pot. That was my interpretation although either could be correct
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