When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail “You’re learning about tournament poker” said Sam Grafton to Karl Chappe-Gatien after the French day trader prematurely celebrated spiking a 3-outer on the flop, only for PokerStars ambassador to smash his own 3-outer on the turn. They exchanged fist bumps and Chappe-Gatien gave ...
It is no use waiting for your ship to come in unless you have sent one out There is a Belgian proverb that translated into English goes something like this: “It is no use waiting for your ship to come in unless you have sent one out.” The poker version of this would be “you’ve ...
Putting villains on pedestals The founding myth of the Olympics is the story of Pelops, grandson of Zeus, hosting the first edition of the games as a funeral celebration for his vanquished father-in-law King Oinomaos of Pisa. Pelops fell in love with Oinomaos’ daughter Hippodamia, but in order to win her hand in marriage, he ...
Deeb taught Zack all the tricks A couple of weeks ago, I was playing the 2022 World Series of Poker Mini Main Event, drawing an unusually tough table for such a soft tournament that included Shaun Deeb and top Irish player/professional mystery bounty envelope-opener Padraig O’Neill. Deeb exquisitely “reversed slowrolled” me Deeb exquisitely “reversed slowrolled” me in ...
Norwegian granite Staring down at a Jack and a Four for the second time during the heads-up contest, a visibly rattled Adrian Attenborough wanted to make the call. A high-level-thinking, combination-counting savant, he knew it would be, in all likelihood, a bad call. He knew that to do so would be leaving the game tree ...
Sometimes even the mightiest must move There is a famous story, often co-opted by speech writers, which describes an encounter between a large naval ship and what appears to be another vessel on a collision course. It usually goes something like this: Released by the Chief of Naval Operations, the following is a transcript of the ...
Hashtag positivity Covid-19 may not be front-page news anymore but the extremely contagious virus that ground the planet to a halt for almost two years has not gone anywhere. With the BA-4 and BA-5 variants, both sub-lineages of the highly transmissible Omicron, likely to become the dominant strains in the coming months, a summer surge ...
“Ridiculous fun” on Poker After Dark On the week when the good people with guns sat on their hands for an hour while 19 children and two teachers were being massacred in an elementary school in his home state of Texas, Republican Senator Ted Cruz went to the NRA Convention to defend gun rights, insisting ...
Handbags and Jewellery While poker is obviously inclusive in the sense that all you need is the buy-in, (that is unless it’s a private or invitational game) it is impossible to ignore the fact that the game is mostly played by white males. The game itself may not discriminate, but there are societal biases that ...
Winter goes back-to-back If the phrase ‘America, Fuck yeah’ could take physical form, that is what poker’s elite battled it out for in the PokerGO studio this past fortnight. That, and oodles of money of course, as the US Poker Open crowned ten different winners across a dozen events. In the end, the 60-pound effigy of ...
