Poker Guru Blog

This week's "This Week in Poker" is very notable for the phone interview with the legendary Dwyte Pilgrim. This is the same Dwyte Pilgrim who has won the WPT Borgata Open recently.There is also a skype interview with TwoPlusTwo moderator Kevin 'Kevmath' Mathers, which might interest you.

As I promised, I am back with some news on Liv Boeree, who has recently parted with her previous sponsor, UB. There were rumors which poker room might take her, the community talked about Full Tilt, PokerStars or PartyPoker. Well now the guessing is over, Liv signed with PokerStars, so she's the newest PokerStars Pro.

The PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker was held between 5th and 26th September with over 50,000 participants playing for the prize pool worth $62 million in total. Most of the events had around $100-$300 buy-in and were diverse in gametypes, including NLHE, Omaha, 7 Card Stud, etc.

The $5200 Main Event (26th-27th September) was guaranteed a $10 million prize pool and $2 million for the winner but it grew even bigger with 2,443 players entering: a total of $12.2 million was distributed to the best 306 and the winner, ‘PotterPoker’, took $2.3 million. Not only did he manage to beat the best of the online poker community but also won the biggest WCOOP prize ever. Moreover, except for some WSOP, WPT and EPT events, it is far bigger than most of the live tournament prizes as well.

Here is a video of the final table from PokerStars.tv. 

Although it had seemed that some kind of dreamteam was going to sit at the WSOPE 2010 Main Event final table, it eventually turned out to be a set of relatively unknown players, but it was no less anticipated. After the remaining 22 players played it down to the best 9 of the £10,000+£350 event on Day 4, the final table setup was as follows:

Play began on the 22nd level (3,000/10,000/20,000) and, although the players showed aggressive game, it was no sooner than late in the 23rd level (3,000/12,000/24,000) when the first two of the field got eliminated (Inizan, Powell) by Lee. He was also involved in the showdowns with Fleyshman, Steinberg and Levi and was eventually eliminated himself by Bord.

James Bord's first live event victory

How did you like Lauren Kling the last time I showed her to you? Well here's another interview, a little bit longer than the last one, but now she talks about herself in glorious detail so you can get to know her better. She talks about her reasons of starting poker, her university studies, her time working for Playboy and much more. Did you know her father used to be a professional blackjack player?

After suspending the play two times, the 4th event of the 2010 World Series of Poker Europe in London has finally come to an end. The winner of the £10,000 + £350 NLHE High Roller Heads-Up Championship is Gus ’The Great Dane’ Hansen, collecting his first WSOP golden bracelet ever.

Gus Hansen won his first WSOP bracelet ever

The event was delayed first because the early stages took longer than expected and later because Hansen as well as his adversary Jim Collopy won 1-1 matches each and they agreed upon suspension. For Collopy, this was the first live final table appearance, while Hansen had been expected for quite a while to finally win a bracelet he long deserved. As soon as both were eliminated in the Main Event, the third match of the HU finale took place and it even received an unexpected publicity from ESPN.

Having moved to the Cake Network, Victory Poker believed it was time to advertise – with girls cake-fighting. Sara Jean Underwood, Victoria Moore and others are presented in this shot; additionally, a teaser is released of the shooting, just to make sure we keep checking back to the site in the hopes of more…

Phil Hellmuth is known for his love of big entrances, and then his bad play which leads him to his early elimination. He did exactly to same, one might say according to plan, at the WSOPE Main Event as well. He rode in on a classic double-decker bus accompanied by a brass band, who started to play Lady Gaga's Pokerface, while 11 girls dressed as Gaga danced and sang. This is when Hellmuth entered the scene and entered the casino with the all-singing all-dancing crowd.

At the tables he performed pretty poorly, he soon lost a lot of his chips and at an all-in he got his 99's beat by Leo Margets' AA overpair.

Here's the video, enjoy!

Talented both in poker and in providing his opponents with a couple of lines less than welcome, Dwyte Pilgrim earned his first major event winning yesterday night at the WPT Borgata, the largest World Poker Tour event ever with a field of 1,042. Those regarding him a “minor league grinder” are thus finally proved wrong.

Dwyte Pilgrim wins his first WPT title

Doyle Brunson is back in Las Vegas after his 3-week holiday he spent in his summer home in Montana because of the vampire bats that invaded his Vegas home about a month ago. He posted it on his Twitter: "There is a large colony of bats that live in the trees around my house. Not a bad thing, one bat eats 2-6 thousand insects every night."

It turned out to be a bad thing however, he had to take a 3-week holiday in the beautiful Montana because the situation soon became hot. In his article at his own blog, he tells the whole story of the vacation, and his feelings about the place and much more. If you are interested, read the whole blog post at his personal blog, you just might get to know Doyle Brunson better.

I don't know just how familiar you are with WTSD (Went to Showdown) percentage, the factor that describes how probable it is for a player to get till showdown. If the percentage is low, he might be aggressive, conservative, or a really tight player playing only the nuts. You can never know, because WTSD stats don't show this to you. You would need to add other data (such as (VPIP, aggression, stack size, pot size, etc.) to know for sure.

PokerStars have finally dealt its 50 Billionth Hand. It happened yesterday morning at the Micro-Stakes ($0,02/$0,05) No Limit Hold'em cash game table called Ornamenta (fast). The hand was won by the German 'tbvle' earning $56,140 plus a $5,200 WCOOP Main Event buy-in.

Nearly 220,000 players were online at PokerStars' 33,000 tables hoping they might be the one at the milestone 50 billionth hand which would earn them a $5,200 WCOOP Main Event buy-in, $500 as many times as many VPP they earned in the last 50 hands, plus the winner of the pot would also win a prize of $50,000.

Tom 'durrrr' Dwan was playing high-stakes PL Omaha recently at Full Tilt tables, and while he was winning a lot of money, he had interesting chats as well from which I present you the 2 best.

He played against Jared 'harrington25' Bleznick, pro poker player from NY, and after playing this hand, he got upset at durrrr saying there was something "weird" about his call on the river, as he might have cheated in some way. Durrrr of course makes fun of Bleznick who says he's going to show the hand to his friends to see what they say.

If you can't decide how to spend your well-earned millions of poker dollars, well I have some great ideas for you. Cars are oldschool now, why not buy land? I mean...land inside a lake or an ocean.

It's more popular among high rollers to buy a very own island than you would think. Many actors and actresses have their very own retreats surrounded by lots of water. Want to join the club that includes names like Johnny Depp, John Lennon, Marlon Brando, Mel Gibson, Leo DiCaprio, Eddie Murphy, Celine Dion, Michael Schumacher etc.? All you have to do is buy an island.

Johnny Depp's private island

Following Scott Montgomery's Facebook status update (“Getting ready to celebrate my gf’s birthday. hope she likes my gift!”) there were heated discussions at TwoPlusTwo forums about the identity of the girlfriend, many of the users were surprised (because lots of folks there thought Montgomery was openly gay), but they soon came to the conclusion that his girlfriend can only be Annette Obrestad.