Poker Guru Blog

Erik J. Schlicht, a postdoctoral Harvard University student, has recently conducted a scientific research showing that poker face, as we know it, doesn’t really work.

A poker face?

In his research paper entitled 'Human wagering behavior depends on opponents' faces’, Schlicht presents his findings about novice players playing HE after being tested of their knowledge of poker. Based on their hands and a picture of the opponent facing them, they had to decide whether to call (winning or losing 5,000) or fold (losing 100 chips). The results of the experiment showed that neutral or threatening expressions did not affect decision-making, while friendly smiles discouraged the test subjects and their decisions were of reduced optimality.

Schlicht concluded that

"mistakes against trustworthy opponents resulted from increased loss aversion, suggesting that participants believed trustworthy opponents were betting with hands of greater value than neutral and untrustworthy opponents."

Along with the 7th season of the PokerStars European Poker Tour, a refreshed version of the EPT Awards ranking system, debuted last year, was unveiled. Eight titles, including EPT Player of the Year, are there to compete for and winners receive trophies and packages for next season’s opening event, in addition to the recognition, as PokerNews.com reported.

According to feedback from players, PS modified last year’s system so that it is now not possible to gain the PoY title with a single victory at one of the largest events. Additionally, field size is now a factor in rewarding points, which was a key issue last year, as Maxim Lykov was able to beat Kevin MacPhee to the title by defeating a field of 296 players in Kiev for the same number of points MacPhee received for beating 945 people in Berlin.

2+2 forum member ’LoveisHell’ made an hour long session video available in two parts, originally for CoinFlip.com, in which his main goal is to show the importance of position, so he plays mainly from button and CO. The HU and 6-max specialist from Finland plays NL25 at the FTP tables under the nick ’I Gravity I’. 

Only a couple of days after his $200,000 winning, Phil Ivey is once again on ‘killing spree’; he drained all his opponents the other night, cashing $435,899 in total.

The first and probably the most interesting two hours of the night were provided by his heads-up games with Tom ‘durrrr’ Dwan. They played 132 hands in $300/$600 PLO, 108 hands in $500/$1,000 Cap NLHE and 66 hands of $500/$1,000 Cap PLO. Ivey won in each, $210,160 in all. After two losses in a row, which were arguably bad beats, durrrr quitted, but that didn’t stop Ivey.

The second Day 1 event of the first stop of EPT 7 took place yesterday with a number of renowned players once again. Among the 239 people entering the day were Betrand 'ElkY' Grospieller, bracelet winners Dario Minieri and Richard Ashby as well as EPT Berlin winner Kevin MacPhee.

The day, as the one before, saw 9 levels with stacks rising from 50/100 with no ante to 500/1000 with ante of 100. While 89 players survived Wednesday, about 130 were eliminated during Day 1B, making up a total of around 190 participants to enter Day 2 today. For the race with the €400,000 first prize 420 players have registered, which is a record number in the history of Estonian tournaments, according to PokerNewsDaily.com. What is more, it is truly an international filed, as opposed to US tourneys: no one nation gives more than 13% of the field, the top countries represented being Russia and Finland with 53-53 players.

In the end, Perica Bukara, who placed 6th in Prague at the Unibet Open, became chip leader of the day and he even took the overall lead from Ali Tekintamgac with his stack of 210,600. Top 10 Day 1B chip counts are as seen below:

You can follow PokerNews.com’s live reporting on Day 2 here.

Released on 27 July, StarCraft II is one of the most anticipated titles of the past decade in the PC player community. Many of the committed players of the 1998 first instalment are also pro or semipro online gamblers. Question is to what extent will SCII affect online poker?

Have a taste for some Finnish hip-hop? If so, check out the northern Uniikki’s music video for ’Pojat On Poikii’ (meaning ’Boys will be Boys’), in which your favourite loudmouth PLO pro Ilari ’Ziigmund’ Sahamies takes a leading role. Have fun!  

Macau and Hong Kong may have little else than their special governmental status in common; whereas the former can be considered the "Las Vegas of Asia", the latter has strict rules against poker and gambling in general.

The latest issue was DonkDown.com forum member hongkonger’s. PokerStars co-sponsored room The Hong Kong Poker House organised a final all-you-can-eat party the other night, together with a freeroll tournament, before closing doors. The 160 participants got raided by the police who were looking for money and confiscated their stacks. Even though prized tourneys are legal in Hong Kong, all players were arrested “under suspicion of illegal gambling.” Although the tournament started at 7 pm, the raid, together with identifying the players, moving them to the police station by two(!) vans in 9 trips and keeping them at the station, took several hours. Eventually, they all could go from around 5:30 am on a bail of HKD $400 (USD $50) per person.

Hongkonger's fellow players get arrested

As I have noted, EPT Season 7 started yesterday with the main event of the first stop, Tallinn. The Swissôtel in the downtown of the Estonian capital hosted 181 players, including several PokerStars pros like Vanessa Selbst, Pierre Neuville, Michael Keiner and Ivan Demidov.

The term ‘Year of the Brit’ doesn’t seem to apply to the day as both promising names Praz Bansi and James Mitchell (Irish Open winner) were eliminated. The cards favoured the Russians instead, as Matvey Linov was in lead for most of the time, and although the end of the day saw German Ali Tekintamgac gather the greatest stack, it is Linov and his fellow countryman Artem Litvinov right behind him.

The Top 10 Day 1A chip counts are as follows:

Day 1B is already under way right now; you can follow PokerNews.com’s live thread here.

Those of you who read my post on Mike Matusow losing $2 million on a bet with Ted Forrest and concluded that The Mouth couldn’t possibly pay that sum have now turned out to be right.

Ted Forrest and Mike Matusow

After losing about 50 lbs (22 kgs) in only two months, thus beating the challenge on which they bet, Forrest now seems to be fooled by Matusow, as the latter sais he is unable as well as unwilling to pay the $2 million, at least in full. Matusow argued that the original bet was about paying the sum by monthly portions of $5,000, which would take 33 years and 4 months. He also admitted that he had made the bet because he couldn’t have imagined Forrest could do it, risking his life for the money: “I don’t have the $2 million to pay out. I made that bet because I didn’t think it was feasibly possible. I could pay him a big lump, but I’m going to wait six months to see if he dies first. I think he’s 50-50 to die. He starved himself for 11 days and ran 16 miles a day. He’s lost all of the muscle around his heart. He could have a heart attack. All that for $5,000 a month.”

In this latest episode of ‘The Hijack Seat’ (by PokerNews Daily), Bernard Lee interviews Joe Cada, last year’s WSOP Main Event champion.

Joe speaks about what it feels like to be back at the WSOP with all the expectations from other players and sponsors and how he has been doing this year.

Joe Cada grew up in Michigan, where he started playing online poker at 16. He soon became known as an online heads-up cash game master, but the real success for Joe came in 2009, when he managed to beat Phil Ivey and Darvin Moon among others at the WSOP Final Table. Holding only 1% of the chips at the table, Joe flattened the rest of the table and secured himself the precious bracelet.

From the interview, we can also learn which is Joe’s favorite NL hand, which was his most memorable hand at last year’s WSOP and which player he thinks is yet unknown, but will soon become a poker star.

The 7th instalment of the PokerStars European Poker Tour begins today with the €4000 + €250 NLHE Main Event of EPT Tallinn in the downtown Swissôtel.

The Swissôtel Tallinn

Tallinn is the first Baltic city to host the EPT, but encouraged by the success of the PokerStars Baltic Festival in October 2009, organisers expect about 600 participants. The Main Event takes place on 11-16th August with side events along the way varying between €300 + €30 PLO Turbo and €10,000 + €300 NLHE games.

Doyle Brunson celebrated his 77th birthday yesterday, and on this special occasion, he decided to reward Doyle’s Room players with a unique tournament with $50,000 in bounty money added to the prize pool.

The special $50K Birthday Bounty Tournament will take place todays at 9:30pm ET. Anyone knocking out a pro will receive $1,000 in bounty money. Two pro knockouts will make you $10,000 richer, and if you happen to knock out three pros, you will get a massive $50,000 bounty.

The marked poker pros will definitely include high stakes pro Todd Brunson, 2007 WPT Event 19 champion Pam Brunson  and Mike Caro.

Eliminate all three to win $50K!

Another extra is that today’s tournament also has a final table bonus. Players finishing in the top ten will be invited to the Todd Brunson Montana Poker Challenge Semi-Final on Saturday 14th August at 5pm ET.

The Bounty Tournament will have a $27.50 buy-in. For more info please visit the Doyle’s Room website.
Newly registered players will receive a full refund upon conclusion of the tournamet, no matter whether they win or lose.

A video interview made by Gambling Compliance has just been published, in which Congressman Jim McDermott speaks about the new online gambling legislation.
McDermott (who is a knight, by the way) is sponsoring the HR 2268, which basically sets up the structure of a revised federal online gambling taxing machine, the “companion bill” for Barney Frank’s HR 2267.

About five minutes into the interview, McDermott makes a statement predicting that “it is very very likely that this bill will pass” before the end of 2010. He also provides explanations for this, saying that the supporters of online gambling can influence Congress, “one Member at a time”.

The interview was made before the mark-up of HR 2267, where the bill had bigger success than expected. As HR 2268 is necessary to make HR 2267 work (and vice versa), the bills will probably merge at some point. Until then, however, the bills can easily be modified and shaped to meet the requirements of the clients’ interest.

After playing about 200 hands of $2,000/$4,000 LHE with ’IHateJuice’ the last weekend and losing $31,000, Ivey moved to the $500/$1,000 Cap NLHE games and faced the player known as ’riyyc225’, who was a surprise winner of $404,000 at the Full Tilt tables in July. After 227 hands, however, Ivey gathered a $190,000 profit.

Phil Ivey

Later on, the Full Tilt pro won an additional $68,000 in 40 hands of 10-handed $500/$1,000 Cap NLHE and a further $47,770 in 106 hands of heads-up $500/$1,000 Cap NLHE versus ’ginette22’. Then came Jungleman12 and the $500/$1,000 NLHE, in which Ivey lost $100,000 in merely 27 hands. This was enough for him not to push it further and added a handsome profit of $200,000 to his bankroll, which raised his total online winnings to $2,6 million this year. Now it is only Tom ’durrrr’ Dwan still ahead of him, who, despite his latest downturn period, is still leading the board with $3,9 million.

Thus climbing to the 2nd place in earnings not long after winning his 8th WSOP bracelet, Ivey is now competing with Michael Mizrachi for the fictional title of the Most Successful Player of the Year.