Ivey League
If there were a vote, I think Phil Ivey would be elected best poker player in the world. So seeing him eliminated at the final table of the World Series Of Poker took a lot of fun out of the game. All the people left put together didn't add up to one Phil Ivey. But with thousands trying to win the bracelet, it's rare even the greatest players can make it to the end.
He's got a lot of years ahead of him, but the odds of him making another final table aren't great.
Phil bet his last hand properly. Sometimes the cards don't come.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:01 AM
3 Comments:
The final table of this year's WSOP was a big disappointment.
Not because Ivey lost, but because there turned out to be no one to root for.
Why? Because everybody seemed to be "failing upward", i.e., sucking out was the ultimate path to advancement, not great poker playing skills.
Ivey is a good example. His A-K was a 3-1 favorite to Darvin Moon's A-Q when all the money went in preflop. A queen hits the flop and... bye-bye Phil, thanks for playing the last 8 days.
As for the winner Joe Cada, the guy sucked his way to a championship. There were at least a couple times where he was completely dominated, pair over pair, and sucked out on the flop, hitting trips (one time after he was all-in).
I tried to root for Darvin Moon, as he would have made a far better story for poker than Cada, but Moon played very poorly at the final table, including the last hand, where he called an all-in preflop bet with just Q-J suited.
One can imagine Ivey sitting off to the side shaking his head and thinking, "how did I lose to this guy?", but Ivey knows better. He knows that anybody can (and more than occasionally does) win in the short term, like a single final table.
It's the long term that counts in poker. Which is why amping up the importance of a single final table to "the history of poker", even the final event of the WSOP, doesn't really work. Holding the "November 9" months after the main body of the event, setting it in the Penn&Teller Thunderdome at the Rio, ratcheting up the hype...
...none of it really works because luck trumps skill in the short term. As any pro will tell you, they'd rather be lucky than good.
This was particularly apparent during ESPN's final table coverage.
Todd
P.S. Speaking of ESPN's coverage, I feel sorry for those who recorded the presumed 2-hour event-- only to find that ESPN let it run over by 30 minutes. Maybe they really were embarrassed by Moon vs. Cada heads up.
Cada was down to about 2 million at the final table. He'd be blinded out pretty quickly. He doubled up about four times in a row, and a number of those times required a lot of luck.
Yeah, it really was a suckout-fest. Starting with the Brit pulling a two-outer on the river (although he was only a 3-1 dog when the money went in), and not really improving in quality from there. Very disappointing. Best moment of the entire show was when Lon called out Darvin for bluffing his own wife after the hand was over. He was just embarrassed by having overplayed his hand, and lied to cover, forgetting that it was all on tape.
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