Running World Series of Poker Thread

SPOILER ALERT...


















Hellmuth won No. 11.

 

What a performance by Hellmuth. He dominated the final table. He was definitely running good, catching lots of flops, etc., but he was dialed in on his reads and made some really tough calls.

Phil likes to say he's the best No-Limit Hold'em player in history, and with 11 bracelets now (all in NLHE), I think it's hard to argue.

 

Greg Raymer is at the final table of the Stud Hi-Lo 8 or better event.

E-Dog Lindgren and Daniel Negreanu are at the final table of the No Limit Hold'Em shootout event.

 

What is a shootout? Is it where you have to win your table before you go to the next table?

 

Yeah, it's like a tournament, table-by-table. If you start off with 81 players, for instance, that's 9 tables. Then you play until there's just one person left at each table, and then you've got your final table.

So everybody starts the final table with the same amount of chips.

 

Fixed.

Hellmuth is a great tournament player but he gets his ass handed to him when he sits in the big cash games, which, to his credit, is why he doesn't play in them often.

 

One very interesting sidenote to the action so far...

Michael Binger, who finished 3rd in the Main Event last year, already has four cashes in the World Series this year and is on his way to a fifth with a nice stack of chips in the $1,500 PLO w/rebuys event. Binger has a third place in the $5,000 NLHE, a 22nd in the $5,000 PLHE, a 14th in the NLHE w/rebuys and a 29th in the $1,500 NLHE.

That's a very impressive performance.

By the way, we should have a pool on how long Jamie Gold lasts in the main event. He's definitely out on Day 1. The only question is whether it's in the first, third or fifth hour.

 

Seems to me like Gold was the yahoo catching cards last year.

 

Scratch a pair off the best never to win a bracelet list.

Jeff Lisandro and Eli Elezra both have bracelets now, with Lisandro currently leading the Player of the Year standings.

 

According to WSOP updates ...

"Phil Gordon had a nasty spill -- and the result was a torn meniscus. He was reading his Blackberry and fell down a flight of stairs. He's in pain and will wait until after the WSOP ends to have surgery."

Gordon is high in chip count in the most recent $1,500 NLH event.

As for Gold's chances ... if Chan is helping him out again, he has a good a shot as any pro. He'll cash in the ME this year.

 

There's a reason Gold hasn't done shit in poker since he won the ME. Last year, he did three things to win. 1) Played a lot of bad cards and got lucky, filling inside straights, flopping two pair, things like that. 2) Once the field narrowed, Gold got some absolutely monster hands and got them at the right time. Like when he eliminated Richard Lee at the final table with QQ against JJ. 3) Executed a lot of bluffs with his table talk.

Now that everybody has seen Gold's act, his table talk is worthless. The pros know how to play him. And he got enough cards last year to last a lifetime. He'll never have a deck hit him like that again.