The Pinnacle is our weekly round-up of all things related to high stakes poker catching my attention in the past week, and I begin by firing Cupid’s arrow straight into your heart.
It’s been an excellent week for poker love.
Alex Foxen overtook Stephen Chidwick at the top of the Global Poker Index (GPI) World Rankings, in a move that saw Chidwick’s strive to equal Fedor Holz’s 30-week straight record fall to pieces. The New York native also took the lead in the 2018 GPI Player of the Year (POY) standings.
What does this have to do with love?
For the first time in the GPI’s history poker has a couple of lovers sitting on top of the world with Foxen’s squeeze, Kristen Bicknell leading the GPI Female Poker Player Rankings.
Foxen and Bicknell isn’t the only couple smashing things up this week. Maria Ho and Rainer Kempe also bagged a couple of honours at the WPT DeepStacks Event in Johannesburg.
Ho defeated 387-entrants on her way to a $69,166 payday in the ZAR 13,500 (USD 940) buy-in WPTDeepStacks Main Event at the Emperors Palace Casino, and
joining her for the ride was her beau, Rainer Kempe. The German star beat 15-entrants to win the ZAR 200,000 (USD 14,000) No-Limit Hold’em Super High Roller for $81,270, and then beat 59-entrants to win the $28,358 first prize in a ZAR 20,000 (USD 1,400) No-Limit Hold’em event.
It seems there’s more to love than taking the digging of fingernails as you watch The Haunting of Hill House.
bitB Staking Concerns; Hellmuth Skips WSOP; Deeb Dominates
Patrick Leonard might be on a high roller live tournament hiatus, but he’s still extremely active in the online poker circuit and on social media, and this week one of his ripples turned into a tsunami after posting the following image on Twitter and Instagram.
#sunday #bitB pic.twitter.com/8nxxziCYZ8
— Patrick Leonard (@plenopads) October 14, 2018
Leonard is the co-founder of bitB Staking, and the photo is from bitB HQ in Budapest, Hungary. After Leonard posted the image, a section of the poker community reacted angrily suggesting a high proba
bility of ghosting, collusion, and all manner of infractions that would see your driving license revoked.
Leonard posted a rebuttal trying to alleviate the community’s fears, explaining how competitive the bitB Staking group is internally, and reminding everyone that staking houses like this have been around since Adam pointed the finger at Eve.
Onto the World Series of Poker Europe (WSOPE), and one high roller (sometimes) missing from the lineup is Phil Hellmuth. The 15-time WSOP bracelet holder and the only winner of WSOP Main Events in both Europe and North America skipped the event – the first time he has missed a WSOP bracelet series since 1989.
What is Hellmuth doing instead?
This week, he will be representing PokerVR in the world’s first Virtual Reality (VR) Multi-Table Tournament.
Here is virtual Phil.
Sticking with the WSOPE front, and at the time of writing none of the high roller fraternity has secured a bracelet, but Shaun Deeb is currently running away with the Player of the Year title, cashing in two of the first three events, although it helps that none of his competition made the trip.
Lambs, Elephants and Pigs
Ben Lamb doesn’t often air his thoughts on Twitter, and this week he was reminded why. Lamb posted a video of a hunter in Nambia killing an elephant.
“I never post basically any opinion on anything here. But, trophy hunting is really sickening. Intelligent creatures just minding their own business and these jackasses open fire. I don’t understand it. Sad.”
Daniel Negreanu was one of the first to respond, reminding Lamb that pigs are intelligent creatures just minding their own business. A challenge for the purveyors of cognitive dissonance, for sure.
Finally, Nick Petrangelo has released an online training course on Doug Polk’s Upswing Poker. Winning Poker Tournaments retails at $999, and given that Petrangelo is a beast with close to $16m in live tournament earnings on his resume its work smashing up that piggy bank to invest (think twice about posting on Twitter about the damage you did to your piggy bank).
And that’s this week’s Pinnacle.