Tag: Doyle Brunson

cpp
The Bahamas is going to get a tad busy in November.
Tiger Woods, the Phil Ivey of golf, is in town, leading 16 of the world’s best 23 players in The Hero World Challenge, and partypoker LIVE has set up camp in the Baha Mar Resort, Nassau, for their annual Caribbean Poker Party (CPP).
The first two flights of the $25,500 MILLIONS World are in the books. The event created as a direct response by PokerStars to build a $25,000 buy-in, PokerStars Player’s No-Limit Hold’em Championship, pulled in 77-entrants on Day 1A, and 205-entrants on Day 1B, for a combined 282-runners. Late registration is open for the first four levels of Day 2, and as they are more than 100-players shy of the $10m Guarantee, one suspects the CPP begins with a healthy dose of free money.
Here are the top five chip stacks going into Day 2.
1. Geraldo Cesar – 4,315,000
2. Chance Kornuth – 3,840,000
3. Calvin Anderson – 3,700,000
4. Isaac Haxton – 3,660,000
5. Andreas Eiler – 3,645,000
Also on the CPP roster is a $50,000 Super High Roller and a $250,000 Super-Duper High Roller.
Two players who made it through to Day 2 of the $25,500 MILLIONS World are Sam Soverel (1,200,000) and David Peters (900,000), and if you have a few bucks to spare, it may be worth a punt if you can find a book on the event.

David Peters

Soverel and Peters were the stars of the ARIA Poker Room’s recent Fall Madness. The series consisted of seven events, three of which had buy-ins of $25k+
Event #1: $10,500 Pot-Limit Omaha (Anthony Alberto – $128,800)
Event #2: $10,500 No-Limit Hold’em (Jared Jaffee – $132,000)
Event #3: $10,500 No-Limit Hold’em Short-Deck (Sam Soverel – $81,000)
Event #4: $26,000 No-Limit Hold’em (Stephen Chidwick – $283,500)
Event #5: $10,000 No-Limit Hold’em Short-Deck (Sam Soverel – $102,600)
Event #6: $52,000 No-Limit Hold’em (Matthias Eibinger – $575,000)
Event #7: $103,000 No-Limit Hold’em (David Peters – $1,104,000)
Here are the updated High Roller of the Year Top 5 Spots.
1. Sam Soverel – 1,560
2. David Peters – 1,325
3. Cary Katz – 1,255
4. Justin Bonomo – 1,025
5. Dan Smith – 1,025
Remember, the HR Series only includes tournaments held at ARIA or ARIA’s partner casinos, and the top five will avoid the Super High Roller Bowl (SHRB) lottery should they choose to pay the $300,000 buy-in, which I am sure they all will.
Finally, the World Poker Tour (WPT) and partypoker LIVE completed the first joint event of their new four-year deal. WPT Montreal took place at the Playground Poker Club, and despite not having a High Roller in the schedule, several of the mob put up a decent showing – Sorel Mizzi finished third, Mike Leah finished 18th, and that man David Peters was at it again finishing 83rd.

The Best of the Rest
Moving from the live arena to the digital one, and Fedor Holz will stream his involvement in the $5,300 partypoker MILLIONS Online Main Event on Twitch. The $20m GTD event promises to be the most significant ever held online and runs 25 Nov through 5 Dec. Holz is a member of the No-Limit Gaming stream team, a poker/esports streaming team created by the former Triton Poker Series Macau Six-Handed Champion, Stefan Schillhabel.
PokerStars has extended their online High Roller schedule. While the buy-ins might not feature in the $25k+ realm you are used to reading about here; they are the highest buy-ins that you will find week-in-week-out in any online poker room.
Here are the events for Mon, Wed & Sat.
$530, $150k GTD Bounty Builder High Roller
$530, $50k GTD Daily 500
$530, $50k GTD Daily Supersonic
$1,050, $100k GTD Daily Warm Up
$1,050, $100k – $225k Daily Themed $1k
$1,050, $100k Daily Cooldown
On Tue, Thu & Sun there is also a $530 Omania High Roller.
Each Sunday, the Daily Themed $1k turns into a $2,100 Sunday High Roller, the buy-in for the Sunday Cooldown inches north to $2,100, and the Supersonic moves up to $1,050.
In other news, Philipp Gruissem appeared on The Chip Race podcast this week. The two-time WPTAlpha8 winner talked about the effect that ego played during his meteoric rise to fame, drugs, and effective altruism.
Check it out here.

Dan Smith is donating 5% of anything that he makes in the $25,000 MILLION World and $250,000 Super-Duper High Roller at the partypoker CPP. The recent WPT DeepStacks Joberg winner Maria Ho immediately declared she would join him.
One area Smith might want to take a look at is smoking. There are 9 million deaths directly contributed to smoking, and Smith recently asked on Twitter if there were any two packs a day poker players? It turns out that Doyle Brunson used to eat two packs a day for breakfast.


Dietrich Fast is one of the players who recently took advantage of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) by removing his content from Hendon Mob. Poker stat fanatics were undoubtedly angry about the WPT Champions’ decision, including an old guy from Scotland.


Had that old man ran over Daniel Negreanu then we are pretty confident he would have blocked him on Twitter.


And we end with a song.
Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday Erik Seidel. Happy birthday to you.
And that’s this week’s Pinnacle.

In the second of a 10-part series, the Paul Phua Poker School recalls how 10-2 became the luckiest hand in World Series of Poker history

With the sheer number of hands that have been played during all the successive World Series of Poker (WSOP) tournaments, you would think that anything could happen. But of all the unlikely strokes of fortune over nearly 50 years of the WSOP, there cannot be anything to rival Doyle Brunson taking down the championship two years running – with the very same lucky hand!

Who is Doyle Brunson?

Doyle Brunson, nicknamed “Texas Dolly” or “The Godfather of Poker”, is one of the last of the old poker greats still standing – or at least sitting, since you’ll often see him in a motorised chair these days. He’s 83 years old, and has been plagued for most of that time by the bad knee that ended his youthful dream of becoming a professional basketball player.
Basketball’s loss is poker’s gain. Brunson has won 10 WSOP bracelets, and his poker strategy book Super/System, originally self-published in 1978, became the bible for a whole generation of poker players. In 2006, after Super/System 2 was published, Brunson was voted by Bluff Magazine the most influential force in the world of poker.

1976: Doyle Brunson wins the WSOP Main Event

In the 1976 WSOP Main Event, Doyle Brunson was heads-up with a player called Jesse Alto. Unlike Brunson, Alto was a keen amateur rather than a professional: his day job was as a car dealer. As a result, he had not fully learned to keep cool in tight spots, and Brunson said he was looking to exploit that weakness.
Jesse Alto bet out with A-J, an excellent starting hand when heads-up. Brunson called with 10-2 suited. The flop came A-J-10, giving Alto two pair. Brunson went all-in with the weaker hand, Alto of course called.
The story of the 1976 WSOP could have been about how an amateur car dealer bested the world’s top pros… but the poker gods decided otherwise. In one of the worst bad beats in Main Event history, Brunson caught runner-runner 2s on the turn and river to make a full house!

1977: Doyle Brunson wins the WSOP Main Event again – with the same hand!

They say lightning never strikes twice. Perhaps it does in Texas. The very next year, Doyle Brunson was defending his title heads-up against Gary “Bones” Berland when he looked down at 10-2 – again. Berland was dealt 8-5.
Yet again Brunson found himself behind when the flop of 10-8-5 gave him a pair, and his opponent two pair. Yet again, the 2 hit on the turn to give Brunson two pair, and this time he was ahead. When Berland pushed all-in, Brunson gladly called. Incredibly, Brunson yet again made a full house on the river when a 10 hit, and he was crowned world champion for the second year in a row.

The “Doyle Brunson hand”

There are many colourful names for different poker hands. Aces are nicknamed “bullets” or “pocket rockets”; pocket Kings are nicknamed “cowboys”; J-5 is known as “Jackson Five” or just “Motown”.
To this day, if you show 10-2, another player around the table is likely to nod wisely and say, “Ah, the ‘Doyle Brunson hand’”.

Who is Doyle Brunson? Poker player profile

  • Born in 1933, Doyle Brunson is nicknamed “Texas Dolly” or “the Godfather of Poker”
  • He is second equal in WSOP bracelets, with 10
  • He won back-to-back WSOP Main Events in 1976 and 1977
  • Doyle Brunson is the author of several books on poker including Super/System and Super/System 2

Read the first blog in our World Series of Poker mini series on how the World Series of Poker was born, and how “the Grand Old Man of Poker” earned his name.

Or come back tomorrow and read about how the tournament phrase “a chip and a chair” was born at the WSOP.

Poker player Mike Noori’s bet to supersize himself on McDonald’s this weekend is part of a long tradition of outrageous prop bets. From Paul Ivey to Dan Bilzerian, Paul Phua picks out 10 favourites 

Starting from today (Friday May 19), poker player Mike Noori has just 36 hours in which to eat $1,000 of McDonald’s food. Many people believe it cannot be done, estimating that he will need to consume about 70,000 calories – the recommended daily amount is less than 3,000! Others say it can: hundreds of thousands of dollars have by now been wagered on the outcome by poker players.
And why is Mike Noori putting his body through this ordeal? Because he was challenged to do so in a prop bet.
Some poker players will gamble on just about anything: whether it’s as small as what the next woman to enter the room will be wearing, or as big as eating several weeks’ worth of food in 36 hours! The most outrageous of these prop bets make great stories. Here are just ten of them, starting with some old-timers:

Titanic Thompson and the golf ball

Titanic Thompson, who hosted the very first World Series of Poker, is one of the most famous gamblers of all time. Sky Masterson, the hero of the musical Guys and Dolls, was based on him. He was no fool: when Titanic Thompson made a prop bet, he always had an angle. He would first secretly count all the watermelons in a truck and later wager, during a seemingly casual conversation with bystanders, that he could guess the exact number. Another time he bet he could throw a walnut over a building, having first secretly weighted it with lead. And when he bet he could drive a golf ball 500 yards, further than any golf pro had managed at that time, he found no shortage of takers for this seemingly impossible feat. But he simply waited till winter, then drove the ball, bouncing, over a frozen lake!

Amarillo Slim and the ping pong battle

Amarillo Slim was one of the great old-school poker players, who won the first of his four WSOP bracelets in 1972. He, too, would bet on almost anything. Perhaps his most famous prop bet was when he challenged Bobby Riggs, a former tennis champ, to a table tennis match. Slim’s one condition was that he could choose the paddles they used. He showed up with two frying pans, having secretly practised with them for months beforehand. He won the match. He successfully repeated the trick years later against a Taiwanese ping-pong champion, though this time his weapon of choice was Coca-Cola bottles!

Brian Zembic and his 38C breast implants

A magician and high-stakes gambler, Brian Zembic was famous for his bizarre prop bets: he lived in a box for a week and in a bathroom for another week. For another bet he slept the night in Central Park with $20,000 on his person. But one prop bet in particular made the headlines. In 1996, for a $100,000 bet, he agreed to have breast implants – 38C, to be precise – and keep them for a year. He even won the $4,500 cost of the operation from a cosmetic surgeon at backgammon. Not only did Zembic go through with it, he kept the implants for two decades. It was only last year that he appeared on the reality TV show, Botched, saying he had finally decided to have them removed.

Antonio Esfandiari and the lunges

What is it with magicians? Poker pro Antonio Esfandiari is also a former magician, and one of the most entertaining people you could share a card table with. His willingness to take a prop bet is legendary, though he often lives to regret it: he once swore off eating bread for a year, but cracked after a few minutes; a bet to remain celibate for a year was cancelled after nine days. But the prop bet that made the headlines, for all the wrong reasons, was one where for 48 hours he was not allowed to walk, only to lunge forward (going down on one knee then the other). It caused him so much pain that at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, rather than face going to the toilet, he made use of an empty water bottle at the table, and was promptly disqualified for “breach of tournament etiquette”. To Antonio Esfandiari’s credit, he offered up a sincere public apology for taking things too far, and donated his $50,000 winnings from the prop bet to charity.

Phil Ivey and the $150,000 steak

Phil Ivey is another player who is never afraid to take a big bet. His golf course wagers with Doyle Brunson and Daniel Negreanu are the stuff of legend, and he famously had a $5 million wager on whether he could win two WSOP bracelets in two years (despite his 10 bracelets overall, he only managed one bracelet in that period). But his craziest prop bet was when Tom Dwan challenged him to go vegetarian for a year. Phil Ivey stood to take down $1 million if he could swear off meat, something he had been thinking of doing anyway. But in the event, Phil Ivey said, he was too busy to work out how to eat healthily, and found eating pasta three times a day affected his poker. So he bought out of the bet after just nine days. The cost of that first juicy steak? $150,000…
Read part two of this Top 10, along with the eagerly awaited result of this weekend’s McDonald’s prop bet.