Tag: Feder Holz

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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.


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.

global-poker-index
As a nipper, I loved Games Day. It was an opportunity to skip boooring lessons, and a chance to elevate playground status by bringing in some state of the art game or gadgetry.
It wasn’t all circles and oblongs, though.
There was the odd triangle thrown in for good measure.
I grew up on a council estate called Poet’s Corner (our poet was Shelley). We didn’t have a pot to piss in, so Games Day was tough. I had to take the only game I had, one that I had made – WWF Wrestling.
I had taken a pack of Trivial Pursuit cards, covered them with blank scrap paper, and created players, attributes, and moves. The cards included characteristics such as Skill, Strength and Unique Finisher. The moves were things like Clothesline, Bodyslam, and Figure-Fore Leglock.
I based the rules on Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson’s Fighting Fantasy series.
I thought the other kids would cast me to the wind.
The opposite happened.
They loved it.
And do you know what they loved about it?
The rankings.
We had a WWF Champion and an Intercontinental Champion, and the only way you got a shot at the title, was to be the top contender, and you became the top contender by accruing points through my leaderboard system.
I never told anyone my secret.
It was like KFC without killing 850 million chickens per year.
 
Love Rules
During the Triton Poker Series in Jeju, South Korea, I sat down with the British #2 All-Time Money Earner, Stephen Chidwick, to talk about poker and life. At the time, Chidwick was the Global Poker Index (GPI) World #1, and I learned that the man from Deal had always wanted to reach that apex, and had a new goal in his crosshairs.
Chidwick wanted to take the longest streak record from Fedor Holz.
Remember when Holz was picking up more cheques than a broiler chicken farmer picks up eggs? During that insane multi-million dollar run, the German racked up a record 30 consecutive weeks as the GPI World #1. That was the record Chidwick wanted, and Alex Foxen has just turned Chidwick’s dream into mashed potatoes and gravy.
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Five weeks shy of achieving his goal, the man with the ice-like stare has removed Chidwick from the head of both the GPI World Rankings and the 2018 GPI Player of the Year (POY) Rankings.
The New York native has racked up $3,935,519 in 2018 live tournament earnings – not a lot in the world that Chidwick eats his pork chops – but the GPI isn’t interested in money earned, it’s chasing after consistency, and Foxen has buckets of that beneath his ribs.
Foxen has made 13 final tables in 2018, including appearances in all the world majors: The PokerStars European Poker Tour (EPT), World Poker Tour (WPT), partypoker MILLIONS Main Event and The World Series of Poker (WSOP), and he has won four events.
In March, Foxen topped a field of 68-entrants to win the HKD 400,000 buy-in No-Limit Hold’em Super High Roller at the Asian Pacific Poker Tour (APPT) in Macau for $963,880. He beat 50-entrants in a $25,000 High Roller at the WPT LA Poker Classic for $424,625, defeating 422-entrants to win a $2,650 side event at the Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open (SHRPO) for $208,452, and booked a controversial win by beating 178 entrants, including his girlfriend Kristen Bicknell, heads-up, to take the $239,000 first prize in a $5k event at the Mid-States Poker Tour (MSPT) at the Venetian. Last week, he finished runner-up to Ioannis Angelou-Konstas in the £5,300 No-Limit Hold’em MILLIONS UK Main Event earning $947,916 from a field of 1,015 entrants.
All of which means Cupid is happy as we have the first-ever boyfriend/girlfriend combination at the top of the GPI World Rankings, with Kristen Bicknell currently dominating the female rankings, as well as sitting #16 in the GPI World Rankings, and #15 in the GPI POY Rankings.
One wonders how long it will be before partypoker sign Foxen, and make the most of this fantastic marketing opportunity.
Foxen has earned $6,165,247 in live tournament earnings.
He is the 19th player to rule the poker world since the GPI’s inception.
And I reckon he applies a pretty mean Bear Hug.
 
The Top #10 GPI Rankings

  1. Alex Foxen – 3,980.45
  2. Stephen Chidwick – 3,781.56
  3. Justin Bonomo – 3,628.40
  4. David Peters – 3,587.77
  5. Adrian Mateos – 3,551.66
  6. Jake Schindler – 3,408.53
  7. Joe McKeehen – 3,327.51
  8. Steve O’Dwyer – 3,301.96
  9. Ben Pollak – 3,287.99
  10. Jason Koon – 3,203.72

 
The Top #10 GPI POY Rankings

  1. Alex Foxen – 3,710.76
  2. Stephen Chidwick – 3,691.67
  3. Justin Bonomo – 3,660.28
  4. Jake Schindler – 3,625.15
  5. David Peters – 3,561.52
  6. Adrian Mateos – 3,364.20
  7. Shaun Deeb – 3,230.72
  8. Jason Koon – 3,191.17
  9. Ben Yu – 3,191.07
  10. Chris Soyza – 3,147.81

 
Previous GPI POY Winners
2017 – Adrian Mateos
2016 – David Peters
2015 – Byron Kaverman

justin-bonomo
I have Blu Tack stains on my wall.
I should sue.
I used it because its sole purpose, the only reason it exists, is so I can stick things on the wall. So I did. A butterfly, a spider sitting on his cobweb, a dragon circling a volcano mid-spew, and a snake. Mary will be over in an hour to try her best to rob me of my deposit, and here I am squeezing lemon over the oily residue as I know she will do everything in her power to rob me.
Five thousand miles away, 27 people have paid a million bucks to play poker. The contrast is as sharp as Mary’s lizard like tongue. Six remain. There is a $10m prize at stake. And one man, the same man as always, sticks to the top of the chip counts like my stubborn pieces of blue.
I can’t imagine what it would feel like to pay a million bucks, play for two days, get down to the final six players, and still be a million bucks in the hole, but that’s the situation as Day 2 of the Big One for One Drop ends in Las Vegas.
This is what they are playing for.
 
The Gold

  1. $10,000,000
  2. $6,000,000
  3. $4,000,000
  4. $2,800,000
  5. $2,000,000

Here’s the tale of wonder and woe.
 
The Tale of Wonder and Woe
Level 11: 50,000/100,000/100,000
Brian Rast, Byron Kaverman and Rainer Kempe all believe the Day 2 50 big blind strategy is best.
The first person to bust on Day 2 was Adrian Mateos. The Spaniard got into a spat with Fedor Holz on the turn in an upraised pre-flop pot. The board showed ThTs7d3h when Mateos moved all-in and Holz called. Mateos held KT for trip tens, but Holz showed down pocket sevens for the flopped boat. Mateos was up shit creek without a boat or a paddle.
Phil Ivey moves ominously into the chip lead like an iceberg the size of Australia floating towards 20 penguins cuddled together on a sheet of ice the size of a surfboard.
Rainer Kempe had the shortest One Drop experience of anyone who took part over two days. The German star got it in pre-flop with pocket queens, only for David Einhorn to turn over the rockets. Kempe didn’t last a level.
Non-professional poker players were as rare as homeless guys without a dog, and we lost one in the first level in the shape of Meditor Capital Management Founder, Talal Shakerchi. Once again it was Holz taking the role of playground bully when his AK found an ace on the turn, to beat Shakerchi’s pocket nines in a race to the death after a pre-flop all-in encounter.
Jason Koon doubled through Stephen Chidwick, KK>JJ on a Td4c3d flop, and the Global Poker Index (GPI) #1 put the last of his change in the middle against Matthew Siegal only for pocket aces to swallow pocket sixes like Jonah and the whale.

Level 12: 60,000/120,000/120,000
No eliminations, but Mikita Badziakouski found himself short before doubling through Nick Petrangelo K6o>AJs after flopping a six.
 
Level 13: 80,000/160,000/160,000
Despite that double up, the Belarusian was the first player of Level 13 to leave his DXRacer chair after running AJs, into the pocket kings of Rick Salomon.
The next to person to go bump in the night was the former Super High Roller Bowl (SHRB) Champion, Brian Last. Last got it in with AK versus the QQ of Petrangelo and the Q77 flop looked like a nuclear warhead. The 6s on the turn drawing a line under Rast’s participation in the event.
Then we lost the 2014 runner-up.
The action folded to Daniel Negreanu in the small blind. The Canadian moved all-in, holding T7s, and Steffen Sontheimer called from the big blind holding A6o. The board offered no solace to Kid Poker who was still steaming after missing the first hand after the break due to a communication issue.
We were down to the final two tables, and Fedor Holz held the chip lead with Rick Salomon, David Einhorn, Erik Seidel and Nick Petrangelo pressing.
David Einhorn takes the lead after winning a decent chunk from Phil Ivey, and then Koon takes those Ivey chips by doubling through the philanthropist JJ>AK.
Koon tried the same trick with Justin Bonomo a few hands later resulting in the opposite effect. Koon moved all-in holding pocket tens, Bonomo called with queens, and the man wearing the Never Die cap, died.
Then we lost the 2017 Poker Masters Champion.
Sontheimer opened from the button, Dan Smith moved all-in from the small blind, and the man with the purple jacket made the call against the man wearing a blue one. It was AQ for Sontheimer, pocket sevens for Smith, and the pair held.

Level 14: 100,000/200,000/200,000
The first man to leave the contest in Level 14 was Matthew Siegal. It was a three-bet pot, with Siegel the aggressor, and Justin Bonomo playing ball. The flop came down QdTh3h and Siegal moved all-in. Bonomo made the call holding KJs for the open-ended straight draw, and Siegal held AKo for the Broadway straight draw, and ace high. The turn was the ace, giving Bonomo his straight, and Siegal was out. Bonomo was the new chip leader.
Bonomo was like a bloodsucking leech by this point, the next person to be drained of life was Dominik Nitsche. The pair got it in with the German holding AQ, and Bonomo showing the dominating AK, and five cards later the SHRB Champ moved over the 30 million chip mark.
From one SHRB Champ to another and Christoph Vogelsang found a fortunate double up against his compatriot Fedor Holz. Vogelsang’s K3s finding a three on the flop when all-in against AK.
Then Ivey doubled through Bonomo.
In an upraised pre-flop pot, Bonomo put Ivey all-in on the turn with the board showing 7d3d3hQc, and the legend called with AA. Bonomo showed AQ for a less significant two pairs.

Level 15: 120,000/240,000/240,000
Ivey’s topsy-turvy period continued when he lost a race against Einhorn TT<AK to double up the savvy businessman. And then Erik Seidel eliminated Vogelsang in a cooler.
Seidel made it 550k from the cutoff, and the German defended the big blind. The flop was Js4d3c, Seidel bet 1.5m, Vogelsang shoved for around a million more and the New Yorker made the call. Vogelsang showed J4o for top two pair, and Seidel turned over pocket fives. The ace on the turn opened up wheel possibilities for Seidel, and the 2d on the river turned those possibilities into a hard fact which Siedel used to bludgeon Vogelsang over the head with until he was no more.
Then we lost the Poker Central creator.
Cary Katz moved all-in holding A6o from late position, and Dan Smith mad the call from the big blind holding 87o, and flopped a seven to send Katz to the rail.
We had our unofficial final table.
Here were the chip counts.

  1. Justin Bonomo – 25,400,000
  2. Nick Petrangelo – 18,880,000
  3. Erik Seidel – 15,980,000
  4. Fedor Holz – 15,455,000
  5. Rick Salomon – 14,425,000
  6. Dan Smith – 14,085,000
  7. David Einhorn – 12,930,000
  8. Byron Kaverman – 12,135,000
  9. Phil Ivey – 5,710,000

The last action of the level saw Einhorn find another double up, this time AA versus the K5o of Bonomo.

Level 16: 150,000/300,000/300,000 
ivey-bonomo
Byron Kaverman doubled through Seidel, AK>QQ, after a turn landed on the turn. And then the Poker Gods handed Seidel a cooler when he got it in holding the nuts on Td9h8d (Quo), facing off against the flush draw of Einhorn (Q9dd), and the 4d landed on the river to send the experienced Seidel to the rail.
The final seven players were happy to see the back of Phil Ivey. The one time greatest player in the world got it in holding AJ, but Bonomo woke up with kings, and Ivey was out in eighth place.

Level 17: 200,000/400,000/400,000
No action to speak of.

Level 18: 250,000/500,000/500,000
Seeking an unprecedented third final table, Salomon doubled through Smith when his ATo beat the KQo of his ten gallon hat wearing opponent, and then we had our final table, when Bonomo eliminated Petrangelo 99>A8o.

Final Table

  1. Justin Bonomo – 48,950,000
  2. Fedor Holz – 22,125,000
  3. Dan Smith – 21,450,000
  4. Rick Salomon – 19,650,000
  5. David Einhorn – 12,300,000
  6. Byron Kaverman – 10,525,000