Phil Ivey sitting out WSOP in protest-Running 2011 World Series of Poker thread

Surprised this thread hasn't been brought back earlier today. ESPN is doing the final table live (but on a 15-minute delay) and then showing the hole cards at the end of the hand.

They ran 6 1/2 hours from 2:30 (CENTRAL) to 9 and are now on a 10:30-2 a.m. telecast.

They'll get down to thre tonight and show the three-man final the same way Tuesday night.

Great stuff. And, as mentioned up above from the first live stuff in July, Esfandiari is great at this analysis.

 

I watched a lot of it. Great stuff.

 

lots of raise-fold pre flop. Lather, rinse, repeat.

 

True, but that's why condensing a lot of it into two-hour shows shown later makes for such great TV.

What they showed yesterday is great for the real serious poker fan. And let's be honest, not many people are willing to sit through 10 hours of coverage, nor do the great majority have that kind of time. But this is great for the serious fan, and then the one- or two-hour shows are great for both the serious fan and the more casual fan. I like what was on yesterday (and I've DVR'd it and watched quite a bit) because it forces you to work harder yourself at trying to put the players on a hand. And to be good at poker you have to be good at putting your opponents on certain hands.

 

One thing I'm picking up on is how tight these guys really play. I've seen an awful lot of folding of some pretty decent starting hands ... AJ, KQ, stuff like that, even after making the initial raise. Seems like the only calls to raises are with monster hands.

 

Yeah when I have played at our local club, at first I was in pretty much everything with AK. It looks so great! Once you play awhile though, you see how great that hand isn't.

 

Sure, the problem with good starting hands is they're just that -- "starting" hands. No such thing as a "starting" hand that wins every time. But these guys are refusing to play some damn good starting hands that have a pretty good chance of being good finishing hands.

These guys all got to the final table by being aggressive and building a stack. Now they're suddenly playing as though the other guy always has pocket aces and is trapping them.

And listening to Hellmuth's analysis commentary, you'd think he's never, ever made a call while he was behind pre-flop.

 

With these stack sizes at a shorthanded table, if you raise and get 3-bet, there are few few hands that can flat call -- probably just monsters you want to trap with. Otherwise, you want to fold or go-all in, because otherwise you're going to be playing a flop heads up with probably one-third of your chips in the middle. That's a nightmare if you're out of position, and not that great even with position.

Generally, the only way you'll see a flop is if there's one raise and a blind calls, so the pot is smaller.

 

Of course, someone puts a read on that and they're taking down 14 out of every 15 posts without a call or a flop no matter what cards they have.

 

Uh, no. My options were always raise or fold, not fold or fold, so you can't really take pots against that because you don't know if you are going to get the raise or the fold.

 

Calling raises with only monster hands is super-standard. That's poker 101. Calls are for monsters and repping monsters, raises are for mediocre hands or repping a mediocre hand.

 

So you only call raises with what, pocket queens or better? That'll be good to know if we're ever at the same table.