2009 June 22

Will the playing style of a table affect the profitability of your starting hand? It is widely known that in a loose game your swings will be greater. The real question is this: Will you earn more money, or will the loose play cause the rest of the table to draw out on you?

Tournament Highlights:

Event Headlines -

1. David "Gunslinger" Bach Wins First WSOP Gold Bracelet

2. 2009 H.O.R.S.E. Championship is Second-Longest Final Table in WSOP History

2. Bach Wins Fourth Annual H.OR.S.E. World Championship

3. Bach Pockets Nearly $1.3 Million -- Second-Highest Cash Prize of 2009 WSOP, So Far

4. Three Non-Gold Bracelet Winners Finish 1-2-3 at Final Table, While Five Former Bracelet Winners Take Spots 4-5-6-7-8.

The Champion --

Mike is presenting six seminars at the Rio during the World Series of Poker and playing in some of the events.

Poker personality, columnist, and WSOP Media director Nolan Dalla has been introducing Mike and regaled the audience with a tale about Mike from 15 years ago.

Mike was giving a seminar at a restaurant, and as occasionally befalls such events, the audio equipment went on the blink.

One of the skills of a winning poker player is patience. In cash games if you play maniacally you usually end up losing. In tournaments, though, sometimes patience must take a back seat to naked aggression.

"The price of poker is going up!" as Mike Sexton would say.

Just when you thought that action at the nosebleed tables was already ridiculously high, the stakes have been elevated. Tom "durrrr" Dwan and Ilari "Ziigmund" Sahamies engaged in several $3,000-$9,000 heads-up pot-limit Omaha matches. The two normally played with $500-$1,000 blinds, but they agreed to make it at least $9,000 to see the flop. Ziigmund alluded that he wasn't all that comfortable playing so high, but with the lack of available high stakes opponents, he really had no choice.

Hobby stopped at my condo to pick me up for a Saturday lunch. "C'mon in for a minute, Hobby. I want to show you something." It was a miniature deck of cards a friend gave to me. It was about half the size of my pinky fingernail.

"What is it?" Hobby asked as I put it in his hand.

"It's a deck of cards."

"Wow! It's amazing," he said, squinting his eyes as he tried to read the markings. I handed him a magnifying glass. "The face cards have incredible detail. I've heard about artists who paint with a single hair to make miniatures. This must have taken years to make."

There were many intriguing issues raised by my column entitled, "Legal? Immoral? or Just Tricky?"-including:

• Should cards ever be retrievable from the muck?

• Should a liar be reprimanded or punished?
The usual rule is that once a player's hole cards touch the muck, his hand is dead-out of play, and that player is no longer competing for the pot.

One of the recurring themes of poker theorists is the concept of dominated hands. Entire books on poker strategy are based primarily on the concept of building the kinds of hands that dominate those held by opponents, and avoiding situations where yours is the hand that's dominated.

Kirk Kerkorian, who controls MGM Mirage, the second largest casino company in the world (Harrahs is first), is one of Nevada's best poker players.

Actually, I don't know if he ever plays poker with cards today. But when it comes to trading multi-hundred million dollar casino properties, Kerkorian usually comes out a winner.

He started in 1962 by buying 80 empty acres on the Las Vegas Strip for $960,000. It's now Caesars Palace. In 1969, he bought the movie studio, MGM, and turned it into a casino company.

There's an old poker adage that says if you never get caught bluffing, then you must not be bluffing enough. A corollary to that adage might be if your bluffs keep getting caught, then you must be doing it too often. Either way you look at it, there's no getting away from the fact that bluffs always carry the risk of getting snapped off. For many players, that's a big part of what makes bluffing so much fun-the thrill of taking that chance in order to buy a pot without the best cards.