The dealer barely put down the deck on the 2009 WSOP when it was announced that Jeffrey Pollack, the World Series of Poker Commissioner, had resigned. In 2005, Harrah’s hired Pollack on as the Vice President of Marketing. In January 2006 he got bumped to the new position of WSOP Commish.
Pollack excelled on a number of fronts. Although in ’05 and ’06, the marketing end of his job wasn’t that difficult. In the post boom to pre-UIGEA era, marketing the WSOP was a sellers market. All Polack had to do was put bits and pieces of the WSOP up for sale and wait for the bidders. From online media rights, radio rights, the bracelets, playing cards, table felts, exhibitors’ booths, and TV “moment” sponsorships — companies lined up for the privilege.
Who could forget the Levitra final tables of 2005?
But once the UIGEA kicked in, finding mainstream sponsors to supplant the rich pocketbooks of online gaming companies wasn’t easy. Pollack plugged away and got the job done. While some people may mock Jack Link’s Beef Jerky as the 2009 WSOP presenting sponsor, finding any sponsor during the economic downturn was no small feat. Read More »
“You’ve got to have the heart of a lion — play fearless, don’t be afraid and, when you roar, they better back up.” – Hans “Tuna” Lund.
It was probably arrogance. But by early 2007, I figured I had met most all of the “old school” players who still had game. A lot of them never left poker. A few more of them straggled back after the boom, hoping for a comeback fueled by larger fields and prizepools. So I was a little surprised when John Caldwell said, “Well lookie there. It’s the Tuna.”
I had heard of Hans “Tuna” Lund. His dramatic heads-up hand (thanks for the link Kevmath) against a chain-smoking Mansour Matloubi in the 1990 Main Event was legendary. After his second place finish in 1990, he cashed in 1991, and made the final table again in 1992.
He won his first WSOP bracelet in 1978 in the $1,500 No Limit Event. Eighteen years later, Lund took home his second WSOP bracelet in the $1,500 Ace to Five Draw Event. In his career, he grossed nearly $3 million. This is especially impressive considering the many years Lund was absent from the poker circuit to spend more time with his family.
Hans “Tuna” Lund died on November 6th of cancer. He was 59. Read More »
“Game over, Moonpie.”
If you missed The Big Bang Theory this week, you missed this line getting deliciously delivered by Wil Wheaton. Wil plays his “delightfully evil” alter ego while tilting Sheldon in a card game called the Mystic Wizards of Ka’a. Up until this week, I had only ever seen Wil play poker.
It was just a couple of weeks before I discovered Wil was going to be on BBT that my brother and I discussed how Wil would be a perfect guest on the show. I recently gave Matty a copy of Wil’s book Just a Geek: Unflinchingly honest tales of the search for life, love, and fulfillment beyond the Starship Enterprise
, which he highly recommends.
Wil was, indeed, perfect on the show. Now that he has staked out his territory as Sheldon’s nemesis, I can only hope he comes back to reprise the role. Reading through the blogosphere, I’m not alone on that front.
Getting to see the evil-yet-still-playful side of Wil has me convinced that he could totally pull off Hellmuth in the movie version of Check-Raising the Devil.
I first met Wil at the World Poker Blogger Tour in December 2005. Every one was falling all over themselves to introduce me to Wil. He struck me as very nice — passionate and articulate about poker. But I wasn’t sure what all the hoopla was about.
Even when people referred to him as Wesley Crusher, I didn’t put 2 and 2 together. I just thought they called him that because he looked like a slightly older version of the character on Star Trek: The Next Generation. It wasn’t until months later that I realized he WAS Wesley Crusher. Read More »
This 2005 PokerPages article was inspired by a chat at a cocktail party. Poker was all the rage and people were curious about the way in which I made my living. While much has been written about the similarities between war and poker (as in David Apostolico’s Tournament Poker And The Art Of War
), a Civil War buff at the party was intrigued about their shared need to exploit uncertainty. A little further Civil War study on my part yielded this article.
As a new commander of the 21st Illinois Regiment, Ulysses S. Grant was about to enter a rebel camp.
“As we approached the brow of the hill from which it was expected we could see Harris’ camp, and possibly find his men ready formed to meet us, my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt and consider what to do; I kept on.”
Grant was about to learn a valuable lesson. A lesson the best poker players know by heart. Read More »
Using a Swimsuit Edition-esque model, ESPN Magazine has released its Body Issue, featuring athletes in various stages of undress.
Poker gets its due, with this picture of Scotty Nguyen, Jennifer Harman, Phil Hellmuth and Daniel Negreanu.
I have no beef with the magazine’s selection. I feel our fearless foursome pretty much represent the field of poker. And I’m glad the magazine didn’t cherry pick among the Vanessa Roussos and Patrik Antoniuses. (I do kinda wish they picked Doyle — I just think that woulda been perfect)
There are two things that non-poker players will learn from this photo. The first is that poker is a “big tent” game. This is the only co-ed photo in ESPN’s feature. Unlike other sports, both genders go tits to balls at the poker table. The second thing they will learn is that poker is a sedentary sport. Read More »
Note: I wrote this article for PokerPages in 2005. It started from a pitch I made to Capital Sports and Entertainment (the company that represents Lance Armstrong). I wanted to see if they would start a business unit dedicated to representing professional poker players. As part of my pitch, I wrote three commercials: Phil Hellmuth for Preparation H, Phil Ivey for Nike, and the Feduniak’s for Ensure. They eventually passed on the idea, but this article was born.
No. This is not an article about managing your bankroll or defending your home game against marauding bandits. Although after you read it, you may wish it was.
Something happened to me last week that made me think about Bobby Ojeda. Ojeda was a pitcher for the New York Mets and missed the last three weeks of the 1988 season, jeopardizing his career, when he severed his middle finger while trimming his hedges. I mean, he was a major league pitcher. Maybe he could have hired a gardener?
Most athletes know the importance of safeguarding their physical assets. In the movie Bull Durham, that theme is echoed in the advice veteran catcher, Crash Davis, offers rookie Nuke Laloosh, “When you get in a fight with a drunk, you don’t hit ’em with your pitching hand.”
I grant you that poker players don’t need much of a fastball. And a vertical leap doesn’t necessarily come into play. I used to think if poker players had the mental stamina to play a ten-hour session, they were good to go. But I was sorely mistaken.
A Painful Realization:
I spend a lot of time in front of the computer, writing and playing poker. To get some exercise and gain a little perspective, I take a two-mile walk every day. Last week I was accosted by a neighborhood dog, whose run extended past the sidewalk. And I’ll be damned if he didn’t bite me right on the ass. He didn’t break the skin, which I verified by pulling down my pants for all the neighbors to see. But he left a pretty good-sized bruise. I’ve always been a little self-conscious about my lack of butt. However, in this instance, it served me well. If I were J Lo, they’d still be trying to pry that dog from my seat. Read More »
I sat on the steps of my back deck, talking on the phone to Michael Casselli in the UK. He was part of the effort to start up a new poker magazine. It was 2004 and the post-Moneymaker poker boom was in full swing. They were looking for a “gossip” column — sigh.
Lou Krieger had recommended me for a column in the yet-to-be-launched Bluff Magazine. I was leary of a new magazine. Like restaurants, everyone thinks magazines are easy to run and most people lose money at them. It also made me nervous when I mentioned Mike Matusow’s name and Casselli asked if he was an American football player. Read More »
It’s an age-old adage in the investment world: Buy low and sell high. Everyone rolls their eyes when they hear it — as if it were that easy.
The latest Forbes 400 has been published, listing America’s top 400 richest people. It was no surprise that the sub-headline was “Almost all of America’s richest citizens are poorer this year.” As stock markets the world over tumbled, the devastation to net worth was felt not only by the richest, but by almost everyone. Everyone, that is, except Andy Beal.
“The biggest gainer is banker Andrew Beal, who tripled his net worth to $4.5 billion buying up cheap loans and assets as the markets crumbled last fall.”
Meanwhile, one of America’s most popular investors, Warren Buffett, saw his fortunes dwindle by $10 billion. Buffett is known for his value-minded investing, but confessed that he overpaid for at least one large position that came back to haunt him.
At work, I wrote about the two investors and their divergent fates. I opened the article with Beal’s heads-up match against Ted Forrest at the Wynn back in February 2006. That was the second time I met Andy Beal. But the real clues to Beal’s investing abilities were revealed at our first meeting. But before I share that poker-related story, I guess you should know just how driven I was to meet Beal to begin with. Read More »
The news used to be a public service; now it’s mostly a thinly veiled ratings grab where octamoms and brainless starlets get more air time than messy issues like war and unemployment. Empty soundbites, rehashed talking points and emails from uninformed listeners rule. There’s more hard news in a half hour of The Daily Show than there is in an entire day on the news networks. So maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that I find myself at Pokerati or Tao of Poker for poker news more times than the poker media sites. Read More »
Since I can’t obsess about Mike’s book anymore, I’ve taken up obsessing about the movie. Part of my obsession has to do with wanting to learn how to write a screenplay. Every writng genre has its own unique challenges. The limitations of haiku are vastly different than an article. An article is vastly different than a novel. And I like the idea of trying to tap into each genre’s strength to unlock it’s unique viewpoint. Although I confess, I’m still struggling with Twitter.
I suspect that most of my disdain for Twitter has to do with it’s relative newness. It may take time for people to realize how to channel it into something more meaningful. Life is a wonderous thing but, as yet, Twitter mostly captures the mundane.
It’s like the underlying tragedy of the play “Our Town” getting played out, day after day, in 140 character clips. Shronk’s last Twitter feed before his death still haunts me in this regard. Although there are signs that people are learning to harness Twitter into something more. For instance, the Royal Opera House recently produced a work called #youropera, comprised of nothing but Twitter feeds.
When I take a break from trying to bend Mike’s story into my copy of Final Draft, I cast the movie in my head. Since my brother suggested Johnny Galecki, I can think of no one else to play Mike (unless Robert Downey Jr. has a younger clone I don’t know about). But if y’all have some casting ideas — including ideas for Scotty Nguyen, Phil Hellmuth, or Daniel Negreanu — let me know. Read More »
The dealer barely put down the deck on the 2009 WSOP when it was announced that Jeffrey Pollack, the World Series of Poker Commissioner, had resigned. In 2005, Harrah’s hired Pollack on as the Vice President of Marketing. In January 2006 he got bumped to the new position of WSOP Commish.
