WSOP bracelet winners, card flashers, and pink poker tournaments
It's a funny old poker world....
THREE OF THE BEST! Sometimes a few of the most significant developments during the World Series of Poker each year get overshadowed by the monster amount won by the Main Event victor. Until this year’s Series only two men had the honour of holding ten WSOP bracelets. This year saw a third player join them at the very pinnacle of the poker pyramid. Phil Hellmuth won the one thousand euro Hold’em Re-buy Event and took his bracelet holdings into double figures to join Johnny “Orient Express” Chan and the one and only Doyle Brunson in the Ten Club. Phil has played brilliantly throughout his career and thoroughly deserves his brace of bling. As far as I’m aware he’s the only poker player in the world to appear on the front cover of the prestigious Sports Illustrated magazine and Rolling Stone. Phil won his first WSOP bracelet at the tender age of twenty four and despite being named by his fellow professionals as “Poker Brat” not many of them would say he didn’t deserve the millions of dollars he’s won so far in prize money.
FLASHING IN PUBLIC The card flashing debate continues. Two players on dailystarpoker.com have apparently encountered the infamous “show one, show all” rule at a bricks and mortar casino poker room. This rule kicks in if a player sitting next to you claims to have seen your hole cards because you were careless. If he or she mentions this fact to the table at large it immediately entitles all players in the game to demand to see the hole cards in question. The demand has to be made through the dealer who can then order the hole cards to be shown. It makes no difference if you are in the middle of a hand. The message in all this is to guard and conceal your hole cards at all times during live social games. It is yet another benefit of online poker that this type of pantomime can’t occur during a web based game.
PINK TOURNAMENTS I note various sites setting up Ladies Only Tournaments of late. Obviously it’s great that so many women are enjoying online poker now but it’s hard to see why games need to be categorised by sex. In live poker rooms it has always helped to cool down the more extreme male behaviour to have one or two women at a table. Similarly online it would be good if men and women could see poker as an integrated game. The professionals set a very good example in this regard. You’ll often see Annie Duke and Jennifer Tilley sitting down with the likes of Doyle Brunson and Phil Ivey. I have a pal who’s an eighteen stone bouncer at a local nightclub who always signs in as Daphne8. I’m not sure if that moves the debate on at all but it makes me uncomfortable keeping these things to myself.
