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We all know the affable Norman Chad from ESPN's telecasts of the World Series of Poker, but Chad may have a shot at a bracelet of his own.

I want to do this daily, but I’m not making any real promises here.  Basically I was thinking about doing a quick little piece on the things that I’m interested in seeing in the upcoming day, but I don’t know that I’ll actually hold myself to a daily commitment of blogging.  After all, I’m not getting paid for it, and sometimes life (and er…um…motivation) gets in the way.  So when I do get to it, the piece will be here.  When I don’t….well….tough noogies.

First let me start by congratulating the people that won the 23 bracelets so far in the series.  You’re awesome.  I’m not.

I particularly enjoyed the story of John Juanda besting Phil Hellmuth to gain bracelet number 5 and prevent PH from hitting number 12.  I couldn’t take my eyeballs off the livestream…until what seemed to be the final hand of the event and they killed the broadcast.  I had to find out through twitter that Juanda took it down because the feed went down in the closing seconds, but the rest of the match was a slow painful grind anyway.  2-7 Lowball is one of the more painful games to watch, so it was hardly mesmerizing.  Juanda really tore up Hellmuth heads-up and overcame a more than 3 to 1 chip disadvantage to take home the gold.  He’s certainly worth of acknowledgment.

I also want to sent congrats to my buddy Tristan Wade for final tabling the $1,500 NLHE event. Read more…

It's been 2 months since the online poker shutdown, and I'm still completing the grieving process.

I hate beginning blogs by saying “I apologize for not writing more often.”  But the reality is, I really hate that I’ve been too depressed to put my fingers on the keyboard and just see what comes out of it.  I think that the combination of having online poker taken away from me on April 15^th, and being on the outside of the WSOP looking in, along with the acceptance of having to get a real job that pays only slightly less than minimum wage, finally just all caught up with me. The last couple of days have been somewhat of an acceptance that while I didn’t get what I wanted, I’ll just simply have to grab myself by my belt-loops and trudge through it all.

Let me first start out talking about the WSOP.  It’s been pretty painful to watch all of my friends at the WSOP this year and realize that there is no way that I can join them.  I’m not backed to play in events, and I don’t have a gig this year that would allow me to attend.  My last ditch efforts and solicitations to bring my passion and knowledge of the games, and my abilities to some media outlet to cover the events just came up short.  I couldn’t find a single source to bring me aboard for this year’s events, and I wasn’t financially capable of doing it on my own dime this year.  So I was one of those “outside looking in” guys that got to watch everything take place without me.  Now that the first 2 weeks are a memory, it’s hitting me that I really missed out.  I’ll take some solace in the fact that I’m traveling out to Las Vegas with the family from June 28^th – 30^th, as we’ve got two nights comped.  So the plan is to steal time away from the family for as many hours as they’ll let me to hang out at the Rio and see some of my friends.  At least I should be able to get one day in…hopefully that will satisfy some of the loss. Read more…

DeepStacks Live is a course that I'd recommend for anyone serious about improving their poker game.

On Friday I finally got to cash in on a DeepStacks Live Course that I won way back in October 2010 when I shipped a prize through a series of poker tournaments with the top prize being a DeepStacks Live Course.  I’d been looking forward to the opportunity to attend since before I won the prize, as I’d been yearning for the opportunity to have my game picked apart, and to learn something new for my game that I could incorporate.  I love learning, and I love poker, and I like being critiqued so that I can make improvements in my game, so I desperately wanted to attend.  But unfortunately, DeepStacks had been offering courses all over the globe and at dates and times that I just couldn’t make work for me until Friday, when I finally had a spot where our two calendars synced with one another.  I couldn’t be happier that it finally did.

Jack and I took the 5 hour drive from my place to Turlock, CA in the afternoon on Thursday and headed up the I-99 past Fresno to get there.  It was long after dark on Cinco De Mayo by the time we arrived, and there wasn’t a whole lot of partying going on in the tiny city of Turlock.  We unloaded our stuff at and checked into the hotel, and went out to enjoy a few beers at the bar at a Red Robbin restaurant while chatting about what we expected from the class, which began at 10am the next morning.  Jack was unfamiliar with any of the instructors that were scheduled outside of Mike Matusow, who is one of the most recognizable personalities in the game.  Mike “The Mouth” has been on TV playing poker countless times and has a character persona that never stops.   But he definitely knows the game of poker having amassed more than $7.7 million in Live Tournament earnings, being one of the most prolific cash game players ever, and holding multiple titles including 3 WSOP Bracelets, and a WSOP Tournament of Champions win in 2005.  Mike is one of the great members of the “Old Guard” of poker and a virtual lock for the Poker Hall of Fame sometime soon. Read more…

Tom "Durrrr" Dwan finishing 2nd in a WSOP Event was perhaps the biggest spectacle in a non-Main Event tournament in WSOP history.

There is perhaps no more polarizing poker figure today than that of Tom Dwan.  If he’s playing poker, there are scores of eyeballs that want a peak at what he’s doing, what plays he’s making, and what the stakes are for.  Even online, railbirds show up in droves to get a glimpse of “Durrrr” taking on the world’s best poker players for stack sizes that many people won’t make in a lifetime.  He’s been involved in more than his fair share of a few million dollar pots, a few high stakes challenges, and a few entertaining prop bets, all the while drawing the interest of both the poker junkie and the casual fan.

Dwan’s career story is one that make people believe that anything is possible.  In much the same way that Chris Moneymaker ignited the poker boom in 2003, the emergence of Durrrr in 2004 on Full Tilt Poker launched a poker phenom that the public saw navigate his way from playing $6 Sit and Go tournaments off of a $45 stake from his grandfather, to playing at the highest cash games online.  Dwan has been the epitome of variance, with the most drastic up and down swings, and his meteoric rise to the top of Poker’s elite became all the more interesting when he signed as a member of Team Full Tilt in early November 2009.  Donning the red triangle on his shirt at live tournaments and high stakes live cash games around the globe, Dwan made huge waves at the World Series of Poker in 2010 with a great number of stories.  But his run in Event #11, a $1,500 buy-in No Limit Hold’em Event had a back story with the likes of which was something that the World Series of Poker hadn’t ever really seen before.  The end result was a memory for everyone that will be forever etched into the poker world, one which people will recant as “I remember that WSOP event when Tom Dwan….” and everyone will fill in their own blank. In fact, the moment created by Dwan may have a larger historical impact on the game of poker than the Main Event this year, which is why I have him ranked above that story. Read more…

Tom Marchese had a magnificent year, and finished as CardPlayer Player of the Year in 2010

I recognize the fact that I’ve been lagging on getting these stories up.  It’s been two weeks since my last post on Pablosplace, and really there is no excuse why I couldn’t finish the December Countdown of the Top 2010 Poker Player Stories in the month of December other than laziness.  So here we are at the second week of January, and life is settling down enough to the point that I’m going to blog again.  But before I get to talk about the things going on in my life, I want to complete this series.  So I say “hang on” to all of you that want to hear about the Pablosplace White Elephant gift exchange night, The recent Team7Deuce journey to the Bicycle Casino, and my biggest poker tournament cash to date.  I’ll get to those.  But for now, I want to get back to wrapping up the last four stories of 2010, because they’re worth telling.

At the Borgata Winter Open in January, there probably wasn’t a soul at the tables that had heard of the name Tom Marchese.  But slowly he racked up a chip stack en route to finishing in 3^rd place in the $3,300 No Limit Hold’em Championship Event, and would book a $190,027 score.  Full Tilt Poker pro Jeff Madsen would win the event outright for a $625k payday and get all of the accolades, and deservedly so.  But what nobody realized was that the 3^rd place finisher in this event was going to outdistance every other player in the world with performances that continued to turn heads at every stop that Marchese made. Read more…

Sorel Mizzi made headlines in 2010 by winning the Bluff Player of the Year, but was also mired in controversy

2010 was a tale of two stories for Sorel Mizzi.  The first story comes from his play in the live tournament  circuit, where if there was an award for “player of the half-year,” Mizzi won it in a landslide.  It’s hard to quantify exactly how good Mizzi’s first five months of the year were, other than to say that it was so good that he had the Bluff Magazine Player of the Year honor virtually locked up by the time that the calendar got to May.  Let’s take a look at the results from the first 5 months of the year:

January – Mizzi finished 5^th in the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure $5k Heads-up event, and 13^th in the $5k prelim.  Then 3^rd in the Aussie Millions Main event.

February – 2 final tables at the L.A. Poker Classic (a 2^nd and 6^th place finish) and 2 more at the Wynn Classic (a 6^th place finish and a win in the $2k event)

March – Mizzi won TWO events at the EPT Snowfest at Hinterglemm.

April – Mizzi wins the $7,200 Buy in Main Event East Coast Championship at Borgata, and min-cashes at the NAPT Mohegan Sun Main Event.

May – A runner up at the WPT Rendez-Vous á Paris in France at the £25,000 Buy-in High Roller Event.

All told, the first 5 months of the year accounted for 10 final tables, with 4 of them resulting in Mizzi winning the tournament.  The sum total of his cashes was nearly $1.5 million by May, Read more…

Frank Kassela's Two WSOP Bracelet wins, and 3 final tables made him the 2010 WSOP Player of The Year

I’m hesitant to call Frank Kassela’s 2010 a “breakout year” because as it turns out, he’s been playing solid poker since 2003.  A regular at final tables in tournaments around the U.S. for the last 7 years, Kassela had his best professional year yet in 2010 and on the World’s biggest stage.  The Tennessee native has been at the World Series of Poker a number of times in the past, and is no stranger to WSOP final tables. In fact in 2005, he shipped in pocket Aces with 4 players remaining in the $2,500 Pot-Limit Hold’em event, and got a caller in Johnny Chan with Q-Q.  But Chan spiked the Q, and found a way to use those chips to collect his 10^th WSOP Bracelet as Kassela exited the tournament in 4^th place.  5 years later, Kassela started the WSOP strong as he finising in 10^th place in a $1,500 buy in Limit Hold’em event when his pocket tens failed to hold against Terrence Chan’s Ac-Jc.  But the final table bubble was just a precursor to the best WSOP performance of the year, and an important stepping stone to becoming the 2010 World Series of Poker Player of the Year. Read more…

John Juanda had a fantastic year, even if most people didn't notice

There are few players in the game of poker that have been as consistently awesome as John Juanda, and yet still managed to escape the attention.  The Team Full Tilt Poker Pro has racked up incredible results in his poker career, amassing an impressive list of victories and final tables that make him the envy of every poker player.  For me, Juanda embodies the “true poker professional.” He’s never really sought out to create a “poker personality” or be at the front of the cameras.  Juanda has very quietly amassed 6 figure earnings in every year since 1997 (except 1999 when he only hit $91k despite 2 WSOP Final Tables), and coming into 2010 had eclipsed the $1 million earning mark in 4 years (2004, 2005, 2006, and 2008).  Juanda has tons of hardware to his name, including 4 WSOP Bracelets (including 1 in the WSOP-E Main Event), 6 WPT Final Tables, and an Aussie Millions win in their Million Dollar Challenge.  Coming into 2010, Juanda was ranked 8^th on the All Time Money List in tournament earnings, and that’s not including how much Juanda has won at the tables playing ring games as one of the most well respected cash gamers in all of poker.  So when Juanda had another monster year, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise, and the fact that it flew mostly under the radar should come as even less as a surprise.  But that doesn’t mean that Juanda’s year wasn’t one of the top stories of 2010.  In fact, 2010 was one of Juanda’s best ever, which makes him an easy add to this list. Read more…

Phil Ivey captured bracelet #8 in the 2010 WSOP

In my opinion, placing Phil Ivey on a poker list has nothing to do with “how much did he win?”  It does however have everything to do with “Where did he finish this time?”  There are very few people that are going to argue the fact that Phil Ivey is the greatest living poker player on the planet.  There are still a great number of people who will conjecture that Ivey is probably the greatest player to have ever played the game, and they can make a compelling argument.   Ivey is at the top of the leaderboard when it comes to money earned in the career tournament earnings category and finished the year with another “ho-hum” $1.6 million in earnings in 2010.  But the most compelling story over the 10 years that Ivey has played at the summer series in Las Vegas has been how many championships Ivey will win at the WSOP, and in 2010, we saw him increase that number by one, making him one of the best stories of the year. Read more…

Jonathan Duhamel's win in the 2010 WSOP Main Event makes him one of the top stories of the year.

Here’s the deal, if you win the World Series of Poker Main Event, you’re going to be one of the top stories of the year.  Years from now, when people begin to recount the championships that players have taken home, people will remember them by who won the Main Event that year.  It’s the tournament that matters most among poker tournaments, and it’s the one that gets the most attention every year.  As such, Jonathan Duhamel gets added to the list as one of the top stories of 2010.

Duhamel came out on top of the second largest main event field in the history of the event.  7,319 players put up $10,000 to play for the title, and he was the only one that avoided elimination long enough to be called champion.  From the hands that I saw him play at the Main Event this year, he wasn’t the most deserving player.  But often times in tournaments, the most deserving player doesn’t win.  That’s the luck factor.  Duhamel made several questionable calls that led to several giant pots being shipped his direction as things just worked out for him time and time again. Read more…