петак, 26. април 2013.
WSOP - World Series of Poker
The World Series of Poker (WSOP) is a series of poker tournaments held annually in Las Vegas and, since 2005, sponsored byCaesars Entertainment (known as Harrah's Entertainment until 2010). It dates its origins to 1970, when Benny Binion invited seven of the best-known poker players to the Horseshoe Casino for a single tournament, with a set start and stop time, and a winner determined by secret ballot.
The winner of each event receives a World Series of Poker bracelet and a monetary prize based on the number of entrants and buy-in amounts. Over the years, the tournament has grown in both the number of events and in the number of participants. Each year, the WSOP culminates with the $10,000 no-limit hold'em "Main Event," which, since 2004, has attracted entrants numbering in the thousands. The victor receives a multi-million dollar cash prize and a bracelet, which has become the most coveted award a poker player can win. The winner of the World Series of Poker Main Event is considered to be the World Champion of Poker.
As of 2012, the WSOP consists of 61 events, with most major poker variants featured. However, in recent years, over half of the events have been variants of Texas hold 'em. Events traditionally take place during one day or over several consecutive days during the series in June and July. However, starting in 2008, the Main Event final table was delayed until November. The 2012 final table commenced in October because of the 2012 U.S. presidential election
четвртак, 25. април 2013.
Tom Dwan - My Favorite Player
In March 2004, Dwan began playing online poker at Paradise Poker with $50 his father had given him for his 17th birthday. He believed the alias "durrrr" would put players on tilt if they lost to him. Dwan initially focused on $6 sit-and-go tournaments and ended up losing $35. With his last $15, he continued to focus on these sit-and-gos until he was able to turn a profit. After finding he could beat these games, he turned to cash games, where he built his bankroll starting at low stakes and slowly climbing his way up, eventually reaching the largest games found online. After beating multiplayer cash games, Dwan switched his focus to playing heads-up No-Limit hold 'em against other professionals, such as Frederick Halling at the $10/$20 stakes level. He challenged Prahlad Friedman at $25/$50 stakes but kept losing to him for several months, forcing him to drop to lower stakes before coming back again and again until he was able to beat Friedman.
According to HighStakesDB.com, a site that tracks high-stakes online poker action, Dwan earned $312,800 in 2007 on the Full Tilt online poker cardroom and $5.41 million in 2008, even though he has gone through several large swings throughout his career. Before the 2007 World Series of Poker, Dwan claimed to have lost, at the time, $2 million of his $3 million bankroll, over a span of four months. He was able to recover from this loss within a year. In January 2009, Dwan lost more than $3.5 million, which he managed to recover after six months. However, from late October to late December 2009, Dwan suffered his largest downswing, losing approximately $2 million to Phil Ivey and Ilari "Ziigmund" Sahamies, and $5 million toViktor Blom.
In mid November 2009, a player from Sweden using the online name "Isildur1" challenged Dwan to a series of heads-up No Limit Holdem cash games. Isildur1's foray into online high stakes cash games began in late October, when he initially lost $1.1 million to Patrik Antonius, Brian Townsend, and other high stakes players. However, by the beginning of November, Isildur1 had recovered his losses and challenged Dwan to a heads-up marathon playing six tables at a time with over a million dollars in play. By the end of the week, Isildur1 had gone on the largest run in the history of online poker, winning approximately $5 million from Dwan, prompting Dwan to issue a live challenge to play Isildur1 at the Full Tilt Poker Durrrr Million Dollar Challenge.
At the end of 2009, HighStakesDB.com reported that Dwan had lost $4.35 million in 2009, putting his cumulative online poker winnings at Full Tilt since January 2007 at approximately $1.4 million. HighStakesDB.com also reported that after stepping down in limits following his massive loss to Isildur1, Dwan won $2.7 million in December 2009. According to the same site, Dwan had more than recouped his 2009 losses in the first few months of 2010; he was reported to have won $1.6 million in the first two weeks of April 2010 alone,and after a session in which he won $1.6 million off Sahamies in a little over 2 hours, was up $7.3 million for the year to date as of April 21. However, in an illustration of the swings of fortune often associated with high-stakes play, Dwan lost about $4 million in the next three weeks, leaving him up about $3.3 million for 2010.
[edit]Million dollar challenge
In January 2009 Dwan issued a $1,000,000 challenge to play anyone online, "with the exception of Phil Galfond", heads up for 50,000 hands 4-tabling $200/$400 or higher No-Limit hold 'em or Pot-Limit Omaha. If his opponent is ahead after 50,000 hands, Dwan agreed to give them $1,500,000 more, while if Dwan is ahead, he will get $500,000. Regarding his challengers, Dwan has said, "I think all of them actually are better over-all poker players than me -- by quite a bit; I happen to think in this one area, I might have a little edge -- and we'll see if I do."Patrik Antonius and Daniel Cates are playing Dwan as part of the challenge, but no 50,000-hand challenge is yet complete.
The History of Texas Hold 'em
Although little is known about the invention of Texas hold 'em, the Texas State Legislature officially recognizes Robstown, Texas, United States as the game's birthplace, dating the game to the early 1900s.
After the game spread throughout Texas, hold 'em was introduced to Las Vegas in 1967 by a group of Texan gamblers and card players, includingCrandell Addington, Doyle Brunson, and Amarillo Slim. Addington said the first time he saw the game was in 1959. "They didn't call it Texas hold 'em at the time, they just called it hold 'em.… I thought then that if it were to catch on, it would become the game. Draw poker, you bet only twice; hold 'em, you bet four times. That meant you could play strategically. This was more of a thinking man's game."
For several years the Golden Nugget Casino in Downtown Las Vegas was the only casino in Las Vegas to offer the game. At that time, the Golden Nugget's poker room was "truly a 'sawdust joint,' with…oiled sawdust covering the floors." Because of its location and decor, this poker room did not receive many rich drop-in clients, and as a result, professional players sought a more prominent location. In 1969, the Las Vegas professionals were invited to play Texas hold 'em at the entrance of the now-demolished Dunes Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. This prominent location, and the relative inexperience of poker players with Texas hold 'em, resulted in a very remunerative game for professional players.
After a disappointing attempt to establish a "Gambling Fraternity Convention," Tom Moore added the first ever poker tournament to the Second Annual Gambling Fraternity Convention held in 1969. This tournament featured several games including Texas hold 'em. In 1970, Benny and Jack Binion acquired the rights to this convention, renamed it the World Series of Poker, and moved it to their casino, Binion's Horseshoe, in Las Vegas. After its first year, a journalist, Tom Thackrey, suggested that the main event of this tournament should be no-limit Texas hold 'em. The Binions agreed and ever since no-limit Texas hold 'em has been played as the main event. Interest in the Main Event continued to grow steadily over the next two decades. After receiving only eight entrants in 1972, the numbers grew to over one hundred entrants in 1982, and over two hundred in 1991.
During this time, B & G Publishing Co., Inc. published Doyle Brunson's revolutionary poker strategy guide, Super/System. Despite being self-published and priced at $100 in 1978, the book revolutionized the way poker was played. It was one of the first books to discuss Texas hold 'em, and is today cited as one of the most important books on this game. In 1983, Al Alvarez published The Biggest Game in Town, a book detailing a 1981 World Series of Poker event. The first book of its kind, it described the world of professional poker players and the World Series of Poker. Alvarez's book is credited with beginning the genre of poker literature and with bringing Texas hold 'em (and poker generally) to a wider audience.
Interest in hold 'em outside of Nevada began to grow in the 1980s as well. Although California had legal card rooms offering draw poker, Texas hold 'em was deemed to be prohibited under a statute that made illegal the (now unheard of) game "stud-horse". But in 1988 Texas hold 'em was declared legally distinct from stud-horse in Tibbetts v. Van De Kamp, 271 Cal. Rptr. 792 (1990). Almost immediately card rooms across the state offered Texas hold 'em. (It is often presumed that this decision ruled that hold 'em was a game of skill, but the distinction between skill and chance has never entered into California jurisprudence regarding poker.) After a trip to Las Vegas, bookmakers Terry Rogers and Liam Flood introduced the game to European card players in the early 1980s.
Пријавите се на:
Коментари (Atom)