I thought she did too. She played very similar to his very basic pre and flop strategy fwiw. It seems like most of the later street advanced play she didn't implement but she really didn't have too, either. After a short amount of time it was abundantly clear that it would take only a very simplistic strategy to beat Mike.

cate got smacked by the deck in the first 1/4 of the match at which point it was abundantly clear mike was extremely bad. i don't think she hit the gas because she didn't really need to. doyle won like 15 televised cash games in a row using the same strategy and who really cares? they won the $

I just watched the rest of this. He's even worse than I thought .... at the beginning of the second match, he loses four pots in a row and starts tapping about what a bad player she is. He looked like a complete and total tool.

why does anyone care if she was a 500k py lawer pre poker or ****ing meth addict? it means nothing people lie/add **** on, never let the truth get in the way of a good story, it means squat for her poker ability to which is only thing she should be getting 'made to produce' stuff for = results imo

So she went from being ultra miserable to mostly miserable? Her demeanor makes me want to slit my own wrists (and i'm pretty happy)....i can't even imagine how she feels inside. There are so many better things a talented individual can do with their life than grinding it away at the poker table with a bunch of miserable degen ****wads. I do understand the dream, but after a few years I'd expect the reality of her terrible situation to smack her right in the face.

Doug pooed his pants when Mike came to the commentator booth lol

.

To paraphrase the great Phil Hellmuth:

“We'll see if you're even around in five years. That's the truth. I don't think you will be, to be honest.

My thought: No chance she will be around in 5 years.

In 5 years, Cate Hall will rule the world
.

mike dentale is the definition of a tool/douche.

I think that you have to apply some balance when analysing this match, the standard of each player's play on the night and how you should now judge their overall poker playing ability going forwards based on what we saw.

I think some things are clear. Mike could have played better than he did. Cate played at a very average standard in game 1 but much better in game 2. The deck didn't smash Cate in the face in terms of hole cards but she certainly hit way more boards than Mike, plus when she got dealt garbage like 36 off he had 95 off and she already had the chip lead so it was far easier for her to steal a lot of the smaller pots than it was for him.

We know, and he has admitted himself, that Mike's achilles heel can sometimes be his temperament, and I believe that he was unfortunate that it turned out to be the perfect storm for this to happen to some extent and to affect his play.

He lost big pots early in both games, it seems like he wasn't pleased that Cate was getting messaged hand details previously played and strat advice during the game, reports are that he had little or no sleep after playing a long cash game session the night before, and IMO in hindsight he may now be of the view that he went in a little under prepared regarding HU strategy because he was relying solely on his innate ability and experience.

I think that his innate ability and experience may have seen him through had most or all of the other factors not have happened, but because they did it made it super tough for him to get any kind of game rhythm going.

Conversely, after Cate won game 1, she was definitely fed way more strat and info by friends, plus she could make her own adjustments based on her learning from game 1.

She was very passive and average in game 1, so IMO an on form, non sleep deprived, slightly better prepared Mike would have beaten her in game 1 and then we may have seen a role reversal of her game deteriorating in game 2 and his growing.

I don't BS or talk behind people's backs so I will link this thread post to Mike as I like him a lot because he is a genuine person with good qualities, and yes he is also probably quite a complex person, but we all are, it is just that most other people are quite introverted and hide their complexities.

I do think that Mike got part of his overall strategy about face, in so far as that when he was deep stacked ~10K to 15K he could/should have splashed around/floated/stabbed at more pots etc because he had the chips to do so, but when he got quite short ~4K to 7K he could/should have played a lot tighter because it was shallow meaning his chips had a lot more value in terms of his tournament (freezeout) life and him protecting them and using them very, very wisely.

I am sure that *he* knows this, and again I think that him getting things about face in this respect is largely a function of him being frustrated at being dealt bad hole cards hand after hand and either not connecting with the flop or connecting less well than Cate.

For Cate's part, she also made some bad plays. Although Doug Polk praised her jam with the Ah blocker in a pot, in the game situation at the time it was totally unnecessary and IMO only had any real merit if the match was like a best of 9 so was to set up some kind of high level game dynamic down the line. Other than that she was played weaktight / passive through most of game 1 which is poor given that she is supposed to be a GTO style player, mixes with players of that ilk and had paid $999 for Doug Polk's 30 hour long HU cash game coaching video course.

So what we have here is a player, Mike, who came in under prepared, then had no sleep, got dealt awful cards all night, and was tilted to varying degrees throughout the match by all of this and by Cate getting hand info and coaching given to her during the match, versus Cate who played average at best in game 1 but then better in game two, but against an opponent who was already in boxing terms fighting on one leg and continued to get bad hands and get out flopped.

Yes Mike's game probably deteriorated in game 2 but you have to take all of the above into account to put a proper perspective on it.

If there were a rematch then I feel that Mike would correct a lot of the above and combine it with some of the advantages that he does have such as a helluva lot of live poker experience and general experience of how to play against different types of player.

In a rematch I'd expect Cate to play to a similar standard that she played in game 2. However, with in game being fed previous hand details and in game coaching banned I think she would find it way, way more tougher to defeat Mike.

Overall, I am not particularly impressed by Cate's game. I do feel that she has a number of qualities that have and will serve her well in MTTs such a great work ethic, a hunger to learn and a good table presence and equilibrium of mind and temperament, but as far as her going on to be a crusher that can think and play and execute strategy at a super high level that creates a big enough edge to over ride sustained periods of negative variance in MTTs, I have a lot of doubts that she possesses the core level of natural poker/math/logic/aptitude intelligence to achieve this. This is just my take based on everything I have observed and on listening to interviews she gives. It is also based on her IMO one eyed view of the world and of politics that she gives on Twitter, much of which I think is irrational.

Being irrational in poker in the long run will hurt your results.

Could he have though? Can Mike deal with any kind of adversity in this situation? He's clearly a tilt monkey and can't deal with bad beats, a bad run of cards, anything. I doubt he'd beat $10nl HU regs on ****ing Ignition. It's easy to say "he could have played better" when we know what good play looks like imo.

Didn't read past that line until the very last line because tl;dr but your last line is spot on.

lol his achilles heel is buying in

He's actually happy with this play

Awfully presumptuous to assume that she's even more than slightly miserable in her current profession, and that her demeanor is clearly indicative of "how she feels inside." Even if she is for some reason, it doesn't necessarily have to have anything to do with what she does to make a living.

From what perspective? The whole life EV argument has been laid out, and obviously the subjective experience of playing poker professionally can wildly differ.

Yes for sure a weakness of his it appears is to not react well to run bad, but you know that there are many players not just in poker but in sport generally that are like this. A prime example is snooker such as (the younger) Ronnie O'Sullivan. Alex Higgins and Jimmy White, all of whom almost had to play their D game for a few frames just to get themselves fired up and would then often play their A+++ game and blow away the opposition.

I think Mike has some of this in him as I've seen some bits and pieces of Tweets that indicate that in live MTTs he sometimes does badly on his first entry but then runs up a very big stack on his second entry and then goes on to cash high up and big afterwards.

Indeed after losing game 1 v Cate, he did say "I'll get a fresh 15K now", or words to that effect.

So I think he may have slightly miscalculated/misapplied his strategy before the match and not taken into account enough that the nature/structure of this relatively short best of 3 match was that there is very little wiggle room to get a bad stack (bad buy in) out of your system so to speak.

I have personally played against two cash game players who nearly every time I saw them play lost 1, 2 or 3 buy ins in a hurry but then adopted the most serious game face you have ever seen and upped their game by 300%+ and ended up even or in front for the session and were frankly scary and almost unplayable during this upswing. Without exaggeration, I observed this exact pattern ~8 times out of 10 that I saw them play. And this was in NLHE (not PLO or a very high variance game) so incredibly impressive that they were able to do this.

allegedly, he didn't even do that

In all fairness. Mike has a point here. Outside of a couple of questionable calls pre, his reads were mostly spot on.

Any idiot can say "I really think you're bluffing" and then fold and say, "see, I knew it!"

He made one correct call against a bluff.

Or maybe he's just ahead of his time.

Lmao.

Forget the poker played for a minute.

The latest to come out is that the very dislikable Cate Hall stiffed the dealers entirely. Not a cent paid to them despite the immense help they gave her!! She really is a gross person.

Come out of where?

Every time Mike had a good hand he would start mouthing off, every time he bluffed he didn't say a word lol.

I wouldn't tip either. Get over it. Maybe sugarhouse and pnia could pay the dealers extra. Or feel free to send them a tip yourself for watching.

Good lord, he is totally and completely delusional.

I saw at least two hands when he was bluffing and was talking, the 777xx board where she had AJ and another one that I don't remember the specifics of.

The problem for him was that he literally had no hands, or had a bad run out in a huge percentage of hands, so there was no real way he could play any kind of balanced strategy, e.g. bet big on the river when he had it or didn't have it or bet small on the river when he had it or didn't have it........ because he hardly ever had it.

So the best strategy he could have adopted IMO in both games, after he had gone to sub $8K in chips was to basically nit it up. Although even if he had done this the hole cards continued to be awful, but it would have at least bought him some more time and given him a better statistical chance of say doubling through twice from 4K to 16K in each game, particularly as the blinds were due to increase after a certain number of hands meaning that he would then have far more scope to apply some pressure with his short stack.

Yes I acknowledge that he did miss a couple of spots to bet his equity, e.g. betting a gutshot when checked to when his stack was ~15K but this I think falls under the category of him being a bit under prepared HU strat wise.

But overall, he was in a very tough spot in both games due to horrible hole cards and flops, and this was accentuated by Cate basically wearing a wire to her coaches thus gaining an additional advantage.

All of that is possible in theory, but Mike did not show one molecule of an ability to react well to adversity. His immediate reaction was to whine about runbad. At what point in the match did he make a single quality play that would have been asymmetric? He also demonstrated a total inability to understand dan and shawn's analysis as to why he butchered the last hand. Literally none. It's also criminally stupid to not sleep and play late the night before, then refuse to get live data and instead cram six Red Bulls. His preparation was poor. His analysis was poor. His attitude was poor. And his execution was poor. His live tricks (like his slow roll and his habit of showing one bad card) were both obvious and ineffective. I did think his apology for lying about showing the j6 hand was sincere. I'd lay 140 on a rematch.