Episode #404 - March 25th, 2016

Live from the Two Plus Two Studios - This week on the Pokercast: What’s harder, listening to 8 national anthems or a real cage fight? To kick things off Terrence gives us the trip report of his most recent bout inside an octagon. We review Boston’s March Madness picks from last week, talk about some Pokercast download statistics and more.
This week in ICYMI: Phil Hellmuth’s uncensored stream and the stakes are raised in the Dan Bilzerian biking prop bet. Pokerstars is live in New Jersey and Jason Somerville is there streaming. Also, Pokerstars is changing their rake and we break down the changes and Amaya CEO David Baazov is charged with insider trading. After a break we come back with your E-mails, Voicemails and our new segment “Shower Gate” in which we’ve received 1 submission to the ice shower challenge! We also review some of Ross’ hands, some favourite things and the password and formats to the Pokerstars Invitational for Pokercast listeners is in the show!

Ross' Hands:
Hand 1
Hand 2
Hand 3
Hand 4

Music: A Tribe Called Quest - The Hop / Pad & Pen

Click here to Listen On 2+2 Player

Direct Download mp3

Invitational IDs:
PM - 1518613403
$1 - 1518613833

Good morning.

Podium finish

3st

3rd + 1

5thhhhhh

The music in the background when Hellmuth was on Twitch wasn't U2, it was REM - Orange Crush. Would that still have got Adam's judgemental tone?

Obviously

Anything past Document is trash

I would say Green just about slips into the good area, but maybe I'm too influenced by my love for Hairshirt.

Murmur was the stone cold nuts though.
I even loved Dead Letter Office, and that was just B sides.

Final table in reverse, made it!!
About to listen,looks juicy though,why do i always froth when i read of a Hellmuth balls up!?

Great show as always guys. (I'm half way through)
Congrats on the fight win Terence.
Ross: Love that you played Phife Dawg in the show.
The Hellmuth Twitch story is hilarious and love how Adam tells it.

Fwiw Poker players aren't by any means the only ones to massively over use the word obviously and do so in distinctly non obvious situations.

Hi guys, I like the show and listen almost every week, but this episode was difficult to get through. I hope you don't take this the wrong way and I'm not trying to be a jerk, but this is a poker podcast, and you literally did not talk about poker at all for at least the first hour! A whole hour+ of talking about random things like MMA, the friendliness of different cities around the world, etc. etc. If I wanted to hear an hour of personal stories I would listen to The Moth.

You seem like nice and interesting guys, but maybe keep the non-poker personal life catch-up to like 5 or 10 minutes?

Fair enough, thanks for the feedback.

Two things. First, it is likely the first time we've ever done that over 400 odd shows. Second, we didn't have a guest so the other 2/3rds of the show was poker related.

I'm gonna disagree with above. Part of being a long term listener to any podcast is building some sort of relationship with the presenters and hence being interested in their various goings on. I'm way more interested in Adam's terrible driving than I am in Bilzarian's poker exploits. I couldn't give a damn about the vast majority of poker prop bets, or poker mma fights, but I'm interested in hearing about TC's fight because it's TC.

But I'm also going to disagree with the Favourite Things. Nassim Taleb has always struck me as a pain in the arse. I read Fooled By Randomness shortly after it came out, when I was working in banking, and even way back then it struck me as saying thing as that really ought to be second nature to thinking finance workers or poker players. If a poker player of any experience in 2016 reads it and finds something new then I'd have to ask what they've been doing with their time. Similarly, #SkinInTheGame is a solid point, but really it's nothing new. Anti-fragile is perhaps a bit more interesting maybe, but I'm not sure how practical an idea it is. But fine, the ideas are ok, they're the poker equivalent of reading the newspaper with your own politics to tell you things you already know, the real issue is that the guy has a Trump level of self regard and zero interest in anyone that has any sort of disagreement with him. His web page, & I'm talking years ago now, was almost self parody, and occasionally I see erruptions from him on twitter RTing their way into my timeline. He's a colossal fail on my number one rule for evaluation: would I want to have a beer with him.

That said, apparently the UK prime minister is a fan.

In-between show is my favorite kind of show!

I checked the data from Adam's twitter, only 3 downloads from Greece??? One more than Botswana??? I gotta find those 2 other guys.

Botswana isn't that big of a surprise.
There's quite a few Brits living out there.

Ross "Yung Haralabos" Henry

I gotta say, I was telling myself in the beginning of the show that I liked the banter about things non-poker and was really interested in T's MMA fight prep story. I was the one who asked the crew in mailbag about suggestions for interesting off-strip and non-downtown casinos with poker rooms. My brother and I have our annual poker trip to Vegas booked for August. We never rent a car and use the bus transportation in Vegas to get around. In past trips, we've taken excursions to Red Rock and Southpointe (Pokercast meetup 2014). I am wondering about suggestions other listeners might recommend. What about Green Valley Ranch? Please post suggestions here.

Terrence when you get to Kiwiville, check out Great Barrier Island and take a bike with you as it is a great place for a ride,they may even have a bike hire place on the island these days.There are lots of winerys to take a look at even if you dont drink they are a good place to visit.Auckland has a ton of outdoor pursuits,forget Wellington basically when it comes to the outdoors stuff,it is great if you are into coffee (i live here) but as far as the outdoor stuff it is not so touristy,the South Island is The Boss when it comes to that sort of thing,but Auckland is passable. Actually Waiheke Island is .www.waiheke.co.nz/ is just as nice,prolly even nicer and a 35 min ferry ride away,where Gt Barrier is about 90kaway,you will prolly like to buy a place there it's so nice.
I saw your blog pic of you by the bucket fountain in Cuba Mall on your site,wish i had known of you then and we could have met for a coffee,however.

In Wellys' defence from when you were here,what you blogged was on a Sunday night where Welly is so dead you could fire a shotgun down Cuba St and not hit anyone,but it is a real party town down Courtney Place,even on a Sunday night. If you know Lee Nelson check out his place,Tony G loves to go there for a relax and has done for a few years now. Lee runs a ...retreat resort, i think is a good way of describing it and from what i understand it is right up your alley,i am sure your good lady will also enjoy.Sorry if this is too long but i love my country and will rave on about it at any excuse to vent.

I've tried the cold shower a few times and I think you're not doing right if you just have the water on one side of your body. It is easy to get used to that after 30 seconds or so. It's kinda cheating.

I think full commitment requires continuously turning so that no part of your skin has time to acclimate to the temperature, and making sure to to dip your head in the stream. I can only handle a minute of that.

I more or less agree with this (however, I DO enjoy poker prop bets). But as you said, we are long-time PCast followers who have cultivated a listener's relationship with the hosts. So we certainly could go hours and hours listening to stuff from Adam's and Terence's non-poker lives, and would enjoy every minute of it.

However, I understand this being a frustrating episode if you're not a regular listener or especially if you're a first-timer.

On a different note, I actually had NOT heard about the Hellmuth gaffe. (Really haven't been on 2+2 very much in the last few weeks.) Laughed hysterically about this while sitting at a busy intersection, so I'm sure other drivers think I'm out of my gourd.

I haven't seen the photo in question, but are we sure it wasn't a remnant from browsing porn or something? Both my iPhone and iPad occasionally give a flash of something I viewed as much as a week before when I open the Photos or Safari app for the first time in a while.

I actually am a regular listener and I enjoy a small amount of this, just not when it goes on for longer than an hour and takes up roughly half the show. I actually wouldn't be surprised if more than half of this episode was completely non-poker related if you include later discussion about ice showers, etc. I'm not really trying to complain, just offer feedback and my opinion.

So I did another cold shower this morning. I seem to have more energy the rest of the day. For example, I tend to get sleepy right after lunch but on cold shower days it doesn't happen.

It could be correlation instead of causation. I may be doing something else different before I take the cold shower (like getting more sleep than usual). Or maybe I think I'm supposed to be more energetic and that is affecting my subjective evaluation of how I feel. But whatever the reason, it feels great!

Very funny to hear Adam mention the passing of Dutch football hero Johan Cruyff ad hear Terence and Ross go "Huh. Who?" and then Adam explaining he played in the USA league for a few years (generally considered by far the least relevant part of his career).
Over here in The Netherlands, this was Big News. My newspaper, which isn't at all sports oriented, dedicated the first 6 pages to him, including an entirely wordless photo front page.