Live from the Two Plus Two Studios, June 5 2012 - World Series of Poker Coverage with Andy Bloch This week on the Two Plus Two PokerCast the guys continue coverage of the 43rd annual World Series of Poker recapping all the completed action and currently ongoing events. They discuss some controversy involving Jonathan "FatalError" Aguiar and a new World Series of Poker rule that requires players at all live-streamed featured and final tables to verbally declare all of their actions. The feature guest is poker pro and former MIT black jack team member Andy Bloch who won his first WSOP bracelet in Event #7 ($1500 Seven-Card Stud) by defeating Barry Greenstein heads-up for the title and over $126,000. Andy talks about how it felt to finally win the coveted WSOP bracelet he's been chasing for so many years, shares some details about his Heads-Up match with Viktor "isildur1" Blom and even provides some Seven-Card Stud tournament strategy. In the third segment Mike and Adam briefly connect with friend of the show and professional tough guy Terrence Chan to hear about his impressive streak of cashes at this year's World Series. In forum static they preview the next round of "Stand Up Comedy Madness" and of course give away the password for the June 10th Poker Stars VIP Club Invitational for PokerCast listeners.


PokerCast Theme - Demitone Productions Inc. © 2007 : The Minutes - Black Keys - Single Model Citizen Records © 2011 : Heaven - The Walkmen - Heaven © 2012 : Get Me In A Room - Hallelujah The Hills - No One Knows What Happens Next © 2012 :

2rd

Getting slow in my old age...

ddl: http://pokercast.s3.amazonaws.com/twoplustwo_224.mp3

hoping we get to hear about Andy's bout vers "Carl"

Man that was fast.

This looks great, who had Bloch?

Angry Hawks Fan! aka Matt "Grapes" Grapenthien

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...v=bmVUAqraDNE#!

fidth fidth fidth.............bottle service please!!!!!

never ever a fan of Andy Bloch tho

best 3rd post eva?

I was just browsing WSOP.com and said "hey, I recognize that guy!"

http://www.wsop.com/news/2012/Jun/38...NE-6-2012.html

A bit tardy, eh?

I like Andy Block. Seems rly down to earth.

Me or the ref?

Most definitely.

I've just started playing on Stars again in prep for Vegas next week, so this is the perfect accompaniment whilst playing.

Glad to see Andy win one.

LOL @ Quote of the day on this link

I don't know why I wanted you guys to hammer Andy on the FTP stuff so bad. I agree there's nothing more you could've gotten out of him, but I want to hear those guys squirm more I guess. God I can be vindictive...

Tried watching the WSOP stream last night and it was awful. And then at the final table the feed goes down and the tournament ends with the thing off line as a woman went for a bracelet (and a cutie too). That feed was awful, what a step backwards from last year.

Good show guys, wish I could make one of the parties at the WSOP someday.

I'm glad to hear that Stars is doing everything they can to break into the U.S. market legally. I wish the gov't would hurry up and get wise.

You guys said you'll be in Vegas soon. I'll be there in just over 2 weeks. Are we finally going to meet up, or what?

About the byes: how about giving those players who receive a bye, half the chips when they start round 2.
So if you get the advantage of skipping round 1 (which doubles your chance of making it to round 3), you get the disadvantage of working with half a stack (which should halve your chance of getting to round 3).

if someone has a pipeline to Jess Welman ask her why 'The Daily Shuffle' has today's info, but seemingly no links to other days pages...its weird that I cant just click to yesterday's or 2 days back...etc etc....no archive link, nuthin

or am I ******ed?

Half seems too punitive -- i.e. the advantage and disadvantage you state do not offset in my opinion. But I like the way you're thinking.

There is no good way to solve the problem Bonomo and others complained about. I was long in the camp of doing "half-price" play-in but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it's not a great solution either. This year was a tad goofy because the field was slightly larger than 128. But imagine if there had been 125 runners. Would the WSOP suddenly refund almost the entire field half their buy-ins? While the players would say yes, the tournament organizers would never go for it.

In the end, I have more recently found myself siding with Adam on this argument. You know what you're getting into when you register. The chances of getting a bye are the same for all entrants. So at the time you fork over your entry fee, it IS a fair system even if turns out to be unlucky for certain players.

Now, MJ opined that a tournament should be fair from the moment the first hand is dealt, not when the players register. I disagree with this. Suppose two people sign up for a regular MTT. One player finds himself with, say, ElkY and Jason Mercier in the two seats to his right. Furthermore, Ike Haxton will have the button on our hero's BB. The other player has two random donks in the two leftward seats, with a third rando holding the button on his BB.

At least for the early part of this tournament, our second player has it FAR worse than our first. So would you say the tournament was unfair to four first guy? Probably not. In terms of fairness, getting a bye vs. not getting a bye in a HU tournament is no more or less fair than getting an easy table in an MTT -- even if its effect is more dramatic.

Even if you throw out the MTT comparison and just consider the HU tournament, take a look at the initial matchups for this event:
http://www.wsop.com/pdfs/reports/12112\$10K_HEADS_UP_1st_ROUND_MATCHUPS.pdf

No offense to Ronald Crabtree of Old Hickory, Tenn., but I'd say E-Fro had a much easier first round than Yevgeniy Timoshenko or Steve O'Dwyer (who drew each other). Should Timoshenko get a refund because he had diminished equity in this tournament compared to one of his cohorts? How 'bout Matt Marafioti, who drew Chris Moore? Imagine if Marafioti went to Jack Effel, pointed at Moore's finishes at two previous $10K heads-up events, and demanded a reduced buy-in. I think Effel would still be laughing.

Playing a first-round match while 75 percent of the field gets a bye downright sucks. I'd never question that. But to say it's unfair strikes me as being, well, results-oriented. And poker players know better than that.

Everyone entering should pay the same entry fee, they all have an equal chance of having to play an extra round so it's fair. Those who played the extra rounds shouldn't exclusively be playing each other though, their table should effectively go back into the draw.

The problem with this point is that no one has any control over table draw in ANY fairly run random poker tournament. If you take skill out of the equation, which tournament organzers must do, you can control that each player that starts the event has the same mathematical chance of winning the tournament in relation to their buy-in.

In this event, people who drew the short straw and had to play the extra match in the 10K HU started the tourney with 0.4% chance of winning. Players who didn't have to play the match started with a 0.8% chance of winning. Doesn't sound like a big difference but it is.

Players having to play an extra match, yet pay the same buy-in is mathematically no different than someone paying the same buy-in and having to start the event with 50% less chips than everyone else. Mathematically, when you have to win a few million chips, starting with 5K instead of 10K is insignificant but for practical purposes, it's a huge disadvantage.

Well then it seems like the only solution is to limit entrants to a power of 2 in order to eliminate any chance of byes. I guess in this case it would have been 128 and they would have had to refund the buy-ins of the "excess" (or have had a predetermined hard cap).

Carl is a popular name in many parts of the world

Your statement during the on-air discussion was that the tournament should be "fair" from the time the first card is dealt*. More specifically, your statement was that all players should have an equal mathematical chance of winning from that point forward. This is why my counter is that players don't have an equal mathematical chance of winning from the start of the first deal in an MTT either. Any given player loses or gains on his/her mathematical chance due to the table draw.

However, they DO have the same mathematical chance from the time they enter the event, which was Adam's point. The chance of drawing a buy is equal for all players. It sucks for a player to not get a buy, but it also sucks for a player to draw a tough table (few people seem to complain about the latter more than Mike Matusow, by the way).

*For those who haven't listened to this episode in its entirety, this particular point is made at roughly the 2-hour, 17-minute point in the show.

I agree with this in theory, although from a business point of view, I don't see it happening in practice.

Suppose you set a hard cap of 128. Then the event draws 111 (like the 2009 LAPC heads-up event did). Then you'll have a few players with byes and most of the field without. These same discussions surface.

On the flipside, suppose this hard-capped event draws 152, putting 24 on some sort of alternate or wait list. By turning away those 24 players, the tournament organizers lose their six percent juice on two dozen 10K buy-ins. Would they consider the $14,400 revenue loss worth the goodwill gained from running a tournament without byes? What if the event could have drawn 190 without a hard cap? Now we're talking $37,200 in lost rake.

The interesting thought experiment, despite my two previous posts in this thread, would be to follow MJ's proposal exactly as he said. First-round byes are $10,000. If you end up with a first-round matchup, your buy-in is halved $5,000. The byes are drawn randomly. Of course, this is made explicit in the tournament information long before anyone enters. For all we know, the WSOP will make more money from their combination of $5K and $10K entries than they would from their current system. But they won't know unless they give it a shot.