turtleknife_poker_blog

Patrick Antonius Advances to Final 4 of PLO 25K Championship.

After a grueling heads-up matches with trex313 and Brian Hastings, Patrick Antonius has climbed to the final four of the 25k PLO Championship at Full Tilt Poker, now assured of earning 4th place money of $168,000. As you can well assume, he is now looking at the $560,000 1st place as a realistic outcome.

That won't be easy, as now Antonius will be facing Urindanger, who in fact is trex313's brother in real life!!

The "Urindanger" account is played by Di Dang, and "Trex313" is played by his brother, Hac Dang. Both brothers are extremely talented cash game players, especially heads-up. They are online poker millionaires multiple times over, and are clearly adept at PLO as this field of mostly professionals included competition like Gus Hansen, Phil Ivey, Erick Lindgren, Tom Dwan, Scott Fischman, and Omaha specialist Robert WilliamsonIII.

The final four in this event scheduled for Sunday September 6/08 at 4:00PM est also include "slaktarn" and "Ugadabugada".

Low limits at Full Tilt may get a call no matter how weak they are...

Should you call slow or fast? Consistent or mix it up?

I am more hesitant to call with time taken. To me it looks like someone strong pretending to be weak. If you are weak why would you raise?

A quick re-raise to me (again) seems to imply I want to throw money out here, and see if you will fold. So, I guess my answer as answer would be I would be more likely to call a faster bet than a slower 1.

As a general question, this is my general answer, not taking into account any reads I have developed on a given player. However at the $1.00 level at Full Tilt Poker, you could probably re-raise quick or slow, and type in the chat box "I have the nuts" and still get a call. Nothing against smaller stakes games, it just goes back to my theory that bad players lose their money calling, not betting.

There are many more reasons to expect poor play than your opponent simply not understanding. Reasons like, not caring, being too tired, drinking and playing, teenage sillyness..  etc. Its not simply a question of poker odds calculations or strategy. If it were you might be able to figure them out, but I wouldn't bother with it at this level. You never know why your opponent may be making horrendous plays, but the more they make the better. Even if some of those plays work out for them!!

sbrugby aka Brian Townsend

A few days ago, Brian Townsend admitted to using multiple accounts to get an unfair edge in his poker games. Since so many players were used to his style of play under his main accounts: aba20 (PokerStars.com) and Brian Townsend (FullTiltPoker.com), he decided to create 2 new accounts so that nobody would know who he was. Brian has since admitted what he did was wrong in a recent apology posted in his blog. 

Brian wrote: “For the past 6 months I have been playing under the 2nd aliases Stellarnebula on FTP and makersmark66 on PokerStars.  I have not used the aba20 account on Stars since I began playing on the Makersmark66 account.  I have since gone back to using the aba20 account and will play only that account.  During this time I played the 25/50 and 100/200 PLO games.  I played under the Stellarnebula account from February until the end of June at which time Lee Jones and I had a discussion and we came to an agreement that I needed to close it.

During this time I was playing under the Brian Townsend account, never at the same table with the Stellarnebula.  Under the Stellarnebula account I played 25/50, 50/100, and 100/200 Pot Limit Omaha PLO.  During this time I played a very small amount of 50/100 PLO and primarily 200/400 PLO under the Brian Townsend account. I wanted to have come forward and make this public sooner, but unfortunately because of certain business relationships I could not do that.  What I did was wrong and I am going to be punished by FullTilt poker by having my red pro status revoked for 6 months.  I am unsure what action, if any, PokerStars will take.

I have also hurt those that I work closely with primarily at CardRunners but also at FullTilt.  To compensate those that were hurt by my actions I am going to be donating 25,000 dollars to a charity to be determined in the future.  This money will be removed from my CardRunners distributions.  This is by no means me making my actions correct but I hope that it shows some good faith towards those that I work closely with.  I am very proud of CardRunners; we are doing something very special.”