Poker News

History repeated itself at the Commerce Casino’s L.A. Poker Classic (LAPC). In the event’s $10,000 Heads-Up tournament, Vivek “Psyduck” Rajkumar and Chris Moore found themselves playing heads-up for the championship for a second consecutive year. The occurrence seemed all too familiar for those in attendance, until the end result.

Last year, Rajkumar ousted Moore for the title and $350,000 prize. The outcome was different on Wednesday, as Moore got his revenge against Rajkumar in a relatively short match when his diamond flush topped Rajkumar’s two pair on the final hand. Moore earned $147,200 plus a $10,000 LAPC Main Event Seat for the victory. The Main Event got underway on Friday and is part of Season 8 of the World Poker Tour (WPT).

“Winning was just very relieving,” said the 26-year-old Moore. “There was a lot of pressure on me. I’d have lost a lot of respect for myself if I had lost again. I’m glad it didn’t take too long so the pressure didn’t mount too much. But sitting in my hotel room as I saw how Vivek worked his way through the loser’s bracket, I had a feeling we’d be meeting up again.”

This year’s $10,000 Heads-Up event drew only 39 entrants compared to 111 in 2009, but the accomplishment by Moore and Rajkumar was nevertheless astonishing. Moore defeated Erick Lindgren, Scott Fischman, Frank Kassela, and Anthony Guetti en route to the final table, while Rajkumar had to battle his way back to the championship match by sweeping through the loser’s bracket. After an early loss, Rajkumar bested Eugene Katchalov, Thomas Gabriel, Guetti, Michael Binger, and Aaron “aejones” Jones before facing off against Moore in the final.

2010 LAPC $10K Heads-Up results:

1. Chris Moore - $147,200 + $10,000 Main Event Seat
2. Vivek Rajkumar - $78,600
3. Aaron “aejones” Jones - $47,160
4. Michael Binger - 31,440

In the LAPC Ironman Event earlier this week, Al “Sugar Bear” Barbieri was the last man standing, capturing his third win of the 51-tournament series to collect $59,036. Barbieri won the winner-take-all Ironman tournament after 19 hours of play by defeating “Karate” Mike Santoro heads-up. The event went non-stop without breaks until a champion was crowned.

“I could have gone another 10 hours with the adrenalin rush of playing at the final table,” said Barbieri, 51.”My heads-up partner was fading fast, but I could have kept going.”

Barbieri took only one bathroom run during the tournament and didn’t bother eating, telling Tournament Director Matt Savage that he likes playing on an empty stomach. He also noted that he is in great shape, which helps in an Ironman format.

The Ironman victory brought Barbieri’s 2010 LAPC winnings to $136,100. Earlier in the series, he won the $545 No Limit Hold’em $200,000 Guaranteed for $54,700 and the $335 Seven-Card Stud Hi/Lo event for $12,970. He also took second in the $335 Seven-Card Stud tournament for $8,500 on January 25.

The L.A. Poker Classic concludes with the Main Event, which began Friday, and the $25,100 High Roller tournament, which gets underway on Sunday.

Why tattoo the face of one fellow poker player on your body when you can tattoo two? UB.com pro Joe Sebok will ask himself that question after losing a last longer prop bet during the World Poker Tour’s (WPT) L.A. Poker Classic on Friday.

The three-way prop bet featured Sebok, Full Tilt Poker pro Gavin Smith, and young gun Jeff Madsen. Whoever was eliminated first from the $10,000 buy-in L.A. Poker Classic would tattoo the faces of the other two players on his body. That honor went to Sebok, whose aces were cracked during the third level of play on Friday to come out on the short end of the bet. On the wager, Sebok told new WPT Live Updates Hostess Jacque, “It is so stupid. I am so embarrassed to even admit it. I feel like one of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project and now I’ve done something so awful that it’s going to torment the world for so long.”

Madsen was the next player out and now must tattoo Smith’s face on his body. Smith, meanwhile, reached Day 2 of the L.A. Poker Classic at the Commerce Casino, but sits with the second smallest stack in the room as play begins. Sebok’s Twitter feed was full of prop bet-related 140-character outbursts on Friday. He honorably admitted defeat, saying, “fair victory for @olegsmith, w/ @jeffmadsenobv’s bust. 1 thing is certain; i shall never drink alcohol w/ EITHER of these clowns again…”

The rumor mill at the WPT tournament indicated that Smith would accept a $20,000 buyout of the bet, while Madsen may take $15,000. However, Sebok stated on Twitter that buying out of the unique bet was not an option: “btw all, the ONLY thing worse than losing this bet and getting these fool’s ugly faces on my body is PAYING them to not do it. hell no…” Sebok let Madsen buy out of a prop bet during a previous running of the <a href=”http://www.pokernewsdaily.com/articles/wsop/” title=”World Series of Poker”>World Series of Poker (<a href=”http://www.pokernewsdaily.com/articles/wsop/” title=”wsop“>wsop) for $15,000, hence Madsen’s offer.

When Madsen busted from the L.A. Poker Classic, his Twitter feed was equally lively Madsen sought user suggestions for the pending tattoo: “Its ok, i will happily memorialize gavin forever… Any suggestions on the theme of the tat?” During play, he added, “I’m trying not to remind myself that I’m in the middle of the most retarded prop bet ever.” Madsen is a two-time wsop bracelet winner. Smith already owns a tattoo immortalizing Sebok, as the initials “J.S.” appear on his back.

The poker community weighed in on the bet, which panned out at the Commerce Casino. Tournament Director Matt Savage chimed in, “@joesebok: @SavagePoker jeez, don’t sound so happy, jerkus… Not Happy but at least you can do radio shows this week?” Sebok co-anchors the UB.com poker news show “Poker2Nite” alongside Scott Huff. The series’ second season will kick off on Versus on Wednesday at 11:00pm ET. Meanwhile, Smith trumpeted his victory for all of cyberspace to see: “No tattie’s for ole GSmith, Madsen and Sebok can’t say the same!”

Upon hearing that Sebok had lost the bet and now has two new sets of ink coming his way, actress Shannon Elizabeth exclaimed via a Tweet, “@joesebok  LOL-you LOST??? NO WAY! That’s huge! LOL-nice work! Haha ” Poker publicist Lara Miller offered her own advice: “Can you get the tatts super super small? Like the head of a pin?” No indication has been given on the size of the tattoos.

Smith has been involved in some of the industry’s most memorable prop bets, including a wager with Allie Prescott during the 2006 wsop Circuit Championship at Harrah’s New Orleans. Prescott could have been out $700,000 if Smith won the tournament, while Smith would have owed Prescott $1 million if Prescott won. In the end, Peter “Nordberg” Feldman defeated Smith heads-up in the $10,000 buy-in Circuit Championship; Prescott finished seventh.

Absolute Poker pro Mark Seif and online gamer Ben “xthesteinx” Zamani are among the leaders after one day of play in the World Poker Tour’s (WPT) L.A. Poker Classic. Day 2 takes place today at the Commerce Casino in Los Angeles.

A total of 745 players entered the $10,000 buy-in tournament, up a solid 7% from last year’s count of 696. A tent was set up outside the casino to accommodate the extra demand in a scene that was likely reminiscent of the 2006 <a href=”http://www.pokernewsdaily.com/articles/wsop/” title=”World Series of Poker”>World Series of Poker (<a href=”http://www.pokernewsdaily.com/articles/wsop/” title=”wsop“>wsop) Main Event. The top 72 players will finish in the money when the final cards are dealt on Thursday and first place will pocket $1.8 million. The minimum payout is over $18,000.

A field of 477 players will assemble on Saturday in Los Angeles. Defending champion Cornel Andrew Cimpan was one of the casualties of Friday’s action. Taking his place at a table featuring Full Tilt Poker pro Mike Matusow was none other than 11-time wsop bracelet winner Phil Hellmuth. Upon the UB.com pro arriving at his new digs, Matusow welcomed him with the following line: “Welcome to the table. You’re now the worst player at the worst table in the room.”

The Commerce Casino spent the day buzzing about the now-infamous prop bet with Gavin Smith, “Poker2Nite” host Joe Sebok, and Jeff Madsen. The trio agreed on a creative last longer bet in which the first player to bust from the L.A. Poker Classic had to adorn tattoos of the other two players’ faces. The second player to bust had to ink a tattoo of the remaining player’s face. Sebok saw his aces cracked during Level 3 play and was the first musketeer eliminated. Then, it was Madsen’s turn to go. Accordingly, Smith came out on top of one of the wildest prop bets ever conducted. Whether a buyout of the bet will occur remains to be seen.

Heading into Day 2, Masa Kagawa paces the field with a stack of 124,000 chips. He’ll head to Table 4 on Saturday and will be keeping a watchful eye out for Seif, who holds 122,000 chips. Seif, a sponsored pro of the CEREUS Network site Absolute Poker, is a two-time bracelet winner whose last piece of hardware came in 2005 in a $1,500 No Limit Hold’em event. Seif’s company will include Victory Poker pro Keith Gipson, European Poker Tour (EPT) founder John Duthie, Nick Binger, and 2009 wsop Europe bracelet winner J.P. Kelly.

Team PokerStars Pro front man Daniel Negreanu, fresh off helping promote the site’s first ever North American Poker Tour (NAPT) stop on U.S. soil at the Venetian, doubled up with pocket kings at the Commerce Casino on Day 1. His cowboys held against an opponent’s pocket jacks to move him to 40,000 in chips. Negreanu finished the day with a stack of 29,075, good for 223rd in the room. He appears on the leaderboard in elite company, however, as also holding around 29,000 chips are Erik Seidel, Gavin Griffin, Matt Glantz, Tuan Le, and NAPT High-Roller Bounty Shootout third place finisher Joe Cassidy.

Here are the top 10 chip stacks in the WPT L.A. Poker Classic heading into Day 2:

1. Masa Kagawa - 124,575
2. Mark Seif - 122,025
3. Charles Dolan - 120,500
4. Benjamin “xthesteinx” Zamani - 115,000
5. Naoya Kihara - 104,100
6. Chansung Choi - 100,350
7. Shawn Buchanan - 100,225
8. Hieu Luu - 98,250
9. Cary Katz - 97,475
10. Eugene Katchalov - 95,675

Notable names that appear in the top 50 include:

21. David Singer - 73,525
24. Marco “CrazyMarco” Johnson - 72,125
31. Robert Mizrachi - 68,575
32. Darus Suharto - 68,275
39. Peter “Belabacsi” Traply - 64,200
40. Chau Giang - 63,250
41. Jimmy “gobboboy” Fricke - 63,075
44. Keith Gipson - 61,175
45. Vanessa Rousso - 60,900
46. David “WhooooKidd” Baker - 60,725

Stay tuned to poker news Daily for the latest L.A. Poker Classic coverage.

In fact, as a crew of barely legal pros turned on to the game by Chris Moneymaker’s 2003 World Series win when they were just teens dominate poker tournaments across the globe, you are more likely to hear a player at the L.A. Poker Classic this week complaining about the difficulty of his table draw if it includes half a dozen 21 to 23-year-old online pros than a stable of veteran gamblers.

“I think even I would fear the youngsters more, to be perfectly honest with you,” said Hoyt Corkins, a 50-year-old veteran of the game who just won his second WPT title at the Southern Poker Championships in Biloxi last month.

“I mean, I just made a final table and everyone was in their 20’s and here I am 50 years old. I think these kids are going to dominate in the years to come.

“It’s a different style. The kids are tough. Their technique is good.”

At just 23-years-old, Jason Mercier already has more than $4 million in live tournament earnings.

But the South Florida native says his success has very little to do with youthful exuberance.

For a young man who watched Moneymaker win the World Series of Poker Main Event when he was just 16 and has dedicated his life to the game ever since, it’s all about the valuable experience of an adolescence spent grinding online.

“That kind of experience you will never get live,” the Team PokerStars Pro said. “You just can’t play millions of hands live. I think that definitely contributed to my success. In 2007, I played over two million hands online. You just can’t do that live.”

But is the experience gained playing online poker the same as playing live? Corkin’s doesn’t think so.

“You can’t discount 32 years of watching people’s faces and watching the way they put their money in the pot,” said the Alabama born Corkins. “When you’ve played that much online you may be more experienced as far as the technical side goes, but poker is more than just that. It’s got a human element to it.”

Mercier sees his point.

“Of course experience helps and playing tons and tons of hands online helps,” he said. “But the more you play live, the more you pick up on as well. That’s why so many of these big online guys have yet to have a big score live. A lot of it has to do with variance, but a lot of them also haven’t grasped how live poker is played.

“There’s just so much more to it. It’s so much more complex. There’s only so many things that you can learn online and there are so many more things you get live that you don’t get playing online.”

At just 21-years old, Yevgeniy Timoshenko won the WPT Championship last season. Like Mercier, he is another baby of the Moneymaker boom.

However, the Ukranian-born Timoshenko says what makes a table full of young online players something to fear isn’t just youth, or the number of hands they’ve played online.

It’s the studious approach to the game taken by a group of players who seem to have grown up treating poker like another subject in high school as much as a form of entertainment.

“I don’t think being young necessarily makes you good at poker,” he said. “And I think even though you play more hands online it doesn’t necessarily give you the same amount of experience as you would get playing in a casino.

“But for me, it’s not just about hands. What’s more important is reviewing your sessions. If you don’t do that, it doesn’t matter if you play a million hands. If you don’t study and try to improve, you are not necessarily going to get a lot of experience out of those million hands.”

According to Timoshenko, a player that takes the right approach and studies the game as much as he plays online can gain experience about four times as fast as one playing strictly live.

“It’s hard to quantify,” he said. “The biggest factor is how many tables you play and how many hours a day that you play. But you can get better at poker online in like one fourth of the time it would take you strictly playing live. It’s like a factor of three or four I would say.”

Considering those numbers, it’s no wonder fresh faced young players born from the Moneymaker boom are having so much success.

They have almost the same experience as 30-year pros like Corkins.

“I mean, I definitely don’t feel like a guy who has been sitting here for 20 years,” Timoshenko said. “But I feel comfortable enough.”

The World Poker Tour’s L.A. Poker Classic continues through March 2. For comprehensive coverage, tune in to PokerListings’ <a href=”http://www.pokerlistings.com/live-poker tournaments/wpt/season8/la-poker-classic/live-updates” target=”_self”>Live Updates and News.

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You feel the rush of jumping out of the airplane. Wind and all manner of force is in your face as you speed down towards the earth.

As you fall closer to the ground the time comes for you to pull the rip cord and it fails.

When Tyler Reiman spiked a queen all in pre-flop against John Duthie’s aces at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure this past January with 12 people left and enough chips in the middle of the table to send the winner of the pot through to the final table with a massive chip lead, Duthie says that’s exactly what it felt like.

“I equate it to that,” Duthie said on Day 1 of the World Poker Tour’s L.A. Poker Classic. “The feeling the skydiver feels at that point is exactly how you feel I would imagine.”

With Duthie practically guaranteed second or third-place money had he won the pot, the value of the beat made it all the more devastating.

“The situation really made it the worst beat that I’ve ever had or will ever have in the game of poker,” he said. “It was literally like losing $1.5 million in one hand when you are an 87 per cent favorite.”

Duthie says taking a beat like that can definitely have an effect on your psyche and, therefore, your game.

“The horrible thing is you start expecting to lose these hands even when you are a massive favorite,” he said. “What you end up trying to do is keep the pots much smaller. Not take as many big risks.”

But as time goes on, you have to put the bad beat behind you, no matter how big it was.

“You actually don’t want to play poker for a long time,” Duthie said. “You might even say I’m never playing poker again, but a good sportsman doesn’t stop playing the game just because he gets beat.

“I’ll never forget that hand, but the impact is diminishing. Life goes on and I’m a great believer that it’s only a patch. I’m just going through a phase at the moment.

“I’m not an unlucky person. I know it won’t last forever and as long as I keep telling myself that, it will be alright.”

The worst bad beat story Daniel Negreanu says he ever heard was from a $1-$5 Stud game.

Two players were heads up showing a king-high straight flush against a queen-high straight flush. With a $300,000 bad beat jackpot on the line, the entire table was already counting the money when the player with the queen-high straight flush drew the king on Seventh Street to chop the pot.

“Think of these guys playing $1-$5 Stud,” he said. “All they all have is $100 to their name and they are going to win a sick jackpot. That’s bad.”

But in the end, that’s poker.

“Those are the exact two words you chalk it up to,” Negreanu said. “That’s poker. Weird stuff is going to happen to you all the time. You have to have mental strength and emotional stability. If you don’t you are in the wrong environment.

“Other people struggle through much worse things in their lives. If the worst thing you have to complain about is a bad beat and you only ended up in fourth place - Sorry about your luck. Some people have no arms. Some people have been paralyzed from the waist down. Other people have it worse. Think about real bad beats, put it in context and you realize your life’s not so bad.”

In the World Poker Tour’s first Season, Mark Seif had aces cracked in a pot for the chip lead at the final table to bust in fourth at the Legends of Poker main event.

Four years later, in the pot that gave Vivek Rajkumar an insurmountable lead at the WPT Borgata final table, all the money was in the middle with Seif holding aces against Rajkumar’s tens before a ten flopped.

“That one still sits with me,” he said. “It’s been a year and a half now and I still think about it.”

But despite lingering thoughts, Seif said he tries not to let it affect his game or his outlook on life.

“I’ve been extremely unlucky at very unfortunate times,” he said. “But I look at it as though I did what I was supposed to do. My job is to get the chips in when I have the best hand. I got all the chips in pre-flop with two aces against two tens. That was my job.

“The fact that I was so unlucky might devastate other people and, as I told you, I still think about it. But at the end of the day, I look at my life in general, and I’m so lucky.

“I get to play poker for a living, I live in a really great house and I have two beautiful little girls. I just live a really great life and, in the big picture, I can’t mope around and feel like I’m unlucky.”

In the end, even bad beats are all about perspective.

The WPT’s L.A. Poker Classic continues through March 2. For comprehensive coverage, tune in to PokerListings’ <a target=”_self” href=”http://www.pokerlistings.com/live-poker tournaments/wpt/season8/la-poker-classic/live-updates”>Live Updates and News.

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card player TV brings you an update from day 2 of the 2010 WPT Los Angeles Poker Classic, including interviews with Daniel Negreanu and Eugene Katchalov.

The final table of the World Series of Poker Europe main event, presented by Betfair, will air during two, one-hour episodes on Sunday, Feb. 28 on ESPN2 starting at 9 p.m. EST. Action will pick up at the start of the final table of nine players.

card player TV brings you an update from day 2 of the 2010 WPT Los Angeles Poker Classic main event, including an interview with big stack Shawn Buchanan and late arrival Antonio Esfandiari.

card player TV brings you an update from day 1 of the WPT Los Angeles Poker Classic at the Commerce Casino, including the prize pool information and an interview with the LAPC heads-up champion, Chris Moore.