Royal Flush Poker

Erik Seidel is probably amongst the cream of the crop of poker pros around, although he seems little known, and tends to keep a low profile. His achievements in poker are many though, and made more remarkable by the fact that he wasn’t always a poker player, having dedicated eight years to being a backgammon player. The first World Series event Erik ever played in was the 1988 main event, and he prompty outlasted a field of professionals to get to heads up play, he eventually lost to the great Johhny Chan.

Not a bad debut performance in anyones books. In more recent years he finished second place in the Aussie Millions 100k event in 2007, and finished runner up in the Aussie Millions 10k event in 2008, but Erik certainly isn’t just a second place finisher. He has amassed 8 World Series bracelets and is one of only a select few to have reached that milestone. He also has a WPT title to his name, and continues to perform very well at the World series on a regular basis.

He currently lives in Las Vegas and has live tournament earnings of around the $9 million mark. Erik also has commitments to Full Tilt Poker, being one of their sponsored professionals, and has been very consistent over the years with World Series victories in 1992,1994,1998,2001,2003,2005, 2007. It is surprising that Erik has not received the accolades he deserves in the eyes of some people, but as his record testifies, he is truly amongst the greatest players and legends of the game still competing today.

The type of wild and loose play which often heralds the beginning of a re-buy tournament is one of the fundamental reasons why I am not too keen on playing in this type of tournament.

The whole ideal of poker is to carefully and strategically outplay your opponent in the various duels, the time and place of which, the dealt cards will determine. Carefully calculating the outs, odds, chances of being called and strength of your opponents hand, is the very fabric from which the game is formed. All this however, is tainted I feel by putting a big safety net under every player in the tournament.

Basically, if your bankroll is big enough, you can just push all in every single hand until you double or triple through. This certainly does happen, and with increasing frequency with the lower buy in tournaments.

With this in mind you would think once the add on period had finished players would settle down to play poker, but this isn’t always the case.

I’ll spare you the details of a recent bad beat which cost me an hours hard work and 22k in chips because someone got very excited about their hole cards of (7,8) suited. You get the picture.

In a freezeout tournament players really play their best poker, because they know one false move could be their last. This to me, is poker at it’s best. The effect of such loose play in re-buy tournaments is that good play with strong hole cards can result in multiple calls and subsequent outdraws. And weak players with money to burn can end up with lots of chips simply by being lucky.

The only way to combat this is either play in high buy in re-buy tournaments where such wild play is more scarce, or don’t play in them at all.