blonde poker forum

hey guys ive just been watching the main event from 2002 and 2003

some of the play is ridiculous!!( even taking into consideration tv editing)

so i put it to you who is the worst player to win the big one???

i alwaus thought it was moneymaker now tho there is no doubt in my mind that robert varkoni is worse..


over to you....

robert varkoni

I wasn't keen on Jamie Gold's talking to distract the other players, for this reason I pick him

I'd say Moneymaker or Varkoni, Gold is a great winner,mentored by the best. Not too sure whats going on with all that rubbish about his 50% deal though.

Johnny Chan

monkeymaker


his sukout against ivey was a travesty

I seem to remember him having a huge hand as well though? Cant remember - did he play it that badly?

I would happily like to be any of them for a day, just to know how it feels to be WSOP champion

Moneymaker can play and didn't make any huge mistakes all the way through, the move he put on Farha was world class and he has since made WPT final tables. Played with him in St Maarten and he impressed me before he drank 40 bottles of beer then he played just like me.

Raymer got lucky numerous times on the final table but his performance the year after in the main event showed it wasn't a fluke. The following year was more impressive for me. Played with him a few times and rate him highly.

Hachem is the best of the bunch as a player. Took me out in last years aussie millions and I was honestly amazed by some of his plays in the 8 hours I shared a table with him. He will be winning wsops, wpts etc for as long as he wants to.

Gold although imo a total **** played perfect poker for me this year and managed to win without ever being allin and was chip leader from the end of day3. Anyone who claims him to be a donk doesn't know poker. Anyone who thinks he's a **** for his on table antics and alleged % stealing is a good judge of character.

Winner by a million miles is Varkoni who donked his way through a small field and got his money in bad so many times it was untrue. He sat on table with a few of us in St Maarten and I swear if you hadn't seen him on the TV you would think he was an internet newbie. He was like a rabbit in startled headlights when anyone put any moves on him and there is no way he will ever win another tournament of any stature.

very well put mr ariston

couldnt agree more

varkoni's play, or at least what we seen on espn coverage, on day 1 of 2003 was REALLY bad.

i liked brunson " idon't mean to degrade him but......."

Amarillo Slim Preston

Robert Varkoni i think its agreed is the worst winner from recent years, i mean he has not got close in another big tourney since. All the winners since i believe can play a bit, Hachem and Raymer especially.

Worst of all time from what i understand the 1979 winner Hal Flower was who was a complete amateur who was never heard of again after he donked all his winnings off within 12 months of his win.*

* I think it was him might have been another of the winner from the mid 80's.

yeah varkoni is definately the worst since 2000. pretty common knowledge. i mean when do you ever hear anyone talk about him in a good light?! lol.

also. why does everyone seem to respect raymer? i've seen a couple of hand historys from big pots he won on day 2 i think it was that were proper hilarious! one of them involved an 11 x BB preflop raise from the cut off with KJ sooted!
the following year was impressive but alot of people have said it was partly because he got alot of chips early on due to people wanting to take pots off him and calling him with absoulte shit constantly?

i think moneymaker played a far better final table than raymer. raymer had absoultely no challenge heads up against david williams whereas moneymaker had to overcome one of the best all round players in the world. and to be fair he outplayed him on the night.

jamie gold. although the luckiest fucker in the world. did seem to get paid all those times he flopped the nuts. and it takes a good player... or talker... to get paid. but unlike the other winners. he has no class.

Couldn't agree more.

Raymer was one of the best strat posters on 2p2 and helped many people with their game. by all accounts he would be happy to still be posting in the strat forums but he started getting flamed massively after he won the WSOP so he had to stop. He gets respect cos of the hours he spent discussing hands on the internet.

Farha may be world class at omaha and other games but if his hands that were shown on HSP are any indication he ain't that good at NL HE cash.

I watched a whole episode of HSP for the first time last night and the final hand was Barry Greenstein AA vs Farha KK.

Great TV

IMO Farha is easily one of the bestr cash players (if not THE best) on HSP. Have both series on hard drive. Unlike Harman, Esfandiari, Arieh and a couple others, he isn't transparent in his betting patterns/starting hands and doesn't play scared.

 

when i first read all the HSNL forum slagging off the HSP players and saying they were fishy I thought they were talking complete nonsense, but thinking about it i think it's very possible that some of them are better NL HE players than Farha etc. They are specialists in one game and have probably played more NL HE hands in the last 3 years than farha has in his whole life. Also the amount of knowledge you can pick up from the internet is amazing. That's why you get people like Sbrugby or CTS moving up from 1/2 to the highest limits on the internet in less than a year.

I'm pretty sure that the best players on the internet have overtaken the live players now. Zeejustin crushing live donkaments is another (admittedly small sample size, high variance etc) example

Until i win a WSOP bracelet then i am not in a position to answer this question as they have something i dont. For me to label someone the worst ever world champion is a bit rich considering both my WSOP Main Event excursions ended before the end of the first days play.

Maybe when i win it one day there will be another name for you to consider!! :D

What is a donkament?  :D .  I saw Dale write it in a post recently as well and I forgot to ask

I couldnt agree more mate. I have railed Sbrugby on full tilt quite a bit and he absolutely schools gus hansen! No doubt despite what people like to think about how hard it is to transfer over to live poker from internet poker, i have pretty much no doubt they netters would ruin the lives pros, especially sammy 'fishy' farha!!!!

 Ks KingPoker Ks

How can you guys call Sammy Farha a fish?

Wish I was a s bad as him!

The HSP players probably weren't playing their typical game seeing as they were in the unusual position of having their cash hands televised. Quite a few of them mentioned they had revised their strategy from series 1 to 2, aware that their opponents will have seen all their plays.

I realise the wsop coverage is heavily edited but some of daniel negreanu's reads were outstanding. Online or live, very few tournament players could have made those reads with such accuracy. I think it's generalising a lot to say the best online players have overtaken the best live, apart from the fact that many of the top players do both.

Zeejustin has done well so far live, and was always highly regarded as a tournament player online, even if granny-gate undermined his credibility in many eyes. Like you say though his initial success live is meaningless on its own.

I think someone like brunson deserves immense credit, for producing results in different eras with wildly different poker environments. And all after opening up his strategy to the world in SS. Adaptation's the mark of  a great to me. If brunson had been a stegasarous, the dinosaurs wouldn't have died out, but would be kicking our butts at deuce to 7 triple draw.

I generalised too much. I'll shorten my post to-

The best short handed NL HE Cash game players are the relative unknowns (compared to Brunsen and Negreanu) playing high stakes on the internet.

IMO :)up

The later winners will get far too much focus in any debate such as this, due to the relative amount of exposure they had.

Hal Fowler in 1979 is a name that I've often seen mentioned with regard to this question.  He was the first amateur to win it and nobody has ever seemed to be very complimentary about his play.

Sheriff

Reminds me of a good post from a while back.
The subject was on who the best UK player might be.

Worst main event player:

I think Gold is by far the worst. I don't mind Varkonyi being a geek or getting lucky, at least he is a nice guy (not that I know him or anything!).

Gold on TV just seemed like a total ****. Obviously I don't know him personally at all either, but I didn't like the way he smarmed his way through (and IMO borderline cheated a few times!).

I also don't think Gold was that good a player, he had a very amazing run of cards, which is where his luck lay. Rather than other players who sucked out a few times, Varkonyi, Moneymaker, Raymer and probably every winner really, it's a long tournament! Who needs to suck out when you get dealt the best hand almost all the time. It was probably exaggerated as I only saw the highlights, but he certainly got more than his share.

Allen Cunningham really had Gold's number and I was hoping he won. I didn't really believe Gold could call his reraise with KJ! If only Cunningham had been raising with a worse hand than 10 10, say KQ and he'd have doubled up and more on that hand and almost definately have beaten him. Gold's talking wasn't working on Cunningham and was giving away lots of information.

I'd much prefer a lucky, not very good poker player who is a nice guy (or girl) to win.

Still, the argument in his favour is quite compelling.

Who else has won this poker tournament without ever being all-in, even in the days where just a couple dozen guys showed up.

I just feel that evrything about GOLD is dodgy. He was pretending to be such a nice guy at the table saying things like "i told you to fold and i had the best hand, why did you call me there" like either he's your best mate and he wants you to win it or that you are meant to believe him and not go against him. He is such a sleaze, you can see why he is suited to being a hollywood talent agent. You can just imagine him saying "if you want the part you have to strip off in front of me, come on alan take your clothes off!" (i assume he's gay!). And thats without all the 50% cut that you just know he did actually agree too.

I think more than anything poker needs an ambassador for the 12 months proceeding the main event with him (or her maybe in the near future!)being a bit of a show man, approachable and being able to back up the Big Win with consistent play throughout and Hachem and also Raymer, i say were probably the best we will EVER see at that. They showed themselbes to be good winners and gracious losers. And to be fair in some extent Moneymaker was to. I would say he can be said to be responsiblke in a massive way for online poker kicking off like it did in 2003 after he won.

So you can say what you like about Gold and his poker ability but he will never have (if any at all) positive effect on poker this year. I dont doubt for a second he wont be in the news and magazines and threads all over the wold but i promise you it will be for the WRONG reasons!! (And poker at the moment doesnt need more bad press- between US online poker squabbles and british card room disputes!)

 Ks KingPoker Ks