NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship, PokerStars, and Gold Strike

The first 16 players have been invited to the NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship, which will take place March 4-6 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. There must have been an error, because I wasn't on the list. The first 16 players who were invited included last year's champion Phil Hellmuth and Hall of Famers Doyle Brunson and Johnny Chan. Others who have confirmed are Daniel Negreanu, Phil Ivey, Jennifer Harman, Barry Greenstein, Chris Ferguson, Howard Lederer, and Annie Duke. The format of the tournament is like that of the NCAA college basketball tournament, in which there are four brackets and you advance if you win and go home if you don't. Everyone who played last year loved it, because heads-up play is the ultimate ego game in poker. The best part is that every person playing thinks that he or she is the best in the world.



You can watch the tournament on NBC on Sundays in April and May. The 10 hours of programming will be split among six shows. There will be an online competition at nbcheadsup.com for the final seat of the 64. To me, this event is like the Masters golf championship, because it is the best playing the best.



Looking back at the past couple of tournaments this year, there were a couple of new ideas that I just loved. PokerStars hosted a battleship poker tournament in the Caribbean. I wasn't there, but I saw a bunch of cool photos. They had a roomful of players with laptops, facing each other and playing heads up online. So, it looked like the game "Battleship," but it was really an in-person online heads-up tournament. Hopefully, this will become bigger as time goes on.



Recently I played at the Gold Strike in Tunica, Mississippi, in the World Poker Open. Bellagio's superstaff flew in from Las Vegas to run the tournament. There was a new rule that I had never seen, which Barry Greenstein invented and they tested at Bellagio in December. I should have known about it, but I didn't make it through the first day there. Anyhow, with 10 minutes left in the day, they stop the clock and play either four, five or six more hands, depending on a random drawing. This prevents people from stalling at the end of the day, trying to avoid their blinds. Typically, with 10 minutes left, you see players pretend that they have tough decisions every time, so that they won't get stuck losing the big blind with one minute left. At our table, we played the final six hands in about four minutes, and everyone was able to leave six minutes early, which seems like an eternity at the end of a day of championship poker. Every casino needs to try this rule.