On the 43rd floor of the Borgata Hotel Casino and Spa, a dormant dragon waits in his lair. David "The Dragon" Pham sits with family and friends, waiting to leave for New York City, where he will visit an uncle before returning to Southern California. Downstairs, day one of the World ...
The Year of the Youth? Not Quite Yet Top 10 Players Average 35 Years of Age By Bob Pajich There is no doubt that live tournament poker is in the midst of a youth movement that was given a huge exclamation point when 18- year-old Annette Obrestad won ...continued
When selecting a high-stakes casino host, The Bicycle Casino was looking for a respected player, and found him in Dr. Roy Winston. The licensed anesthesiologist and high-stakes cash-game player who had two deep runs in major tournaments, including a ...continued
Stud poker is not a very difficult game after you see your opponent's hole card. - Herbert O. Yardley By the turn of the game's second century, poker was firmly established as America's national pastime. More people watched baseball, ...continued
After Annette Obrestad, 18-year-old online poker prodigy from Norway, won the World Series of Poker Europe main event, it was hard to ignore the obvious. Thanks to online poker, there is an entire generation of crazy-good players out there who are due ...continued
After spending nine days playing poker in the World Series of Poker Europe in London, sadly, the highlight of my trip was a publicity stunt. I'm a person who prides himself on winning poker tournaments, or short of that, making final tables (the ...continued
I was really enjoying my time in Barcelona and got off to a very good start in the tournament. By the time the blinds got to 150-300 with a 25 ante, I had a pretty good handle on my opponents. The following hand occurred with a couple of players ...continued
"God Save the Queen," and all of her subjects who play poker. These guys are gonna need divine intervention if they hope to stay in money, but I'll get to them in my next column. I just got back from the World Series of Poker Europe in ...continued
It was Monday night at Bellagio, and Monday Night Football was on the tube. Most of the players were watching football, and their poker games were an afterthought. I find that when players are not paying attention to the game, they are on auto-pilot, ...continued
Live $1-$2 and $2-$5 no-limit hold'em cash games can, for many players, be some of the most lucrative games in the cardroom. Several years ago, I was a committed limit player (and even wrote a couple of books about it), but nowadays I'm sold ...continued
If you are a maniac, limit hold'em is definitely your game. No other poker game offers so much opportunity for your raw aggression to be considerably successful. Of course, your swings will be huge, and you eventually will lose money, but the ride ...continued
I have always been a strong advocate of learning as many games as you can; not just all of the varieties of poker, but any gambling game you find interesting. In some ways, this is a "mission impossible." You could spend 18 hours a day on ...continued
I recently went through my files and found a few situations, both cash games and tournaments, that I thought were worth discussing. The game is no-limit hold'em in all cases. The first two questions came from Ed Burton, who attended a WPT Boot ...continued
I always enjoy reading the reports from some of the other writers in which they report on hands played during the course of a tournament. I also have written several columns of that nature, and based on the number of e-mail comments I've received, ...continued
Having had a more than decent World Series of Poker already (with three cashes in 18 events), I was eager to close things successfully in the main event. The draw favored me. My table had mostly loose and predictable players, with two tight-passive ...continued
Poker is most often played as a gambling game. As such, an important element of success in poker is having gambling skills - useful assets in any form of gambling - as well as skill in the particular form of gambling being played. There are a lot more ...continued
If you don't think realistically, you probably can't be a long-term winner, and you certainly will win less than an equally talented but more realistic player. Powerful psychological, cultural, and social forces make all of us deny some ...continued
The 2007 World Series of Poker was no different than any other year's tournament; it provided me with lots of material for interesting columns. In particular, I was involved in, saw, or heard about several situations and decisions that had to do ...continued
Hi. Come on in. I picked up a couple of quarts of medium-hot chili and a large loaf of sourdough bread to tear apart and dip into the chili. Start tearing and dipping. "Of course I believe in luck. How else do you explain the success of people ...continued
Many new players are coming into brick-and-mortar (B&M) cardrooms for the first time. They have played online and in home games, but may not know the rules and conventions of live cardroom play, and might get tripped up. As a public service, this ...continued