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Isaac 'WestmenloAA' Baron Captures Card Player Online Player of the Year Title
By Shawn Patrick Green

The final few days of the Card Player Online Player of the Year (OPOY) race were nail-biters, but then again, most of the year was for the top contenders. In the end, however, 20-year-old Isaac "westmenloAA" Baron came out on top to take down the coveted title.

Baron, of Los Gatos, California, concluded an amazing year with his OPOY win. He began his trek up the OPOY leader board by winning a $500 buy-in version of the PokerStars Sunday Million on Jan. 28, for which he earned $255,000. As far as the rest of his year goes, if we take into account only his OPOY-qualified finishes (and he assuredly has plenty of cashes in lesser tournaments), he earned $1,036,452, had 37 top-20 finishes, made 20 final tables, and took down seven events. He had 18 cashes of at least five figures.

The top two players, Baron (8,304 points) and Matt "ch0ppy" Kay (8,278 points), were a mere 26 points from each other with barely a week of tournaments left to play after Baron pulled into the lead by taking down a $200 rebuy tournament on PokerStars. Kay, a 19-year-old player from Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, could have made almost any OPOY-qualified finish to push himself back into the lead in the remaining eight days.

Their next-closest competitor, Sorel "Imper1um" Mizzi, was relatively far back with 6,676 points. Mizzi, previously the leader in the race, would have needed to win the PokerStars Sunday Million plus make additional scores to be able to catch up. However, neither he nor Kay succeeded in reclaiming the throne, and Baron emerged victorious.

Baron's competition was fierce. Kay started the year as the leader by taking down the first Sunday Million of 2007. As the year progressed, Baron and Mizzi both spent some time in the top spot.

But now that 2007 is over, players are looking to start from scratch and prove themselves all over again in 2008. Good luck, and may the best man win.

To view the entire 2007 OPOY official standings, go to www.CardPlayer.com/link/OPOY2007.



Card Player Pro trainers Chris "tribefan9" Rhodes and Dani "ansky" Stern (part of the PokerSavvy Plus stable of poker pros) give us some insight into the games they specialize in.

Chris "tribefan9" Rhodes (limit hold'em specialist)

On bluffing in limit hold'em:
"I think that the problem a lot of players have when moving from no-limit to limit is that they bluff too often, which simply isn't as effective in limit, because you usually can't bet enough to get a person off a made hand. Also, I think they're still trying to trap players a little bit too much, and they may be taking the worst of it preflop and on the flop, hoping to hit their card. In no-limit games, they're used to getting better implied odds, because they can win an opponent's entire stack, whereas in limit, they can't really make those fancier plays because the reward just isn't there if they do hit their hand.

"I think there's not as much bluffing in limit hold'em as there is semibluffing, a situation in which you might be playing a big draw aggressively so that you have an extra way to win by either hitting your draw or by pushing your opponent off his hand. It's rare that you're going to bluff an opponent off top pair, or something like that, in a limit game, just because of the betting structure. You really can't bet enough on the end, whereas in no-limit, you can bet your entire stack.

"I think one of the keys is that in limit, you can almost never bluff a bad player. The only time that bluffing opportunities come up is when you're playing in a hand against another good player, one who might be thinking on a similar level as you and who might have a better ability to read hands. You might be able to get him to fold a pair or something of that nature."

Dani "ansky" Stern (shorthanded no-limit hold'em specialist)

On a strategy that he considers particularly effective in shorthanded no-limit hold'em:
"I think the overbet is something that is a very dangerous thing to incorporate into your game, because if you do it improperly or someone figures you out, you're just going to lose your money that much faster. But if you're able to overbet properly, with the proper frequency for bluffs and for value-bets, and get into your opponent's head and try to think how he'll interpret an overbet, you can really start to make extra money on a lot of your hands.

"The truth is, in a lot of situations, if a lot of the players you are playing against are doing the same thing, if they have the same general strategy that you have, it's going to be hard to make money off them. They're basically playing the same game as you. It's not that any two players really play the same game, but one of the most important things when you're playing high-stakes cash games is finding every little possible extra edge and really exploiting it as best you can. So, I think that if you can properly use overbets in your game, you're really going to profit.

"When you start taking these lines that aren't standard, you start making plays that might not really make sense to your opponents. It basically puts them out of their comfort zone, and then they start making decisions that are irrational or without basis."