Dutch News

Top of the Poker-Pops
The end of the year generally means loads of 'top ten' lists. In the Netherlands we are all big fans of top ten lists and who am I to keep you from the most interesting poker stats of 2007? So, the top of the pile are...

Live Tournaments Money: Thierry van den Berg - $561,729
Thierry has had an excellent year after his break-through in the live tournament circuit in 2006. The second-best Dutchman in this year's World Series of Poker (WSOP), Thierry has become a familiar face in the largest international tournaments. He has made back-to-back final tables at the European Poker Tour - Baden and Dublin - and is well-known for his feat of winning three $10,000 EPT packages in one weekend through multi-table satellites online. There is no doubt that we will hear from him again in 2008.

Dutch Championship Winner: Peter Dalhuijsen
The prestigious title of Dutch Champion remained with the pokercollege.nl team, as fellow Card Player Poker + Sports columnist Peter 'De Dal' Dalhuijsen took over from Steven ten Cate. Too much has already been written about this man, admittedly, mostly by me, and to prevent his head from becoming too big we'll leave it at this - big up, Dal, and let's see you back at the final tables again next year.

Highest WSOP Main Event Finish: Ed de Haas - 71st
The ranking speaks volumes: the WSOP 2007 was, as it is every year, a big disappointment for the Dutch players. We might not have been a mathematical favourite to win the main event, but just one bracelet, is that really too much to ask? On that subject, this year Rolf Slotboom discovered that one Christiaan van Hees, a veteran tournament player from Seattle, had won a $1,500 limit tournament at the WSOP in 1995, and was, in fact, born in the Netherlands. But since he, as far as I can make out from the various reports on blogs and forums, has lived in the U.S. for almost his whole life and still has to utter his first words in Dutch I suggest we forget about his achievement - respectable as it is - and continue our quest for the first Dutch bracelet.

Christmas Day saw a peculiar addition to the list of poker winners in the Netherlands. Leroy Soesman became the winner of Veronica Vegas Voyage, a television game show this column has covered previously, in which the contestants battled it out in various poker-related games for a winner-take-all reward. Soesman, who is a PokerInfo forum enthusiast and moderator, will be representing Everest Poker for the next year and will play in some of the largest live tournaments in the world. It looks like Soesman will have to put his tasks for PokerInfo aside for a little while and focus on bringing these tournaments to a good end, but I am sure he will keep us posted.

Experimental TV Shows Poker is a Skill Game
Early January marked the broadcast of a TV show that, once and for all should have decided that poker is a skill game, as opposed to the game of chance that it is still being mistaken for by the Dutch government. The television program Nieuwslicht, which covers popular science, had organised a poker night for many players with little experience, plus one seasoned but unknown professional, and one player who was informed of all the players' cards and community cards to come. The cards on all live tables were the same and dealt from a pre-shuffled deck without the knowledge of the players. The experiment would prove that poker is a skill game when the pro would make more profit than the average player with the same cards, and the all-knowing player would make the most profit of all.

There were some undeniable problems with the set-up of the experiment - the sample size was only 36 hands, and some of the players started to suspect something fishy when the dealers insisted on dealing each player their two cards at once and never burning any cards since that was the way the decks were set up by the inexperienced crew. The results were therefore rather inconclusive.

Nonetheless, the show got a good amount of attention in the media and it should have opened the door to larger experiments and research to convince our government of the skill factor in poker. The acknowledgement of poker as a skill game would have a positive effect on the poker scene in the Netherlands, allowing more games to be set up and less confusion when it comes to taxes. The experiment that was carried out last July in Canada with the computer Polaris playing against professionals Phil Laak and Ali Eslami - the pros squeezed out a narrow win - would be an excellent base for further research. The creation of a winning pokerbot, scary as it may sound to us players, would certainly prove that poker is a skill game. Have you ever seen a robot beat the roulette table? But knowing our government, it will take a long time before they will be convinced of anything of the kind.

Maybe in five years, when mankind has created the first winning heads-up limit hold'em robot, the Dutch government will realise the error of its ways and recognise poker as a skill game.

Anthon-Pieter Wink is a writer for www.pokerinfo.nl.