It’s been a while since I played any live poker. I play 5-10 NLH at DoylesRoom.com several times a day, but I can’t seem to focus enough for any long sessions. The NBC Heads Up Championship starts this Friday and I’m still debating if I want to play. Granted, I won’t be at my best, but I can put my game on auto-pilot and be competitive in that format. The antes and blinds have to go up very fast and that means whoever wins needs a lot of luck. If I decide not to play, there are lots of players waiting to take my place, but I’m pretty sure I will. It is a fun tournament with no long hours and it will be good to get out of the house. A friend in Texas asked me why he never sees my name on the leaderboard of any recent tournaments. I told him, “I don’t know, could it be because I haven’t played in any of them?”

I think the cash game players, including myself, owe the online pros an apology. I know there are lots of things about the mechanics of online play we don’t know and we shouldn’t criticize the pros that only play online. Maybe the hard truth is cash players are inferior to online players when at the computer and vice versa. I’ve decided there are 4 different kinds of poker players. (1) cash game (2) online (3) tournament (4) all around. Different skills are required for each group. There would probably be a different #1 in each, but if you listed the top 10 in each category, there would be more of the #4 group than any other. So my vote for the best players goes to the all around players. Could it be because I would probably be in that group (LOL)? The bottom line is it’s all poker and poker is the greatest game in the world.

Another question I’ve been pondering during my brief (I hope) exile from the poker scene is how do the old time poker players stack up against today’s best players? As there was no internet or tournaments long ago, you to have to eliminate the specialists in those fields. There wasn’t nearly as many games to choose from so take away the all around players and it leaves the cash game guys. The biggest difference is that the mentality of the two eras are so different. The oldtimers were playing for their living with little or no other income. Many, many times they had their entire net worth in front of them. That makes it a lot harder to make these big bets when you didn’t have much money and didn’t know where you could get any more. These guys were true gamblers. Compare that to today’s great players who have lots of income from today’s poker world. Good luck to the guy that 4 or 5 bet any of the oldtimers trying to make a play on them.

So, for that reason it is almost impossible to make valid comparisons about today and yesteryear. Most of today’s players have good management skills but don’t have the pure gambling mindset of the old guys. There are exceptions. Phil Ivey, Tom Dwan and David Benyamine are some names I think are “throwbacks” to the old time pure gamblers. I think any one of the three would fit right in with the great players of the past.

It makes me think of a Stu Ungar story. Someone brought up the question, “What if there was only one bullet in a six shot revolver, would you spin it and put the gun to your and pull the trigger for 20 million dollars? Everybody agreed that nobody would do that. Stu said, “for 20 million, they could put 5 bullets in the gun and I would do it.” Everyone laughed but I’m not sure Stu was joking.

DoylesRoom has an unusual promotion with our bounty tournament every Wednesday. We have 3 or more bounties each one worth $1,000. Knock out 2, win $10,000, knock out 3, win $50,000. Last week, a player broke 2 bounties and won 10k!  Not bad for a $25 buy-in tournament and if it is your 1st time on DoylesRoom.com, you get the $25 back, I don’t know who comes up with those things.

I hope everyone was as proud of our mayor, Oscar Goodman, as I was. President Obama made a second disparaging remark about Las Vegas in a speech and Oscar refused to meet him on a recent visit to Vegas, unless he apologized. The president didn’t apologize and Oscar was very visible by his absence during our president’s stay. Way to go Oscar!

-DB

Las Vegas, Nevada – February 24, 2010 – After rumors that one of online poker’s most celebrated players had been scooped up by Doyle Brunson spread like wildfire on the online poker forums, DoylesRoom.com has confirmed that Alex Kamberis is the newest member of The Brunson 10, Doyle Brunson’s team of elite legends-in-the-making.

With a record as impressive as some live game players who have been playing cards for decades, the 23-year-old is the perfect addition to The Brunson 10. In 2009 alone, Kamberis cashed in over 50 online poker tournaments, collecting nearly $580,000. One year prior, his online poker winnings topped $1.5 million, making him one of online poker’s most financially successful players. It was his tremendous success in 2008 that led him to a spot at the very top of one of online poker’s most prestigious charts, Card Player’s Online Poker Player of the Year rankings.

Since beginning his career, Kamberis has won over $4 million playing online poker and live poker. His largest win to date was in a major online poker series where he collected $782,542 for a 3^rd place finish.

This isn’t the first time Kamberis has played with a DoylesRoom.com patch on his arm. In 2008, he was a marked man in Doyle Brunson’s Wednesday Bounty Tournament. It was then that the online poker superstar caught the eye of poker’s biggest legend.

Stated Doyle Brunson, “I’m really excited that Alex has decided to come on board. He’s a real class act, just a real nice kid, and he’s the type of player that makes us all look forward to the next generation of poker players.”
Alex Kamberis joins Zachary Clark, Amit Makhija, Chris Moorman and Dani Stern on The Brunson 10. With five spots left on The Brunson 10, Doyle Brunson, poker’s biggest legend, will continue to handpick members for his group of young, elite poker players until the team is packed with 10 of the world’s best legends-in-the-making.

For more information on all five members of The Brunson 10, visit DoylesRoom.com.

About DoylesRoom.com:

Online since 2004, DoylesRoom (www.DoylesRoom.com) is the only online poker site to proudly bear the legendary Doyle Brunson name. DoylesRoom offers its players access to unequaled poker promotions, fast action, and countless opportunities to play with Doyle Brunson and other legends of the game. Poker players from North America and around the world can compete for the biggest stakes on the web or sharpen their poker skills while playing Texas Hold‘em and other popular games for free. With free poker software, lessons, tournaments, nonstop Sit-and-Go tournaments and ring games available at all limits, DoylesRoom is the preeminent poker destination for real live game play—online or anywhere.

For example, I guess I never really understood that people regard me as one of the ancient and old-time players. Really!  I don’t do a lot of time studying spreadsheets and trying to figure out my opponents patterns, etc. That stuff may work online against players you are unfamiliar with but I still believe poker is a “people game”. If you can look a player in the eye, you can learn more in a fraction of a second than a month’s worth of analyzing his play on paper. I’m not saying the paperwork has no value, but for Pete’s sake, don’t these genius youngsters understand the changing gears concept of poker? I may have certain trends in my play that can be monitored but I challenge anyone to figure out what I’m going to do in a poker game. How can they when I don’t know myself what I’m going to do until I do it? I’m always aware of certain things I do while playing a pot and I try to vary different things. That is an “old fashioned” thing called tells.

Speaking of tells, all the top poker players develop what we call mini-tells on every player we play with. How? By the way a newcomer handles his chips, his table talk, plus physical tells that almost everyone has. The older pros are aware of this and try to change several times in each session how they bet, etc. Even the great players sometimes are unaware of some things. For example, Stu Ungar did something that was 100% accurate. When we were playing lowball draw, it is common to pretend to look and then bet out. Stu would sometimes look at his card and bluff knowing for sure what he had. He would always make a point of being sure I saw him looking back so it would eliminate my thinking it was a “dark semi bluff”. That was golden and over the years I’ve picked up things like that on almost all the players I’ve played with. The tells have to be in the right situation always, but my point is, how do you learn things like that online?

I feel I’m rambling quite a bit now but when you are doing nothing day after day, your mind gets active. Anyway, I’ve never pretended to be a bonafide online poker player so I might not know or understand some of the more complex problems. When I hear people talking about tracking devices, statkeeping software, etc. I just think WTF. So maybe it is a different world when you play online and perhaps I’m a dinosaur and don’t understand the ins and outs.  But poker to me is a group of players sitting down and trying to figure out how to get the opponent’s chips.

I might as well keep rambling while I’m at it. After I read blogs, forums and different poker discussions, I see where I’m perceived to be a “nit” at the poker table now. Old style, new style, doesn’t make any difference. The object of the game is to win your opponent’s chips. It’s not to make “star” plays and try to entertain an audience. I thought I was doing ok when I won 15 straight times in the TV cash games. But that doesn’t please the poker critics who want to watch spectacular plays, big pots, etc. If you want to watch poker on TV objectively, you have to realize that the way the other players play dictate the way you should play. So yes, I sit back and wait for the young guys to make mistakes. And they always do. Call me crazy, but I only see 5 or 6 players that I can think are fundamentally sound. You can get away with it sometimes but if you don’t observe some simple fundamentals, they are going to bite you in the ass. There must really be a big difference in the online play because most of the youngsters from the internet don’t have a clue. One of these days I might just twist off and show these kids how Doyle Brunson used to play. Actually, that would be stupid because right now, it’s hard to lose when these young guys are trying to make their star plays.

Being an ex-basketball player, I think a good analogy is basketball at every level. Today against yesterday. The players are certainly different, but in a physical sense. Today’s players are bigger, stronger and can do things no player in my era could do. But the object of the game is the same. You try to score and keep the other team from scoring. Bottom line, you try to win. Poker isn’t a physical thing and the main thing is to win more chips than you lose. So it’s pretty difficult for me to say today’s players are better than the old-time players. You can only judge the quality by who wins and who has the staying power. Lots of room for debate here.

-DB

My daughter Pam called my attention to a blog written for Cardplayer by Dusty Schmidt and the comments that were posted. The comments were insane and some of them are downright comical. The one I like best was that I cheated Andy Beal and was threatened by Andy and had to return 16 million dollars. Do people actually hear these kind of stories or do they make them up? Did Andy say he would kill me if I didn’t give him all that money? Do you supposed he would have intimidated me more than Tony Spilotro did when he tried to get me into his cheating schemes? The next time I see Andy, we will have a good laugh about this little gem.

As far as the other negative stuff about the old time cheating, I spent two long years defending myself about that. I don’t intend to go through it again. For the record, I never had any involvement in cheating in poker from any era. This is America, believe me or not, I really don’t care any longer. It does look like there would be some evidence somewhere besides wild stories.

My thanks to Dusty for the nice things he said about me. I didn’t really know everybody thinks these young guys are so much better poker players than me. I do know I’ve survived through several generations of new superstars. Most of them are gone now. Send this new bunch down to Bobby’s Room and let’s find out if they are really so great.

There were also some positive comments and I appreciate them. Texas Road Gambler (I’m pretty sure I know who he is) really makes good points. If I ever go to court, I would like for him to be my attorney, Cardplayer doesn’t allow comments at the bottom of my blog. I wish they would, I can stand some criticism. Seems like it would be fun to read what poker players think.

-DB

I don’t have much to look forward to after the Super Bowl. The next day I go into a 5 1/2 hour surgery on my teeth and gums. That is going to require a lot of change in my schedule. I’m supposed to play in the Premier League tournament that is being filmed at the M Casino here in Vegas. It is the most widely watched TV show in Europe, with a $100,000 buy in. That would be great exposure for DoylesRoom but there is no way I’ll be 100% recovered from all that dental surgery so I’ll have to cancel.

Then, there is the WPT event at the Commerce Casino in Los Angeles. That is one of my favorite tournaments because the side action is always good. Then the Celebrity tournament is right afterwards and is a fun time. I’ve got an invitation to play in a big Poker Stars TV tournament and immediately afterwards is the NBC Heads Up Championship. I’ll have to bow out of all these tournaments because there is no use playing unless you are at your best. The competition has gotten so good you need to feel good physically as well as mentally to have a chance to win.

My gut feeling is just chill out until the WSOP and try to have a big series. Could it be my age is finally catching up to me?

-DB