[shaniac]

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These Stuey hand stories don't age well.

In all the hands you cited in this thread, Stuey was helped along enormously by his opponents' bad play and his decisions usually seem more inspired with regard to the results than the integrity of the plays. If anything, the praise he receives from Phil and others is a reflection on how much more sophisticated our collective understanding of NL tournament play is today than it was when Stuey was in his "prime."

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right....let's look at this year's final table for this superior NL play:

Example 1: On the flop, holding top pair, terrible kicker, Kanter reraises a bet from Hachem and a rereaise from Barch and then moves all-in after Barch reraises again.

Example 2: Dannenmann goes bust with A3 on a connected board with top pair and the idiot end of a straight draw.

Example 3: Lazar calls Black's preflop all-in with QTo.

Example 4: Lazar calls Dannenmann's preflop all-in with K9s.

Donktastic plays such as these are likely to happen in next year's WSOP just as they have happened in the past. True, Stuey ran goot with both his cards and having such bad donks, but similair things happen. If Raymer's kings had held up this year, would you have said he was a great player or got lucky b/c some donk had tried to catch a runner runner flush?

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My only point was that our COLLECTIVE understanding of NL tournament play is far advanced from where it was 5 years, 10 years ago, etc. Not sure how you expect to contradict that argument by mentioning high-profile recent examples of inferior play. I never compared Ungar to 2005's Final Table, I merely said that our ability to interpret the data has come a long way.

Since you decided to highlight 4 inferior plays from this year's WSOP anyway, I'll humor you and explain them:

example 1: I don't remember the hand, but it's easily explainable: Kanter kinda sucks at poker.

example 2: Dannenmann clearly didn't give a crap at this point in the tournament whether he went bust or not.

examples 3 and 4: Pretty clear, and instantly identifiable, psychological meltdown. Happens in tournaments.

As for the Raymer question--it was clear to me a long time before he won the 2004 WSOP that Raymer has a highly adept poker mind.