I haven't posted in awhile, but here are my thoughts on the TOC coverage.....
--i thought the production quality was very high. espn did an incredible job of summarizing the action and making the telecast entertaining.
--the editors were relatively kind to me (brandon adams). perhaps surprisingly, they were also kind to steve dannenmann.
--i'm surprised that tony bloom didn't get more airtime. he's an incredible player --- the only reason you don't hear more about him is that he makes so much $ doing other things that poker is often a waste of time for him. unlike steve d and hoyt c, tony is completely unreadable at the table. at the first hand of the final table, i laid down QQ pre-flop against tony's AA --- i thought that would make the coverage but it didn't.
--IMO, phil h and mike m are nice guys and there's no question that they're incredible poker players. my theory on mike m is that he's extreme ADD and he'll sometimes go on crazy tilt online or in boring tourney situations, but when the cameras are on, he's a focused guy and he plays just an incredible game of poker. btw, i have five or six diff names online, but when i won the 40k off matusow, i was playing under "brandonadams" on the short-lived site
www.pokershare.com.
--a few people picked-up a tell on hoyt, but in general he played very very well at the final table. he picked-up a lot of pots with raises and re-raises pre-flop once the table got short-handed. the criticisms that phil h had of him were clearly unjustified. phil h has unparalleled reading ability and he's clearly among the best in the world, but sometimes you sense that he doesn't appreciate the mathematics that favor the aggressive style of matusow or corkins. matusow won the tournament by making a lot of moves with hands that were huge dogs to a call.
--david levi should have gotten more coverage but his tight playing style works against tv coverage. david's extremely pleasant at the poker table (which i guess also works against tv coverage) and his tournament results this yr have been excellent.
Brandon
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