[cero_z]

Hi IHC,

I guess you're serious. I thought you were going to talk about the play in general, leading up to the final table. Your final table assessments range from hasty to dead wrong, IMO. I have played against Barch, and he is very, very tough. Matusow is obviously skilled though emotionally fragile. Black appeared to play extremely well to me, with the exception of the set of 5s hand you mentioned. I address this below. Hachem seemed to play reasonably well, though too conservative to win without winning every big pot he played, often as a coinflip or as a dog, which was the case at least as far as the televised hands were concerned. Does anyone like his HU call in the BB with 73o against a player like Dannenman? Not me, and I'm one of the loosest out there.

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Black would have won the whole thing if he hadn't blown that set of 5s vs Kanter. He was so petrified of a draw that he just basically moved all in and did all he could to keep Kanter from calling. Loser poker.


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This was my response at first, too, but then I tried to think of why an otherwise very solid player would do such a thing. I suspect that he had been running over the game to accumulate and expand his chip lead when this hand came up, and was playing it fast, expecting someone to take a stand against him with a medium-strong or better hand. The youngster with a penchant for gambling seems like a good target for that move to me. Notice that Black also played his JJ very fast in a spot where it surely figured to be good, and got paid.

I don't know that the above scenario is accurate, but you don't know that it isn't. I believe that viewed through this lens, Black's play with 555 was a small mistake, though still probably wrong (these opportunities are so rare and big that you can't waste them). You must realize that we only see a tiny fraction of the hands played when we watch the WSOP on TV.

And finally,

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David Williams...decent to very good.


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This must be a joke.