[Al_Capone_Junior]

Well I sign in this morning and see this challenge post (and some rather interesting responses), so I guess I have to respond...

First off, I'm not impressed by your creating a phantom account to hide your true identity. Everyone knows exactly who I am, many have met me, many have played against me, both online and live, and it isn't a mystery who *I* am. Although I don't like to divulge where I work on the forums, I make no effort to hide my identity to those who ask. It's doubtful I will take you up on your offer as long as your true identity remains anonymous.

Second, I don't play online anymore. That's basically etched in stone. I do however, make the occasional exception for the king of the zoo tournaments. I had fun bantering and talking chit with the zooers. I respect the KOTZ group of players, and like to occasionally make an appearance in their tournaments. This is especially true since I did win a KOTZ pot limit hold'em event a couple years ago, thus I am a former KOTZ champion. The final hand I won with pocket ACES, BTW (you can find the whole story posted somewhere in the archives, I think in the MTT forum). However, I'm a LIVE player now, I live in VEGAS.

Third, I'm not opposed to a challenge. I don't always have to have the best of it, I will play against better players. Hell, if greenstein or negraneau or sklansky wanted to play me in a heads up match of some sort, and I could afford the stakes, I would take them on, even though I wouldn't have any illusions about who was more likely to win the match. There are lots of players out there who are better than me.

Fourth, a heads up match doesn't really test much except one's skills in heads up matches. I haven't played an actual heads up match in quite a while. You might be an online heads up SNG specialist and be highly favored to kick my ass, I don't know, because your true identity hasn't been revealed yet.

Fifth, I am not opposed to a publicity stunt just for the fun of it. I considered challenging Vince Lepore to a live heads up limit hold'em match a while back, just because I like Vince and his posts, and I figured we would have fun with it. But I got sidetracked with life and never got around to it, oh well. He would have been favored to beat me, as he's certainly a better limit player than me, but I would have had fun taking him on anyway.

Lastly, I wouldn't do this type of thing for a lot of money. Anything that is significant to me financially would be best spent by me playing in live ring games here in Vegas. I can pick and choose my games, leave when the game sucks, stay when it's good, and generally be assured that over time I will beat the tourists and make a decent hourly rate playing cards. $500 a match is far more than I would ever consider for a heads-up challenge, particularly not best of five (or seven), played online against an unknown 2+2 opponent.

So I'm not saying there's no way I will ever take you on, but thusfar it doesn't look good. Work on it some and get back with me. Perhaps as a publicity stunt for the next magoo fest we could arrange something tho....

al