BLOG – How a Kiwi saved the poker economy

BLOG – How a Kiwi saved the poker economy

Monday, 7 June 2010

Shortly after Simon Watt, a former APPT champion from New Zealand, won the $1,500 Event #11 at the World Series of Poker not half an hour ago as I write this, Mike Matusow burst into the room and cried: "Thank you for saving us all millions of dollars! How does it feel to be every high-stakes gamblers hero? They're gonna, like, put you on the wall in Bobby's Room or some shit."

Tom “durrrr” Dwan would have become legend had he won a bracelet. Alright, he’s already a legend but without the recognition of Joe Public, The Great Unwashed, Donkament Fans, whatever you wanna call ‘em, he isn’t quite there. Had he built a multi-million dollar poker empire and topped it off with a WSOP bracelet at age 23 there would be no doubt of his status.
Of course, he couldn’t care less about the status – his Full Tilt Poker sponsorship has him set for life and he crushes the biggest games going. He just wanted the cold, hard cash that he would receive in prop bets for winning a bracelet.


Dwan has a series of bets going for the next few WSOP tournament and rumour has it that if he won a bracelet he would net himself anywhere from $8m to eight figures. There is no verification for this but it would certainly be more than two million; enough to make the $600,000 first prize that Simon Watt ended up taking home look irrelevant. Dwan won a little under $400,000 in the end but that’s not even two full buy-ins at his usual deepstacked table. It would be like me playing a 3-day tournament to net $100. Of course if I had $20,000 in side bets running...
But he didn’t and that was that. Even durrrr can’t overcome a huge chip deficit and the luck-ridden laws of donkaments. Speaking of donkaments, the $10,000 Stud event concluded with Men “The Master” Nguyen taking down his seventh bracelet. Nguyen's victory won't be the most popular of this year's WSOP as he has something of a reputation. There have been accusations from such reliable poker figures as Daniel Negreanu and John Juanda of Nguyen:


Stealing chips from tournaments to use in bigger buy-in events
Soft-playing those he stakes
Forcing staked players to lose pots to him
Being a general douche at the table


It’s people like him who give the game a terrible name and the fact that he has netted a number of bracelets equal to standout characters and legends such as Erik Seidel and Phil Ivey is just a bit... wrong, no?



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