Secrets of the Amateurs

It probably comes across like I'm obsessed with Negreanu and Hellmuth, but I do fancy myself as the amateur psychologist, and what a couple of case studies we have here. As I said in the post on GIQ about sophism, a sophist frequently falls into a contradiction because his arguments are thought up on the fly rather than constructed in a logically consistent way. Imagine my delight when Negreanu pulled this one out last night :

09:39 pm "Also, for those too dense to understand the ramifications of the event not being on television, look at the type of players that would NORMALLY play if their sponsors put up money, but didn't. That creates value for ALL of the players since the majority of the sponsored players are -EV. Has nothing to do with "being on TV", but has everything to do with sponsorship dollars that are gone from the event. "

10:59pm "Seems to me that it's mostly an issue of semantics in terms of the name of the event. If the event is called "The Players Championship" it can use any format that the players think crowns the best all around player."

He wants an event to "crown the best all round player" that's also good value from an EV perspective. Anyone spot the problem ?

If Daniel, or anyone else, wants to be "crowned as the best all around player", it's a lot simpler than that. Go and find the biggest games with the most money on the table, whatever they happen to be right now. Beat them. Basically, be Phil Ivey. Five years ago, the biggest game was the mixed game in Bobby's Room. Fine. Now the biggest games are NL and PLO, and they're mostly online. All that "The best all around player" has to do is sit down and beat the game. There's no point beating HORSE now because the best players don't play HORSE because (duh) it's not the biggest game. If it was, they'd pick it up soon enough, and then you wouldn't be the best at it any more, DUCY ?

As a side note, it is possible that the best players find more value in second-tier games. Isaac Haxton mentioned aejones, ansky and a couple of other players when asked on the Poker Show who the best players are currently, as they're crushing 25-50 and so on. So do that instead. It's just that if DN wants a shot at being considered the best, then he should stop wasting his time making fantasy pools with matchups like Allan Smurfit v Surinder Sunar (seriously), and bring his game up to speed. When he calls out some random guy on the Internet to play 10-20 and then insists on only one-tabling, it just shows how far behind he is. No wonder he wants to push one donkament as some kind of measure of anything.

Playlist 3 :

Avenged Sevenfold - Avenged Sevenfold
Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream
INXS - Kick
Oceansize - Frames
Portishead - Third
Bjork - Medulla
Bach - Brandenburg Concertos
Future Sound Of London - Lifeforms (Disc 1)

Update 30/6 : Hats off to the obviously very intelligent and astute Flawless_CED who made the following post on 2+2 yesterday (forum note: always big up someone who agrees with you ldo)

"Summary of thread and timeline of events:

1) Pros own at poker before TV
2) TV makes NLHE popular
3) New generation of young players learn to really own NLHE
4) Old pros no longer winning consistent bracelets shy away from NLHE
5) Old pros try to make more non-NLHE events at WSOP so they can keep spotlight on them
6) They fail because the viewing public doesn't give a F about viewing their limit/horse events
7) Spoiler: If non NLHE events did gain popularity, wouldn't be long before online guys just learned to own those too... only reason they don't now is because the money is in NLHE."