Secrets of the Amateurs

Past the half-way mark now and the pace is beginning to tell. Various reports I'm hearing suggest that it's more fractious out there by the day, and I doubt it's going to ease off soon. Anyhoo, it's been a fairly quiet week for our WSOP trackees. Euro pros are a comfortable $1m up thanks to Flushy's second big score, this one an eye-watering $300k for second in the $10k Omaha 8. Maximum respect ! Moorman and Elky have also chipped in with decent scores to keep them ticking over nicely. 2+2ers are about $200k down, not too much going on there. TV pros, however, continue to dig themselves deeper and deeper, with the sole exception of Men Nguyen. Men is heads up in the $5K 6-max as I write, guaranteed $410k and gunning for $250k more ftw. A win would pull the TV pros back to $500k down.

Without Men it would be a complete trainwreck for this group ; not one of the other 19 is in profit and some of the stats make gruesome reading. We will, however, wait for the rest of the series before laughing too loud. One more interesting factor to relate is that only 2 of my 60 chosen players have failed to show - and they're both Danish, Eastgate and Jorgensen. Dr Pauly suggested on a recent 2+2 podcast that a lot of Scandis aren't showing because of tax issues which I could believe. Good podcast by the way, excellent interview with Barry Greenstein, check it out. And well done to Mike Ellis, yet another one for the good guys !

As for me, I enjoyed putting some volume in for a few weeks but soon enough it reached the point where I thought "fuck it, football's on". You know what I'm like by now :). The only thing I'm going to commit to medium term is playing Sundays. Must play Sundays. Quite looking forward to tonight after a break. Besides that, woteva. As I alluded to on Twitter, I'm becoming more comfortable with not feeling that I have to prove anything to anyone. We'll see how it goes.

And finally, great post on 2+2 from chicken10der in a thread about WSOP disappointments :

"lisandro won 3 bracelets last year and doesn't have any this year. what a dropoff, i guess he just forgot how to play. how did he get so bad in one year?

Update : Nguyen 2nd, TV pros currently $750k down.