Derby holds POY tourney
By Barbara Engler

On Aug. 14 the Lucky Derby Casino hosted a special deep stack tournament featuring The Cardroom’s 2009 Player of the Year Gerry Davidow. Sixty-seven players came to Citrus Heights from as far away as Fresno and Vallejo to take part in the $150 buy-in tournament that featured $50 bounties on all players and a special $200 bounty on Davidow.

When all the dust had settled, 11 players wound up in the money with the final seven making a deal to chop. Each taking home $900 from the $8,710 prize pool were David Hurley, Andy Higgins, and Barbara Tymchyshyn. Frank Holloway, Jason Collins, Mike Lus, and Tricia Tequida each received $500 with the remainder going to Dan Mitchell, Josh Hilton, Bill Barber, and Randall Rapp (The Cardroom’s editor and NorCal Poker Ambassador). click here to read the whole article!

Final NorCal results at WSOP
By Arnold Warner

This turned out to be quite a year at the World Series of Poker for players hailing from Northern California. In our last issue we reported on three bracelets heading this direction after the first 50 events. The final seven events are now concluded (with the exception of the Main Event’s “November Nine”) and we can add one more bracelet to the total.

Tomer Berda of Menlo Park took home the hardware and $825,976 in Event #56: No-Limit Hold’em (July 2 to 6). The buy-in was $2,500 with 1,942 entries, creating a prize pool of $4,466,600.

Berda is a 34-year-old software developer who has his own high-tech company. He spent most of his life living and working in Israel, before immigrating to the United States. click here to read the whole article!

NorCal Poker Ambassador
Making the trek to wine country
By Randall Rapp

Nothing makes for a great weekend like lots of poker coupled with the opportunity for wine tasting, and few places give you this one-two punch like Sonoma and Mendocino Counties.

The 101 Casino
Petaluma

Mrs. A and I took off on a Friday morning with the goal of reaching Petaluma in time to have lunch at The 101. When arriving, I find myself struck once again with what an incredible makeover they’ve given the place in the last year or two. As always, Daniel Tierney was a wonderful host as he showed us around while we waited for our food to arrive. click here to read the whole article!

Observations of a Poker Room Manager
More tales of my Mississippi poker days
By Daniel Higginbotham

Back in Mississippi, not all of the interesting people were in the bigger games. Our smaller games never lacked those Runyonesque characters that I have always been so interested in. In fact, a lot of the more interesting ones were pit dealers at our casino that would come in to play poker; we had Gloria, FS, TK, CC, GS and many more that always kept us entertained. On one of my first nights I was standing behind a $1/5 7-Card Stud table just watching the game, trying to get a feel for the players and the room in general, and I saw something that blew my mind. Now you have to remember, I had just come from downtown Vegas where these low limit stud games were pure rock gardens, so I was totally unprepared for what I was about to witness. click here to read the whole article!

Tales from the Floor
Parnters or adversaries? Who can tell?
By Johnny Coldeck

Whoever said that politics makes strange bedfellows was obviously not a poker player. The little pairings, partnerships and playmates at the poker table put the oddities of international politics to shame. As in politics, the alliances never seem to last for long.

Sometimes the associations make a certain amount of sense. Take the case of Welder Willy and his cohort Framin’ Frank. Now, this is a match made in heaven. With a combined IQ which would keep butter stiff, they make the perfect poker partnership. They are from a small town in the mountains where running water and electricity are still really neat ideas; they have the refinement and grace which would make them welcome into a polite society (of wolves); they have similar personal grooming habits (to warthogs); and they have a nearly-identical poker playing style. click here to read the whole article!

Gus Hansen reveals every hand
By Raymond T. Akers

Have you ever wished you could crawl inside the brain of one of these bigshot poker pros to get an idea of what the heck they were thinking when they made a particular move? Not just any brain either, but the one belonging to Gus Hansen, commonly regarded as one of the wildest players out there.

This is exactly what you get with Hansen’s “Every Hand Revealed” (Lyle Stuart). He takes you through his win at the 2007 Aussie Millions Main Event where he outlasted 746 other players to take down the championship and $1.2 million.

Most of the poker books out there are either biographies or instructional books offering theoretical advice on how to be a better player. A lot of those books are obviously very good and you can learn a lot from them. click here to read the whole article!

Tells-n-Lies
Stepping up in limits with Ira
By Victor Shaw

The game of poker is a fascinating game and Texas Hold’em seems so simple that even a novice can be fooled into thinking it is a simple game. The nuances and complexities of the game reveal themselves ever so slowly. Players tend to grow and learn because they want to win or at least avoid losing.

To learn and grow while you are winning is very difficult. I have detailed this concept several times and discussed my difficulties in moving up to the $10/20 game. Stepping up to the next level of play is very difficult and often very humbling.

I was recently reminded of my young protégé Ira and our adventures of poker. Ira had learned to play poker very well and was a solid winning player at the hometown hero level. Ira made thousands of dollars in Crescent City playing $3/6 limit and $1/2 no-limit. click here to read the whole article!

Read in terms of ranges
By Bernard Harris

There are over 2.5 million hand combinations in Hold’em which makes guessing your opponents’ holdings problematic. Most players take a limited approach and put their villains on one or two hands. Unfortunately, this tendency is a leak in many players’ games. Instead of reading the villain for a single hand, it is better to put your opponent(s) on a range of hands.

Reading in terms of ranges means you assign your villains all the possible hands you think they would play in a given situation. This is where your observation of their play, tendencies, and hand histories comes into use. The following fictional $5-200 spread-limit Hold’em scenario illustrates this concept.

Effective stacks are $500. Players limp preflop until Mr. Rock raises $35 from mid position. Everyone folds except for Mr. Station who calls from the button. What do these two players have? click here to read the whole article!

Bring your POY ID & name to TDs
By Arnold Warner

As we head into the homestretch of the 2010 NorCal Poker Player of the Year contest, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on how things are going so far. So we asked The Cardroom’s editor and POY commissioner Randall Rapp for a “state of the contest” commentary.

“Overall, we’re very pleased with how the contest is developing,” he said. “Remember though, it’s still basically in its infancy so there are going to be a few bumps along the way. We’ve had some unexpected situations occur that we had to deal with on the fly, but we’ll learn from them so it should only make the program stronger.

“We’ll definitely have some rules changes for 2011 dealing with the use of POY IDs, as well as when and how casinos are eligible to participate. We will also probably tweak the points system again. One thing we’re definitely considering is expanding our 10 percent rule [the top 10 percent of players in a tournament are eligible for points] to go beyond just the top 10 players, or final table. In other words, if a tournament has 240 players then 24 places would receive points. click here to read the whole article!