Players on Social Media Talk Main Event Play & Fashion
GipsyTeam
Yesterday, 15:08
The Japanese are counting their money. An incredible $25,000 solver. Alex Foxen demands his chips back. Gambling stories and Kyle Ray's bewilderment. The finalists' best cosplays. Ryan Riess takes pity on dogs, and other quick news.
This year's World Series of Poker was memorable for its unusually large Japanese presence. Players from Japan were also wildly active on social media, and their joyful excitement at the Vegas atmosphere reminded me of the first mass forays into the WSOP by players from post-Soviet countries. But are there any differences? In 2009, I was impressed by the buffet at one of the hotels near the Rio, where you could eat for just $6—a stark contrast to expensive Moscow. But Vegas has become much more expensive since then, and the yen...
Kazuhiro Shirasawa, who took third place in the $3,000 nine-game tournament for $111,610 (that barely saved him from going broke), shared his first impressions upon returning home:
Common experiences of people returning from WSOP, No. 2
The first time I saw Razz Solver, it was a world that far exceeded my imagination. 90% limp
Tyler Phillips:
– Delete this please. The good players already playing near 100% limp
Ryutaro Suzuki:
– Let's buy it lol
– It seems to be $25,000😫
– Let's hold off and buy the $25,000 tournament that's coming up in the future!
Because of the five betting streets, the lack of community cards, the critical importance of dead cards, and the lack of good abstractions, the game tree is huge and makes the game incredibly difficult for a computer to solve. But that doesn't seem to stop some people!
Derek Kwan wrote a short article asking for the return of the ability for players to build small cities from chips.
The title? "Make chip stacks great again," of course.
Matt Savage called it "nonsense, but Alex Foxen, drew attention to the advantages of this decision.
Beyond the clear aesthetic benefits of bigger stacks, the color-up obsession has technical drawbacks as well. Playing 1500bb with no 100s in play forces players to 2x, 2.33x, or 2.67x. Almost no one would choose these sizes if unrestricted. Forcing such limited choices in terms of sizing hurts the ability to he precise way beyond what is reasonable.
Blind levels should not be amended to fit a color up schedule. Chips should only be taken out of play once they are no longer needed while using a standard 1:2 sb to bb ratio. You should always be able to bet in increments that represent at most 10% of 1 bb with the exception of the earliest levels. This would mean that 100s come out once entering 5k bb 500s come out after 10k bb is complete. 1ks in play until 50k bb is complete. We shouldn't sacrifice bet size options for the ease of the TD (within reason)
The exception is in turbo events where all ins occur frequently. Aggressive color up is more necessary when stacks are needed to be counted regularly. In an event like the WSOP Main, where all ins are quite rare even as far along as day 5/6, having larger stacks is a no brainer.
Alec Torelli:
Fully agree here. The color up police is getting a little out of hand.
It’s also incredibly anti climatic to make Day 6-8 and have 20 physical chips in front of you.
Another player brough up a good point about potentially slowing the game down.
Gotta love those shallow Day 2s with 30 minute levels where players spend half their time asking for counts and dealers counting stacks after all-ins. Having more chips would slow down this process even more.
During the break between the end of the main part of the WSOP and the end of the main tournament, Faraz Jaka fell into reminiscing.
At 19, I turned $3k into $180k playing poker from my college dorm room
This is how it happened.
Freshman year of college, I had about $3k to my name I built up playing live dorm games.
I took $500 and started jumping into $10/$20 NL online, buying in for the minimum.
Lost twice. Then ran a stack up to $10k later that week.
From there I started sitting every $25/$50 NL table I could get action at, and sometimes even $100/$200 ($20k buy-in) heads-up and 6-max on the Prima Network.
This was 2004. I was playing under the screen name The-Toilet 0, and without knowing it, I was battling some of the best cash game players in the world at that time. My regular opponents would be the likes of Ram Vaswani, Prahlad Friedman, and "Dared."
I had no idea who any of them were. I didn't follow poker and didn't know anyone else who played seriously.
I played an absurdly aggressive style that almost nobody was using back then. I'd show huge bluffs to tilt people, was good at adapting to my opponents, and they just didn't know how to combat it.
Within a few months, I had turned that $3k into $180k... from my dorm room at the University of Illinois.
Going to class became a tough opportunity cost. I'd wake up, see someone sitting with $10k at a heads-up table, and have to choose between playing them or going to lecture.
But playing $5k to $20k buy-ins, even with a $180k bankroll, is a guaranteed way to eventually go broke just via variance alone.
Add in the fact that I had never learned real fundamentals and was relying almost entirely on raw talent and feel, so I assume the players must have adjusted to my fundamental leaks.
By junior year I'd not just lost it all but got myself into over $30k in debt at the age of 21.
I got extremely depressed and went through what was the toughest year of my life. Financially and emotionally, I was in a hole I didn't know I'd ever be able to dig myself out of.
But I did.
Looking back, playing that big was a bankroll disaster but...
At the same time, battling the best players in the world with zero fear, then having to learn to swallow my pride and grind it back from $5 buy-ins after playing $20k buy-ins... taught me lessons I couldn't have learned any other way.
Since then, I've never really been intimidated by any opponent or scared to pull the trigger on a big bluff, no matter how much money is at stake.
And whenever life or business gets difficult, I remind myself that I've already climbed out of what felt like rock bottom. If I could fight my way back from that, I can fight my way back from anything.
The story actually gets a lot crazier... but I'll save the details for another day. 😉
P.S. I hadn't looked at these screenshots in over a decade. I'd forgotten they still had the chat logs. 😂
Whether Galliano's cosplay was intentional or just the orange shirt is unknown to us, but Michael's performance at the final table was very sober and a little depressing.
Lauri Saaskilahti also did some cosplay, but only Nick Rigby Nick Rigby noticed:
Well, the most striking cosplay of the first day of the finals was put on by Han Feng.
Greg Jennings asked an unexpected question:
If Feng wins, players will be staring at this banner 30 years from now wondering what the hell was going on in 2026.
But Feng was unable to prevail. He exited the final table on Day 2, busted preflop all-in with aces, and the hand became one of the most discussed on poker Twitter.
With an 8.5bb stack, Feng min-raised from first position in a 5-handed hand. Saaskilahti quickly isolated him from the button. Greg Mueller, in the big blind, grabbed his cards with the clear intention of folding them as quickly as possible, but suddenly realized things weren't so simple...
Here we already see that nines are more likely to be folded, and a 5bb three-bet is much more common than a 20bb all-in. And overall, given the Finn's play, the strategy seems completely unrealistic. Seeing this, Jaka offers his own variation of the Saaskilahti game:
Greg Mueller vs. Solver Button:
and against non-solver:
The mathematically correct decision in any case was to call. But Greg ultimately folded, and rightly so – Saaskilahti made a straight, eliminating Feng in fifth place, and Müller outlasted Galliano and finished third.
Of course, this distribution didn't escape the observant Sam Greenwood. Hot on the heels, he wrote:
I haven't run it and idk exact stacks, but Greg folding JJ only works if he believes Lauri understands that the minraise range UTG is very strong and is AA or bluffs and I don't think Lauri is adjusting accordingly and is going to be too loose so Greg should stack off JJ.
After Greg Muller's elimination, two players remained in the game. Jess Vierling decided to show concern for the fragile psyche of one of them:
Doctor's advice: I really hope Jumalon does NOT win the WSOP Main simply for the reason that if this 22yo boy wins with his inferior technical skills, he will get hyped, think he's a poker God, play big, lose the $10mil plus some and have to claw himself back out of the hole the hard way or die trying. GG to Feng who got punished for his mistake of not jamming TT pre. He was supposed to... but now let's see Saski get it. Feels like he has the maturity and bankroll to not let it fuck him up mentally.
I hope you never win a poker tournament because you’ll probably buy a bunch of more dogs and bring like 9 fucking dogs to the tournament with you and everyone at the table will be accidentally kicking your dogs while you sit there and play poker for 12 hours a day. It’s not because I don’t like the dogs. It’s BECAUSE I do.
Since 2 people will find an insane amount of wealth after today, let’s start a thread on the dumbest ways you’ve gone broke. I’ll start
When I was 20, there was a pool table at the fair. Rules were simple, break and run 4 balls any order, win any prize. 4 balls on the table, easy, right? LOL, $2500 later I was broke and had zero prizes.
Scott Seiver:
– Sat in with my entire bankroll at railheaven on Full Tilt Poker, lost.
Rob Kuhn:
– Played in a private game with keating bruno mars and some big wigs from NY, was advertised as 100/200 so didnt want to sell much (sold 20%). The blinds after two orbits were 100/200/400/800/1600/3200/6400
Brought 200k, lost 1.1mill and let the guys who bought action freeroll the other 900k i lost on top (they lost on the intial buy only -kinda obvious). Didn't completely felt me but sure did hurt
Beriuzy:
Had 25k when i was 17 from playing underage. I'm 18 with 100k now, threw big parties for friends & provided everything. Last party cost 15k ish to impress a girl. It didnt work. My friend said " why didnt you just take her to Turks & Caicos instead?"
Realized I'm a moron & never did that shit again 😂
Joe Cada raised an important topic, in my opinion, that is almost never discussed before the heads-up:
I low key hate the BB ante heads up. The whole point of the BB ante was to speed up play and eliminate a lot of chips in play full ring. Keeping an extra blind in play heads up changes the game so much. They can at least reduce it to .5 bbs.
Jonathan Tamayo:
– It made preflop kinda wild because there's so much in the middle.
Andy Wilson:
– Also increases how much recreationals can get wrecked due to preflop.
The frantic hand, in which Saaskilahti's unfortunate calldown effectively decided the title, sparked a storm of varied emotions.
I will just say about that final hand, if the river isn't another spade, there's probably a different main event champion and people call it the best call in main event history. Funny how poker can work like that, so let's just all remember that in this moment
– He's bluffing the river if it blanks after 2x pot turn bet gets called?
The new WSOP champ seems like a really nice kid and a solid player.
Happy to see him win, CONGRATS!
It's also pretty comical listening to a 22 year old talk about the ups and downs of a poker career when I have people who still owe me money from before he was even born.
