The Poker Chronicles

I want to see Allen pick Gold apart.

I would say your comment about not having a good player win the tournament in a while is way off base. Greg Raymer has been a regular at Foxwoods for years and has done very well as a tournament player. I have watched him play well at Foxwoods for years in many of the same tourneys I was in. He won the main event 2 years ago and finished in the top 30 last year.

Joe Hachem won the tournament last year, has done very well in tourneys over the past few years and made a decent run this year.

Both of these players made it much further than you did in both years and also have successful tournament track records. I agree that Allen is a better player than both of them, but to say that either is not a good player is moronic. Chris Moneymaker was a lucky guy who had a great run. Raymer and Hachem are tournament pros who have had much success and I would say both of them are good players.

While I agree that Greg and Hachem are great players and are hardly rank amatuers, it was very apparent that Matt was using the term "great" to describe someone with multiple wins under their belt and tons of final table appearances like Cunningham. It was hardly a knock on those other guys. They both have a long way to go before they can put up a tournament resume that even begins to rival Cunninghams.

"I agree that Allen is a better player than both of them, but to say that either is not a good player is moronic. Chris Moneymaker was a lucky guy who had a great run. Raymer and Hachem are tournament pros who have had much success and I would say both of them are good players."

Your statement that both are good players does not necessarily contradict Matt's claim that it's been a while since a GREAT player won the Main Event. Raymer and Hachem might someday be acknowledged as great players, but right now they're still building their resumes.

I'm glad some of my readers can actually read. Raymer isn't a "great" player, though he is very good. And Hachem isn't even good. He's weak-tight, mediocre, and very lucky, at least according to my (very reliable) sources.

Also I love the results-oriented thinking. "Both of these players made it much further than you did" therefore they are great. If you're using my performance in the past two WSOPs as a metric that makes roughly 5,000 great players. Why would anyone say anything that stupid? No wonder it's so easy to make money at this game.

Another wonderful quote: "Raymer and Hachem are tournament pros who have had much success." Actually they are two guys who got lucky (or as you would say "had much success") and then became "tournament pros" (or as I would say "guys who get paid a shitload to sign their name on stuff"). And neither of them have had much success since winning. They both have somewhere in the $300k range worth of cashes on what is undoubtedly at least nearly that much in buy-ins, and maybe more.

ESPN is gona broadcast the final table pay per view, I might watch it over the internet. Love to see the whole thing live.

Raymer has been playing at Foxwoods for a lot longer than you had been playing at your "vegas nights" games in Ohio. He's been on the scene for a long time. I would consider him a great poker player and I have played with him.

I don't know as much about Hachem, but I have read up on some of his stats before he won the tournament, and I know some people who know him from Australia. I'll give you the "good" for him, but the way you phrased your statement, you make it as if he doesn't deserve any credit at all.

You are awfully egotistic. But hey, its your site, you can go on and on as much you want. Everyone agrees with what you say no matter what, even if 99% of what you say is opinion based and can be argued either way.

I was simply stating my opinion and your return is to berate me and say I can't read. Good for you my friend. I'll sit back and read your posts as I always have. I agree with what you say most of the time, but this time I had to disagree. I'll go back to my 6 figure investment management job now and I'll see you on PP where I made over 6 figures last year myself.

If I berated you it is because your comments are full of very poor logic. Also you don't distinguish at all between "good" and "great". Read my sentence and then your first comment responding to it, it really is assinine. You responded to something I didn't even say.

You also use my performance in two tournaments as a metric for greatness. That's just plain stupid, and the fact that you even mentioned it shows a very common lack of poker knowledge. I never said I was "great", by my definition of greatness in tournament poker I am not, but even if I was you couldn't use my perfomance in two tournaments to prove or disprove it. And even if you could do so it would have nothing to do with my statement that neither Raymer nor Hachem are great.

Also there's nothing egotistical about saying someone else isn't great. There's a difference between the two statements "I am great" and "he is not great". That's another common logical flaw amongst poker players that costs a lot of money at the table when it manifests itself during play. If you can't see your error there I recommend another hobby. I hear crocheting is fun.

Also you claim they have successful track records, I would hope an investment manager would know better. They both won one tournament and have since been either marginal winners or slight losers. If you think that is successful you may want to go back and take a high school stastics course. Their sample isn't significant, but if it were their performances since winning one tournament wouldn't make them great.

And the fact that Raymer has been playing for a long time doesn't make him a great player. From what I understand he used to beat up middle stakes stud games at Foxwoods. That alone doesn't make one great. Good, maybe. But not great.

I'm not trying to attack Raymer at all, I like the guy. And he's a good player, no doubt. A lot of people who would know have respect for his game. But if you consider him great then you have a much more liberal definition of greatness than I do. And either way please try to use better logic and reading skills when you respond here in the future.

I guess our definition of great is different then. Stu Ungar won two tournaments almost 10 years apart, but was a donkey in cash games. Most poker players around says he was one of greatest poker player of all time. I think he was a great player as well. However, he only had success in two tournaments, so I guess its not a great measure of success.

I work with Private Equity and some of the best investors I know (billionaires) made 2-3 investments in the past few years. One of them went gold and made them billionaires. Are they great investors? Damn right they are. Sometimes having a small population does not necessarily mean your not great. In fact, sometimes realizing that keeping your sample size small and only playing a few events a year that you think you might be sucessful in makes you great. I would say that applies to Raymer. He doesn't play in all the tournaments. He keeps his tournaments minimized to what he has had success in.

I'm not going to argue logic with someone who has no real world work experience and has not backed himself up with an advanced degree in order to support himself in case poker goes belly up (which all indcations have shown it will eventually). These things are illogical in my mind. What will you do when your wife wants to go on vacatio nand you say "sorry, poker is gone and my fake poker money trading site went belly up, its McDonald's tonight".

Good luck with your future, but I think you should come back with some real world experience before you start throwing the "logic" card.

More faulty logic and cluelessness to boot. Stu Ungar won more than two tournaments. He won three WSOP Main events, and numerous others. And nobody with a clue considers him one of the greatest poker players of all time. Some consider him to be one of the greatest tournament players. There's a big difference.

Pretty much everything you say is illogical. Remind me never to put any money in the hands of Private Equity.

Logic doesn't take a college degree or a job, as shown by the fact that you have one or both and can't even understand the simplest logical statements. If poker completely vanished tomorrow, which is impossible, I have more than enough capital saved to do something else with, including get an advanced degree.

Poker has been growing in popularity every year for over a century now. The bubble may burst, but it will still be a viable means of making money for me. It's not going to completely disappear. Maybe it won't be as popular as it is right now, but I'll certainly still be able to make a lot more money than I need to. I have friends who were making a quarter mil a year before the WPT ever came on the air, when sites had less than 5% of the action they do now. It's not that hard.

And this thread, which I am now bored of, proves that I have far more skill in applying logic to situations than you. And I have plenty of real world experience in it. That's what poker is. That's what writing is about too, at least in part. If you can't go through your past few comments and find at least 5 gaping logical holes, try printing this out and taking it to any college philosphy professor, who has nothing but experience in logic. I'd love to hear their thoughts.

Jon, you are a dope. You are berating Matt for not having an advanced degree, but you don't understand finance or probability. By your logic the guy who won the last powerball is a greatest investor in the history of the world cause he was "smart" enough to put a buck on the right 6 numbers. Maybe you can calculate the ROI of a $240M payday on a dollar investment and then go rub one out. Imagine how much he could make managing your $5B fund? As your stats prof probably told you (maybe you skipped that class or fell asleep), every investment return has a systematic element and an unsystematic element. There are lots of numbskulls who have gotten lucky and become or been born rich. Its the Cunninghams and Warren Buffets of the world that have a demonstrable, underlying skill for winning.

And your old college professor sounds stoned.

Raymer won a bunch of races on the way to the title. I personally wouldn't want to play him heads up for high stakes, but I'm sure Negraneau or Cunningham would do it all day long.

That was my fault. I was bored so I responded, rather than just deleting stupidity like I normally do. From there it went how it always goes. I forgot the cardinal rule of internet arguments: you can't convince an idiot that they are an idiot because if they were smart enough to understand why they are an idiot, they wouldn't be an idiot in the first place.

Haha I like that last statement of yours Matt. Jon take the bad beat and don't ridicule yourself any further.

This being the internet, and Jon being in private equity, him taking his beat is highly unlikely.

I'm a friend and coworker of the guy who started this rant, here in New York and I also read your site. I have to make a few corrections to what some of what you (and your readers)are saying.

There's a huge difference between winning powerball and making a smart investment. One is purely random and involves luck and the other involves analysis and thought, much like poker.

In the PE world we work in, making a smart investment is an extremely difficult thing to do. We often make what we think is a good decision based on the information in front of us, but the investment goes sour because we didn't have all of the information we needed. Every once in a while, we get all of the information we need, we make a great deal and make a lot of money. There are a lot of less skilled managers out there who never make a good investment and go broke. If you were to read through a private equity portfolio you would see that the majority of investments are duds.

To say that a private equity manager with over 8 years experience, a CFA, as well as an MBA has no knowledge of probability, statistics or systematic and unsystematic risk elements, is way off base. Maybe you should know who you are talking about before making a comment like that.

A good freind of ours, named David Einhorn recently finished in the top 30 at the Main Event. Do you have any clue who he is? No. Do you think he got lucky? Most likely. Do you realize that he is one of this country's best money managers and could probably pick both of you apart at a poker table? No.

You people are stuck in your own mouse-clicking world of internet poker. You think that coming into the world, getting an MBA and making millions after poker will be an easy thing to do, but I guarantee you it will not be.

It's very amusing to see how just about anyone defends Matt because he runs the site. He could make any comment he wants despite how opinion-based it is and everyone would agree. Monkey see - Monkey do!

Most of what you say may be true Tom. It doesn't change a few facts:

1) Your friend has poor ML skills, as Sklansky would say. He commits many of the most common logical fallacies in his few comments, not to mention that the whole thing started when he responded to something I didn't even say. That's just plain stupid. Do you dispute that?

2) If he understands statistics then why does he repeatedly mention a bunch of things that are stastically insignificant as if they were significant? Forgive me for not doing in-depth research on every guy who makes a stupid comment on my blog, but if he understands basic statistics then he sure doesn't sound like it. Perhaps he just doesn't understand poker well enough to apply statistics. Either way it makes his comments sound even more assinine. Do you dispute that?

3) Poker is nothing like your type of investing. It's very easy to determine which tournaments are profitable and which aren't, and which are more profitable than others. If you're a great player they all are profitable. Actually to Raymer, who I don't think is a great player, just about all of them are a winning proposition.

You of course can't predict which ones you will win at, which makes your friend's assertion that a great player might "keep his tournaments minimized to what he has had success in" fairly ludicrous. Do you dispute that?

4) David Einhorn may be a great investor, but he isn't a great poker player. He may be pretty good for an amateur, but he isn't anywhere near great. I don't know who you are referring to by "both of you," but he probably couldn't beat me at any of the games I am competent at in heads up matches over the long run.

5) I have enough friends who've made their millions (with or without MBAs) and have made enough money of my own in ways other than poker to be pretty confident that it won't be hard. Your friend has become a savvy investor (according to you) without even having the logic skills necessary to craft a coherent argument. I'm pretty sure that means I could figure it out.