Event Overview
DATES:
September 6-9th, 2011
BUY-IN:
$20,000
ADDED MONEY:
$400,000
PRIZE POOL:
$2,301,200
FIRST PLACE:
$782,460
STRUCTURE:
8-Max
The Palms witnessed some great poker as the field played down across four days until a winner was crowned. The structure allowed the best players in the world to utilize their strategy throughout the tournament and the quality of poker was evident.
On November 4th, Velocity and CBS began broadcasting episodes from Event 2 and we have all the information to go along with it.
Complete Broadcast Schedule can be found here.
Just after 3 AM on Saturday, Mike McDonald from Waterloo, Ontario became Epic Poker League’s Main Event 2 Champion, defeating Hong Kong commodities trader and high-stakes poker player David Steicke heads-up. McDonald and Steicke were the last competitors from ninety-seven on Tuesday and eight who started the final table more than twelve hours before. For McDonald, the final table was trial by ordeal. After losing a catastrophic hand to Erik Seidel with ten players left, he went from the top of the chip leaderboard to seventh among the eight starting play Friday. Even after eliminating third-place finisher Fabrice Soulier, Mike never had the chip lead until he was heads-up with David, and even then he had to win a pot worth eighty percent of the chips in play.
A Champion for the Ages
*Mike is the youngest player in Epic Poker League, where membership requires (among other accomplishments) $1.25 million in career live tournament poker earnings.
*Mike is the youngest League member by a margin of at least a year. That means he will be younger next year than any other League member this year. In fact, there is a reasonable chance that he will be the youngest League member next year. It may be several years before another twenty-one-year old qualifies for Epic Poker.
*If Epic Poker had started a year earlier with similar requirements, Mike undoubtedly would have qualified, though ineligible because at age twenty, he would not have legally been allowed to play poker at the Palms.
*(Here is where it gets even better.) McDonald is a full-time college student and has already largely retired from professional poker. In April 2010, he explained in his blog that “despite playing lots of poker and enjoying it plenty, I feel unfulfilled by it and think it can cause me to feel unfulfilled about other things in my life.” He concluded, “for now I don’t really know whether I’ll be considering myself a ‘pro poker player’ anymore. I’ll still play. I’m sure it will always be a part of my life …. In some ways I feel that the poker chapter of my life is ending and although I may regret it I’m looking forward to finding something new.”
It sounds remarkably cliché to say something like “Mike McDonald has a very old soul” but that is an accurate way of conveying that the precocity of his poker talent is not the most interesting aspect of his personality. He was more than five months from his twenty-first birthday when he wrote those words, but he proved true to his intentions. Although he has played some outstanding poker, he re-enrolled in college, in the business program at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. He is a full-time student, enjoying meeting new people, learning more about health and nutrition, thinking about some future business plans, and trying to read more.
McDonald has been playing online poker since he was fifteen. By the time he graduated from high school, he was making six-figures online. As “Timex,” he became one of the most respected and successful online poker players. He tried university, but was too good at poker to continue. He played his first live tournament, World Series of Poker Europe, the week of his eighteenth birthday. After successes in the Czech Republic and Australia, he became poker’s youngest major titleholder just five months later when he won €933,000 (over $1.3 million) and the European Poker Tour’s German Open in Dortmund.
How often does a talent this great, having earned this much success, even partially withdraw to seek a more balanced and fulfilling life at twenty-one? Has any modern athlete won $4-5 million and then become a full-time student? Any television or film personality? Any musical performer?
Don’t get the idea from these platitudes that Mike McDonald thinks he is somehow too good for poker or noble because he wants to be a college student. As he said in his blog one year after announcing his return to school, “while I may come across as if I know what’s best for myself, I am ultimately still a kid who has no idea what to do with my life.”
Before play started on Friday, Mike and I talked about shared reading interests, though he has to devote a lot of his reading time to course-work. I recommended Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein, about a writer who covers the U.S. Memory Championship, meets some European competitive memory champions who share their techniques, and trains for the following year’s U.S. Championship.
A poker player of McDonald’s talent and accomplishments, though he never heard of a memory competition, instantly understood that such a thing existed – indeed, must exist. Mike told me that, even before he started playing poker, he wanted to be a world-class competitor at something. “We’re a games-playing family – cards, chess, board games. When I told my dad that if I worked at it, I could become a world-champion Monopoly player, he said, ‘What you need is to get a girlfriend.’”
Cracking up, Mike concluded, “That’s probably the best advice he’s ever given me.”
Many Happy Returns
The expression “many happy returns” is typically a birthday greeting, a wish that the celebrant have many more birthdays. According to Wikipedia, its earliest attributable use was by a Lady Newdigate in an 1789 letter: “Many happy returns of ye day to us my Dr Love.” I don’t know who Lady Newdigate was – or, for that matter, the identity of this Doctor Love character – but it can be a birthday greeting as well an encouragement to travelers. It could apply to any of the seven talented players Mike McDonald outlasted at the final table.
David Steicke, second place, $506,260 – David Steicke plays only the biggest poker tournaments. He literally can’t afford to play smaller: he is a full-time commodities trader and his home in Hong Kong is too far from most tournaments outside the Pacific Rim to be worth his time. We got to know David much better this week, which is the least we could do since the distance of his two round trips to Epic Main Events exceeds 30,000 miles. He is a fierce competitor who plays with the nerve and unpredictability of someone who regularly makes big financial decisions and wants the challenge and accomplishment more than he needs the money. It’s nice to see someone do well who came from so far away. I wish him a happy return to Hong Kong, at least a fifteen-hour non-stop flight – though there are no non-stop flights from Las Vegas.
Fabrice Soulier, third place, $299,160 – Fabrice, likewise, was rewarded for his patience with commercial air travel. Safe returns to his native France, where he and friend Nicolas Levi have already gone for the Partouche Poker Tour’s Monday, September 12 Cannes Main Event (where Fabrice finished third last year). Soulier, who was short-stacked on numerous occasions during the final two days, has a way of making his time in the money count. He has just three U.S. cashes this year: third at the LAPC Heads-Up event, a World Series bracelet in the $10,000 HORSE, and this third-place Epic Main Event 2 finish. We look forward to his December return.
Erik Seidel, fourth place, $184,100 – Chris Hanson (@HPTChris), HPT’s TV host (along with Fred Bevill), tweeted before the final table, “@Erik_Seidel makes another @EpicPoker final table. If he cut off his pinky, would the finger regenerate into a better player than me?” This was Erik’s return to the Epic Main Event final table. Although it ended unsuccessfully – Seidel didn’t even move up on the Epic money list, stalled at second – it was his second excellent performance at Epic. If we have run out of superlatives for him, consider this: Erik Seidel has made ten final tables in 2011 events with buy-ins of at least $5,000, and his fourth place Friday night tied for his worst finish.
Nam Le, fifth place, $126,570 – Nam, like McDonald, celebrated a birthday over the weekend. He turned thirty-one on Saturday. Le was a creature of habit at the Palms, ordering the same breakfast delivered at the same time every day, following the same routine of returning to his room during every break to lie down, and even watching the same television show before going to bed. It is unknown whether such habits fueled his strong play, either in the past week or in the past decade (during which he has earned over $6 million) but his return to familiar circumstances paid off. This was not, in fact, Nam’s first September 9 final table. On September 9, 2008, he won the APPT High-Roller event in Macau for over $473,000. David Steicke had the chip lead in that event, too, though he took fifth place that time, Nam’s finishing spot on Friday. Happy birthday to Nam.
Isaac Baron, sixth place, $92,050 – Like winner Mike McDonald, Baron enjoyed enormous success as a teenager and may have not yet reached the peak of his talent or achievements. He was Card Player’s first online Player of the Year in 2007. He also scorched the EPT before he was casino-legal in Nevada, finishing fourth in the 2008 EPT Grand Final in Monte Carlo for €589,000.
By the time we get to the sixth-place finisher, “happy returns” may be recognized only with the perspective of an outsider. After all, everyone but the winner ends up with zero chips, slinking away from the table while play continues, and wondering of what might have been. For Isaac, this was his return to the money on Epic (along with Erik Seidel, Matt Glantz, and Adam Levy, who bubbled the final table twice). Baron deserved better than the horrible luck he had against David Steicke in the first hour, but he can’t be faulted for his two-for-two record in Epic Poker League or his outstanding play in consecutive events.
Sean Getzwiller, seventh place, $69,040 - After meeting Sean during his back-to-back seat-winning Pro/Am performances and playing him in the Charity event, I felt invested in his success and watched closely as he survived a short stack for the second half of Day 2. Wishing him luck at the beginning of Day 3, he had the tremendous confidence appropriate to a man who had made it through a pair of Epic Pro/Ams and had a WSOP bracelet and $800,000 to show for his 2011 efforts. He was still short but told me, “If I double up, I’ll be top ten and I’ll be in good shape for the long road ahead. And you know I’ll get it in good before then.” He expertly navigated his way to the final table and had the misfortune twelve hands in to run his A-K into Mike McDonald’s K-K. In addition to this event marking Sean’s return to the Main Event via the Pro/Am, his final-table finish earns him a provisional card enabling him to enter Main Event 3 in December.
Russell “Dutch” Boyd, eighth place, $57,530 – Representing the 2003 poker boom in early ESPN WSOP broadcasts second only to Chris Moneymaker, Dutch has borne eight years of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune: over $2 million in career earnings, a pair of WSOP bracelets, and admiration as a wunderkind when things were going well – and some very difficult times when they weren’t. At thirty, he has a great partner in his life in his girlfriend Michelle, and an appreciation of what he has accomplished along with what he has left to accomplish. Coming off a twelve-month period in which he earned just $10,000 in live tournaments, this was his return to TV, final tables, and, hopefully, the potential he has shown during substantial portions of the last decade. He played three days of canny poker, and then got stuck on the eighth hand at the final table running his jacks into Erik Seidel’s aces. Although Seidel eventually fell, it was clearly a case of Dutch running into the wrong hand from the wrong player at the wrong time. Emphasizing poker’s cruelty, Boyd got to watch the flop bring Erik a third ace before his enforced exile.
Happy returns to all, whether it’s for birthdays, long voyages, or consistently great performances. We look forward to seeing all eight competitors again on December 14 for Event 3.
For our Epic Poker League members, we track four important statistics that give insight into each player’s playing style. These stats are VPIP, PRFA Index, POFA Index and SDWN. Explained in detail below, these four simple stats provide a picture of how loose or tight and how aggressive or passive a player is. It is the understanding of where a player falls on the spectrum of loose/tight and aggressive/passive that is the most crucial to proper evaluation of a player or opponent at the poker table. Player Hands Mike McDonald 35.20% 1.4 2.6 52.20% 491 David Steicke 41.60% 0.9 2.5 60.40% 486 Fabrice Soulier 28.50% 1.2 1.9 41.70% 466 Erik Seidel 33.50% 1.1 2 42.10% 367 Nam Le 19.00% 2.1 2.3 38.50% 263 Isaac Baron 27.40% 2 3.1 50.00% 241 Dutch Boyd 21.70% 1.1 1.7 33.30% 212 Sean Getzwiller 17.50% 1.3 5.5 66.70% 206 Adam Levy 19.80% 1.3 7.5 50.00% 197 Amit Makhija 19.40% 1.8 1 87.50% 175 Tim West 14.60% 5 1.2 40.00% 164 Matt Glantz 17.20% 2.1 2 55.60% 163 Allen Bari 24.80% 3 2.3 43.80% 145 Mike Watson 25.20% 2 1.2 18.20% 143 Jonathan Little 20.30% 1.3 6 60.00% 138 Matt Marafioti 16.70% 2.7 0 33.30% 66 Christian Harder 25.00% 0.9 1.3 50.00% 52 Marco Johnson 19.20% 1.5 0 0.00% 52 Chris Moore 26.90% 2.5 0 33.30% 52 Chino Rheem 37.50% 2 0 25.00% 32 Dan O'Brien 17.60% 0 0 0.00% 17 Jaime Kaplan 38.50% 4 3 0.00% 13 David "Bakes Baker 33.30% 1 0 0.00% 6
VPIP: Voluntarily Put In Pot
Simply: how often does a player voluntarily enter a pot? VPIP records the percentage of hands where a player chooses to voluntarily put money into the pot before the flop. Put another way, VPIP is the percentage of hands a player chooses to play rather than fold pre-flop.
VPIP answers the question about whether a player is loose or tight. The higher the VPIP, the looser the player. The lower the VPIP, the tighter the player.
In general, in a 9-handed game of poker, you will see a VPIP range of about 15% to 25% among the top poker players in the world. As the number of players at the table goes down, a player’s VPIP will generally go up. In a 6-Max game, for example, you will usually see a VPIP range between 20% and 30% among the game’s top players. When play gets very short-handed, with 4 players or fewer, VPIP can reach well above 40%. In heads-up play you will often see VPIP’s over 90%.
PRFA INDEX: PReFlop Aggression Index
Simply: How aggressively does a player choose to enter a pot? When a player is first into a pot before the flop, they can enter by just calling the big blind amount or by raising. The PRFA Index measures a player’s pre-flop aggressiveness by looking at the balance between entering the pot raising and entering the pot calling.
The PRFA Index is calculated by taking the number of times a player chooses to enter a pot with a raising action pre-flop divided by the number of times the player enters a pot with a calling action pre-flop, creating a ratio of pre-flop raises to pre-flop calls.
Because pre-flop raises are in the numerator and pre-flop calls are in the denominator, a PRFA of over 1 will indicate a player who raises more often than they call when they enter the pot. A PRFA index of 2 indicates a player who enters the pot with a raise twice as often as they enter the pot with a call, obviously, a highly aggressive player. A PRFA of less than 1 indicates a player who tends to call or limp into pots more often than they raise to enter.
Among top players, the PRFA Index will generally range between 1 and 2 but you will occasionally see a PRFA of above 3, especially in shorter handed situations.
POFA INDEX: POst Flop Aggression Index
Simply, how aggressive is the player after the flop? How often does the player attempt to win the pot post-flop with either a bet or a raise? Aggressive post-flop actions are actions where a player gives their opponent the opportunity to fold, thereby giving themselves the opportunity to win the pot right then without a showdown. For the purposes of the POFA Index, bets and raises post-flop are considered aggressive actions as those actions can win the pot right there, giving their opponent(s) the opportunity to fold. Calls and folds are considered passive actions. If a player folds post-flop they obviously cannot win the pot. If a player just calls a bet they are not giving their opponent an opportunity to fold. Checks are considered neutral and are not counted in the index.
The POFA Index is calculated by taking the number of actions post-flop that are bets and raises divided by the number of post-flop actions that are calls and folds, creating a ratio of post-flop bets and raises to post-flop calls and folds.
Because the aggressive actions are in the numerator and the passive actions are in the denominator, the higher the POFA, the more aggressive the player is post-flop, the more a player attempts to win hands without a showdown. A POFA Index of over 1 indicates a player who bets and raises more often than they call or fold post-flop. A POFA index of 2 indicates a player who bets or raises twice as often as they call or fold, obviously, a highly aggressive post-flop player whose hands do not go to showdown that often. A POFA of less than 1 indicates a player who tends to call or fold post-flop often than they bet or raise which you will rarely see among professional players.
Among top players, the POFA Index will generally range between 1.5 and 2.5 but you will occasionally see a P0FA well above 3, especially in shorter handed or bubble situations.
SDWN: ShowDown WiN percentage
Simply: SDWN tells you how adept a player is at getting their money in the pot with the best hand. The higher the percentage of time that a player wins the pot when the hand goes to showdown, when the pot is won because the cards have gone face-up, the better the player is at getting their money in the pot with the best hand.
SDWN is calculated by taking the percentage of pots a player wins.
Among the best players in the world, SDWN should range around 50%. At 50% that means the player is winning the hand 50% of the time a pot goes to showdown, meaning they are unlikely to get their money in worse than a race situation.
|
1st Mike McDonald |
$782,410 |
|
2nd David Paul Steicke |
$506,260 |
|
3rd Fabrice Soulier |
$299,160 |
|
4th Erik Seidel |
$184,100 |
|
5th Nam Thien Le |
$126,570 |
|
6th Isaac Baron |
$92,050 |
|
7th Sean Getzwiller |
$69,040 |
|
8th Dutch Boyd |
$57,530 |
|
9th Adam Levy |
$46,020 |
|
10th Amit Makhija |
$46,020 |
|
11th Timothy West |
$46,020 |
|
12th Matthew Glantz |
$46,020 |
