Winners and Losers: Aussie Millions Winners and Online Poker Losers

Photo: PokerNews.com

Topics: Epic Poker League, Winners and Losers, Phil Ivey, Chris Ferguson, Aussie Millions, Online Poker, Full Tilt Poker, Black Friday, Groupe Bernard Tapie [+]

The Aussie Millions are wrapping up, which means poker professionals are keen to look for the next place to hunker down to play some cards. With two popular WPT stops coming up in California late in February, players may find themselves back in the West after spending a month out in the Caribbean or Down Under. For now though, it’s time to digest what’s going on now and while results from Australia are a given, they are by no means the only news stories happening. (Don’t discount in between January’s global travels and late February’s West Coast events some newsworthy action in Deauville, Venice, Copenhagen, and elsewhere.) This past week reminded us that Black Friday still has us in its grip, and that even great players can have bad days. Let’s see what happened to whom this past week:

Winners

Oliver Speidel – Despite all the high roller events, the Aussie Millions grand finale is actually the A$10,000 Main Event, believe it or not. While the Main Event had its lowest turnout since 2006, a still respectable 659 runners battled it out for the right to take down A$1.6 million for first place. Oliver Speidel, a Melbourne native, beat back the international field of players to take down the tournament for Australia, but more importantly, for the prize money and ring that comes with being the Aussie Millions Main Event champion. Congratulations are in order for Oliver for outlasting the large field and taking out most of the players in the final table in the process, proving that well-timed rungood and skill go together quite well. The Aussies have now won 4 straight on their own soil, and if players like Speidel are vying for the title they will make things tricky for any other player to win any tournaments Down Under, let alone the Main Event. There does seem to be an exception to every rule…

Phil Ivey – …and usually, when it comes to poker, that exception involved Phil Ivey. Since Black Friday, Ivey’s presence in poker has been rare, sporadic, and puzzling. He started his return in Macau, and came back with a vengeance during the tournaments in Australia. He ended up finishing 12th in the Aussie Millions Main Event, a bad-news-good-news scenario that earned a reasonable (non-Ivey) payday, properly announced his return to tournament form, deprived him of a shot at the Championship, but knocked him out in time to compete in the A$250,000 Super (Duper?) High Roller event. Well, true to how Ivey operates, he actually won that tournament, pocketing A$2 million and reminding people that no amount of time off from poker is going to keep Phil Ivey from winning. While it’s still too early to tell if he will play in this year’s WSOP, it’s probably a good start to see him playing (and winning) elsewhere around the world.

Thor Hansen – Recently Thor Hansen was diagnosed with cancer, and that’s a fairly bad hand to be dealt in any circumstance, let alone when you are being told you, at best, have a couple years left to live. What makes Thor a winner (aside from having a first name of freaking Thor), is the overwhelming outpouring of well-wishes he received from the poker community, and his name in the news, however sad, allows us to remember why he such a big deal in the first place. The 2-time WSOP bracelet holder was the first non-American to win a WSOP event, and his success in the Eighties arguably spurred a poker movement in Europe, one that churns out professionals at such high volume you’d think the epicenter for poker was over there, not in the United States. While I don’t hold the cure for cancer in my hands (I hear other people at my university are working on that), I wish Thor the best of luck fighting this. Hopefully he’ll get the care he needs and, no matter the outcome, that he gets to enjoy himself as long as he can.

Losers

Phil Galfond – Oh how the mighty have fallen. Last week I labeled the man formerly known as OMGClayAiken as a winner for the week because of his thought-provoking blog on the state of online poker and how things can be made better. Well…the man now known as MrSweets28 has taken a nearly $700,000 hit to his bankroll on PokerStars in just a couple days, and has stated on his Twitter that he is going to hold off on any nosebleed games until he gets his bankroll back up. Now, Galfond is no stranger to big swings, and he has lost more than this on a month-to-month basis before, but to lose three-quarters of your bankroll in a matter of hours has got to be a shot to the ego here. Still, if anyone is capable of shaking it off, it’s the one person Tom Dwan refused to offer his Challenge to play 50,000 hands heads-up. We assume that’s because he doesn’t stay down for very long.

Chris Ferguson – I think, given the reaction to the Subject:Poker investigation on Ferguson’s bank accounts, loser might be putting things mildly. In the news-summary poker press, Ferguson went to Public Enemy Number One pretty much overnight with word that he could try holding up the pending GBT/DOJ deal for Full Tilt Poker. At issue is whether a $14 million infusion of cash from Ferguson’s Pocket Kings accounts was actually a loan from Ferguson that he expected to get back. Players would readily argue that his $14 million means nothing when thousands of players are out a collective $300 million, and it is the mere threat of a holdup to the deal that makes Ferguson look really, really bad here. Chris is under a triple whammy here: he was the biggest principal of Full Tilt, these transactions were sufficiently complex that they defy simple characterization, and Ferguson has nothing to gain by publicly clarifying the situation based on his pending legal action and this pending sale of Full Tilt. For now, at least, he has to suffer in silence.