This week on the Final Table radio show, Dennis Phillips and I were in the Harrah's St. Louis Poker Room with two guests joining us via phone.
First, we brought on Matt Savage to comment on last week's topic about whether the structure of deep stack poker tournaments is really giving players the best value, or whether it's excessive to offer so many chips and such long rounds that it takes 2 days to finish even a smaller buy-in ($200-$600) event. Matt knows a lot about the topic because he's tournament director for Commerce Casino, Bay 101, and Hard Rock Las Vegas, and was one of the founders of the Tournament Directors Association. Since he used to be TD of the World Series Of Poker, we asked his opinion of the controversial Prahlad Friedman countdown hand we discussed on last week's show. We also talked about changes he's made as executive director of the World Poker Tour, which has begun its 9th season and will begin airing of FSN in a few months.
Our other guest was another member of this year's November Nine, Jonathan Duhamel, who will be the chip leader when the WSOP Main Event resumes in two months. This is the position Dennis was in 2 years ago, so they compared notes on strategy, and Jonathan revealed how he exploited the bubble when there were only 10 players left.
Dennis added some stories about playing in the only legal poker room in Massachusetts this weekend, we updated the chances of online poker regulation legislation being passed now that Congress is back in session, and we marveled at how PokerStars (which celebrated its 9th birthday this weekend) will soon deal its 50 billionth hand.
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