Card Runners

Brandon Cantu recently won the Main Event of the Bay 101 WPT tournament series, but has drawn controversy over not leaving a tip for the dealers. Some have speculated that Cantu, who won over $1,000,000, was simply unaware that dealer tips were not withheld from the prize pool, but many have labeled him a stiff and criticized him for not making it right after the fact.

The Allen Cunningham red-name account on Full Tilt has been multi-tabling mid-stakes No Limit games recently. He has been seen playing between 8 and 15 tables of $2/$4 NLHE, in addition to his more regular higher-stakes games. In the wake of the recent Jon Little incident, some have wondered if it is really Allen on the account, but many close to him have confi rmed that it is.

ESPN has now added a Think Tank” to its online poker coverage. Every week, Gary Wise chooses a topic to discuss and hosts an online roundtable. Participants so far have included Brian “sbrugby” Townsend, Mike “Schneids” Schneider, Phil “Jman” Galfond, Justin “ZeeJustin” Bonomo, and many others.

This month’s high-stakes sensation was “Yossarian,” who hit the high-stakes games on Full Tilt Poker and booked some big wins despite the fact that most considered him a megafi sh. Yossarian won $85,000 from Boosted J in one session of $25/$50 NLHE, and later took Phil Galfond for $70,000 at $100/$200 before Galfond demanded to know who he is. Some high-stakes players still wary from the recent Absolute Poker and UltimateBet scandals began to suspect cheating, but Yossarian then lost $200,000 to Ariel “DaEvils” Schneller.

Nat Arem has stated that 60 Minutes has contacted him in conjunction with a story they are considering, which concerns the Absolute Poker scandal. Arem, a well-respected member of thepoker community who went to Costa Rica during the aftermath, said that he has talked to the show’s producer and a reporter from the Washington Post. The scandal, which broke last fall, involved a "super-user” account that could see the holecards of all the players. Meanwhile, UltimateBet has kept quiet about the millions of dollars likely stolen by the set of super-user accounts, including “NioNio.” Playershave not been told if they will get their money back.

Taylor “Green Plastic” Caby, the elite poker player and co-founder of CardRunners, recently spoke at NYU’s Stern Business School as part of a series organized by the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society. Caby spoke about the relationships between poker and business, the nature of the critical thinking skills that poker develops, and the effort to legitimize poker.

Twenty-eight online sites in the Microgaming network, including Battlefi eld Poker and RedNines Poker, shut down unexpectedly after a payment processor went bankrupt. Players have been unable to withdraw money. The sites, however, have been working to assure players that their money is safe, and it appears that Microgaming plans to bail out all the lost money.

I fi rst got interested in poker, I guess, when a lot of other people did, after Moneymaker won the Main Event. I had seen Rounders a few times and poker was always on TV, so my friends and I decided to start having home games. I was already a junior or senior in college at this point, and I started playing online after I graduated because my friends were all in different parts of the country and I didn’t really have a home game to donk around in. The stakes were pretty small: $5 and $10 sit-n-goes and freeze-outs, and occasionally we played a “big” $25 buyin cash game. Those were fun times.

At fi rst I liked poker for the social aspect. It was fun to hang out with my buddies, drink beers or whatever, splash chips around, and maybe take home a few extra bucks once in a while. When I started getting a slightly better grasp of the game, I really fell in love with the competitive aspect. I liked knowing I had a slight edge in the game, before I even knew what an edge was, and consistently being able to take home more money than I lost. That’s what really kept me interested, knowing that poker is a game of skill and the more I put into it the more I would eventually get out.

Oh yeah, defi nitely. I graduated from Dartmouth with a degree in English, and at first I felt compelled to put my degree to use. I didn’t want to go to graduate or law school right off the bat, so I landed a job as a grant writer for a local non-profi t organization in San Diego. It was an all-right job, but it defi nitely wasn’t my passion and a lot of the time I didn’t feel challenged enough. There was more I wanted to do. Plus, there’s the whole wanting-to-make-more-money issue. Eventually I become more and more serious about poker, and when it came to a point where I was consistently making more money online when I came home from work than I did at my job, I decided to make the plunge into playing full time.

(Laughs) I defi nitely am a mid-stakes grinder, but I don’t know how “known” I am. I don’t play on the major sites or in the nosebleed games, and I don’t play TV tourneys or anything. I just play the games I am comfortable with and rolled for, bank my profi t, and call it a day. But to be a winner in the current state of games, you have to be serious about it. You have to actively search for games you have an edge in, and constantly work on your game. Things that worked four or fi ve months ago might not necessarily work today. The games are constantly evolving and defi nitely getting tougher, across the board. Unless you are just insanely talented, you really need to use all of the resources that are available to be a winner. Forums, training sites tracking programs, everything. You need it all to compete these days.

CardRunners really changed everything. I found CR I think in the beginning of 2006. I had been playing low buy-in SNGs for a few months and built up my bankroll a little bit, but I needed something to take my game to the next level. I was terrible at cash games and I knew it. I wanted to take poker more seriously and the books I read didn’t really offer the hands-on advice I was looking for. I stumbled across CardRunners and knew immediately this was what I was looking for. I remember watching Taylor’s $50 NL video on Ultimate Bet and literally having my mind blown. The concepts I had read about in books, like position, were explained and shown in ways that I could incorporate directly into my own game. When I found out about continuation betting it was like a light went off in my head. It’s so funny looking back; I wouldn’t tell people I played against about CardRunners because I didn’t want them getting better. Now everybody knows about it and you just have to work that much harder. But yeah, CR is probably the only reason I can make my living from poker. It was that important for me.

I think a lot of times it’s easy to look at what other people have accomplished and at how far they’ve gone, and try to compare yourself to them. That’s a very fl awed way of thinking. My accomplishments in poker might get outshined by thousands of other players, but that’s okay with me. There’s always going to be smarter, better, more aggressive, richer players than you. Guys like CardRunners pros Cole South, Brian Hastings, Raptor, Eric “p3achy_keen” Liu, Menlo, etc… the “young guns” I guess, are really the exceptions to the rule. They have accomplished so much at such a young age that it almost defi es logic. If you try to compare yourself to that, you’ll probably just go crazy or end up feeling insignifi cant. The only thing you can do is learn from their path and try to mesh their ways with your own. Poker, more so than money, is about the personal journey you take by yourself: transforming yourself and your game, and putting hard work into it all to make yourself better.