My Full Tilt Fantasy Poker Wrapup

The results of the main event of the World Series of Poker are in and the fantasy poker season at Full Tilt has been settled. By virtue having picked Phil Ivey and Eugene Katchalov, I came in 739 in this last event, earning $4.9M of the fantasy dollars. To point out the “Ivey Effect” of basically having the baseline of this event be over $4M: my brother had Ivey as an A and one other guy that cashed low so he had $4.2M . He came in over 10,000th place. More than 9,000 places were determined by the 700K in the middle.

By virtue of my 39th place overall, I came in 4th in the Poker Road Forum league and have already been paid a cool $15 American into my Poker Stars account. I’m pretty sure that the Poker Road Forum league kicked the absolute ass of every other one. PR had 13 people in the top 100 of the overall season.

This was an unbelievable amount of fun, and I picked up a little cash between the PR payout and cashing in the freerolls associated with the events. I can’t wait until next year.

My Full Tilt Fantasy Poker Picks for the Main Event

Going into the main event of the World Series of Poker, I’m sitting at 101st overall in the Full Tilt Poker fantasy league. The top 100 finishers get entrance into special freeroll that pays out an entrance to the 2010 main event (really, $12,000 which is about the equivalent – you can use the money for whatever you want.) I was under no illusions that I could coast regardless where I finished after event 56 but this is a tight spot. I have to have a good main event.

After a month plus of playing this hard and trying to gather as much information about each player, which events they were entering, their past performance, etc – the main event was different. I could make the assumption that everyone was playing. I sort of went with the zen and just picked without over thinking it. I picked Phil Ivey and Patrik Antonious out of defense. I expect that most everyone will have them and if I don’t and they do well, I’m sunk. This really comes down to picking the couple of highest finishing more obscure players and whoever does that will do well.

Here then are my picks:

A group:

Phil Ivey
Patrik Antonius
John Juanda
Eugene Katchalov
Justin Bonomo

B Group

Kathy Liebert
Jacobo Fernandez
Sorel Mizzi
Vitaly Lunkin
Shaun Deeb

C Group

Jeffery Lisandro
Steve “mrsmokey1” Billirakis
Tom Dwan
Shannon Shorr
Matt Hawrilenko

I’m on pins and needles about it. The main event is so sprawling I’m not even sure if any of my picks have played, what their stacks are, who is out. I made my bet, now I can only hope it works out for me. I’m leaning more towards younger internet players than name pros so I hope a few of those bets hit.

James Slusher’s WSOP Run

If you look at the coverage of Day 1 of Event 27 of the World Series of Poker, one of the last entries of the day is below.

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 00:58:30

When You’re Hot You’re Hot

Bernard Lee has just sucked out on another player to eliminate him and extend his lead. He reraised a player all in preflop with 99 who was holding AA. The inevitable 9 fell on turn to send the pot his way. He’s up to 167,500 now.

What is it to me? The guy with the aces against Bernard Lee was my brother. It sent him out in something like 230th place, but his initial $1500 buy-in netted him over $3000, better than doubling that money. Not bad for a days work. My jealousy continues, but this gives me that much more incentive to step it up so I can go next year.

Congratulations James!

My Brother The Gambler

My brother is in Las Vegas right now, playing in a World Series of Poker event. He’s been calling me all day with status updates at every break. While I was in the office with my team working on a Saturday, he was phoning me with his adventures in his first ever big time tournament. As he’s been on the phone with me, he’s been joking with the likes of Steve Zolotow. At the last check-in, the field had shrunk from 2700 to 600 and Jim had about an average stack. Something like the top 270 will get paid, so he was getting awfully close to the money. He hasn’t called lately so that has to be good news.

I’m incredibly jealous because I wish I was out there with him. I still need to build up my poker bankroll before I can go. By next year I need to turn the $300 or so I have online into a few thousand. I’m more or less on a freeroll with all of that. I started as a poker site beta tester which ended up garnering me some actual cash which I ended up transferring to other site. I’ve only ever put about $20 of my own cash into the online poker world, and that was just to round up a transfer to get the maximum of a 100% match bonus. If I can parlay this into a WSOP entry, it’s very much like winning in on a $1 super satellite ticket.

Good luck James. May you go deep, cash out for much, and knock them dead.