The “High Stakes Poker” Premieres
Written by Matt W | Thursday, March 5th, 2009
On the 1st of March the “High Stakes Poker” Season 5 premiered on GSN. There will a total of 13 episodes that will be aired on Sundays. The episodes were shot at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas in December 2008. The show’s sponsors are CardPlayer and SpadesClub.
On the premiers episode young Turks faced off with veterans. The younger set of players was Tom “durrrr” Dwan, Ilari “Ziigmund” Sahamies and Peter Eastgate. In the older generation were Doyle Brunson, Daniel Negreanu, Barry Greenstein, Eli Elezra, and David Benyamine. Dwan was by far the most active of the lot. He must have seen the flop in almost every hand. He entered the action from the word go. In the first hand he entered with K-9 of hearts, ended up heads up with Eastgate and won the pot.
The largest pot of the episode was also between the same two players. Again Dwan entered with weakfish hand but his luck did not hold. Eastgate won the $175,200 pot. The last battle however was between Eastgate and Negreanu. Eastgate held A-K while Negreanu entered with J-2. But the community cards favored Negreanu who won the pot. Future episodes will feature a galaxy of pros that include Antonio Esfandiari, Phil Laak, Joe Hachem and Howard Lederer. The poker will be spiced up with prop bets. One involves players doing push ups.
Meanwhile Negreanu discussed some of his experiences of the premiere show with Poker News Daily. At the outset he said that this season poker will take the center stage and not the banter between players. The reason is that all the players are of an equally high caliber and the stakes are higher. On a personal front Negreanu enjoys “High Stakes Poker”. Though he has been lucky in tournaments and unlucky in cash games he finds the latter format more challenging.
Of the new lot of players Negreanu is most impressed by Dwan. Speaking of Dwan he said, “I hadn’t had a chance to play against him before. He’s relentless. He plays a great big stack and has a lot of money. He keeps the pressure on, makes moves, and also makes big lay downs.”
Moving away from “High Stakes Poker” the “durrrr challenge” between Dwan and Patrik Antonius is inching ahead. 4,178 of the 50,000 hands have been played and it has taken 5 days. As of now Dwan is leading by $140K. Given the speed, or lack of it, the contest could well take two months. These guys are playing one of the many US poker sites out there, Full Tilt.
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· Written by Matt W · Filed Under Poker News · Comments Off
