Windy City Poker Championship Returns March 6
Windy City Poker Championship returns to your television set Sunday, March 6, 2011 with its most exciting content yet. 13 new episodes debut in 2011, beginning with the Heads Up Tournament, featuring 2007 WSOP Main Event Champion Jerry Yang, movie critic, columnist, and radio host Richard Roper, Mark "Poker Ho" Kroon, WPT Boot Camp Instructor Nick Brancato, St. Louis Poker Pro, and founder of Saint Louis Poker, Scotty Clark, local amateur, former WCPC champ Brent White, and number of other great poker players from around the Chicagoland area and the region.
If you're in Chicago, or get Comcast SportsNet on your local provider (including naitonal broadcast on DirecTv and Dish Network) you can tune in this Sunday night at 9PM Central. The show will also be broadcast on regional sports networks in the Washington D.C. area, the Mississippi gulf coast region, and in Florida. Check your local listings.
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The Gap Concept
The Gap Concept is one of David Sklansky's poker theories that states a player needs to have a stronger hand than what they would raise with in order to call a raise. The concept highlights the fact that poker players actually prefer to avoid confrontations with another player who has indicated they have a strong hand and also that calling only has one way to win a hand (being the best hand) whereas raising allows you to win immediately if your opponent folds.
The majority of the players taking part in the GSOP $100000 Betfair Poker events will have some understanding of the gap concept but a much smaller sample size will be aware that the size of the gap is not fixed, in fact quite the opposite is true. Some of the factors that alter the size of the gap include where at the table the raise came from, the size of the chip stacks in play and the playing style of the player making the raise.
It should be obvious that the gap, or the difference in strength of cards needed to call the raise, widens when the player making the raise has a tight range of hands that he plays. This is because when a tight player enters a pot he is more likely to hold a premium hand. Conversely, a player with loose starting hand requirements actually narrows the gap as they have many more weaker hands in their raising range.
Again, if the raise comes from early position then you should tend to give it more credit for being a strong hand than say if the raise came from one of the later positions at the table. Likewise, if you are facing a raise from a deep-stacked player in one of the Betfair GSOP 6 events then the gap should be narrower as they is an increased chance they are simply splashing around in the pot but a standard sized raise, and not an all-in bet, from a short-stacked player should be treated as immense strength, which widens the gap.
So to recap, the tighter the player and the earlier position the raise comes from the wider the gap, therefore the stronger the hand required to call becomes, but a looser, late position raiser narrows the gap so you can call with a weaker hand. Simple when you think of it really!
Shaun Deeb Owes Chris Cosenza $50
Do we have a scandal brewing?!
On January 27, 2011 Chicago Poker Club and Windy City Poker Championship cast and crew headed down to Orange Park, FL to the Orange Park Kennel Club, home to the JAX Poker Room, for the 2nd Annual Chad Brown No Limit Texas Hold 'em Championship.
In the coming days and weeks, we'd like to share stories, pictures and videos of the adventure. In the meantime, I'd like to corroborate a story I heard on the February 3rd Ante Up Poker Podcast, for the purposes of getting a friend $50 (at the expense of another new friend). ;)
Our good friends Scott Long and Chris Cosenza, from Ante Up Magazine came to the event as spectators, journalists, and hosts of the upcoming television production. They are also doing some guest hosting on Windy City Poker Championship, so Kirk set them down in front of the camera to record some on-camera introductions, transitions, and so on.
I'm not saying our buddies at Ante Up are camera shy, but... well... they needed a few minutes to warm up after being away from the critical camera eye for so many months. After a few failed attempts at landing a drop, Shaun Deeb bet Chris $50 that he wouldn't nail the spot on the next take. Let my video tell the rest of the story:
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