Bigger Deal

The World Series as we know it was born in 1971. Since then, player numbers have swelled, events have been added and the tournament relocated, but the format has remained largely unchanged. The pattern so far has been familiar: poker-mania in Vegas builds during the preceding events until a champion is crowned in the early […]

London rocks. The welcome party for the London EPT  was on a Thames cruise boat and former EPT champion Brandon Schaefer and I were discussing the town as we passed the Tower of London. Brandon shook his head in disbelief: “I’ve been to 35 countries and this is my first time in London. What was […]

For better or worse, I wasn’t at the WSOP Europe inaugural event. If the situation for the press and media was anything like Grub Smith described, I think it’s better that I was safely ensconced here in the north. But honestly, I would have liked to have been there just to the see the smile on […]

 I grew up in a crossword solving house. Home from work, my dad like to settle down in his armchair with the Telegraph or the Times, chewing the end of his pencil as he decoded the cryptic intentions of the setter. It was a contest every evening, a battle between two formidable brains. He enjoyed […]

Last night I played in a satellite for next week’s mega-tournament at The Loose Cannon, BiggerDeal.com’s bricks-n-mortar partner down by Father Thames in London’s Blackfriars. Didn’t win, of course. Usual story: my button A-J beaten by the small blind’s Anna bloody Kournikova – yes, since you ask, ace on the flop and I was a goner. […]

So it’s true. Psychological savvy helps. For the superstitious (like me), it was also his commitment to giving 10% of his winnings to charity that saw 40-year-old psychologist Jerry Yang from Laos, now resident in California, arrive at the final table with by far the punchiest karma. When play began at noon yesterday, Yang held the […]

Julius "Big Julie" Weintraub said that the man who invented poker was bright but the man who invented the poker chip was a genius. If you own a poker room, you might add that the man who invented the rake was an absolute legend. The rake is a player’s biggest enemy. It eats away at your […]