Texas Hold Em News
Texas Hold em Tex - For all about Texas Hold Em
Poker player bets on success at tournament
By Greg Barr
The Daily News
Published April 16, 2006
GALVESTON — In professional football or hockey, intimidation takes the form of jarring collisions or blinding speed. For Bill Blanda, taking the fight out of an opponent starts with a pair of gold bracelets.
The one on his right arm comes from winning a World Poker Tour event at the Borgata Hotel Casino in Atlantic City, N.J., in September 2004. He picked up the one on his left for winning the same event, exactly one year later.
The Galveston resident will have his shiny bling prominently on display this week when he enters the seven-day World Poker Tour world championship, which opens Tuesday at the Bellagio Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. The finals will be shown June 28 on The Travel Channel.
His entry fee is what some folks make in a year. Blanda will plunk down $25,000 just to walk through the door.
Cutthroat Competition
As many as 600 professional and amateur players will enter the championship with the same goal: to sit in one of six seats at the final table. The winner of this cutthroat tournament of no-limit Texas Hold ’em is expected to take home more than $3 million.
To make it that far, Blanda would have to beat some of the world’s most cunning players. The field includes last year’s champion, Tuan Le of Los Angeles, who won $2.8 million to go along with his prestigious title in 2005, and runner-up Paul Maxfield of England.
Even without the bracelets, Blanda, 50, is imposing enough, with the physique of a linebacker, and 280 pounds on his 6-foot-1 frame. He is wearing his black biker garb — he and a partner just opened a custom motorcycle sales shop in The Woodlands — and he hails from a rough neighborhood in Philadelphia, where he dreamed of being a pro hockey player.
“I guess I was about 10 when I started playing poker on the streets of Philly,” Blanda said. “But the poker then is not what it is now. All you did back then was try not to get cheated. It was ruthless.”
Stunning Popularity
Blanda just played poker for fun off and on through the years, but took notice of the game about three years ago on television, when this card game most associated with Western movies where cheaters took six-shooter bullets for their transgressions jumped into the modern era.
What changed the game in terms of its stunning popularity was when cameras at the Travel Channel and ESPN — which broadcasts the rival World Series of Poker — began to show the hidden cards held in players’ hands, Blanda said.
In Texas Hold ’em, players hold two cards in their hand and have five community cards shown face up — and use the best five cards out of seven.
“It wasn’t much of a spectator event before that, kind of like watching paint dry,” Blanda said. “But when the viewers knew what cards everyone has, then they became participants instead of spectators.”
Combine that with the phenomenal popularity of Internet poker sites — most of which are based in Canada or the Cayman Islands — which let players from around the world win or lose money at cyberspace poker tables, and the game has become a pop culture phenomenon.
Betting On Himself
For Blanda, who has worked most of his life in the financial industry and can quickly calculate lengthy mathematic problems in his head, his recreational poker games became a serious, lucrative endeavor in early 2004. It happened one night when he and his wife, Amanda, were watching a game on TV.
“I told her that I could play with those guys,” he recalled. “I said I’d make her a bet, that in a year from how, I’d be playing on TV. She just kind of looked at me.”
Blanda started by playing online tournaments to get a feel for the game. Then he started taking short trips to Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Later in 2004, he entered his first small tournament at Sam’s Town Casino, and, to his amazement, seven hours later won the championship game — and $6,000 — with only an ace and a nine in his hand.
Since then, Blanda — whose idol is Doyle Brunson, who began winning world championships in the 1970s and has nine gold bracelets — has entered more than 50 tournaments, and he is relieved to say that he has ended up on the winning side more often than the alternative. The most he has won at a single tournament is $167,000, the year he picked up his first gold bracelet.
He keeps a separate account for his poker funds, saying he would never jeopardize his family’s financial future over a game that he still considers only a serious hobby. It’s not how he makes a living, he said.
Read the rest of this article >>