Fantastic Casino Glen

What do you call it when 16 of the best poker players in the world (and a few gambling businessmen) get together to play a $250k buy-in tournament? 

One hell of a photo opportunity.

Of course Phil Ivey, who just busted from the $10k Main Event in 12^th place, went on to win the historic event for a cool $2 million.

We were allowed a surprising amount of time on the floor to snap photos as players competed for $4 million in prize money.

We didn’t have time to post the photos during the Aussie Millions (we were pretty busy with the whole “Main Event” thing) but we compiled a collection of the best photos below.

Hope you enjoy.

Phil Ivey was a man possessed after busting out of the 2012 Aussie Millions Main Event in 12th. The $250k Challenge went until 6 a.m. but Ivey didn’t miss a beat.   John Juanda was partially responsible for getting four Chinese businessmen in on the game.   Patrik Antonius came in second place and cashed for $1.2 million. Despite his notable cash game winnings, it was his biggest ever live score.   Daniel Negreanu busted in fourth and experienced one of poker’s worst bubbles. Instead of making $823k, Negreanu lost $250k. Gus Hansen snagged the min-cash for $823k.   The $250k Challenge took place entirely in Crown Casino’s TV friendly studio 3. The event began at 4:30 p.m. and ended just after 6 a.m. the next day.   After the last hand was dealt, Patrik Antonius and Phil Ivey agreed to go get breakfast together. Ivey just asked that Antonius wait while he sorted out how he was going to get paid.  

Fairy tales are full of quaint and colorful characters, some of them human and some of them non-human. There is a magical touch to the stories that attracts children and adults alike. The leading software provider Realtime Gaming (RTG) offers online slot games based on fairy tales that recreate the freshness and innocence on the reels.

Wooden Boy is based on Pinocchio. The reels are set in Geppetto’s workshop, where Pinocchio was fashioned out of wood. The other symbols on the reels are taken from the Pinocchio story and include the blue fairy who gives him life, Honest John the fox who tricks him and the whale that swallows Geppetto. The high value card symbols are made from wood. The background music as the reels spin is fast and peppy. Pinocchio is the wild symbol. When it appears there is a pile of wood shavings and the Pinocchio appears expanded across all reels dancing a jig. The blue fairy is the scatter symbol and it triggers the free spins. But before that it delivers one of the more famous lines from the story – “Now, remember, Pinocchio be a good boy.” Three, four or five fairy symbols appearing anywhere on the reels award 5, 10 or 15 free spins respectively. During the free spins Pinocchio multiplies payouts three times if it substitutes in a winning combination.

Roberta’s Castle is another fairy tale themed slot game from RTG. It is based on the popular Rapunzel story by the Brothers Grimm, only the name has been changed to Roberta. In the background to the reels Roberta can be seen imprisoned in the tower of her castle with her long golden tresses hanging down. The symbols on the reels include brush, mirror, scissors and cat and royally fashioned high value card symbols. The handsome prince with the sparkling teeth is the wild symbol. He gives a knowing wink when he substitutes in winning combinations and also doubles all payouts. The castle window is the scatter symbol. When it awards the free spins the windows open, Roberta lets her long hair down and blows kisses to the prince. 15 free spins are awarded at tripled payouts.

Aladdin’s Wishes is based on Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, an Oriental fairy tale from the Arabian Nights. The highest fixed payout of 5,000 coins is provided by Jasmine. The other high paying symbols are the genie and Aladdin’s monkey. Instead of high value card symbols RTG has used Arabian Nights icons like magic carpet, palace, scimitar, gold bag and ewer. Aladdin is the wild symbol that appears only on reels 2, 3 and 4, but doubles payouts when in winning combinations. In the animation Aladdin can be seen flying on the carpet holding the magic lamp. The magic lamp triggers the Aladdin’s Wishes feature when three or more symbols appear scattered from left to right or right to left. The player gets to pick from five lamps. The number of picks is the number of lamps that triggered the bonus round. If the magic lamp is picked then the player gets 25 free spins at doubled payouts. Otherwise he wins up to 100 times the triggering bet. Like Wooden Boy and Roberta’s Castle, Aladdin’s Wishes also offers a randomly triggered progressive jackpot.

All these Real Series fairy tale themed slot games can be played at RTG online casinos like Club World, Slots Jungle, Cherry Red and Win Palace.

William Hill have already taken nearly £100,000 on the Eurovision Song Contest and fully expect to take £1 million by the time the show has finished on Saturday 14th May, sparking an industry wide turnover of £10 million. France are the current favourites with Hills at 11/4, while the UK are the 11/2 second favourites. Both countries already represent a five figure loss for Hills with 10 days still to go until the big event.“Eurovision gets more and more popular every year with punters and this year we are looking at our first ever million pound turnover,” said Hill’s spokesman Joe Crilly.One Hill’s punter in Ireland has placed the biggest Eurovision bet so far, staking €1,000 on Ireland at 20/1.William Hill Eurovision Odds:

Outright: 11/4 France; 11/2 UK; 7/1 Estonia; 8/1 Azerbaijan; 9/1 Hungary; 12/1 Bosnia Herzegovina; 12/1 Sweden; 16/1 Russia; 16/1 Germany; 20/1 Ireland; 20/1 Norway; 25/1 Turkey; 25/1 Denmark; 33/1 Finland; 40/1 Italy; 50/1 BAR.

 I think that too many people in poker fall for the hype that is in the game at this time. This then means that they end up playing the wrong form of poker. I believe that too many people are playing six max poker when they should really be playing full ring. If you lack skills as a poker player then you really should be reducing the number of hands that you play and not increasing them. The vast majority of people who attempt to play poker are not psychologically cut out to play the game or they simply haven’t got enough time to study the game in depth. Also if they have personality flaws linked to point number one then that can represent a very formidable obstacle to overcome.

So if these players want to make more money then they should do so by playing less hands and not more hands. You can only do this by playing full ring where you are correctly folding a far greater percentage of your hands and in many cases then 90% is close to being correct. When you play full ring then multi-tabling is far easier. You can play ten tables pretty easily in full ring and still have time for doing other stuff. This is especially the case if you have a style of play that reduces the number of flops that you see. This is what multi-tabling is all about because if you can successfully multi-table then you will dramatically add to your bottom line. Let us look at a hand where you could be playing ten tables all at once and it is folded around to the cut-off who raises to $1.75 in NL50.

You have Jc-10c on the button and now you have to decide what to do with the hand. If you were playing a single table then calling the raise is more of an option than if you are playing ten tables and I will explain why. If you call then unless one of the blinds re-raises then you are forced into playing post flop poker. This may be optimal if you have good reads on your opponent but you will often have to face marginal decisions on the post flop rounds. Let’s say that the flop comes Q-10-5 and your opponent c-bets. You call and the turn card is the 4c and they barrel again. You only have second pair with a mediocre kicker and now you don’t really know what to do. You are going to be spending time here trying to collate data but playing so many tables means that other tricky decisions may be happening elsewhere.

The more tables that you play then the more of these situations that you will face! So getting back to the previous hand then if I were playing 10-12 tables then I would be more apt to either fold or three bet this rather than just call. I think that this style of play is more conducive to playing more tables when your decision making processes are simpler. When you three bet to say $6 then you are simplifying the hand even though your risk-reward ratio isn’t great. With only $2.50 in the pot and you raising to $6 then you are doing several things with the hand. Firstly you are looking to win an immediate $2.50 and that is a very good result. But secondly you are speculating as well that you can win the hand by using the combined power of your hand strength and your position to perhaps win a huge pot.

It’s like we’ve said time and time again, we don’t like to make flat-out statements about how good poker players are. Poker’s a complicated game, and even after years and years of winning, millions of hands played, the farthest we’ll go is to say someone be good at poker.

This week we’re bestowing that dubious honor on Isaac Haxton.

Interestingly it was the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure that first brought Haxton to our attention, and it’s the PCA that put him on our radar today.

The first entry on Haxton’s tournament record is an $861,789 runner-up finish in the 2007 PCA main event.

Since then he’s earned roughly $2.7 million playing live poker tournaments and he’s looking to build on that big-time today in the Bahamas as he leads the final 16 in the $100,000 buy-in Super High Roller event.

The Backstory

When you find players excelling in poker at a young age more often than not they excelled at other mental athletics as well. Such was the case for young Isaac Haxton.

Born in New York and raised in Syracuse, Haxton was the son of an English professor and started playing chess at four years of age.

Haxton was too cool for school, or at least the fifth grade.  

Like some sort of Tenenbaum replicant Haxton skipped the fifth grade and was absorbed by Magic: The Gathering by age ten. Swept up in the wave of MTG players making the switch to poker, Haxton was making trips to the Turning Stone Casino in New York as a high-school senior. It wasn’t long after that he found online poker.

Haxton started winning and, using the knack for gaming excellence he had acquired early on, applied himself to poker in a big way.

The Evidence

Isaax Haxton has been providing evidence that he might be good at poker for years, starting chiefly with the aforementioned $861k PCA score five years ago.

As  we reported all those years ago, Haxton ran extremely bad to have transferred his winnings from his PokerStars account to Neteller. That’s because the day after the funds hit his Neteller account, the online payment processor’s funds were seized by the Department of Justice and its owners arrested.

It took many months for Haxton to recoup the money, but luckily for him he went on to earn another $214,000 before the end of 2007. That mini-heater included a final table at the WSOP, and extended straight into 2008 with four more World Series cashes and a six-figure payday at the EPT London High Roller event.

Haxton’s biggest score to date came at the 2009 WSOP when he finished second to Vitaly Lunkin in the $40,000 40^th Anniversary event. Haxton earned $1,168,568.

In 2010 Haxton fared well with two more six-figure finishes, winning a $2,500 Venetian Deep Stack event and finishing ninth in the $25k WSOP Six-Max Championship.

His most recent windfall before today’s PCA Super High Roller came in the way of a third-place finish in the $100,000 buy-in event at the Bellagio’s Five Diamond series in Las Vegas. That result earned him $581,806.

And now we treat you to the photo reel of Isaax Haxton we’ve compiled over the years.

Haxton used to have long hair, like really long.   Looking very Jim Morrison at the 2007 WSOP.   2008 and the hair remains.   2009 was the first time we saw Haxton 2.0   After a while it just started to look normal.   One year ago in the Bahamas.