Mar
9
by Chad Holloway
Congratulations to Annie Duke on her NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship win. The National Heads-Up Poker championship is essentially poker’s version of March Madness. I look forward every year to competing with other players from around the world in making predictions. CardPlayer currently offers the best Fantasy Poker competition for this tournament and this year had nearly 700 entrants (for the record, not one player pciked Annie Duke to win it). That’s not a lot, but then again the time between determining the match-ups at the draw party and the event’s start is quite short. It’d be nice if NBC held the draw party a week or so in advance. This would surely increase the number of participants from the Fantasy Poker/bracket prediction perspective. With all that said, I pretty much failed with my Fantasy Poker bracket.
Of the 32 first-round match-ups, I only got 16 correct. That doesn’t sound too bad but most of those came in two of the four brackets, so the winners advanced and just knocked each other out. Because of this, I wasn’t able to rack up too many points. It didn’t help that I chose Antonio Esfandiari to make it the to the Championship Match and he was knocked out in the first round. I did have a few good picks though. From the other side of the bracket, I picked Phil Laak to go all the way. He didn’t, but he had a decent run and made the money. I picked both Eric Bladwin and Jason Mericier to go far. Baldwin didn’t but Mercier sure did. I also did well in predicting how far Doyle Brunson and Annette Obrestad would go. Even though I didn’t win this Fantasy Poker competition, I had a great time. I can’t wait to watch it all unfold on television.
In other Fantasy Poker news, Scott Clements and Jason Mercier are having a little competition of their own. At the PCA Main Event, both players put an undisclosed amount of money on the line (rumored to be quite high) in regards to the BLUFF’s 2010 Player-of-the-Year race. Each chose ten players for their team and whatever team racked up the most points would win. Since the PCA Main Event was going on, the remaining players in the field influenced the draft. Clements won a coin flip for the first pick. Here is how their teams ended up:
Team Clements
Jeff Madsen
Eric “basebaldy” Baldwin
Nick Schulman
Jonathan Little
Nick Binger
Bertrand “Elky” Grospellier
Jason Potter
Daniel Negreanu
Joe Serock
Yevgeniy Timoshenko
Team Mercier
Praz Bansi
Amit Makhija
Christian Harder
Dan O’Brien
Faraz Jaka
Todd Terry
Mike Binger
Ben Zamani
J.C. Tran
Vivek Rajkumar
“Jason and I are both pretty competitive. It’s something that would be fun to watch throughout the year, and also [we] talk a little trash to each other,” Clements says. “Even though we have the bet, I won’t root against him. I still want him to win. He’s still a friend, even if it costs me money.” It should be interesting to see how this Fantasy Poker bet pans out.