In my poker education I am always trying to find the guys who are CURRENTLY beating the games and trying to learn how they play and what they do differently. I have the opinion that the books explain to the masses how to play poker properly but most of the masses are losing players - so how do the few winning players do things differently than what the book says. I am also a kind of contrarian - I like to find the best books that promote nitty play and compare them to the best books that promote LAGGY play. I like to compare shallow stack tournament play with deep stack tournament play etc. and compare all tournament play with cash game players. Especially profitable players.
So I follow players like JohnnyBax, sheets, westmenlo, bond18, JovialGent, Stinko_Mikko, mi_turtle, jorj95 etc - these are online guys crushing different aspects of poker - the first few crush mtts, whereas stinko and mi_turtle (same guy) crush sit n gos and jorj95 crushes super turbos and high-limit satellites/sngs. When I follow these guys I watch them play online, I study any training videos they release, I read any books/interviews they are in and I follow them in live tournaments they might enter. In fact I almost feel like a wierdo stalker sometimes.
Hence last year when JovialGent - real name Yevgeni Timoshenko - played the WPT Bellagio and won it - I was following the poker media and they hardly mentioned him - they had no clue who he was and kept giving updates on everyone else and ignoring him as he slowly tore through the field. Then the same thing happened in the SCOOP event. Finally this year he gets a mention in the poker press.
And this year the same thing is happening with stinko_mikko aka mi_turtle aka Nick Rainey. Nick is a grinder and has had a bunch of publicity on the forums and on sites like poker_static this year but unless you know who he is and actively look for him, you would probably not have a clue. And this is where the poker media is - clueless. I look at the blogs - pokerati and Tao of Poker, I look at pokernews and cardplayer and even the offical WSOP site. They dont even mention him but he is one of the best players on Full Tilt (last year) and Pokerstars (this year) constantly near the top of the leaderboards and grinding out win after win.
Now you have to be really lucky to win the main event and he prob wont make it that far but he was 8th in chips after day 1, top 20 after day 20, top 100 after day 3 and easily made the money on day 4. He is tweeting his progress which is great for people like me who are "virtual-railing" him and slowly progressing through the field while all the big-name players the media is focused on are getting knocked out one by one. It is impressive to watch and I hope as he goes deeper and deeper all his online experience comes to the fore and he makes it all the way.
So join me and keep an eye on mi_turtle (thats his twitter name and pokerstars name), or Nick Rainey (his real name on WSOP up-dates/chip counts) and see and hear the guy directly at pokerstatic.com.
GLGL Nick!!
PS - also glgl bond18 - Tony Dunst - currently the chip leader.
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