The Showdown with Jon Friedberg returns and Jack Effel, tournament director of the World Series of Poker, is his in-studio interview guest.
This is Part 1 of 2. Be sure to watch The Showdown – Episode 6, Part 2.
In this episode, on top of interviewing Jack Effel, Friedberg discusses the vote on Full Tilt Poker’s multi-entry tournaments and also the poker Twitter chatter.
To start the show, Friedberg talked about the recently completed UBOC 6 played on UB.com. There was a solid turnout for this year’s tournament event series.
On Twitter, Friedberg talked about Phil Hellmuth and his tweet that he met with Full Tilt Poker executives recently. Friedberg decided to call B.S. on that topic, not because he doubts that Hellmuth met with Full Tilt Poker people, but that the tweet didn’t mean anything. Friedberg feels that if Hellmuth was in serious negotiations with Full Tilt Poker that he would not be tweeting it to the entire world.
Greg Raymer has left PokerStars. Friedberg takes the controversial stance that Raymer isn’t that valuable to PokerStars anymore, like he was in 2004 and 2005. Now, with the Cada and Duhamel and the new champions, Friedberg doesn’t feel like he can compete with those guys to give the same level of exposure to PokerStars.
The next topic talked about the recent exodus from Cake Poker in the form of poker room manager Lee Jones leaving and the recent departure of Doyle’s Room.
The next segment, The VoteDown, comes and Friedberg talks about the new poker league started by Annie Duke. The overwhelming feeling from viewers is that when it comes to this league, the selection process needs to be fair. They need to take some live players, some online players, some cash players and some tournament players.
This week, Friedberg wants to know your opinion on Full Tilt Poker’s new multi-entry tournaments and their recent Double Guarantees week that resulted in some huge prize pools thanks to allowing all the tournaments to allow players to enter into them more than once simultaneously. Personally, Friedberg us not a fan of these events and the “5 to 1” pro to fish ratio. He wants to hear your feedback via Twitter @JonFriedberg or by email jonfriedberg@gmail.com.
The guest this week, Jack Effel then joins Jon on the show. Effel is the tournament director of the WSOP, with the schedule for this year’s events recently being released.
