This week, “The Showdown” with Jon Friedberg welcomes recent Full Tilt Poker $1K Monday winner Shaun Deeb. The top-tier poker pro sits at #44 worldwide in the PocketFives.com Rankings and has maintained his place atop the industry for the past five years. Check out Part 1 and Part 2.
Friedberg began the show by discussing the recently announced professional poker league commissioned by Annie Duke. The series will be stationed at the Palms in Las Vegas later this year and Friedberg was looking forward to its debut: “I’m extremely excited for this. This is something that the poker world has needed forever. The PGA works this way and many other professional sports and game associations work this way. Poker just needs it. I hope it’s successful.”
Multi-year exemptions for players are available and Friedberg questioned how the process of paring down the poker community to form a field of 200 would take place: “There might be a lot of politics involved. How many of the biggest names in poker – the household names that the U.S. knows about – are actually in the top 200 best poker players, which is what Annie said she wanted to select? There are tons of people that most people don’t know about that are definitely in the top 200 best poker players.” Voice your opinion by sending Friedberg a Tweet at @JonFriedberg.
Also discussed prior to Deeb joining the set was the multi-accounting admission from Jay “Krantz” Rosenkrantz last week. Friedberg received strong feedback from “The Showdown” listeners and explained that he’s doing a double-take: “After receiving several e-mails from you and a couple of messages on Twitter, it sort of opened my eyes up to the fact that because Krantz was playing in heads-up games and not in six-max or full ring games, it was much more deceiving. I didn’t consider the fact that he was doing this at heads-up tables, so I might go back and swallow some of my words a bit.”
Deeb is fresh off making two final tables at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure worth over $100,000 combined. On his lack of success in the live poker arena to this point, Deeb told “The Showdown” viewers, “I was playing very poorly. I didn’t really give credence to the skills that live poker takes. I generally just didn’t care. I was totally content to bust a live tournament to play the $3 Rebuy and the nightly tournaments online. I would look at my clock and see if I busted that hand what tournaments I could play online. I based my decisions on that.”
Deeb is a fixture on the poker circuit, but gave Friedberg a rundown of a day in his home base of Nevada: “When I’m sitting at home in Vegas, I wake up at any random time and take a shower… I’ll open up my laptop, see what games are going on, try to jump in a few of them, play for a couple of hours, go out to dinner, and then come back and play some more.” The result of his loose regimen is over $4 million in online poker earnings.
Finally, Deeb admitted that his strategy entails a mix of decisions based on stats and feel: “When I think about it away from the game, I’m definitely analytical. I wish I kept stats from early on in my days. I think I could have some really interesting data that most people wouldn’t have because I’ve played so much volume over the years. In game, I think I’m big about flow. I really just know what my table’s doing and play a lot of hands based on my image.”
Check out the rest of this week’s installment of “The Showdown” with Jon Friedberg. New episodes are released every Tuesday exclusively here on Poker News Daily.