Doyle Brunson enters online poker wars

After an innocuous Tweet by John Juanda congratulating his fellow Full Tilt Poker pro Erik Seidel on winning the $250k High-Roller tournament at the Aussie Millions there was quite a bit of blowback from the poker community on the veracity of the win, and how the prize-money was pushing Seidel up the all-time leader-board. Even Seidel’s Hall of Fame presenter Doyle Brunson got in on the act, Tweeting back: “@LuckBoxJuanda yep, FT will soon have a 2 million dollar buy in exclusive to their pros. Whoever wins it will be all time money leader.”

Doyle’s Tweet elicited the following response from Juanda: “To those who r jealous, 250K super HR was an open event.” And I have to say, Juanda is 100% right! Is it Seidel’s fault, or any other player who took part in the tournament for that matter, that Team PokerStars didn’t attend the Aussie Millions? Do they really think that if Team PokerStars was present that they would have called off the tournament fearing Daniel Negreanu or Isildur1 could win it?

Doyle is way off base here; after all I don’t remember anyone questioning Negreanu passing Phil Ivey on the all-time money-list with his second place finish in the PCA $100k Super-High-Roller tournament. Actually, I’m quite surprised that someone who racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars -putting him as the winningest poker player for years– in tournaments that were limited to fields of a couple dozen Poker Pros would make this claim -if you think about it the $10,000 buy-in of the 70’s is no more exclusive than the $250k buy-in of today.

There were 20 entrants in the $250k tournament, five of which are Team Full Tilt pros -the faces of the site-and a further five were Full Tilt Poker Red Pros. The event was open to anyone, and if David Williams, Vanessa Selbst -two more critics– or any other Team PokerStars wanted to play they could have. Unfortunately it is PokerStars that is to blame for their absence -Just as it is Full Tilt Poker’s problem that their pros did not compete in the $100k tournament at the PCA.

It has nothing to do with exclusivity, the $250k event was an open tournament, so if Selbst and Williams think Seidel’s win is on par with holding a 3-person, invite-only, tournament with a $50 million prize-pool they sound foolish -and I know both of those players are a lot smarter than to make this false equivalency -as Bluff magazine ascribes to them.