Wow, Mr Rocks and Rings can play some good poker...

So I picked up Ep12 of High Stakes Poker. It was a good show as usual. Just wanted to give my thoughts on a couple subjects:

1. What the flying FUCK is up with Phil Hellmuth? I mean it's really hard to describe how he's playing, but he earned every bit of his reputation as an atrocious cash game player. A lot of his plays just absolutely baffled me. I'm kinad confused as to what he was thinking.

"Hey I have 6-7 on a A-Q-x board, lets bet $1,000 into a $8,000 pot and that'll surely be good enough to knock out TWO opponents!"

"Hey I have MIDDLE pair against 6 opponents, lets bet $3,200 into a pot of nearly $16k and then CALL a 25k raise from a set"

"Hey I finally hit a good hand. Lets just smallbet/check/smallbet to extract the LEAST amount of money possible"

And there were more. To be honest, I'm not much of a NL cash game player, but I know when there's a live one at the table. They aren't kidding when they said Phil stunk. He gets 0 value from his monsters, steals 0 pots with pathetic bets, and loses hand after hand to get him angry. Ugh. But he's worth a lot of money, so what the hell do I know.

2. When I first saw Antonio Esfandiari, the first thing I thought of was "douchebag". This was before I saw his wonderful website. Rocks and Rings. That pretty much sealed the deal for me. He's a dumbass. Well...till I saw HSP.

The man can play poker, he is constantly getting it in with the best hand, and he read Daniel as good as possible. (Granted DN did give it away thanks to his idiotic "I'll show you one card" comment) This is also a guy who got Eli Elezra to stick his stack in with just Jacks. And after being pissed for a couple minutes, he was back to joking around. He deserves a lot of respect. Not many people can lose 200k the way he did, and laugh it off.

3. Squeeze Plays: I'm kinda surprised more people weren't pulling these off the whole series. Johnny Chan put on a really nice one with my lucky hand. In a game like this where people are just flat calling raises, why not try a squeeze? You'll have position if someone does call you. I guess people fear the call/reraise or the original raiser actually waking up with something.

Anyways I'm glad this is getting another season. (Well, there are talks but nothing more) I've been watching a lot of cash games lately on UB. The NL ones are something I'd like to get into in the future. Till then, I'll stick to my grind.