The drawing for the NBC Heads Up Poker Championship will be Thursday and it should effect the likelihood particular players might win a title. Participants can be found on this poker blog. Certainly, brackets effect the bettors decision in events like March Madness or the Champions League when it gets to knock out rounds because match-ups mean everything. Even more so when a player has to wade through a field of 64 in six different heads up matches. theoretically the further a player advances the harder the match ups get.
Early on the betting services seem to be giving more respect to live players than the online players. You could argue names like Tom Dwan, Phil Ivey, and Patrik Antonius transcend labels like online and live players, though TV face time is the reason Dwan and Ivey are superstars. Antonius to a lesser degree. NBC will hope to give a lot of face time to these guys and the services suspect they will.
At the top Huck Seed, the defending champion is co-favorite with Phil Ivey at 10/1. Since no player has ever repeated seems like that would be reason enough to not make Seed the favorite. However, Seed has shown an ability to go deep in this even and be there during the pay-outs that nobody else has. Phil Ivey has never made the finals in year of the competition and has only one deep run of note. So again, he’s a surprising favorite too.
Chris Ferguson is next at 12/1. Heres a guy you can justify as the outright favorite. He’s a math whiz and understands push/shove better than most of his live peers. He’s also gone to the finals three times winning once. He may be the only guy with a better showing than Huck Seed, and if he is it begs the question why isn’t he favored. It’s true “Jesus” hasn’t done much recently but the guy has a piece of a major poker site where they print money. Why play if you are the casino elsewhere.
The next group is Phil Hellmuth, Daniel Negreanu, Tom Dwan, and Patrik Antonius at 16/1. Dwan hasn’t done much in this event but he has a ton of experience playing heads up cash games. While the escalating blinds and short stacks are a little different than what he is used to, he should be getting more respect from the odds makers. Patrik Antonius has been on a downswing online (as Dwan was recently) but he too is an experienced heads-up player. Both have to be among the best in recognizing patterns in their opponents.
Hellmuth and Negreanu are arguably the two biggest stars in poker. Hellmuth has a better showing in this event than Negreanu with a victory in the very first one. Negreanu who can’t seem to write a blog post or tweet without referencing Hellmuth hasn’t done much of his own of in this type of format. Negreanu excels in ring games and plays off group dynamics maybe better than he does heads up formats. He also makes a great deal of chip accumulation preying on the weaker players that flood the fields.
Three players get rated as 20/1 to win. They include Gus Hansen, whose online bankroll until recently was on life support, Allen Cunningham, and John Juanda. These are guys that were atop the poker world in the middle of the 2000s, and in the culture of what have you done for me lately, the answer is not much. Juanda has a couple of good major tournament successes but none of these guys have made a huge live impact of late.
Like any of the players above them, criticism leveled at these guys has to be taken with a grain of salt, they are the world’s best live players. Negreanu, Hellmuth, Cunningham etc are being challenged by this author as far as skill goes but just vs. the rest of the field in this format.
