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Phil Ivey Has Been Playing the Biggest Poker Games In The World, Which Are Played Without 2s, 3s, 4s, or 5s In The Deck

Poker News - Ivey has been mainly absent from the poker spotlights. Most times his name was used in a headline, it involved legal cases. His last cash came from January 2016 when he finished fifth in a Triton Poker event in the Philipines. Before that, his last cash came from February 2015 when he won the Super High Roller at the Aussie Millions. Asked about his whereabouts over the last couple of years, Ivey said he had done a lot of traveling and spending time with his family. “Just kinda all over the place,” Ivey said with a smirk as he, like Tom Dwan, have been mainly focused on the games in Asia.

Phil Ivey is such a GOAT. We don’t talk about it enough. It’d be like if Tiger (in his prime) left the PGA Tour and only played in private games where he could make a ton more money. That’s what Ivey does. Instead of playing the WSOP or WPT or what have you, he plays the highest stakes games in Macau with Chinese businessmen and stays off the radar. Ivey did the whole “winning bracelets” things, now he plays games where he can win million of dollars in a day. And apparently now that game is “short deck”, which means what exactly?

Compared to regular No-Limit Hold’em, the Short Deck format features a 36-card deck with the deuces, threes, fours, and fives removed, with aces doubling as fives instead. With just 36 cards instead of 52, straights become more common, while flushes are a rare sight. In order to adjust for this, the hand ranking chart has been updated, and a flush beats a full house.

That’s so awesome. I love how the game keeps evolving. Straights and full houses everywhere. So much more action with the condensed deck and paired boards. These Macau games, where blinds are often $10k/$20k and upwards have to be absolutely wild.

Back to Ivey again- not enough can be said about how good he is. He rarely plays tournaments anymore, so he hopped into this one, in a format that has had maybe 2 tournaments of it’s type ever, and won it.

Pokernews - It was a master class of strategy and determination that saw Ivey overcome a 1-4 chip deficit at the start of the heads up duel to grind down his opponent and take home the lion’s share of the HKD$14,347,200 prize pool.

The first tournament of its kind on the live poker circuit attracted a field of 61 entries. The ante only format came with a buy-in of HKD$250,000 (~$31,850) with the top nine spots getting paid.

For his victory, Ivey claimed a payday of HKD$4,749,200 (~$604,977) and the prestige to be the first player to win a live event of this action-packed game type that has become very popular in the high stakes cash game scene in Asia.

And the best news is he said he’s going to play the WSOP this Summer. I doubt he really will play much outside of the $1,000,000 One Drop and a few other high rollers because he isn’t going to leave the juicy cash games, but right now he says he is going to play the WSOP so I guess we’ll see. Either way, it’s awesome whenever the GOAT comes back to the spotlight. Ivey=good for the game.

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PS: Maybe I’ll make this it’s own blog, but if god damn SPORTS BETTING is legal, online poker shouldn’t be far behind. I mean, come on. It has to happen now.