If you were going to field a team of poker players, who would you start with? Those whose first thought was not Phil Ivey either don’t know a thing about Texas Hold’em, or they the play in poker tournaments whose highest stakes are a year’s supply of beef jerky. Well that seems to be exactly the type of folks picking the American team for the World Team Poker event. Poker pro, Doyle Brunson, will be captain, and Spock to his Captain Kirk will be the self styled king of holdem, Phil Hellmuth. The rest of the team includes Howard Lederer, Annie Duke, Allen Cunningham, Chris Ferguson, Jennifer Harman, Mike Matusow, and Erik Seidel.
This is not the best group of Texas Hold’em players that the American’s could gather. While they have a lot of hardware between the nine of them, very few of these poker players have been making a lot of waves lately. Doyle is closest thing that the poker tournament world has to Babe Ruth, but even the best baseball player ever had a sell by date on him...and so does Doyle. His game is in another era. With that said, Phil Hellmuth has proven consistently that he can no longer keep up with current generation of poker pros. In short, to beat the American team all anyone is going to have to do is show some aggression and watch them fold.
They would have done themselves some favors by choosing Phil Ivey for their team. He is without a doubt the best holdem player on the planet at this point and time. Not only is it a scandal that he is not on the team, I am shocked that Britain or Yugoslavia didn’t adopt him just so he could play under their flag. If Canada had a team in this event, I have the feeling they would not have overlooked Daniel Negreanu.
