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  Dream teams don't always perform as advertised. For example, in 1980 the Soviets fielded an Olympic hockey team that had the sort of talent that would have made Wayne Gretzky look like Pee-wee Herman on ice skates. Most of us know how that ended. Igor Larionov and his all star line up eventually were beat by a group of guys whose day jobs involved the words "Would you like some fries with that?" More recently, the Detroit Tigers expanded their payroll to the third highest in Major League Baseball and put together a group of "all stars". What they got for their money was the worst record in all of baseball and an 18 million dollar a year player who has a .176 batting average. So will PokerStars do any better with the additions they made to their all-star poker team?



  PokerStars has recently added Chad Brown and Gavin Griffin to their team. For those who don't know much about these players, Mr. Brown is the 2006 Bluff Player of the Year, and Gavin Griffin is the first player to ever win a World Poker Tour championship, attain a World Series of Poker bracelet, and claim a European Poker Tour title. These two are a couple of high powered additions to a team that already includes the likes of Daniel Negreanu and Vanessa Rousso.



  Poker teams are more akin to racing teams than they are to guys who chase a ball or a puck around and try to score. Despite wearing the same logo, members of a poker team are as happy to beat up on their own teammates as they are the members of other teams. How it generally works is that an entity like PokerStars throws all its team members into a tournament or event. Because of the sheer number of quality players that they are fielding, the chances are relatively good that one of them is going to bring some championship hardware back to the locker room.



  A good example of this was when the Full Tilt team had a group of its players facing down PokerStars' Vanessa Rousso at a recent Poker After Dark event. In this case the weight of numbers didn't help: Vanessa took out her Full Tilt rivals like Godzilla going through Tokyo, but in most cases Full Tilt would have come away with that win.



  By adding Chad and Gavin to the fold before the WSOP season it is very possible that PokerStars will be able to add another few bracelets to their trophy case. The rest of the field, including their own teammates, will need to be very aware of these two players.