High Stakes Poker

Finally, this year's season of the televised cash game poker show, High Stakes Poker, aired last Sunday on GSN. This year's first episode featured one of the most impressive line-ups ever seen in televised poker.

Line-up:

- Phil Ivey (Photo), US
- Gus Hansen, DK
- Dario Minieri, IT
- Antonio Esfandiari, US
- Andreas Høivold, NO
- Phil Hellmuth, US
- Tom 'durrrr' Dwan, US
- Daniel Negreanu, CA

This season, the minimum buy-in is $200k but Ivey and Dwan both elected to buy-in for a cool half a million. Already in the first episode, one of the players loses his buy-in and quits the game - this is highly unusual as poker players most often carry around huge ego's. However, you will have to watch the show (see below) to find out who has a blow-up!

If you don't know what the difference between cash game poker and tournament poker is, here's a quick intro; first of all, in a tournament there is a fixed buy-in - you pay e.g. $100 and you get 10,000 tournament chips (= so the maximum amount you can lose is those $100). In cash game, on the other hand, you buy-in with your own money and you can quit or bring more money to the table anytime you want.   

Cash game poker's biggest advantage is that the format makes the game more interesting to watch because the players have more room to play good poker. When you see the final table of a tournament, the players usually only have 6-20 big blinds (BB) left because the blinds increase over time. This way, the most common phrase you will here is "I'm all in!" - it sounds cool but it really takes out the skill element of poker.
In cash games, the blinds stays the same all the time. On HSP the blinds are $400/$800 so all the players start out with at least 250 BB's. The deep stacks are way better for televised poker since the decisions become much harder and the bluffing element becomes more important.