Maybe I should get a little more personal. from Ansky. 6 March 2009, 15:15.

It's fairly obvious to most readers that I don't put too much time into this blog. I go into waves of interest, ranging from total apathy, to actually dedicated time commitment. Thankfully, I am feeling very interested right now. Perhaps I would be more into it if I made it more personal, and stopped blogging about things so uncontroversial as Jeopardy and The Wire.

Inspired by a recent blog spat between two other poker players, I have decided to take off the diplomatic gloves. There has been a bit of a controversy between Shannon Shorr and Shane Schleger. Shannon, made a post about getting "snubbed" by the NBC heads up invitational, and Shane responded with this http://shaniaconline.blogspot.com/. He may have been a tad bit snide with his response, and a lot of posters on 2+2 thought so. I thought it was a fairly reasonable response, and a true one.

My gripe with Shannon's post, really has nothing to do with Shannon, or Shane, or any other alliterative 'Sh' names. I just am not sure why neither Shane nor Shannon realized that in truth, there is an entirely different reason why Shannon should not be invited, though it is one I am sure the NBC producers never entertained. Disclaimer: I realize that the object of the tournament is to get viewers, not to actually measure the best heads up players in the world. I do not think that NBC should do what I am about to say, nor would i expect them to. I am just playing devils advocate off of the assumption that Shannon was "deserving" of an invite.

The "deserving" players for this event, were not any of the accomplished tournament players Shannon mentioned in his blog who were also snubbed.

"After very closely examining the list, Michael Binger, Nam Le, Sebastian Ruthenberg, Michael Martin, Vivek Rajkumar, Amit Makhija, Adam Geyer and Hevad Khan are probably somewhere wondering WTF! as well."

Newsflash. This is a heads up tournament! This isn't a 5 day full ring tournament, which tests a lot of things, the least of which is heads up poker. Even if you were to make the point that in tournament poker you need heads up skills to win, the obvious counter is that, no you really don't. If you were a terrible heads up player, on average when you get to the end of a tournament with the 50bb or so average stacks you will have, you still would never be much worse than a 40% dog. Being at the end of a tournament, you would certainly have accomplished more stacked feats than winning when a 40% dog.

The fact is, the best heads up players in the world are heads up cash game professionals. Most of whom, don't really care about the notoriety or the glamor of the NBC heads up tournament, so I am not writing this on their behalf or to protect their precious egos, just for the sake of truth. Also, an honorable mention should go to the best HU sit and go players, who probably would be great at this format.

Heads up poker is not a game in which a different skill set will transfer easily. There are nuances and subtleties and certain facts of the game which come with long hours of study and practice. If you want to talk about "deserving" then we should first go to about the 30 or so best online heads up players. Honestly, I'd say a good 5/10 grinder is more equipped to win a heads up tournament than a random successful tournament player.

I don't know if Shannon plays any heads up poker, or if any of the other "snubbed" player do, but I certainly wouldn't claim to be a deserved member of a heads up tournament based on something other than my heads up reputation.

The new, improved blogger,

Dani Stern.