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High Stakes Poker Season Six, Episode Two

The second season of HSP continued this weekend with Episode Two. The lineup remained more or less the same, as did the people driving the action – Phil Ivey and Tom Dwan.

The episode kicked off with Phil Ivey continuing to play table captain. Capitalizing on his run good image from Episode One, Ivey muscled the table with a variety of bets and moves, and everyone – including Tom Dwan – seemed uneager to tangle with him.

Fans of online poker at nosebleed stakes were tossed a nugget (if they were listening closely) in the table chatter when Gus mentioned his battles with Isildur1 and Dwan briefly bemoaned his significant losses to the mystery Swede.

While there was some chatter in the opening minutes, the table itself was a fairly quiet one, a face noted by (now solo) host Gabe Kaplan. Kaplan was, for his part, a bit flat. The absence of a co-host really causes a lot of his jokes to fizzle out, and without Benza to lead him in, a lot of opportunities for jokes or commentary just get passed up.

When the talk did start back up, amidst a string of uninteresting hands, it focused primarily on Ivey and the WSOP, which was a very recent event at the filming of HSP back in November 2009. A lot of the conversation focused around Moon’s widely-criticized played in the last hand, where he called off some gross number of BBs with QJ.

The only player interested in defending Moon was Daniel Negreanu, who also savaged Joe Cada for his play against Moon. Specifically, Negreanu felt that Cada was far too willing to play big pots against Moon, while Negreanu would have preferred a small-ball approach (surprise!) that sought to grind down Moon.

Dwan also commented on his mixed feelings regarding Ivey’s early exit from the final table of the WSOP. While a win by Ivey would have cost both players fairly big money in side bets, Dwan felt ambivalent given how “really good for poker” an Ivey WSOP victory would be.

Andreas Hoivold continued his run of sketchy play / bad timing with a super-loose river call of a Dwan bet with fifth pair after a flush and straight also got there on the river. Viewers were then treated to one of the more annoying segments of HSP Season 2 – Kara Scott interviewing Hoivold immediately after the hand and talking through the entire hand (that we’d just seen) at length, with extensive footage culled from … the five minutes immediately preceding the interview.

Scott’s presence in the episode was pretty limited, and fairly useless. It’s not a knock on her so much as a knock on HSP – they just don’t seem to have a strong plan for how to use her, and the show suffers as a result.

Eli Elezra entered mid-episode to fill Hellmuth’s seat; when asked by Scott if he thought Hellmuth’s seat was unlucky, Elezra trashed Hellmuth’s play and seemed confident that, even with Ivey to his left, the game was beatable. He probably felt a bit less confident when Dario spiked a river two-outer to take a reasonable sized pot away from Eli toward the end of the episode.

The most interesting hand of the episode was also the final one. Several players saw a flop in a limped pot that seemingly everyone caught a small piece of. On the turn, five players remained and the queen of hearts proved to be the best card for action in the deck. It gave Dwan top pair, Eli a flush draw and Hoivold top pair as well. The turn didn’t improve Hansen, who had flopped a ragged two pair that he decided to protect with a lead. Dwan came along and Elezra surprisingly elected to fold. Hoivold, already on a shrinking stack, decided that AQ was good enough to go with and (effectively) shipped all in. Hansen thought it through and re-raised to isolate. Dwan exited and the remaining players agreed to run it twice for the $190,000 pot.

Hansen won both, and Hoivold followed in the footsteps of Hellmuth, preferring (to paraphrase Kaplan) a goodbye over a rebuy.

New episodes of High Stakes Poker air on Sundays on GSN. Check local listings for times. If you missed Episode One, here it is:

You can watch high stakes poker online almost any hour of the day, any day of the week at Full Tilt Poker. Before you make an account at Full Tilt, read this first.

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