Phil Ivey is one of my favorite poker players. I could go on all day about why I like the guy, but the bottom line is that I am glad he didn't win the world series of poker this year. It was pretty amazing that he got as far as he did, the odds of a well known player getting that far a just not good.

Sure; it would have been good for Full Tilt, maybe good for poker in general, but it would have sucked for me; this is for sure. Already Phil Ivey is considered to be one of the  best poker players alive... if he took this event down we never would have heard the end of it.

The declaration of any poker player as "The best" is just a silly statement. If you give me any tournament poker player, I could likely trace the majority of their profits back to 10 or 20 key hands that they have won throughout the years. By the same accord... most good players who are not successful can trace their demise back to 10 or 20 suckouts that happened in crucial spots during tournaments.

This is not an argument of skill, it is an argument of statistics. The # of tournaments that would need to be played to have a statistically significant figure is higher than anyone can ever be expected to play in my opinion. This is not true in online poker, but in live poker - the expected # of tournaments needed for the cards to actually break even (bad timing included) is not likely to be achieved by any 1 person in their lifetime.

Let's face it... if it wasn't for 1 nasty suckout (and I mean real nasty) Greg Raymer could possibly be considered to be the best poker player in history. His WSOP accomplishments are still unprecedented in my opinion... and they are dwarfed incomparison to the possibilities in retrospect.

I'm guessing that 50% of the people reading this blog entry will not understand my feelings correctly. I don't hate Phil Ivey and I don't think that poker is all luck. I simply think that the following fact needs to be acknowledged; The greatest poker player ever is likely a guy who plays at his homegame on the weekends and hoes to work on Monday. He doesn't have the passion for poker and he makes more money doing other things than he ever could in poker (yes, you can make more than 10-20 million elsewhere in the world, the WSOP is not the pinnacle in life). The best poker players ever likely is just not in a position where he is able or he wants to succeed in poker.