Extraordinary scenes from poker and chess.
Topic: Poker
There's been a lot of rubbish written about online poker on the Gutshot forum recently. I don't know who these people are who think that you get more freak outdraws online than live. I've never seen any evidence for it myself. I can sit and play online for hours and hours and never see much that's out of the ordinary.

Just for the sake of it, here's a hand I saw live in an omaha game at the Western yesterday night. On a flop of:

Jc 9d 8c

two players got all their money in.

A had Qs Ac Qd Td

B had Ad 5d Qc Tc

so they both had the nut straight, while B was freerolling on the clubs. In the event though, the next two cards came Jd, 8d to give A the backdoor straight-flush! What was particularly annoying for B was that he had the nut diamond draw, so he couldn't lose to a backdoor diamond flush. Ouch!

Changing the subject for no reason ...

I look at Chessgames.com every day for their daily puzzles. The problems start off easy on a Monday and get progressively more difficult until Sunday when there is no point in trying to work it out, you just go straight to the answer and find out what 14 move combination Spassky inflicted on so-and-so at the Leningrad interzonal in 1963 etc.

I used to spend ages studying chess. Eventually it annoyed me that I didn't seem to get any better at it. I've wasted a lot of time looking at games played by people much better than me. Much of it goes over my head. But it's worth it every now and then when you find a gem like this one:

Petrosian v Pachman, 1961

Petrosian's final combination is a thing of beauty. Just once in my life I would like to find a killer move like 21.Bg7