Conspiracy Theories

thanks to Greg for bringing the following to my attention:

Paul "DotCom" Phillips has written previously about ESPN embellishing televised hands to make them more dramatic. In his LiveJournal, he casts some serious doubts as to whether Lisandro actuallly had TT in the big laydown vs. Ivey i described below.

from Paul Phillips' site:

If you saw the ESPN circuit event from lake tahoe, on the first hand they show jeff lisandro raise with TT and ivey call with 99. The flop comes 444, lisandro bets and is called. The turn is a 5, lisandro bets, ivey goes all-in, and lisandro folds.

There is not one chance in a million lisandro held TT on that hand.

1) When lisandro looks at his hand only one card is visible, the ten of spades. When calling the action norman chad actually says "I had trouble seeing those. Did you see those?" Then they make some lame joke about laser surgery. It's almost like they're winking at the audience about the fabrication.

2) Lisandro was chip leader and had ivey covered by over 100K, and had already put a ton of money in the pot after the turn bet. Ivey didn't re-raise him preflop. Some guys might figure to have a bigger pair than TT given the action to that point but lisandro knows perfectly well that ivey is not that guy.

3) On a later hand lisandro seriously considers OVERCALLING in an unraised 3-way pot with J7 on a JT4 board, in a spot where he would have gone broke if he lost. On the flop pham checked, ivey bet, lisandro called, pham check-raised all-in, and ivey called! They give him quite a lot of camera time to agonize over the fold. The idea that he would fold TT on a 4445 board heads-up with phil ivey when he's the chip leader but then consider an overcall with top pair no kicker in a 3-way pot where it's win or go broke is about as likely as that he commutes to work in a yugo but would refuse a gift ferrari because he doesn't like the body styling.The way it played AT is the most likely holding, but it could have been T-anything where X is neither 4 nor T.

-KD