Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

Just getting into to NL, this ME FT was the first time I have watched an entire table play for 13 hours straight. I have to say I didn't really see anything that spectacular from AC in this time span. For all the talk from almost every guest pro in the booth about what a fantastic player he is, he seemed to fall into the same mode as the other "worse" players there by getting pushed around by Gold. I didn't really detect any techniques he used to adapt to the table dynamics.

Also, he seemd to get sucked into Gold's bantar the same as everyone else, although maybe he was trying to use it to his advantage more than the other players. But overall if I didn't know he was considered a great NL player, I would never have put him above Wasicka, Binger, etc as far as poker skill goes.

Did he have a bad FT, is 13 hours too short to judge, or is he overrated?

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

Gold used position on him very well. But as far as playing a shortstack goes, I think Allen played terrifically. His cards just wouldn't allow him to get momentum.

Harrington had the exact same problem in 2003. He played brilliantly with a shorstack but just couldn't get the cards. Moneymaker and Farha wouldn't be as popular today had Harrington gotten a little boost from his cards.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

Well, he didn't win a single race and never really caught a break. I still think he's probably underrated, and one final table experience is not justified reasoning on a players skill.

Ever see the Season 4 WPT Championship? James Van Alstyne...anyone?

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

He sure made a nice call with Ace high.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

Virtually everyone that's played against him agrees that he's one of the best players in the world and I seriously doubt he forgot how to play or was any more affected by the pressure than anyone else there. How many hands did he play, like 200? That's a ridiculously small sample size and I think it's obvious he just wasn't catching cards in the right situations. While Gold was busting people with QQ vs. JJ, AC either wasn't getting those kind of hands at all, or was just unlucky that no one else had a good hand at the same time and he just won the blinds. There are almost infinite ways luck can affect the result and it's pretty clear that Allen just wasn't catching any breaks.

As for getting pushed around by Gold, I think part of it was just not getting the cards to play back at him, and part of it was just good strategy. Allen knew he was the best player there and there were a lot of amateurs with a lot of chips. There's no sense in playing big pots with marginal hands against the one guy that can bust you when you can just sit back and wait for some donk to push JJ preflop against you or get too attached to top pair when you flop a set. I think Allen got involved in the table talk becuase he's good enough to use it to get a read on Gold, not because he was getting "sucked into it".

Basically, yes, I think it's too small a sample to draw any real conclusions. Anyone who knows anything about tournaments would have said before the final table that Gold was the favorite and Allen was a significant underdog just based on chip counts.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

Allen was very aggressive, and picked up a lot of pots pre-flop, and post-flop with good continuation bets. A lot of the other players were clearly staying away from him and his post-flop play.

As someone already mentioned, Binger got extremely lucky against Cunningham on a few occasions. Especially the AQ vs. A10 hand, if Cunningham had won that, who knows what would've happened.

If you noticed, a lot of the other players did well because of other players' mistakes. For example, Wasicka got lucky when Binger stupidly called the all in with A9 and dumped the chips he stole from Cunningham to Wasicka. Similarly, Richard Lee was a huge donk and lost his huge stack with JJ. Cunningham, unfortunnately, was just never the beneficiary on those major occasions.

Bad cards. You could tell.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

[ QUOTE ]
entire table play for 13 hours straight

[/ QUOTE ]

the averaged 20!!! hands per hour

he played fewer hands at the final table, than most 4tablers play in 1hr online

that should put it into perspective

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

[ QUOTE ]
or is he overrated?

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm dumbfounded at this, both he and Phil Ivey......

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

Allen Cunningham is the exact opposite of over-rated.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

are your other 3699 posts equally useless?

EDIT:

Yes to the above question.

cheers
Boon

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

[ QUOTE ]
For all the talk from almost every guest pro in the booth about what a fantastic player he is, he seemed to fall into the same mode as the other "worse" players there by getting pushed around by Gold.


[/ QUOTE ]

How do you play back at someone who calls all-ins (w/ a raise before it) w/ K,J ???

And of course the open-ended to the sucker str w/ no fl redraw.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

I like how Allen can never win when he puts his money in with the best hand.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

[ QUOTE ]
are your other 3699 posts equally useless?


[/ QUOTE ]

nh.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

[ QUOTE ]
are your other 3699 posts equally useless?

EDIT:

Yes to the above question.

cheers
Boon

[/ QUOTE ]

Will you be gone before you reach 450 posts?

Answer: hopefully.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

He lost two all-ins when he was ahead, so meh

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
are your other 3699 posts equally useless?

EDIT:

Yes to the above question.

cheers
Boon

[/ QUOTE ]

Will you be gone before you reach 450 posts?

Answer: hopefully.

[/ QUOTE ]


RacersEdge's retort to boondoggle: Incredibly Lame.



Racers.. You started a dumb thread, it happens, give it up and move on.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

Anyone who thinks that AC played a great FT and just was unlucky must have missed this hand:

114. Allen Cunningham raises to $750,000 from middle position and Michael Binger moves all in from the button for $3,010,000. Cunningham makes the call and shows QJ but Binger turns over AQ. The flop comes 862 and Cunningham loses one of his outs. The turn is the 5 and the river is the 7. Michael Binger has doubled up through Allen Cunningham for the third time.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

[ QUOTE ]
Anyone who thinks that AC played a great FT and just was unlucky must have missed this hand:

114. Allen Cunningham raises to $750,000 from middle position and Michael Binger moves all in from the button for $3,010,000. Cunningham makes the call and shows QJ but Binger turns over AQ. The flop comes 862 and Cunningham loses one of his outs. The turn is the 5 and the river is the 7. Michael Binger has doubled up through Allen Cunningham for the third time.

[/ QUOTE ]

with Binger's range, which could be ANYTHING (he called off half his deep stack earlier with A-9), there's nothing wrong with the call.

If Binger has Pocket 5s and Allen wins his 47 or 48% shot, I think his chances of winning the entire thing improve 5-10%.

Pointing to this hand saying Cunningham played bed is very weak.

Even if Binger has something like A-9 earlier, I think Cunningham is getting the odds to call with those live cards.

These donkeys were practically giving away chips to each other the entire tournament except when A.C. entered a pot.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

[ QUOTE ]
Anyone who thinks that AC played a great FT and just was unlucky must have missed this hand

[/ QUOTE ]

Borderline call getting almost 2:1. Got unlucky that both cards weren't live. Not even close to being in the top-10 worst plays of the night though.

AC seemed to play well, but everyone seemed more willing to play back at him than Gold (like the Wasicka KdQsd hand). Probably because of stack size, and the fact that good players are more likely to make big laydowns. Gold didn't seem to be folding anything (again, stack size was a big factor).

Go re-read the Cardplayer hand log, AC picked up a ton of small pots but lost pretty much every allin and race (not to mention the lower trips hand against Gold). He gets a some better luck (or Lee doesn't donk off $16m chips to Gold) and who knows what happens.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

[ QUOTE ]
Anyone who thinks that AC played a great FT and just was unlucky must have missed this hand:

114. Allen Cunningham raises to $750,000 from middle position and Michael Binger moves all in from the button for $3,010,000. Cunningham makes the call and shows QJ but Binger turns over AQ. The flop comes 862 and Cunningham loses one of his outs. The turn is the 5 and the river is the 7. Michael Binger has doubled up through Allen Cunningham for the third time.

[/ QUOTE ]

He was getting the odds if Binger had a pair less than J or an AT type hand and he must have felt that these were well in the range. This is how Allen thinks and he has spent his career coming up with these scenarios and has a pretty good feel for it. I know because of firsthand knowledge. A few years ago at a $1k Legends event I was down to the final 12. I had around 24k and Allen was two to my left with 27k or so and we were both a bit above average. I had been playing pretty solid but aggressive poker. The blinds and antes amounted to around 5k and it's folded to me on the bottom with JJ and I push. He called me with A9 and hit his A on the turn. I asked him about the hand on these forums and he said that he put me on a range of any A, any pair or any broadway cards and he was a favorite to this range. My point is that he really has done a lot of analysis on these things and uses his reads of players to put them on a range and then make a call based on that range. We all talk about this AFTER the fact in these forums with our pokerstove analysis. Allen has already performed all of the analysis so he is able to execute on it during the hand.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

Compare a couple hands. The trip nine hand early where Cunningham lost about five million to Gold, and the hand Lee went out on.

It's pretty clear that Lee made up his mind that Gold had AK rather than putting him on a range and since he was ahead of the one hand he risked his stack--totally ignoring the fact that he was a huge dog to all the other hands in a reasonable range.

In the trip nine hand, look at the river bet. It's a bet that a worse hand can call, that a better hand is unlikely to raise, and that won't cripple him if a better hand calls.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

They only avg'd what, 15-20 hands/hr.? Allen has to run avg-good to get anywhere against someone w/ a 4:1 chip lead. Jamie didn't really mess w/ Allen anyway. He kept flat-calling Allen's raises preflop and folded the flop several times. If Allen could've eliminated Binger then we might've seen something a bit different, but who knows. Gold still had a mountain for anyone who got HU w/ him to plow through.

And he was on the sickest heater of all time; just so happened that no one ever had him dominated.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

Cunningham is not overrated. He is a great pro. When Ivey, Juanda, and Negreanu all think he is the best tournament player out of the 4, that all the endorsement you need. For the sheer fact he made it to the FT when he was one of the low stacks with around 40 players left was impressive. It takes cards to win and he just had very few opportunities at the FT with great hands.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

AC is not overrated but playing at the FT of a 12 day tourney with 8800 people is a great equalizer, especially when there is a large stack at the table who is semi-aggressive and not just trying to make more money. He did about as well as could be expected and he made a few mistakes and he made a few good plays. Once Gold got Lee's stack the game changed for the other players and you could see it in their styles. AC was trying to win but the others were trying to move up the money except for Gold. That meant that AC would have to get lucky or catch some monsters. That meant that Gold felt he wasn't risking a whole lot by calling the all-in with KJ.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

[ QUOTE ]
He sure made a nice call with Ace high.

[/ QUOTE ]

He made a nice fold against KQd.

I think what's over rated is not AC, but the "huge" edge that pros have vs. the effect of luck.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

From what I understand, at the beginning of the FT, the deck had a little conversation with Cunningham:

DECK: Um, Allen, if you'll excuse me, I have to go hit Jamie Gold repeatedly.

CUNNINGHAM: D'oh.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

This thread eats weiner.

Seriously, what a dumb idea for a thread. AC finishes single-digit out of 8000 people (on top of all his previous accomplishments) and some guy wants to ask if he's over-rated?

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

I think Cunningham's biggest mistake was not value betting his straight against Gold's, IIRC, trips? Allen slammed his cards on the table and looked the most upset at that point all night. I think he knew he got greedy trying to c/r and should have just value bet the river.

I thought he played very well from what I saw (which was right after he called with A high until he went BUSTO).

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
He sure made a nice call with Ace high.

[/ QUOTE ]

He made a nice fold against KQd.

I think what's over rated is not AC, but the "huge" edge that pros have vs. the effect of luck.

[/ QUOTE ]

i agree with this

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

The deck hit Gold harder than cocks hit Paris Hilton.

If AC's cards were even half as good as Gold's, he'd at minimum get heads up against him and would probably beat him based on sheer skill.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

[ QUOTE ]


He made a nice fold against KQd.



[/ QUOTE ]

There's another thread about this hand, so no reason to get into it here, but you've seriously got to be kidding. Sounds like the AC haters here are being seriously results oriented, without taking into account the ranges that he must have put his opponents on. For the record, I think he is the best player at that table, and it's not close.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

Not only the best player at the table but in the top 10 players in the world PERIOD.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

[ QUOTE ]
Just getting into to NL, this ME FT was the first time I have watched an entire table play for 13 hours straight. I have to say I didn't really see anything that spectacular from AC in this time span. For all the talk from almost every guest pro in the booth about what a fantastic player he is, he seemed to fall into the same mode as the other "worse" players there by getting pushed around by Gold. I didn't really detect any techniques he used to adapt to the table dynamics.

Also, he seemd to get sucked into Gold's bantar the same as everyone else, although maybe he was trying to use it to his advantage more than the other players. But overall if I didn't know he was considered a great NL player, I would never have put him above Wasicka, Binger, etc as far as poker skill goes.

Did he have a bad FT, is 13 hours too short to judge, or is he overrated?

[/ QUOTE ]

overrated??

are you dismissing the 80 hours of play that resulted in BEING at the final table? it is nearly impossible to overrate cunninghams ME play.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

This is such a retarded thread. Just because someone is a professional does not mean that he's some kind of god that can shoot lightning bolts out of his ass to miracle all the chips over to himself. He had only 2 big hands that we know of. The TT vs KdQd where he could not possibly call, and the TT where he busted. Despite having almost no good hands at showdown, he picked up more pots than anyone other than Gold.

He might have been 2nd or whatever in chips going into the FT but he did not have a very big percentage of the chips in play. If he had Gold's cards and Gold had his cards then it's extremely likely that the two would have played HU. Poker is a skill game, but Cunningham had a huge deficit to make up, and he just didn't have enough things going his way for it to happen.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

[ QUOTE ]
If he had Gold's cards and Gold had his cards then it's extremely likely that the two would have played HU.

[/ QUOTE ]
This obv can't be said, for many reasons. The proper quote is if Cunningham had won his coinflip with Gold they would most likely end up hu.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

Maybe it was just the length of play or the constant pressure but watching live last 2 tables then into espn final table several players we looking like they were really falling apart after losing a large pot. While AC would hope to maintain a optimal strategy because he has more high-stakes experience and is less interested in moving up the pay ladder a little bit. But he looked rattled at times like we had not seen before, and perhaps in truth he was under MORE pressure than the "regular guys" because winning this event for him was much more valuable. If he had won, it would combine some of the most elite tourny and cash game result for the past few years with the biggest win ever. As media dollar boom, he would have become the far and away #1 hotshot for at least a couple years, and being directly related to a major site already he would have spurred a big windfall.
And they were playing so many days so [carebears] long. Ultimatly I think on the hole cards broadcast will show that he really caught some bad breaks. There wasn't really much of a fatal blow, but everthing was just lining up wrong for him. Although, once he realized his dwindling chances and impending doom he seemed to take it pretty hard. But who would like to have a bad few hours in that spot? We've seen several [carebears] [carebears] dudes just break out in tears for much less. So ya'll gotta feel bad for AC...he only won more than moneymaker, while it defied odds that a big name pro would make the final.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

Are you kidding me, for awhile there according to Gordon, not Hellmuth, he was "running over the table." He was a total stand out.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]


He made a nice fold against KQd.



[/ QUOTE ]

There's another thread about this hand, so no reason to get into it here, but you've seriously got to be kidding. Sounds like the AC haters here are being seriously results oriented, without taking into account the ranges that he must have put his opponents on. For the record, I think he is the best player at that table, and it's not close.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm not kidding because I was responding to someone who was praising the A high call. There's results oriented for you. Also it should be clear to people by now that being the best at the table really doesn't mean as much as how lucky you get. There is this hype in the poker world that great players are somehow able to make things happen when all they are really able to do is maximize their edge and hope the cards are reasonable.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

Most retarded thread ever.

Cunningham shouldve gone broke when he flopped trips against gold early on. His AQ lost to A10. His 22 lost to A6. His JQ lost to AQ (bad call obviously). He really had no cards, and finally he loses a coinflip to Gold to bust him. It doesnt matter how well you play, if your cards dont hold up, you can't win a hold'em tournament. I really don't know what you guys expected out of him, but if persay he had many more winning hands, then he would be declared the greatest poker player of all time. Think about that.

Re: Allen Cunningham\'s FT Performance
 

Let me point out I was not being results-oriented when I made this thread becasue I never once cited any results. I didn't say anything about chip counts or "he should have at least finished 2nd" - or anything about hand results. Those are metrics where sample size comes in to play.

I was talking high level about his general play and tactics in general - whether they worked or not is irrelevant. BAsically a read on a player. You should have a read on a guy if you played with him for 10 hours right? And if the guy is one the elite players in the game, there should be some indications of that. Maybe there were - the trip 9s hand might be a good example of not going bust by AC.

Anyway, this thread was blown out of proportion some - mainly just an observation about a player's image over 10 hours of play.