[Rottersod]

I'm going to give Gold some props for the way he played PAD this week. I don't like the guy but he is good for the game and the high stakes players don't want to say anything that will hurt his feelings for obvious reasons.

Except for a few typical stupid Gold bluffs he seemed able to keep the pot under a semblance of control and was able to bail out of some of his failed bluffs without overcommitting. And lets face it, in PAD format that's the way you need to play.

I'm also constant;y amazed how he gets people to call him with the worse hands and fold the best hands, time and time again. You can see the other players cringe when he goes into his talking. He definitely has gotten into some heads.

Having said that, it was apparent that the other players (except MM and Boston) had a strategy to keep the pots small against Gold and only bet big if they had the hand and let Gold bluff at it. This is a winning strategy against him.

Gold did get unlucky in the final hand. But that's poker.

I thought it was one of the better PAD weeks, except for the annoying Boston guy. And Wascika definitely can play this format (as we all knew). When I made my picks I had him second because I thought that even though he would be good at this format he didn't have the live PAD experience yet. And it showed as he got a bit frustrated.

BTW, on the hand where he had a set of deuces and Gold was bluffing into a 2 heart board, Wacsika called the 10K bet by Gold in position on the flop after thinking for a long time and Ali Nejad made a stupid comment that he had ceded control of the hand to Gold. IMO, he knew with certainty that Gold had nothing that he needed to be worried about and he was simply thinking how to get the most money out of him.