2006 National Heads-Up Poker Championship

For the the biggest poker names this weekend meant business as usual... meaning another high-entry, soon-to-be televised tournament. While we're busy watching second- and third-tier college basketball teams play their way into the Big Dance --- which is gonna be trouble for Atlantic Sun champ Belmont, a conservative school that doesn't allow Dancing (!) --- 64 of the biggest card heavies in the world have been banging heads in the early rounds of the 2006 National Heads-Up Poker Championship. The event is taking place at Caeser's in Las Vegas, being filmed for broadcast on NBC the weekend of April 16th, and at this writing the first two levels of play have been complete.

First, let's do the SPOILER ALERT!!! thing again right here. If you don't wan't to know any of the early results, read no further.

Second, if you'd like to keep tabs on the proceedings beyond the first two rounds, or if you have a favorite you'd really like to track, then the best source might be the live logs over at Card Player Magazine's site.

Third, if you want to read about something here besides televised poker, then you're also in luck --- we'll be drifting off to other topics after this short post. But the reason for this post is that sometimes the most intriguing matchups take place in the early rounds, and most of those will receive brief (if any) television exposure.

So, a few highlights from Rounds 1 and 2:

Hold That Tiger: Tiger was the fave at Doral this weekend, and won. Tiger II (a.k.a. Phil Ivey) was the fave here, and didn't. Ivey went out in the first round to Erik Seidel.

What, No Poker Babes? And as for the fairer sex, they took a 1-for-5 beat in Round 1 as well. Annie Duke... Evelyn Ng... Cyndy Violette... Jennifer Tilly... all gone. Only Dee Luong made it to Round 2, where she lost to Scott Fischman.

Caution, No Flammables: The random draw dropped Mike "The Mouth" Matusow and Phil Hellmuth into the same one-eighth of the total 64-player bracket. Both lost their opening matches, too, and Hellmuth's departure means no repeat winner, either. Viewers on the lookout for poker-punk behavior are at this point left rooting for someone like Josh Arieh or Sean Sheikhan. Arieh was one of the two survivors of the Matusow/Hellmuth region of the bracket --- "Jesus" Ferguson was the other. Talk about a tough early draw. This eight-player region pitted Matusow, Hellmuth, Arieh, Ferguson, Chip Reese, Freddy Deeb, Eli Elezra and David Williams. Sheesh. As for Sheikhan, he's survived his own tough early road, getting by Gus Hansen and Doyle Brunson.

Don't fret if you think that there won't be any big names or exciting poker to watch in the later rounds, either, meaning the majority of the stuff you'll actually see on the tube. One example: A huge Round 3 showdown matches Daniel Negreanu against T.J. Cloutier. (Can't wait for that one.) Other big clashes are the Ferguson/Arieh match, along with Barry Greenstein/Amir Vahedi and Michael Mizrachi/Sam Farha. More big names still in the hunt include Ted Forrest, Huck Seed, and author/player James McManus, the last of the "celebrity" entries, meaning those players who were famous before they played big-time poker (i.e. Tilly, Jerry Buss or James Woods). Not that those folks can't play poker, either.

Good stuff, indeed. Put it on your calendar for the middle of April.