After being almost completely out of the loop for some time (close to 3 weeks), I started reading some catch-up news. Frankly, there are two things that really caught my eye or — boggle my mind.

The first is Dan Colman and his animosity towards Phil Hellmuth. What’s the point?  I can’t help but wonder as Colman was growing up, and getting into poker, if he didn’t once stop and feel a surge of envy for Hellmuth’s ability to play poker.  Hellmuth is a crybaby, a noisy-boy, a whiner, etc., etc., etc., but one cannot deny his talent at poker.  And he’s proven his ability in more than one poker variant for a number of years.

Colman is a snot-nosed kid in the industry.  Yuppers, a snot-nosed kid that just happens to have won $22,389,481 this year, but still, where will he be 20 years from now?  If he’s smart, he’ll make some great investments and move on.  Obviously he’s not going to improve his image the way he shreds people and the great game of poker so he’d better not be out searching for a sponsor.

Both Colman and Hellmuth have massive egos.  Hellmuth believes he’s the only player in the game and he deserves to take down every tournament he plays. Colman believes he’s entitled to trash the game and other players because his ego has led him to believe he’s on a non-stop ride to the top of nowhere.  Nowhere, you ask?  That’s the picture he paints of the profession that has made him filthy rich this year.  Poker is a dark alley, a dead-end street, a mecca for the lost and forlorn, yet he’s saddled up and ready to ride.

I don’t believe Colman makes his statements out of ‘shock factor’ because I do believe he really hates the fact that he’s in the game and he just keeps winning.  He can’t prove a point because he keeps cashing out massive amounts of money. It will be interesting to see if his horse throws a shoe in the next 10 years or bucks him off.

Hellmuth?  He’ll just keep grinding at it, bitching and grinding at it because that’s what he does.  And as many times as Hellmuth has struck a nerve with me, he also makes me laugh, and he keeps coming back.  He’ll be around in the next 10 years and poker will be better for it.

The other thing?  Howard Lederer showing up at the 2014 Poker Hall of Fame induction ceremony. WTF?  Lederer and Daniel Negreanu are not friends, so why did he appear?  For the sake of Jack McClelland?  IMHO, highly doubtful.

It’s a strange way to try to step back into the circle of poker is my thinking.

I doubt that very many players that had funds tied up at Full Tilt for so long are ever going to just roll over and pretend nothing happened.  I’m not making a judgment call on anyone’s actions, I just cannot see Lederer or Chris Ferguson waltzing into a big poker tournament and being accepted by the masses.  I would imagine that even the security staff in some of the rooms has been alerted to the fact that serious, physical altercations could erupt if one of them come in to play, even if they are playing high limit and segregated from the masses.

Of most of the big names at Full Tilt Poker during the dark years, I think Phil Ivey pulled off the biggest coup.  He escaped almost untarnished from the mess but not for one second do I believe he was guilt free in any of it.  Well…that’s another story.

My head is tried and I’m out for the night.  Have a good one.