87 hands into the final table of the Borgata Poker Open main event on Thursday night, Jeremy Brown appeared to be coasting towards an easy victory. The blinds were $100,000/$200,000 with $20k antes, and Brown's opponent in heads up play (Olivier Busquet) had just 1.4 million chips left. Dr Jeremy Brown, a veteran ER doctor, explores the troubling, terrifying, and complex history of the flu virus, from the surprising origins of the 1918 flu that killed millions, to vexing questions such as: are we prepared for the next epidemic, should you get a flu shot, and how close are we to finding a cure?
Poker pro Olivier Busquet, a high-stakes heads-up sit and go expert, recently took down the World Poker Tour’s (WPT) Borgata Poker Open, mounting a comeback of epic proportions after being down 20:1 in chips to Jeremy Brown with a $925,000 first place prize on the line. Busquet sat down with Poker News Daily to recap the comeback.
Poker News Daily: Talk about mounting a comeback of epic proportions at the WPT Borgata Poker Open over Jeremy Brown.
Busquet: Anytime you’re down 20:1 or anything like that, you have to won coin flips or cooler people in some sense. Chips are bound to get in the middle and your opponent will definitely have outs. I ran well in the all-in pots, which is critical when my chips are on the line. I tried to focus on keeping the pots relatively small pre-flop. I didn’t limp that much because there’s a lot of equity in the game to someone folding to a pre-flop raise. Jeremy had a tendency to polarize his ranges. I had to win with J-7 offsuit versus Q-9 all-in. I flopped the nuts against top pair. I had to avoid flush and straight draws on the last hand.
PND: Did you ever feel like winning the tournament was out of reach?
Busquet: If someone had pulled me aside and asked me if I was going to win, I would have said probably not. When I’m playing, though, I don’t think in those terms. I think of what I’m dealt and the situation I’m in. I was actually fortunate in that I play one-on-one tournaments all the time. In heads-up sit and gos, there are 3,000 chips in play and in the Borgata there were 30 million. Dallas police gambling arrests. Every kind of situation I encountered in terms of the number of chips and blinds, I had been in that situation tens of thousands of times before. Being down to 1.4 million was like being down to like 140 chips in a heads-up sit and go.
PND: You were a sizable chip leader entering the final table. Was it frustrating seeing Jeremy Brown eliminate three people and build his stack?
Busquet: I don’t have a ton of experience being a big chip leader in a tournament. When I wasn’t the chip leader, I was just adjusting to stack size changes. I wasn’t reacting emotionally to the sense that I could lose the tournament. Instead, I was thinking of how the change in stacks changes my optimal strategy. There are so many things out of your control. I didn’t have the illusion that I was going to stay the chip leader from wire to wire.
PND: How did you get started in poker?
Busquet: A friend of mine from high school brought me to an old friend’s house. I never really played and walked into a room with young 20 year-old, confident kids and was intimated. I ended up losing money and that piqued my interest a bit. A kid I was working with told me I could play online. My first account was on PartyPoker and then one of my doormen told me that Full Tilt was a better site. I made small deposit of $100 playing $1/$2 six-max cash. I played a bunch and read TwoPlusTwo a lot, especially the high-stakes No Limit threads. I essentially moved up in stakes from there.
PND: What were some of the biggest influences on your game coming up?
Jeremy Brown Poker Drunk Game
Busquet: TwoPlusTwo was probably the biggest. There was one kid who came to Full Tilt that I became friendly with, Dustin Dirksen. When he first started on Full Tilt, he played a style that threw a lot of people off. People were unsure whether he was a massive fish or crazy shark. We talked a little bit and I was more interested in the perception people had of him rather than the actual style he had. I also read “Super System” like other players did. The way that I came up was by trying to be my own player. I would try to think about situations in an original way. TwoPlusTwo allowed me to set a foundation. I learned the basic strategies and then, from that, I was able to leapfrog into my own way of playing.
Jeremy Brown Poker Drunk Scene
Busquet: I don’t have a ton of experience being a big chip leader in a tournament. When I wasn’t the chip leader, I was just adjusting to stack size changes. I wasn’t reacting emotionally to the sense that I could lose the tournament. Instead, I was thinking of how the change in stacks changes my optimal strategy. There are so many things out of your control. I didn’t have the illusion that I was going to stay the chip leader from wire to wire.
PND: How did you get started in poker?
Busquet: A friend of mine from high school brought me to an old friend’s house. I never really played and walked into a room with young 20 year-old, confident kids and was intimated. I ended up losing money and that piqued my interest a bit. A kid I was working with told me I could play online. My first account was on PartyPoker and then one of my doormen told me that Full Tilt was a better site. I made small deposit of $100 playing $1/$2 six-max cash. I played a bunch and read TwoPlusTwo a lot, especially the high-stakes No Limit threads. I essentially moved up in stakes from there.
PND: What were some of the biggest influences on your game coming up?
Jeremy Brown Poker Drunk Game
Busquet: TwoPlusTwo was probably the biggest. There was one kid who came to Full Tilt that I became friendly with, Dustin Dirksen. When he first started on Full Tilt, he played a style that threw a lot of people off. People were unsure whether he was a massive fish or crazy shark. We talked a little bit and I was more interested in the perception people had of him rather than the actual style he had. I also read “Super System” like other players did. The way that I came up was by trying to be my own player. I would try to think about situations in an original way. TwoPlusTwo allowed me to set a foundation. I learned the basic strategies and then, from that, I was able to leapfrog into my own way of playing.
Jeremy Brown Poker Drunk Scene
Jeremy Brown Poker Drunk Gif
While influenza is now often thought of as a mild disease, it kills thousands of Australians each year. Dr Jeremy Brown, currently Director of Emergency Care Research at the National Institutes of Health, expounds on the flu’s deadly past to solve the mysteries that could protect us from the next outbreak.
InInfluenza, he talks with leading epidemiologists, policy makers, and the researcher who first sequenced the genetic building blocks of the virus to offer both a comprehensive history and a roadmap for understanding what’s to come. Dr Brown digs into the discovery and resurrection of the flu virus in the victims of the 1918 epidemic exhumed from the tundra, as well as the bizarre remedies that once treated the disease, such as fatal doses of aspirin and blood-letting.Influenzaalso breaks down the current dialogue surrounding the disease, explaining the controversy over vaccinations, antiviral drugs such as Tamiflu, and the federal government’s role in preparing for a pandemic. Dr Brown warns that many of the most vital questions about the flu virus continue to confound even the leading experts.
Influenzais an enlightening and unnerving look at a shapeshifting deadly virus that has been around since long before people and will most likely be with us for a long time to come.
