Victoria Coren Poker News Archive
Over the years Victoria Coren has written many articles on poker and from time to time we report on some of the more interesting ones; however we though it might be useful to look at some of the Coren News Archives to see if we could find some pearls of wisdom that might otherwise be consigned to history, and our search has certainly born fruit.
Back in 2006 Coren wrote a piece for the Guardian Newspaper titles “How to play poker”. This was shortly after she had won the European Poker Championship and the half million pounds that went with it. Her editor had requested that she should write about her win, but Victoria found herself unable to do so as it had been such a blur that she remembered scarcely anything about it.
She did remember a poor opening day and losing half her chips to aggressive Scandinavian players. She also remembered how things improved when she moved to a table of professionals who knew how to play the game. She remembered Phil Ivey being eliminated in the first hand of her fifth table and her ambivalence between not having to play him and wishing that she had the opportunity to do so.
She remembered doubling her stack when she had 8-8 against A-A and hit an 8 on the board. Three hands from the final table also stuck in her memory but the rest was just fuzz.
She puts all this down to two reasons: the fact that she had been in the zone, just knowing that she was playing optimally and making the best possible decisions; and the fact that she was on form, which she describes as getting the right cards at the right time.
She wrote that Phil Ivey probably experiences the former permanently and the latter sufficiently to guarantee major tournament wins. However, she thinks that this conjunction will only happen to her once a decade.
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