News Archive

Daily 3-Bet: Ivey Tower, High-Stakes “Sharking,” Poker X-Men

Daily 3-Bet: Ivey Tower, High-Stakes “Sharking,” Poker X-Men

Daily 3-Bet: Ivey Tower, High-Stakes “Sharking,” Poker X-Men


The PokerListings Daily 3-Bet is a complimentary cigar, a discreet and attentive bellhop and a special key code to unlock the secret floor in the afternoon poker news elevator.

Got a tip for a future 3-Bet? Drop a note in the comments and we’ll gladly take a look.

Today in the 3-Bet we find an apt visual metaphor for Phil Ivey’s life compared to ours, witness the origin of a new term to describe trojan-planting on high-stakes poker players and learn who’s who on poker’s superheroes team.

1) Ivey in Macau with Diamonds

Our very cursory knowledge of urban planning along with our long and sad history of looking for apartments on Craigslist has left us understanding two things:

  • Rich, successful people tend to live very high up (or at the least have access to very high floors we don’t)
  • Never reply to an ad with something for sale under $5. You won’t like where the seller suggests the transaction occurs

Phil Ivey, in Macau for some ridiculously high-stakes poker, reminds us more of lesson #1 here with his latest Instagram pic from his balcony– although both are good rules to keep in mind, generally:

iveybalcony2

2) Jeans Targetted, Attack Dubbed “Sharking”

Jens Kyllonen
Jeans: Suspicions were true.

If you followed Jens “Jeans89” Kyllönen’s EPT Barcelona laptop theft/hacking story at all you’ll likely be interested in this new info released by the Finnish security company Kyllönen hired to check his computer.

According to F-Secure Kyllönen was in fact hacked like he thought:

“After a while, it was obvious that his hunch was correct, the laptop was indeed infected. There was a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) with timestamps coinciding with the time when the laptop had gone missing.

“Apparently, the attacker installed the trojan from a USB memory stick and configured it to automatically start at every reboot. A RAT, by the way, is a common tool that allows an attacker to control and monitor a laptop remotely, viewing anything that happens on the machine.

“The trojan is written in Java and uses obfuscation, but isn’t all that complicated. Since it’s in Java, the malware can run in any platform (Mac OS, Windows, Linux).”

Important things to note of course are that Kyllönen was specifically targeted as a high-stakes player. He was also lucky enough to catch the hackers in the act and wasn’t compromised during live play. Still it’s a very good reminder, even for low-stakes players, to practice some basic laptop security.

Also interesting is the company thinks the phenomenon of targetting high-stakes poker players is common enough that it deserves its own term – Sharking.

3) Griffin = Wolverine, Galfond = Professor X

Erik Seidel
Captain America?

In case you missed it there were lots of great questions and answers in the Bet Raise Fold AMA that happened last night over on Reddit.

Jay RosenkrantzRyan FirpoDanielle “dmoongirl” AndersenMartin “AlexeiMartov” Bradstreet and Tony “Bond18” Dunst all chimed in and many interesting details about the film/their poker backgrounds were revealed.

Among our favorite questions (and Rosenkrantz’s too): “Who would be in your team of poker player super heroes and who would their x-men or avengers counter parts be?” His answers:

  • Ashton Griffin – Wolverine
  • Phil Galfond – Professor X
  • Ben “Sauce” Sulsky – Beast
  • Ziigmund – Thor
  • Dani Stern – The Incredible Hulk
  • Vanessa Selbst – Jean Grey
  • Aaron “aejones” Jones – Iron Man
  • Jennifer Harman – Storm
  • Erik Seidel – Captain America
  • Chris Ferguson – Gambit

We always saw Seidel as more of a Plasticman type, tbh. Read the full AMA on Reddit.