Jerry Yang – 2007 WSOP Champion

O.K. so here’s a guy that survived several all-in hands early in the tournament when he had the worst of it. Then at the final table, he wins every coin-flip and also makes several questionable (and some very stupid) calls against all-in opponents and of course wins those. The guy, like so many recent winners, is a complete luck-box novice that we will likely never see or hear from again. The last hand of the tourney just summed up how well the guy ran.

On the bright side, he seems like a genuinely nice guy and is donating 10% to charity so his winning the tourney won’t be the same as when that douche Jamie Gold won it last year. Thank god that year is over BTW. Gold was probably the worst ambassador for poker we could have had last year. I can deal with the luck-box winning if he seems like an o.k. guy.

Jerry Yang winning it will hopefully bring back a lot of new players similar to the Moneymaker days. Once novice players see how he played at the final table, hopefully they will try to emulate him by calling all-ins w/ JT, J8, etc. There was a lot of this crazy type of play after the ’03 and ’04 WSOP and after a bunch of WPT shows aired (mostly first and second season). Hopefully he will bring some more of these type of players to the game.