Greg Raymer: So, I reraised all-in   Greg Raymer (World Champion 2004) began to play when he was in college. It was nickel-dime poker. As you know at first Raymer played blackjack to earn some extra money without pleasure. But when he moved to Chicago he began to play Holdem. Raymer began with $3-6 games. At that moment he began to read poker books, that gave him all necessary information to move from $3-6 to $20-40 or even $150-300 games.   In 2004 Greg Raymer won at the WSOP and confirmed that online poker is a serious game with serious players. In fact, he was the second to claim that. The first was Chris Moneymaker. These two players won their entries to the WSOP on Pokerstars.   It became a tendency. But why? Maybe because online players have more practice opportunities. Or how else will you explain that Raymer defeated 2576 players? Greg Raymer always knows when to quit and when to go all in. He’s the man that wins with TT against AA… Though it’s the matter of luck that another T flopped. To tell the truth it is a usual thing for Raymer to win with these hands:   With AT against AK: he won with queen high straight   With T8… That’s how it happened: I made a fair number of bluffs, and got away with quite a few more than merely break-even. My most creative play was a hand on the TV table where I raised with T8o to steal the blinds, and got reraised by John Murphy in the big blind. I felt that he had a hand he thought was the best (and it almost certainly was), but also a hand weak enough where he simply wanted to win it right there. He had been pushing me around a bit, and I wanted to back him off. So, I reraised all-in. He looked unhappy, but folded relatively quickly. I showed him the hand. Don know if it made a difference of any significance in future hands or not, but that was my intent.   Then there was the Tournament of Champions, where Greg Raymer appeared to be not so brilliant as he was at the WSOP. Sometimes I think that every time he managed to win he was nothing more than a lucky man. Doesn’t it seem ridiculous to go all-in with 9T?   Think about his game… he acts like a typical poker star. But he doesn’t have their skills. Monsters like Phil Hellmuth are always confident. And unlike Raymer they never go all in at pre-flop.   What a strange habit – going all-in at pre-flop? The same mistake Raymer made in 2002 when he lost to Tony D with AsQs. Every time Raymer goes all-in he hopes that he will hit at the flop or at the turn or at the river.