With 6 tournament wins, 5 second place finishes and of course winning season 2, Smallers has been a force of nature at the table. At one time he was one of the most feared players at the table, he would causally re-raise any bet to him and players would auto fold. He could easily take down any top player with his motto ‘play the man, not the cards”. Yet, something has happened and this once great player is just a shadow of himself. Without a win in 2 seasons and only a second place finish last season, Smallers is dropping faster than a hooker’s panties on payday
So how could something so pure turn to something so rotten, well let’s take a look at this season. At the first ever draft Darryl took Denely and Smallers with his first 2 picks, many in the poker world thought this was a mistake. Smallers even questioned Darryl about the pick in the now famous “he said my name first” video that’s a YouTube sensation (7 views in 7 months). Kyle quickly dropped Smallers from this team and took Denely as his partner in crime to form the super group “Bad Boys”. Smallers finished 8th at the kick off and collected 6 points, unfortunately this is his best finish this season so far. As for Denely, he continues to have a GREAT SEASON and is far ahead of Smallers in Points and Final Table appearances.
Who could forget “twitter gate” where Smallers decided that player’s points don’t matter and stopped recording the knock outs for the tourneys. This reporter would love to say this only happened once, but in fact, it’s happened multiple times. Even last tournament Smallers was reminded to not screw up the twitter feed and he “guaranteed it wouldn’t happen”. In true Smallers style, only the first 3 players were recorded and luckily Phil was there it record the knock outs and bets. Smallers then mumbled something about “Not My problem” and went to the loser lounge to drink away his sorrows.
I went on the BBPOKER website to see if I could pull off Smallers chart to show the decline, but there seems to be a technical error and I was unable to. I hope whoever runs this site fixes this error
I can only imagine that the chart would look like this
It’s sad to see something like this happen to a once great player and I truly hope he can recover. But it should be mentioned that Smallers is just 2 points ahead of Gaige (who missed the first 3 tourneys) and he is tied with Dan T, who still yells “Go Fish!!” any time he wants to check. Can Smallers rebound? I think so…. Will he rebound? It’s too early to tell as we are still waiting for Darren to call with his pocket Kings to Smallers All In.
Unfortunately this force of nature has turned into a light blow over the past 2 seasons. It seems he’s playing with the man and not against him.