"Table Talk" With Joe Ingram & Doug Polk Episode 2 Online

There was some more great content for high stakes fans on the second episode of Joe Ingram and Doug Polk's new online poker show "Table Talk with Polk & Papi" including Brian Hastings 'quitting poker', David Baazov's continued declarations of intent to purchase Amaya, private games at the Aria, Dan Smith's charity and much more besides.

The quick-fire format is still in place and was a little more polished this time after some minor tweaks. The first topic up for discussion was the announcement last week by Brian "$tinger88" Hastings that he was quitting poker to start a tea business called "Unitea". Hastings has suffered more than most at the hands of the forum haters due to a couple of high profile incidents in his career. First off he beat the railbirds idol Viktor "Isildur1" Blom for $4.2m in a single session of PLO and THEN admitted during an ESPN interview that he had studied mined hand histories with fellow highstakes pros Cole South and Brian Townsend. Although Hastings was exonerated for his part in the scandal he was still berated heavily for years after for his actions. Next up, missing high stakes online poker whilst choosing to live in the USA he VPN'ed into stars playing on another account "NoelHayes" where he was pubilcly outed as a multi-accounted. In reality Hastings had outed himself, thinking that as so many other high stakes pros (allegedly) use other accounts that it was an ok thing to do. The outraged community once again turned on Hastings who handled the backlash pretty damned poorly. Let's just say humility didn't seem to be his strong suit here!

Needless to say both Polk & Papi think that Brian's announcement will be good for him as it would appear the full time poker grind for life isn't for him. However, it's unlikely we've seen the last of Hasting's at the tables, as he only said he was quitting poker "as a full-time job". With 3 WSOP bracelets under his belt, and one of the most impressive poker resumes in the modern game, it's highly probable he'll show up on our radars again soon enough.

Next up was David Baazov, the former CEO of Amaya who is currently under investigation for fraud in his native Canada, who once again appears to have secured backers to table an offer to buy out the company and bring it back into his private ownership (he is already a large shareholder). A couple of weeks ago this seemed incredibly unlikely after one of Baazov's supposed "backers" last time out let it be known that they'd never actually heard of either him or Amaya!

Both Joe and Doug seem somewhat sceptical of Baazov's intentions - not surprises there then...

Other topics up for discussion included their take on the legality of the Aria's big private games, the sacking of controversial (former) PokerNews journalist Marty Derbyshire, the possible demise of online poker in Australia, Dan Smiths charity pledge, the influx of poker-related content on YouTube, and the possibility of Isildur1 having another million dollar upswing.

On that last point, Doug said no, and Joe said yes. We at HSDB can't help but agree with Joe Ingram on this one and this WCGRider is way off!

Doug argued that without the big games at Full Tilt or the soft games of yesteryear it wasn't likely. We think Mr Polk should look at our Isildur1 results graph for 2015. Just last year with stakes no lower than they are right now Isildur1 had several seven-figure upswings, including a two month period between August and September where he hit +$5m. Given that he's only recent had a $500k upswing in less than a week (sure, he lost it again), it's only a matter of time Doug, it's only a matter of time!

ISILDUR1 POKERSTARS HIGHSTAKES RESULTS 2015

Check out episode 2 in full below: