William Kassouf Does It Again

(Photo: Pokerstars.com)

It’s three hand discussions in a row for those eagerly awaiting their Christmas presents, and what better present to warm you up than a hand involving one of this year’s biggest – and loudest – players, William Kassouf.

With the Englishman having just hit the headlines again this week by taking down the 10K High Roller in Prague in a rather strange heads-up deal, Doug Polk decides it would be a good idea to analyse what starts out as an innocuous blind-on-blind battle against Valentin Vornicu from Kassouf’s legendary WSOP performance this summer.

But any hand involving the mouthy Londoner tends towards the unusual, as his ‘verbal diarrhea’ can cause serious problems for opponents, especially those unused to the constant jibber-jabber that Kassouf indulges in – ‘speechplay’ as he calls it, designed to gain information and tilt players.

It certainly seems to work here, Polk pointing out on the river that:

"I can just see it by looking at him, he just looks very tilted with what’s going on here with Kassouf…’cos it IS tilting! Kassouf just talks and talks and talks!”

You’ll have to watch the video to see if Vornicu takes the same approach as Griffin Benger did later in the event, in what became the infamous ‘check your privilege hand’, the Canadian eventually losing his cool and shouting at Kassouf:

"You’re a bully, it’s rude, it’s mean – it’s not called speech-play, it’s called being a bad person! You should really check yourself, check your privilege!”

As we all know, that car-crash hand ended Kassouf’s deep and impressive WSOP run, but it certainly hasn’t slowed his tongue down any, and as Polk points out several times -it’s so hard to face someone like Kassouf, as Vornicu found out…