Poker in the News

Bravo launches its fifth season of "Celebrity Poker Showdown" on Jan. 5th. The season premiere will feature Ray Romano and Brad Garrett (from "Everybody Loves Raymond"), Red Sox pitcher Curt Shilling, Catherine O'Hara, and Sara Rue.

This season, episodes will air on Tuesdays--- there are a total of 6 episodes in a season, with each winner from the first 5 weeks meeting in a final "showdown". All the prize money is donated to charities picked by the individual celebrities-- this season's sponsor will be Cadillac.

I think that it's fitting that Cadillac will sponsor the show--- No Limit Hold'em is often called the "cadillac of poker".

This season's mixture of new and veteran players features Jason Alexander, Nicolas Gonzales, Allison Janney, Chris Kattan and Mary McCormack (all in Week Two), Lacey Chabert, Bonnie Hunt, J.K. Simmons, Robert Wagner and Scott Wolf (in Week Three), Brandi Chastain, Camryn Manheim, Colin Quinn, Tom Verica and Kevin Weisman (in Week Four) and Heather Graham, Jesse Metcalfe, Andrea Parker, Malcolm-Jamal Warner and Fred Willard.

Dave Foley will be back as host, joined by expert poker commentator Phil Gordon.

Schilling, Romano latest poker stars

I'm just going to blockquote this whole article, in case some of you are too lazy to follow the link. Erick Lindgren talks about the value of chasing a straight draw in no-limit hold'em:

IT’S ONE OF the most dangerous hands for novice no-limit hold ’em players: straight draws, especially smaller straight draws, because you’re chasing to start with, and even if you pair up, you’re still at the mercy of big cards, which means you could be jeopardizing your stack by chasing two kinds of dicey hands.

But that kind of danger makes a straight draw a hand that more experienced players can take advantage of.

Take Erick Lindgren, for instance. A young, aggressive poker star, Lindgren plays a lot of hands and believes he can bluff his way out of a lot of post-flop situations. That can mean collecting a lot of chips when he’s up against a predictable opponent.

“I’ll play a straight draw against the straightforward guys — guys who are only raising with the big hands, the really tight players,” said Lindgren, who won the Party Poker Million and Ultimate Poker Classic during the last World Poker Tour season.

This is where you have to be able to put your opponent on a hand. You have to know his game and be able to break down his raising and calling patterns to determine what he’s holding.

Lindgren cited a hand where he held 4-6 of clubs and the flop came 7-5-3 rainbow.

“I got lucky,” said Lindgren, who plays against the public on Fulltiltpoker.com. “I had gin on the flop. I made a straight. The problem is, he’s not going to fold his two queens. He bets and I make a big raise on him, he’s just going to push in.”

The turn and the river were no help to either player, so Lindgren’s opponent was done because he didn’t have the discipline to get away from an overpair that might have looked good but wasn’t the best.

Lindgren read his opponent as a big-card player, and the opponent played true to the scouting report.

“You look for stubborn players to play those hands,” Lindgren said. “But I’m not going to play those hands against guys like Daniel (Negreanu) and Gus (Hansen) and Phil Ivey — guys who are super dangerous. Not only do they play a lot of hands, so I don’t know where they are in the hands starting, (but) they might have a trap hand like mine. Even though I have position, I’m not inclined to mix it up with them.

Implied Odds.
Times Leader | 12/26/2004 | Watch out for this straight on poker steve rosenbloom

Larry Flynt's Hustler Casino in Gardena, California, was the site of some action on Friday.

Police pursued a stolen Jaguar to the Hustler Casino. There was some gunfire, and the suspect entered the crowded casino. Witnesses described the scene as pandemonium.

The suspect was allegedly trying to take hostages when police shot him. The man was taken to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center with a gunshot wound to the back of the head. Police reported that he was in critical condition.

NBC 4 - News - Police Fatally Shoot Suspected Carjacker Inside Southland Casino

Mark Cherico, 36, was gambling at a poker table at Dania Jai-alai minutes after a holdup of the Washington Mutual Bank in Dania Beach, Florida.

Wearing a hat and sunglasses, he allegedly handed a teller a note demanding cash and fled on foot with $7000. A witness followed him and saw him duck behind a dental office to change his clothes, and then watched as he entered the Jai-alai Fronton. The witness then called the police and pointed Cherico out at the poker table.

The Broward Sheriff's office recoverd Cherico's clothes, his glove, and the robbery note along with the $7000 in cash. Cherico still had his hat and sunglasses.

Bold. Brazen. Fearless. I wonder if this guy was any good at poker? If the cops had shown up two hours later, would they have recovered any money at all? I think the funniest part is that he still had his hat and sunglasses on-- next time I'm sitting at the poker table with some young punk wearing sunglasses pretending to be at the World Series of Poker, I know that I'm going to wonder whether he just came from a bank heist.

Witness helps capture bank robbery suspect at poker table in Dania: South Florida Sun-Sentinel

I apologize for this shameless plug.

If you have taken a look at this blog, you will have noticed that it is part of a much larger site dedicated towards improving the Texas Hold'em skills of novice poker players. We actually have a great deal of information on our site, including Texas Hold'em poker strategy, poker software reviews, a directory of casinos throughout the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom where you can play Texas Hold'em poker, and online poker site reviews.

I think one of our most useful sections is our 10 Steps to Mastering Texas Holdem, and is a very good outline of how to get started and work your way up the poker food-chain.

The advice we give is free, and we hope that it proves to be valuable to a beginning player. When a player signs up to play poker through one of our banners, or uses one of our poker bonus codes, the poker sites reward us by sharing a small portion of the revenue generated by that player. It is in this way that we are able to continue to maintain the site and offer these free services.

We invite you to browse through the rest of the site and test out some of the advice that we have presented. All of the sites with which we are affiliated offer "free" games in which you play with fake money, and are a very entertaining way of learning the game. If you decide to sign-up at a poker site, we also have a page of deposit bonus codes for Party Poker, Empire Poker, Intertops Poker, and PokerRoom.com, just click on Party Poker Bonus Codes.

Okay-- end of shameless plug, and back to the news.
Party Poker Bonus Codes

In a public relations stunt (perhaps inspired by Empire Poker's offer to finance Washington D.C.'s baseball stadium?), PokerRoom.com has sent a invitation to NHL commissioner Gary Bettman and NHL Players' Association executive director Bob Goodenow to settle the NHL labor dispute and salvage the season by playing a No Limit Texas Hold'em heads-up showdown.

Hockey fans in North America have had enough of the current high-stakes game of brinkmanship that led to and continues to disrupt the 2004-2005 NHL hockey season," said PokerRoom.com casino boss Patrik Selin in a statement.

"If they can't resolve this dispute through traditional negotiations and compromise, then the PokerRoom.com tournament offers them the best, and quickest, way to declare a winner and let the fans enjoy hockey again before it's too late. With no downloads required to play and the tournament hosted on-line, Mr. Bettman and Mr. Goodenow can easily take on the challenge from their respective offices in New York and Toronto."

TSN.ca - NHL - Canada's Sports Leader

Carter Lake, Iowa- A local business that plans on holding a 10-week long tournament which will start on Jan. 7th has started a legal discussion by the State of Iowa and the Pottawattamie County Attorney's Office.

How the tournament proposed at the new Chez Paree stands under the law, however, is being debated by the State of Iowa and the Pottawattamie County Attorney's Office.

City Attorney Joe Thornton said he has not come to a conclusion on the matter.

Richter said he initially sought an opinion on the tournament's legality from the state. The Iowa Attorney General's Office indicated that his question was not clear.

Richter sought a determination from Pottawattamie County. County Attorney Matt Wilber responded by saying that the type of tournament Richter had described "would not likely be prosecuted by this office."

Wilber said it appeared that state law allows "bona fide contests" if certain requirements are met. Such contests can include "cribbage, bridge, chess, checkers, dominoes, pinochle and similar contests, leagues or tournaments."

"It is my opinion that the type of poker tournaments that you describe could fall under 'similar contests' and would therefore be lawful as a bona fide contest," Wilber wrote.

However, the Iowa Department of Inspections and Appeals describes Wilber's position in a letter sent Monday as "contrary to law."

Wilber disagreed in his reply to the department, essentially arguing that the tournament would fall under a loophole in the law.

Councilwoman Marcy Hawkins asked how Richter planned to proceed in light of the differing opinions.

Richter said he believes that the tournament is "clearly an exception" to Iowa law and would proceed. He has advised tournament operators that the event would be a "window of opportunity" that the Iowa Legislature probably would close.

"Right now it's legal, and I'll stand on that," he said.

It's good that this sort of argument is finally being used. People seem to see cards and money as gambling, but don't blink about a bridge tournament or pinochle. There are all sorts of tournaments in which people put up an entry fee and compete--- fishing, darts, bowling--- it just isn't possible that all these things can be illegal. And if those tournaments aren't illegal, neither should poker tournaments.

Omaha.com

This is a stupid PRweb press release that is an obvious "scare tactic" to promote MtEverestPoker.com.

The idea is that online poker bots are invading the online poker rooms and we end up playing against "unbeatable" computers rather than human opponents. For one thing--- poker is not chess. There are chess programs that can beat world class chess players, yes--- but poker is many many times more complex that chess, and currently there is no program that can beat a world class player. Low limit hold'em is almost entirely mathematical, but even then, a computer program can barely make a profit. I would love to play against a table full of bots--- bots don't have the ability to adjust to the game, they are completely predictable, and it would be very easy to adapt to a style of play that would crush them.

The most laughable part of this press release is, quote:

If you have found yourself losing recently at online poker here are some tips:
- Play games that do not have structured betting. Pot-limit, no-limit and tournaments are all excellent games to be playing.
- Also play at a site that does not attract professional poker players and can offer you good bonuses.

Recommended is a site like MtEverestPoker.com. It is connected with a group of online casinos that offer a very large bonus in order to attract gamblers rather than poker players. Many players at this site choose to play in Pot-Limit or No-Limit games, as well as the many poker tournaments.

If you have found yourself losing recently at online poker-- study the game. Buy a few books. Read some of the free poker strategy advice online, like at our site The Gutshot Straight. Move down in limits.

Do not "step-up" and start playing a more complicated game such as no-limit and pot-limit. The worst thing that you can do is start flailing around trying to place the blame for your failure on something else--- you will never become a better poker player that way.

Online Poker Bot Invasion

Empire Poker has offered to ante up the $150 million in private funds that the D.C. City Council is seeking for a Major League Baseball stadium. EmpirePoker.com claims that it's willing to provide up to $500 million to help build a new baseball stadium for the former Montreal Expos.

In return, Empire Poker would get naming rights to the team's new field, exclusive right to all the signs inside the stadium, AND they would put Internet kiosks throughout the stadium so fans could play Internet poker before, during and after the game.

EmpirePoker.com's president of marketing in New York, Ron Burke, insists that this is not a publicity stunt. (Although no one can deny that it is pretty good publicity)

A Whole New Ballgaming (washingtonpost.com)

Ace in the hole could save Nats

This is a pretty good interview with professional poker player Annie Duke. For those of you who don't know of Annie Duke, she is the sister of professional player Howard Lederer, and the mother of four children. Most recently, she won $2 million in ESPN's Tournament of Champions, and won the 2004 World Series of Poker $2000 buy-in Omaha High-Low event.

Anyway--- the interview focuses mostly on No-Limit Hold'em, and is an overview of how a player should "think" while playing the game.
Quad-City Times Newspaper Online - the Quad-Cities Home Page

Professional poker player Howard Lederer and the tournament director, Matt Savage, of the World Series of Poker will be holding a weekend's worth of events in Denver, Colorado, January 28-29.

It costs though--- $1495 includes drinks, dinner, and dessert in a private room at Del Frisco's from 7 to 11 p.m on Jan. 28. It also includes a Texas Hold'em seminar led by Lederer and Savage from 2 to 4 p.m, followed by dinner and a seat in a charity poker game on Jan 29.

For $350 you can attend just the Jan. 29 events, or it costs just $100 to attend the seminar alone.
Rocky Mountain News: Columnists

Two masked robbers interrupted a Buckeye Lake (Ohio) poker game Monday night.

One of the robbers flashed a small-caliber handgun, before demanding cash and personal belongings from the players. Nine players were at the game, and none of them were injured.

This is the second poker-game robbery reported in Licking County in the last two months. On Oactober 27, two Columbus men allegedly robbed a Summit Station Lions Club poker game and fled with about $3000.

Poker players robbed at gunpoint - newarkadvocate.com

If any of you have been out shopping for Christmas yet this year, you will no doubt have noticed that poker sets and "gambling" accessories are everywhere. Just the other day I was in Sears, and there was a mother and father buying a casino set for one of their little ones. The set had a craps board, roulette wheel, poker chips and cards, dice, an inflatable pit boss, some call girls, and two packs of candy cigarettes.

The casinos must be loving this. It's one thing to buy your kids poker sets--- it's quite another to buy them a "gambling set". I think that poker can actually be educational, but there is nothing good about learning craps or roulette.

Anyway--- that's what this article is about... Nancy Petry, director of the Gambling Addiciton Treatment and Research Center recommends that parents "think twice before encouraging their kids to gamble".

It's ground-breaking stuff. Sometimes I think that you need a Ph.D. in order to say the obvious and have it be news worthy.

Boston.com / Press Releases / Ascribe / Think Twice Before Giving Kids a Poker Set for the Holidays

In a study presented in the Dec. 12 advance online edition of Nature Neuroscience ("Discriminating emotional faces without primary visual cortices involves the right amygdala" Alan J Pegna, Asaid Khateb, Francois Lazeyras & Mohamed L Seghier), researchers suggest that people may be able to "read" people's emotions even when when their eyesight is poor.

The researchers describe a case of a man who had lost most of his vision due to damage from multiple strokes, making him blind and unable to detect movement or shapes. When they showed him pictures of emotionally expressive people's faces on a computer screen, he was able to accurately guess the expressed emotion more often than not--- even though he couldn't tell whether the face was even of a man or a woman.

Brain scans indicated that the part of the brain responsible for processing emotions was activated when he saw emotional faces.

Yeah... Well.... Umm... I wish that I had a little portable brain scanner, about the size of an MP3 player, so that I replay my brain activity and figure out what the hell I was thinking.
Why Your Poker Face May Not Work

Advance Online Publication of Nature Neuroscience

How do you go about making a press release? Does it cost money to make a press release?

I think that it's possible that Party Poker paid for this press release. The deposit bonus codes in the release are no different from the bonus codes that I offer (Party Poker Bonus Codes), so where is the "holiday"?

This bogus press release stuff is a very crafty way of advertising.

Shocking results from a poll conducted by Empire Poker: 42% of the web site's VIP players picked Pamela Anderson as the celebrity that they would most like to play against.

Pamela Anderson is obviously just the right mixture of ditzy and beautiful.

The next most popular answers were: Dennis Rodman with 24% of the vote (everyone must have seen his performance on Bravo's Celebrity Poker Showdown), James Woods came in at 13%, Dave Navarro was 10% (another trainwreck on Bravo). Ben Affleck was only picked by 1% of the surveyed.

In response to the question "Which celebrity would be most likely to cheat at poker?", Ben Affleck was overwhelmingly picked at 37%.

The players surveyed evidently respect Ben Affleck's skill, but they definitely don't trust him.

Poker players would ante up with Anderson

What I like about this story is that it equates risky stock market trading with gambling. Which it is, in my opinion. It's just that somehow trading stocks is perfectly acceptable (and frequently uses the same terminology as gambling), while placing a well educated bet is widely thought of as unacceptable.

Here are some excerpts from the story, as reported by the Scotsman (United Kingdom):

"A 32-year-old worker at a large international engineering company stole more than £9 million from his firm to feed a gambling addiction, it emerged today.

"Wing Kit Chu, of Dell Close, Farnham Common, Buckinghamshire, carried out a "well planned series of thefts" over a four year period from Charter Plc, police said.

"He then used the money for spread betting on the financial markets, such as the Nasdaq and the FTSE.

"Chu pleaded guilty to the theft of £9,080,939 when he appeared before a judge at Southwark Crown Court today. Sentencing was adjourned until January 14, pending reports.

"…Chu, who worked in Charter's finance division at its central London offices, would use other employees' computer passwords to log on as them and authorise the payments, he said.

"He then transferred the company's money to an account he held with a spread betting firm, before using the cash to bet on whether the financial markets would go up or down…"

Man Steals 9 Million for Gambling

In a recent interview, Vikrant Bhargava, marketing director at iGlobalMedia-- the parent company of Party Poker, has hinted at plans to launch a massive spending spree in 2005.

Unfortunately, he didn't hint at any plans to improve Party Poker's customer service (Party Poker may be the best place to play online poker-- mainly because it's the place a player can make the most money--- but they are notorious for their poor and incompetent support staff).

Here are some bits from the eGaming Review interview:

Party Poker has had a hugely successful 2004 with annual profits expected to reach US$500m, but Bhargava said the firm is not satisfied with its market share.

"We have 60% of the industry, but we could be 95% of the industry," Bhargava said.

"With an influx of capital you can go out and acquire everyone else.

"It could be in this industry, or it could be people in other related businesses, but I see that as definitely a possibility," he added.

Bhargava also said Party Poker will be looking at stepping up its presence on Television throughout Europe, after trialling TV shows in the region.

"We have been sponsoring a few TV shows, and if it does well we will take it up from one to 10; and if 10 works well we will take it up to 100," he said.

The full interview can be read in the next issue of eGaming Review, which will be published early next week.

eGaming Review

Approximately 83 people were arrested Sunday at a Texas City bar that was sponsoring a $20 buy-in poker tournament. The owner of the bar, Frank Skaggs, was charged with a class A misdemeanor of operating a gambling place.

Skaggs said he visited with Cpl. Charles Totty, the community service officer with the police department, and with authorities at the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission to discuss the legality of the tournament a week or two before it began. Neither the police department or the ABC gave him a definitive answer on the tournament's legality.

The more than 80 players in the tournament were each charged with class C misdemeanors and will have to pay a $183 fine.

Skagg's mentions in one of the interviews that he's never had a problem with pool tournaments. Which raises an interesting question--- are pool tournaments illegal as well? Fishing tournaments? Darts?

Oh, and the club's name was "Shenanigan's". I can't help but think of the movie Super-Troopers whenever I hear shenanigans... evil shenanigans.
ABC13.com: Former mayoral candidate behind bars following poker tournament

Galveston County Daily News: Club owner thought tourney was legal

83 face fines in gambling raid of nightclub

Analysts love Toronto-based Cryptologic, which runs the fourth biggest network of online poker sites. Last month Cryptologic beat analysts' expectations for the third quarter with earnings of $2.9 million USD, up 32% from last year.

Cryptologic is the software behind poker sites such as Intercasino, William Hill, Caribbean Sun Poker, and Poker Plex. The Cryptologic sites tend to have one of the highest rakes (money the house takes from every pot) and worst cash-out policies of all the online poker rooms.

Analysts might like Cryptologic--- but if you're a poker player, it's not your best bet.
National Post

"Dear Abby" answers a question about poker nights.

"Concerned in California" wrote in about a woman and her husband that host regular poker nights, and have started to demand that everyone donate a percentage of their winnings to the "house".

What Abby neglected to say in her response was that although "home poker" games are legal in every state that I'm aware of, home poker games in which the "house" collects money are illegal.
Extortion not part of poker

Las Vegas makes a buttload of money from gambling. A "Sir Mix-A-Lot"-satisfying amount of money. It wasn't until recently that I realized that people did other things in Vegas besides gambling. Like, there are schoolteachers and firepeople and lawyers. Actually, many many lawyers. Most seem specialize in substance-abuse related cases. Anyone familiar with CBS's hit show "Crime Scene Investigation" would figure that there are a lot of dead hooker cases that also fuel the court-system.

So anyway, next year it's predicted that Macao will make more money from gambling than Las Vegas. Macao happens to be the only place in China where gambling is permitted, and thus has a large number of potential gamblers at its door. The amazing part is that Macao only opened its doors to international gambling investors in 2001.

CBS, however, has no immediate plans for a CSI:Macao.
FT.com / World / Asia-Pacific - Macao's gambling revenues set to overtake Vegas

It's a heart-warming soul-touching business story of a chairman and chief executive of a small Web-site management company who decided to buy up a bunch of smaller companies after the dot-com bubble burst in order to establish itself as the leading provider of online research services.

Umang Gupta of Keynote Systems coveted the Vividence Company. The executives at Vividence rebuffed his every approach, but Umang Gupta dried his tears and continued the pursuit. An invitation to a local Silicon Valley poker game (nickel and dime I assume) gave him his chance-- and he ended up winning the Vividence Company from the CEO Peter Watkins.

Actually, that's not really what happened. But Umang Gupta did get to socialize with Peter Watkins at that poker game, which then led to the negotiations and eventual purchase of Vividence by Keynote Systems.

So--- listen up Keith Whyte (executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling and well-known pedophile)-- poker is also good for multi-million dollar business deals.

(Oh, and I mean "pedophile" in the "loves children sense"-- like one might say "audiophile" or "book-o-phile", not in the "sexually attracted to children" way.)

The New York Times > Business > Small Business: Deal Done, With Perseverance and a Poker Game

The article is not about poker. I KNEW that right from the beginning. There was never a moment when I thought that Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was ACTUALLY playing poker, or that he only started wagering national policy after losing the deed to his primary residence, as well as his summer home, and the apartment in NYC. However, I was curious as the how they were using "playing poker" as a metaphor for political bargaining.

It's actually quite a clever metaphor, hinging on the word "brinksmanship".

Brinksmanship is the practice, especially in international politics, of seeking advantage by creating the impression that one is willing and able to push a highly dangerous situation to the limit rather than concede. (taken from www.dictionary.com)

So, as you can see, Sharon has a pretty solid excuse to tell his wife.
Sharon plays poker to head-off coalition crisis