Online Poker Information Clearinghouse

New poker portals

2009-08-09T23:20:00.000+07:00

I was very bummed when MSN shutdown all our groups. My poker group had over 5000 members, 4 years of an active forum and 96 pages of original content. I have reopened free-standing poker portals (only 5 pages to start) - please check them out - http://www.worldpokerasia.com/ http://www.professor77.com/ http://www.pokernation.ws/

Apology to poker players owed by FBI Assistant Director Mark J. Mershon

2007-01-18T14:36:00.000+07:00

FBI Assistant Director Mark J. Mershon said the multibillion-dollar onlinegambling industry is "a colossal criminal enterprise masquerading as legitimatebusiness."That's funny because I just had an FBI background clearance done (requiredin adoption proceedings) and there was no mention of me being charged with beinga collossal anything. I am deeply offended by Asst. Dir. Mershons ill-consideredcomments and I ask on behalf of all American online poker players for at leastan apology and at best his resignation!

Yours, Mark Pinsker, JD / Professor77

Doyle Brunson plays poker with Santa Claus

2006-12-25T16:31:00.000+07:00

Doyle Brunson is your backer at DoylesRoom Poker

2006-12-18T11:52:00.000+07:00

Poker 101 with Professor77 : Online Omaha high/low Cash Game

2006-12-06T10:10:00.000+07:00

Vote Greg Raymer for U.S. Vice President, 2004 WSOP Champion

2006-12-05T12:03:00.000+07:00

BC: Generally, I promise not to mention politics while interviewing someone outside that domain, but, since you gave me permission beforehand, allow me to ask you what your political inclinations are?
GR: My mindset is very libertarian. I believe in individual freedom, and that you should be allowed to do anything you wish that does not directly harm another person. I also believe that you are responsible for yourself, and that the government has no DUTY to help you (except to protect you from others). That does not mean I am against all government programs that help people, but such programs should not be undertaken merely because they help people, but only if they are economically beneficial to the majority.
BC: Also, are you thinking of becoming a politician? If so, what kind of office do you desire? What types of positions would you support?
GR: In many ways, I would not make a good politician, at least not the way the business of politics presently works in our country. I am not very good at compromising. If you convince me you are right, I will agree with you, but until you do, I will do what I think is the smartest thing to do. Having said that, I am currently talking to some people who run the Libertarian Party about the possibility of running to be the party's official candidate for Vice President of the United States. With a few exceptions, I would support the official planks of the Libertarian Party.
BC: I too am a Libertarian, and am frankly surprised that more poker players are not. Isn't personal freedom the major benefit to becoming a professional poker player in the first place? One comes and goes as they please, and avoids statist bureaucracies altogether. Even better, you're free from having to deposit your brain into the self-mutilating, anti-intellectual cauldron of political correctness.
GR: Every successful poker player is intelligent enough to succeed in almost any career, but many of them are much too independent in their attitude to do well in modern corporate America. In a team environment, it is sometimes more important to get along than it is to be right, but most of us poker players just want to be right. Having said that, my experience with large corporations makes me believe that getting along and being inclusive and such ideas are taking over to the point that there is not enough focus on getting the job done right. To work as a team, you need to not be selfish, but you shouldn't take it so far that you favor the mediocrity of the group over getting the job done as intelligently and perfectly as possible. Basically, in most modern American bureaucracies (and probably most of the rest of the world, though I wouldn't know first-hand) the balance is out of whack, and there is too much focus on the team, and not enough focus on the results.
BC: Back in April, you went to Washington D.C. along with Chris Ferguson and Howard Lederer, to protest the government's attempts to ban online poker. What impression did you have of Congress from your visit? What's your overall opinion of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (UIGEA)? Did your visit to Capitol Hill have anything to do with your desire to become a lawmaker?
GR: My impression of the Congressmen we met was generally positive, but my impression of how business gets done in Congress was pretty negative. There is too much emphasis on getting elected or re-elected, and not enough emphasis on voting intelligently with respect to each bill in and of itself. My overall impression of UIGEA is that it is a load of
BS. The bill accomplishes nothing much in reality, but it gives the impression that it does. It is a further example of politicians passing a law not because they are trying to do the right thing, but because they think it will help them get re-elected.
BC: What books or individuals had the most influence on your development and game? What players do you respect the most?
GR: The biggest influence on my game was David Sklansky's book "The Theory of Poker". It was one of the first books I bought, and it taught me all of the most important basic concepts applicable to any form of poker. I still consider it the most important single poker book anybody can read if they want to improve their game. I respect all players who behave as ladies and gentlemen at the table, and who do their best to win within the rules. There are also many great players whom I respect for their talents, too many to mention them all. For the most part, they know who they are.
BC: Lastly, let me ask you about your own book. We're been hearing rumors about it for a couple of years now. Is it close to completion? Can you share with us what topics and issues it will address?
GR: I have a bad combination of being busy and lazy. I was approached by Two Plus Two Publishing about writing a book just after I won the Main Event, and was very excited by the idea. Two and a half years later, and I am still far from done. When finished, the book will be a tournament strategy book, not a life story type book. I doubt I will ever write a life story type book, as I don't consider my life to be that interesting. I could have finished this book a long time ago by getting a ghost-writer or co-author, but I wanted the book to be all mine. When it comes out, I am going to deserve all the credit, or all the blame.

No Limit - Winner best director at Australian International Film Festival

2006-11-29T18:37:00.000+07:00

Vote for America : Vote For Poker

2006-11-05T19:02:00.000+07:00

VOTE FOR PEACE

VOTE FOR FREEDOM

VOTE FOR POKER

VOTE DEMOCRAT !

http://www.pokersingapore.net/ http://www.worldpokerasia.com/ WWW.MYSPACE.COM/POKERNATION

Lou Krieger: Is poker still the "American way"?

2006-11-03T12:37:00.000+07:00

Professor77 asked:

> "Not only is poker good for you, it's the American way, where winners play > fair, have the right stuff, and nothing else matters, except, perhaps, a bit of luck> every now and then." Lou Krieger
> Lou, this is one of my all time favorite bits of poker insight. However, after the Frist and the gang's "Act" when I read it now I just get depressed. Any new insights or changes to the old in light of our new laws?

Lou Krieger's response was:

Thanks for the kind words about my writing. I believed it then, and when I wrote it poker was still marginalized, not at all mainstream, and yet the game of poker was still a big part of American mythology, and skill at poker -- it didn't have to be practiced at the poker table either; poker skills could be demonstrated in business negotiations, politics, and other phases of our lives -- was one of the ways we have always defined ourselves as a people.I still believe that. And yet poker historically carried the moralistic connotations because it was a gamble and many people believed (and still do) that gambling is not good for you. Bill Frist hijacked the most American of our virtues -- our freedom of choice and our ability to choose how and where we choose to spend -- or win -- our money. He did so for one reason only: to pander to the religious right, a group that has had the Republican Party in thrall for years.So far his actions seem to have hurt investors overseas and the large, publicly-traded rooms, such as Party and related organizations such as Neteller. He's also hurt affiliates, those who were earning a living writing for poker sites, and I guess he's made his deal with the devil and is happy with it. I fully expect Kyl, Goodlatte, and Leach to come back in 2007 with a harsher bill that would make playing poker online illegal. I also expect their bill to have exemptions for horseracing, fantasy sports, and state lotteries.But I'm not giving up. I am nimble and will find a way around this insanity until such time as the USA decides to join the rest of the world and regulate online gambling rather that try prohibition.I'm still playing. So are a lot of others. And the number of online players will continue to grow worldwide. There's a game out there and the lunacy of legislators who want to protect me against myself is not going to stop me. I doubt that it will stop many others either.

Expert Insight's Poker TV

2006-11-03T08:25:00.000+07:00

Expert Insight - Poker, BlackJack & Golf

2006-11-02T17:09:00.000+07:00

Expert Insight

Final Table Poker with Phil Gordon - Expert Insight DVD

Beating Blackjack DVD with Andy Bloch

Short Game Golf DVD with Jim Furyk and Fred Funk

Recommended Online Poker Sites Accepting USA Residents

2006-10-18T19:34:00.000+07:00

Recommended Sites Accepting Americans:
PokerStars.com
Absolute Poker Fulltiltpoker.com Bodog.com
UltimateBet.com
Poker.com
Doyles Room -Will honor VIP status from Party Poker, PokerRoom and other sites if you email after signup vip@dbpn.com
PlatinumPoker.Com - Part of Doyle Brunson Poker Network and one of the oldest rooms on the net
Full Contact Poker
Bugsysclub.com
PlanetPoker

Other Sites Accepting Americans / USA Players
Bowmans Poker
Cardcrusade
Cake Poker Dream Poker
Gamesgrid
Golden Palace Poker
Mansionpoker
LivePoker
PitbullPoker
PokerHost
Red Star Poker
Superior Poker
TonyGPoker
True Poker
Tropical Poker
United Poker Network
World Poker Exchange
TouchstonePoker

These Sites Gave Up Without a Fight :

PartyGaming - (Party Poker, Empire Poker, etc.)
Pacific Poker - Was the first to back out of the USA
iPoker - (Titan Poker, Poker Ocean, etc)
Prima Network-Americans from certain states. For a full list visit primapoker.com
B2B Skins - (24h poker, Redbet, Betunited etc) For full lists of B2B sites visit B2B.com
Boss Media - (WilliamHill, Sportinbet, TotalPoker, Virgin Poker, CelebPoker, Pokerheaven, etc)
Cryptologic - (InterPoker, Intercasino, VIP casino)
Paradise Poker
PokerRoom.com (and bwin sites like Holdempoker, Europoker, CasinoRoom)
HollywoodPoker.com
Kiwi Poker
Jetsetpoker
SunPoker
ActionPoker.com
Victor Chandler
Everest Poker
Poker Champs

Online Casinos Still Taking American Bets:Bodog.com - Slotland.com - GoldenPalace -

Videos On Poker Ban:CNBC Gambling Ban News - Bill Frist Corruption Video - Shelley Berkley - J. Todd Crime to Play Poker - John Steward on Gambling Ban -

Some Prima sites not accepting US players at all and some are not accepting US players from states where gambling is specifically addressed. (FL, IN, IL, KS, LA, MA, MN, MO, MT, NV, NY, OR, RI, SD, TX, WA, WI, UT or HI)

Hey poker players, support a good cause with Liz Lieu

2006-10-10T11:10:00.000+07:00

11/7 Vote for Freedom, Vote For Poker, Vote out all Republicans

2006-10-02T21:54:00.000+07:00

"First they came for the Communists but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists but I was not one of them, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews but I was not Jewish so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me."
- Martin Niemoeller

Get a hold over your poker opponents

2006-09-25T20:22:00.000+07:00

When reads are right the player seems like a magician, especially as they present it on television where you can see the hole cards. The problem is that the shows are edited and you are seeing dramatic moments, not the whole play. Furthermore you are likely in a game-show atmosphere at a short table with the blinds increasing rapidly. In this situation many players are getting creative and overplaying random hands in an effort to beat the clock and make good television [both]. What I am attempting to say here is that a lot of sexy moves made at the poker table are actually driven by the math of the situation, not by incredible reads and amazing actions. A lot of times we, as players, get the door when we make a mistake in our reads. Numerous times in each tournament it becomes key to make the right decision—not that you will win every one, but to give yourself a fighting chance you have to have a sense of where you stand vis a vis your opponent. If you are a television watcher you do not see these mistaken reads very often.
The oversized bet is an interesting weapon and can be another useful tool for the professional player and has become much more of an option for every player in these past few years. Gavin Smith had an important insight about that this past August when he mentioned how much he loved bets that could only be called by hands that had them beat. My favorite quote on this subject was at the WPPA tournament at the Orleans a few years ago when Chip Jett was asked what he thought about Jim McManus's alleged play of moving all-in at the first level (50,000 in chips are given for the 25,000 buy-in at the WPT championship event) with AA over tiny blinds. Chip responded, "Why not? Aces are not part of my plan for gathering chips anyway." It stings when an amateur nails me with this play, but seldom shocks me. If you are someone I have never seen before it might work for you too! One reason I have a hard time beating 'weakies' is that I always think they are thinking. Some players just seem to beat certain other players consistently. I know that Dennis Waterman holds over John Juanda, Layne Flack, Barry Greenstein, and Tom Franklin, but that Billy Duarte, Scotty Nguyen, Paul Wolfe, Alan Cunningham, and John Cernuto hold over him. What do I mean when I say "hold over"? Well the answer is that it usually means that what you hold beats what they hold and so the skill might be in getting as many chips into the pot as possible, but then again it can also mean that you know what they have, what they are thinking, and what your best move is to counteract their strategy. In all cases "holding over" someone is a very good thing. Whereas if someone "holds over" you, you are in trouble!
D.Waterman

Online Poker Kingpin Free: Louisiana Prosecutors Don't Have Dicks!

2006-09-23T16:29:00.000+07:00

(Louisiana Prosecutors' Need Publicity? Guess that must be what this is about or else they don't have enough rapists, murderers and crack dealers to keep the Louisiana Prosecutors and state courts busy...)

Peter Dicks, the former chairman of online gaming giant Sportingbet, has been released from New York State custody, as the Louisiana extradition warrant was considered by a judge to be too weak to hold him in custody.The decision came from Judge Gene Lopez in a Queens criminal court late yesterday. In what appears to be a move to focus specifically on his legal troubles, Dicks resigned as chairman of Sportingbet yesterday as well.According to a UK news site www.timesonline.uk, the state of Louisiana has issued over 50 similar arrest warrants for executives from Internet gambling companies that have clients within the state’s boundaries. Reports indicate that warrants have been issued specifically for board members of companies like PartyPoker and 888 Holdings.Dicks was originally arrested by the Port Authority Police Department and later freed on $50,000 bail while awaiting a court decision on the legality of his detainment.

Professor77 Online Pot-Limit Draw Poker

2006-09-18T00:27:00.000+07:00

Live Poker- New Poker Room-Checkitout!

2006-09-14T22:40:00.000+07:00

AtomikPoker.Com Freeroll at Professor77.Com & PokerNation

2006-09-12T11:34:00.000+07:00

http://atomikpoker.pkrrm.com/downloadpopup.asp?btag=BanAff52715

AtomikPoker.Com Freeroll for Professor77.Com & PokerNation

2006-09-08T14:34:00.000+07:00

AtomikPoker.Com

Atomik Poker, a brand new Prima Poker site, will set up a $100 freeroll for PokerNation and add the following promotion:

Play 200 hands and recieve 50% match to what you win in the tournament in your account. Play 500 hands and recieve a 100% match to what you win in the tournament in your account.Play 1000 hands and recieve a 200% match to what you win in the tournament deposited into your account

Check the professor77.com forum for date/time & password

AbsolutePokerPages

2006-08-30T09:05:00.000+07:00

WCOOP 2006 Schedule of Events at PokerStars

2006-08-07T12:32:00.000+07:00

DAY DATE EVENT BUY-IN GUARANTEE
Saturday September 16 Razz $215 $100,000
Sunday September 17 No Limit Hold'em $530 $1,500,000
Monday September 18 Pot Limit Omaha (rebuys) $320 $400,000
Tuesday September 19 No Limit Hold'em Match Play $215 $300,000
Wednesday September 20 Limit Omaha High/Low $530 $300,000
Thursday September 21 No Limit Hold'em (rebuys) $215 $1,000,000
Friday September 22 Limit Hold'em $215 $200,000
Saturday September 23 HORSE $215 $100,000
Saturday September 23 Pot Limit Hold'em $530 $400,000
Sunday September 24 No Limit Hold'em $1,050 $1,000,000
Monday September 25 Seven Card Stud $320 $100,000
Tuesday September 26 Pot Limit Omaha8 $320 $200,000
Wednesday September 27 Pot Limit Hold'em $320 $400,000
Thursday September 28 Seven Card Stud High/Low $530 $200,000
Friday September 29 Pot Limit Omaha $530 $300,000
Saturday September 30 HORSE $5,200 $100,000
Saturday September 30 Limit Hold'em $1,050 $400,000
Sunday October 1 No Limit Hold'em $2,600 $3,000,000

2006-07-13T08:24:00.000+07:00

Full Tilt Poker Sit & Go Tournament

2006-07-13T08:19:00.000+07:00

New Online Poker Room Tour

Video Tour of Online Poker Rooms

Multiple IDs in online Poker Tournaments

2006-07-07T16:41:00.000+07:00

About 1.5 weeks ago a topranked online player was in a satellite with me at ParadisePoker.com playing 2 ids at the same table for 1 of the bigger cash tournies. They won seats with both IDs and went on to play the tourny with both IDs. I know thisplayer well and was stunned. I confronted them and they responded "this isnt cheating because I have Paradise's permission". Paradise and many other pokerrooms allow you to get other IDs for your "spouse", Dad, Mom etc and all play the same tournaments at the same time! All at the same damn computer. So this player just gave their family a rest and played at least 2 and possibly a third ID in satellites and tournies in all their names.

The online pokerrooms have to stop this insanity! It's tough enough to win a tourny without the sites making it so easy to cheat. The following is Paradise's explanation:"With regards to players playing at our tables from the same IP address, we do not allow this at our ring games and our Sit & Go tables. In our Multi-Tabletournaments we do allow players from the same IP address to enter as it is veryunlikely that the players will be seated at the same table. If the players were to end up on the same table, for instance, if they both managed to get to the final table, then the matter is addressed as or when this may occur."well it did and does occur frequently ! And nothing was done and no one but menoticed it. This player's net, based on tournamentreporter, in the last 60 days is almost $30k clearly that's money out of all of our pockets and no pokerroom should allowthis theft! I contacted 5 other pokerrooms and all allowed spouses to have IDs and play from the same computer, same connection, at the same time and using the same credit card etc.. Write your poker room and let them know what you think. I know I didn't signupto be rippedoff and won't stand idly by and allow it to continue!

Beware! If youplay online tournaments...it's not poker you're playing and its certainly not a level playing field.

New Online Poker Info Site

2006-06-01T09:20:00.000+07:00

Well I finally brokedown and did it...checkitout

www.professor77.com

PokerStars World Blogger Championship

2006-06-01T09:16:00.000+07:00

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker!

This Online Poker Tournament is a No Limit Texas Holdem event exclusive to Bloggers.

Registration code: 7988762

Online PokerRoom Trojan Horse!

2006-05-24T11:01:00.000+07:00

I've just learned that CheckRaise.com was sending a trojan virus with their software(specifically the rakeback calculator) to all players when they downloaded which was stealing and transmitting players IDs, passwords etc. If you ever even visited CheckRaise or downloaded any free poker calculator I strongly recomend deleting their software, changing all your passwords at other sites, and doing a virus scan with the best virus scan software u can find. I use both norton and mcafee as well as a spyware detector. If you were a CheckNRaise player I also would suggest reformatting your harddrives to be on the safeside.

Trojan.Checkraise is a Trojan horse that steals passwords for popular online poker Web sites. It also opens a back door on the compromised computer and logs keystrokes. It sends confidential information to a remote attacker. Note: Virus definitions dated May 16th, 2006 or earlier may detect this threat as Trojan.Dropper.
Type:

Systems Affected:
Windows 2000, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP

Professor77 online poker video - hi-res & full screen

2006-04-07T22:07:00.000+07:00

PokerNation :3 online poker tournaments

2006-03-29T09:37:00.000+07:00

3 PokerNation Tournaments, 2 Freerolls and 1 rebuy, 1st is $200 freeroll 4/7 9pm est, 2nd is $10 rebuy with $100 added to prizepool 4/21 9pm est both at FairPoker

& Every Saturday at Titan

visit PokerNation for passwords and details

Professor77 online poker video tutorials updated list

2006-03-29T09:31:00.000+07:00

homepage free library forum rakebacks links

Professor77's Poker Videos

Tournament Endgame with Professor77

Professor77 finds a glitch in an online poker room

Professor77 potlimit draw stt video

Professor77's Paradise Million Qualifier Video

Professor77 Plays UltimateBet.Com STT

DocsHoggs' Introduction to Online Poker

Professor77 and Poker by the Chart
Added: March 09, 2006, 07:20 AM
Runtime: 10:04

Professor77 Online NL Holdem Final Table Poker
March 05, 2006, 06:32 AM
Runtime: 06:09

New Online Poker Room Tour

No-Limit Holdem Poker the Easy Way
Added: February 20, 2006, 08:29 AM
Runtime: 11:22

Full Tilt Poker Sit & Go Tournament

Professor77's Easy Online Single Table Tournaments
Added: February 08, 2006, 09:58 PM
Runtime: 19:36

Online Poker Tournament = 1on1 with Professor77
Added: February 06, 2006, 09:14 AM
Runtime: 06:42

Poker with Professor77: Online Tournament Strategy
Added: February 04, 2006, 11:30 AM
Runtime: 25:42

New Online Poker Room

2006-02-18T09:14:00.000+07:00

KiwiCasinoPoker.Com
100% Bonus up to $500

bad beat therapy

2006-02-12T19:41:00.000+07:00

In The Jungle
Watch it now on StupidVideos!

WPT poker shopping

2006-02-10T11:16:00.000+07:00

New Professor77 Online Poker Video

2006-02-05T01:56:00.000+07:00

http://www.youtube.com/?v=VpSvVKk8isY

Professor77's 1st Online Poker Video

2006-02-04T01:10:00.000+07:00

Professor77's STTs Made Ez

Professor77 online poker links

2006-01-28T12:22:00.000+07:00

OnlinePokerSites.Bravehost.Com
Poker Links & Shopping Unlimited
My MSN Blog w/ nearly 500 pics
OnlinePokerTop1000 Links Site
DoylesRoom.Com
PokerStars.Com
UltimateBet.Com
TitanPoker.Com
PokerHeaven.Com
PlatinumPoker.Com
TheFishTank.Com
VCPoker.Com
AbsolutePoker.com
StacksPoker.com
PartyPoker.com
NoblePoker.com
PacificPoker.Com
RoyalVegasPoker.Com
PokerRoom.Com
crazypoker.com
7SultansPoker.Com
BetonBetPoker.Net
Purple-Lounge.Com
EmpirePoker.Com
HollywoodPoker.Com
bugsysclub.com
goldentigerpoker.com
captaincookspoker.com
virtualcitypoker.com
pokerrewards.com
expertinsight.com
realpokertraining.com
pokerschoolonline.com

"Have you ever watched poker on TV and wondered what the players were thinking? If so, this DVD is perfect for you!"

Previous Posts

Professor77 ranked 17th in online poker player buzz

Phil Gordon Poker Video Clip

PokerNation freeroll, saturdays 9pm est

Thanksgiving $5k Poker Freeroll at Doyle's Room

Titan Poker will host a $100 Poker Nation freeroll

Doyle Brunson - Poker's Living Legend

Test 7Sultans Casino Free!

Poker List
Vote For My Site Here

Mark Pinsker an Online Poker Librarian

2006-01-28T12:12:00.000+07:00

Mark Pinsker has a free poker Library at http://groups.msn.com/PokerNation

Professor77 ranked 17th in online poker player buzz

2006-01-28T12:03:00.000+07:00

Wow who knew old Professor77 was so popular in online poker circles. Even my real name Mark Pinsker garners a buzz rank of 234 in B&M player list.
http://www.tiltboys.com/buzzindex/online-players/

please visit the free poker library of videos and ebooks at http://groups.msn.com/pokernation

Phil Gordon Poker Video Clip

2006-01-24T22:19:00.000+07:00

http://www.youtube.com/?v=gS7qLsOGhLc

PokerNation freeroll, saturdays 9pm est

2005-12-09T17:05:00.000+07:00

Xmas Eve password is "rain"

POKERNATION FREEROLL

every Saturday at 9 pm eastern std. time

Thanksgiving $5k Poker Freeroll at Doyle's Room

2005-11-24T11:25:00.000+07:00

POKER NATION
free poker library
$$$ Happy Thanksgiving - $5000 freeroll at Doyle'sRoom.Com $$$

Titan Poker will host a $100 Poker Nation freeroll

2005-11-21T19:44:00.000+07:00

Titan Poker will host a $100 PokerNation freeroll, as of the 3rd of December, 9 pm est, andevery Saturday there after. Check at PokerNation

http://groups.msn.com/PokerNation

for weekly password.

Titan Poker

Misc. Anti-Poker Cheat Articles

2005-11-05T18:54:00.001+07:00

NY Times
For years, pundits have debated the relative merits of interaction in the real world versus interaction online. They appear to have missed a more pressing issue: where is it easier to cheat in poker?
The debate is of no small consequence to Sean Stephens, who oversees security for Paradise Poker, a popular virtual poker hall. Mr. Stephens is like a bouncer at a Las Vegas card room eyeballing the joint for cheats, the difference being that he can't actually see anybody.
"I suppose it is some disadvantage not to see personal interaction, but we have so many more tools to use," he said, referring to the data-collection devices at his disposal.
The growing popularity of gambling on the Internet is well documented, but the rise of interest in poker is a curious subset to the phenomenon.
Unlike virtual blackjack or slots, poker is played against other players, not a computer.
The actual players, far-flung in homes or offices, sit in cyberspace around a green felt table. A computer dealer doles out cards, then the players go head-to-head in games like 7-Card Stud, Omaha or Texas Hold 'Em; with a click of the mouse, they can call a hand, raise or fold.
"I yell at the screen, the game moves fast -- it's brought some of the fun of playing back for me," said Stephen Badger, 42, who in 1999 won the world championship playing the game Omaha, and took home the $186,000 prize. He plays poker professionally, a job that once entailed commutes to Los Angeles, but increasingly involves plopping down in his home office and competing against players worldwide.
Indeed, the electronic version of the game has developed a following, despite its questionable legal standing. Depending on whom you ask, the casino operators may or may not be violating federal and, in particular, state laws that regulate gaming activity, explaining why the casinos are typically based in the Caribbean.
At prime time, about 2,000 players compete in Paradise Poker, which is in Costa Rica, the majority playing at tables where the betting limit is $2 to $6 a raise, a modest sum by poker standards. At the high end, players can bet $40 a raise, still modest (considering that in Las Vegas or in Los Angeles, some tables permit raises of $800 or more), but the pots can still top $300.
The twist, poker aficionados say, is that the participants are not exactly playing old-world poker but are engaging in a mutated form of the game.
The Internet has eliminated the pokerface; it is no longer possible to study the players around the table to determine if they are fidgeting, nervously fondling their chips, or otherwise indicating they are excited, bluffing or distraught.
Mr. Badger, who has chronicled the difference between Internet and physical-world poker on his Web site, www.playwinningpoker.com, says the online world greatly eliminates the element of reading players, the emotional element of poker. In online poker, he said, greater significance is placed on math, on the pure value of a given hand.
That said, he has learned to pick up a person's bluffing or betting strategy with clues like how quickly players click the mouse to place a bet.
"Sometimes, people are habitually slow, and sometimes, they play like lightning," he said. "It's readable."
The absence of face-time has led to a debate about the relative ease of cheating on the Internet.
Two or more players, sitting at different computers, may be communicating by phone.
Wikipedia
Cheating is more common in poker than most people care to believe. Although most cheating occurs in private games that do not follow strict gaming procedures, it is also very common in regulated card rooms and casinos. Cheating can be done either by means of collusion, sleight-of-hand (such as bottom dealing, stacking the deck, switching cards etc), or the use of cheating gaffs (such as marked cards, holdout devices, glims etc).
Cheating is as common in friendly games as it is in high-stakes games. A card cheat may operate alone, but most of them operate in pairs or small groups. The groups are often composed of one card mechanic who is in charge of manipulating the cards, one or several shills who pose as regular players, and a muscle who acts as a bodyguard. Street gangs also often employ a wall man who acts as a lookout, however this approach is more common with three card monte mobs, and back-alley dice gangs.
Following is a list of terms used to categorize specific card cheats:
· card mechanic -- A card cheat who specializes in sleight-of-hand manipulation of cards.
· base dealer/second dealer -- Also called bottom dealer/second dealer is a cheat that specializes in bottom/second dealing.
· paper player -- A card cheat that exploits the use of marked cards.
· hand mucker -- A card cheat that specializes in switching cards.
· machine player -- A card cheat that uses mechanical holdouts.
· crossroader -- Originally, any kind of traveling hustler; but now the term is mainly use to describe cheats who specialize in hitting casinos.
Steve Badger
Badger has archived his RGP (rec.gambling.poker) posts and quite a few of them are useful regarding poker cheating. In this collection from late 2000, he addresses how Paradise Poker dealt with a cheater as soon as they were informed and at the end of the post, proposes a payout restructuring for tournament poker so as to diminish the motivation behind deal-making and haggling that occurs these days.In posts from January 2001, he argues that cheating occurs in poker everywhere but that he believes it to be more prevalent in ring games (real-world) than online because it's easier and more effective. Under the topic "Collusion Online or Poor Strategy" from April 2001, he talks about how the first two cheats he tends to suspect online are either collusion or timing-out cheating (where a player deliberately times out to misuse their "all-in") but also why he continues to play online despite the assertions of others that it's a losing game.In another collection of posts from August 2001, he addresses both online cheating and debunks many typical myths regarding online poker. Badger has been a strong proponent of online poker (which should not be taken as an endorsement by PokerTop10) and he responds to many concerns about online poker such as collusion as well as the belief (erroneous, in his mind) that one can't "read" tells online (his argument is that you can but it's very different from live play). He also agrees with Annie Duke (one of our top-10 women players) that it's easier to observe a player's betting patterns online than it is at a casino.In his Winner's Guide to Online Poker, his section on cheating discusses the one kind of cheat you should fear the most and both what you and the online poker rooms can do about them. Basic advice: walk away and contact Support.Finally, in this collection of posts from September 2001, he addresses the fear that online poker rooms cheat either by using bots (instead of real humans) or a human who, with the online room's help, has knowledge of all the cards. He argues that the diversity of winners, the existence of real humans who post and can be met in person, and the consistency of good players winning (and bad players losing) are all proof of the honesty of good online rooms. Whether you agree with him or not, many of his arguments are compelling and at least, food for thought.
Maryann Guberman of CasinoGaming.com
Luckily for us, an archive of Maryann's columns for 2000 and 2001 is available. She discusses shills, props, and backed players in one article and collusion in tournament play in another. (Note: this second article is hampered by formatting problems which place black text on a dark blue background, making it more challenging to read.) More articles include how "chatter" can be cheating, deal-making at tournaments, a poker-ethics test in the form of what-would-you-do scenarios (also challenging to read due to format problem), why a great poker player might cheat, and cyber-cheats (collusion)

Misc. Anti-Poker Cheat Articles

2005-11-05T18:54:00.000+07:00

Thai Poker Pirates

2005-10-17T11:17:00.000+07:00

I've lived in and loved Thailand for many years. One of the advantages of life here was that you could buy the newest music, software or movie cds for just a couple bucks. I was shopping in Panthip Plaza, a megamall of nothing but computer stuff and bootleg cds last week and I was perusing the game software, looking for something for my 5 year old daughter when I came upon a "pan luam"(software collection cd) of poker software. Nobody much knew about or cared about poker here but obviously the impact of tv on poker has increased interest and demand enough for them to create this pirate collection cd. 26 different poker applications and games on 1 cd for 150 baht(about 3 bucks). Everything from Moneymaker's, Hoyle's & Holdem Superstar's games to several poker calculator/cheat programs. Needless to say I was blown away but had to buy a copy, for research purposes only. Jeez whats next, will I see copies of WSOP and WPT DVDs next to the fake antique opium pipes on the shelves of the tourist shops?

Doyle Brunson - Poker's Living Legend

2005-10-07T19:19:00.000+07:00

Among the Immutable Laws of the Universe is the Law of Legends:In any group, there can be only one First.
And in the world of poker, the game everybody is talking about, watching on television, reading about and trying to master, the First has always been and continues to be the legendary Doyle "Texas Dolly" Brunson. Brunson, now 71, is the Babe Ruth, the Wilt Chamberlain, the Arnold Palmer of poker. He basically invented the game of Texas Hold'em. He was the star of the infamous band of traveling poker sharks, the Texas Rounders. He was the first of the high stakes hotel poker players in Las Vegas. He has won an unprecedented ten World Series of Poker events, including the two back-to-back world championships. He is a best-selling author. In the world of professional poker, he is king. Brunson has been winning with good and bad hands all his life. Raised dirt poor in rural Texas, he was a natural athlete who went to college on basketball and track scholarships. His NBA career with the then-Minneapolis Lakers ended before it began when he shattered his leg in an accident at the gypsum factory where he was working pre-season. The leg never did heal properly, and to this day, his place at a poker table is easily spotted by the crutch standing nearby. To pay his bills after the accident, Brunson took up poker. His upbringing and early life as an outsider had made him a lifelong observer of people, and his skill at reading faces was his ace in the hole; he got very good, very fast. But the next hand wasn't so good. In 1962, he was diagnosed with cancer and given three months to wrap up his affairs. But he called that bluff and the other guy folded, and 40 years later, Brunson is still at the table, and still winning. Considered the patriarch of modern poker and the person most responsible for its rise from smoky backrooms to the pop-culture spotlight, Brunson was the leader of the Texas Rounders, a group of men who, in the words of The History Channel, "cleaned Texas dry" playing high-stakes poker in the 1950s and '60s. Outrunning both the law and the hijackers who preyed on winners of illegal big-money card games, he eventually landed in Las Vegas where he became one of the city's earliest tourist attractions: audiences would gather in awe to watch him play. In 1978, Brunson changed the game of poker forever with his book Super/System, a complete guide to Texas Hold'em and other games of poker. Essential reading for everyone from weekend dabblers to high-stakes gamblers, the book remains the bible of poker, the top-selling poker book of all time, still selling 14,000 copies a month. Super/System 2, recently published, includes new games, new strategies and insight from not only Brunson himself but also some of the other biggest names in poker. As well, Brunson has an autobiography, a book on online poker, and the tales of the greatest hands he's ever seen all scheduled to be published in the coming months. Brunson shows no signs of slowing down. He still has the eye, the nerve and the skill and just in the fall of 2004, won another million-dollar World Poker Tour event at the Bicycle Club in Los Angeles, CA. He is a spokesperson for the new online poker website DoylesRoom.com. He plays poker every day and often hosts high-stakes Texas Hold'em games that cost $100,000 just to sit down. He'll win, and sometimes lose, $50,000 or more on a single hand. But as he recently told the History Channel, "to be a successful gambler you have to have a complete disregard for money." That and a keen eye for what's happening in the eyes of the other guy.

Test 7Sultans Casino Free!

2005-10-06T10:43:00.000+07:00

For a limited time 7 Sultans Casino have setup a server to see how new players move around the games lobby of the Casino, but obviously we need the players to come in and not worry about purchasing or credit, so to over come this 7 Sultans will give them $500.00 to play with for 15 minutes, whatever the players makes during their 15 minutes over and above the $500.00 is theirs to keep up to a maximum of $500.00. The site goes live on Monday 3rd October 2005 !! You can play any game that they have including slots, blackjack, poker, craps, roulette, texas hold em feel free to share this offer withyour friends. Good luck. Code is "Test777" click here http://www.fortuneaffiliates.com/tagservlet/tagservlet?btag=ad_127371

PokerStars' Online Poker Blogger Championship

2005-10-06T10:37:00.000+07:00

I have registered to play in the
Online Poker Blogger Championship!

This event is powered by PokerStars.

Registration code: 8275566

Why is this GutShot Poker dealer grinning?

2005-10-03T06:39:00.000+07:00

I was sitting in a bar in Costa Rica talking to this Brit named Hugo, introduced himself as GutShot dealer extrordinaire, next thing I know is I am waking up on the beach with my boxers torn to shreds, my arse feels like it's on fire, there's a tatoo of a heart with "Hugo" in it on my shoulder and the $10,000 I won in the Paradise Poker Million is gone!!! All I remember is Hugo handing me a drink and whispering in my ear to play Legs and Omaha the Game! Is this typical GutShot behavior or is it just Hugo?

Paradise Million Hand by Hand

2005-09-28T23:53:00.000+07:00

5/09/27: $1,000,000 Placings
Congratulations to boon8 of Blackpool, UK who is the World's First Million Dollar freeroll champ, taking in the largest online win from one tournament in a freeroll to boot!1st boon8: $1,000,000Congratulations to our 2nd to 9th placers, who each took home $10,000. 2nd sn-Ale3rd Professor774th judgetim5th StiMi6th LordTranIII7th Mastershake.8th jerryfoam9th docshoggs
05/09/25: Final Hand Summary
Here's your final hand of the World's First Million Dollar Freeroll.sn-Ale is on the button and makes it 600k to go. boon8, showing no emotion, announces that he's all-in. sn-Ale only has 300k left and calls and reluctantly turns over Q9. boon8 takes a moment, looks at his girlfriend, and turns over A10. sn-Ale is already standing up. First card on the flop is an Ace and the crowd erupts. Flop is A63. Turn 8. boon8's in shock and there are tears streaming down his girlfriend's cheeks. River....another 6. It's over. boon8, who showed no emotion over the 7 hours that he played, slowly raises his arms and tilts his head back. He's become the first online poker player to have won a million dollars in 1 tournament. The Million Dollar Freeroll number 2 is already underway. Don't miss your chance to join boon8 in the history books!
05/09/25: It's Over Folks !!
CONGRATULATIONS BOON8 OF BLACKPOOL UK....YOU'VE WON ONE MILLION DOLLARS.Final hand details coming soon...best quote of the night from boon8 after 7 hours of game play.."even my teeth are shaking".Great job boon8 and enjoy, enjoy !!
05/09/25: Flush Madness
With both players checking right through to the river, we see a red board of Ad 4d 6d Kd 10h. sn-Ale makes a move making it $200k. boon8 raises it up to $600k. Called by Sn-Ale. A 9d is flipped by sn-Ale and the crowd OHHHH's as boon8 shows a 10d.The chef boon8 takes the pot!
05/09/25: Biggest pot of the day
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
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What started off as an innocent hand turned out to be the biggest pot of the tournament. Standard 3x raise from sn-Ale on the button. boon8 announces All-in for over 6 million chips and was beaten into the pot. Cards are turned over to reveal AQ for sn-Ale against A9 for boon8. The flop 333Turn KRiver 4Chop it up. Split pot and another few gray hairs for each player.
05/09/25: Game continues...
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
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boon8 makes it 400k to go pre-flop. Sn-ale quickly calls and flop comes 6s 10c 9c. 300k to go by boon8 and sn-ale lays it down. It's deadly quiet....
05/09/25: This tension is killing me!
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
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No big pots yet. Both players are feeling each other out. boon8 has roughly a 3 to 1 chip advantage over sn-Ale right now. Stay tuned!
05/09/25: boon8 vs sn-ale
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We're seeing a lil more action as we're a few hands in to heads up. Sn-Ale makes it $400k to go and boon8 calls. Flop 2h 5d Kh. Checked. Turn 7h. Checked. 4h on the River and boon8 makes it $500k. Has the chef cooked up a flush? We'll never know as sn-Ale folds and chips move to the boon.
05/09/25: Jitters
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We're 6 hours in to game play in the finale of the World's First Million Dollar freeroll and players boon8 (Blackpool, UK) and Sn-Ale (AZ, USA) have a guest at the table..a briefcase of cash (Security!). The final table gang remains in the building, anxious to see who will take home the title and cash.
05/09/25: Shuffle up and Deal..we're back!
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Once again we've got Sn-ale at just under $3.5 mill up against boon8 with $5 mill.Blinds : SB 80-k BB $160k with Ante of $15k. 60 min level now underway!
05/09/25: Players are Seated
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Who's nervous? We sure are. boon8 the Chef from Blackpool, UK is seated across from Sn-Ale, a software engineer from Arizona. We're set for battle. With the World's First Million Dollar Freeroll title and 6ft check on the line, this is action.We'll pause as the money hits the table and the paparazzi do their thing.
05/09/25: The Professor speaks
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Lesson 9:Well boys and girls..looks like the Professor flunked the final exam. But thanks all for all your support and I promise to do extra homework and do better next semester.That's right..the Professor77 will make his return and attempt to take you all on at the Final Table of the FreeMillion 2 !
05/09/25: Players
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boon8 has left the building to regroup. Let's once again remember that boon8 sacrificed attending his mate's wedding to play in the online tourney...and on day 2 of the online event left his girlfriend's Grandfather's 90th birthday to resume play online. He's now heads up for $1,000,000. sn-Ale is looking calm and browsing around the tables, mingling with his cheering section.Play resumes shortly. Stay tuned for the finale!
05/09/25: Player Buy-In
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Let's take a moment to review the player's buy-in.sn-Ale: $0boon8: $0You heard me. This was a freeroll folks.
05/09/25: Break Time
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No need to break your fingers on the refresh button..we're on a 10-15 minute break while we allow our heads up finalists to regroup and stretch it out. There's a $990,000 gap between 2nd and 1st place here......making this almost a true winner take all event.
05/09/25: CHIP COUNT
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Let's hope there are some cheers back in Blackpool UK for boon8 as we know his mates are watching and in Arizona for sn-Ale...we're heads up and the stacks are:boon8 $5 Millsn-Ale $3.5 MillGood luck players !!!
05/09/25: We're Heads up Folks !!
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Professor77 makes his move all-in once again in this tourney and boon8 calls. boon8 flips Ad Kd and we see a visibly pained Professor reluctantly turn over Kd Qd. Board comes 7h 5s 9d ...8c with a Ac river. The chips move to boon8 and we're heads up for $1,000,000.boon8 and sn-Ale begin the $1,000,000 battle.
05/09/25: All-in Sn-Ale
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We get an all-in pre-flop from sn-Ale and StiMi says, let's do it. Stimi flips up As 9s and sn-Ale flips Ac Qd. And we've got action. Board hits 7c 2h 5s 6h Ad and StiMi is out. We're officially down to the final 3. Our top player walks away with $1,000,000 !!Battling it ou: Professor77. sn-Ale. boon8.
05/09/25: sn-ale vs boon8
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Sn-ale raises $300k pre-flop and is called by boon8. Flop Kd 3d 3c. Sn-Ale checks. Boon8 makes it $200 to go. Call.Turn brings Qc. Checked and boon8 takes it up to $400k. Call. River comes 4s. Check again. Boon8 makes it $300k creating one monster pot. sn-ale folds.And Blackpool cheers.
05/09/25: Professor77 doubles up
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sn-Ale raises to 300k from the button. Professor77 announces he's all-in for just over 800k. sn-Ale quickly calls. The professor is visibly happy by the call and flips over pocket Kings. sn-Ale turns over QJs. The board brings no help and the Kings hold up. Lesson 8...get your chips in with pocket Kings. Professor77 gives a quick 'shout out' to his daughter Fern.
05/09/25: Monster Pot
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Pre-flop action puts judgetim all-in against big stack sn-Ale and StiMi, each contributing $470k to the pot. Flop hits 4c 9h 8s and Stimi & sn-ale check through turn Ks and Jd.Sn-ale flips up K J for two pair to StiMi's A 10. Judgetim mucks his card and we're down to 4.
05/09/25: Let's Review
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
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Professor77Break 1: 280kBreak 2: 600kBreak 3: $1.1StiMiBreak 1: 950kBreak 2: $1.1Break 3: $1.9JudgetimBreak 1: 600kBreak 2: $2 millBreak 3: $500kSn-aleBreak 1: $3 mBreak 2: $1.66Break 3: $2.5boon8Break 1: $2 mBreak 2: $1.75Break 3: $2.5
05/09/25: The StiMi crew speaks
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
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Sps and Les - Daddy says hey! Miss you bunches Happy belated to Ashley.And with that, we're back in play level 4.
05/09/25: Break Time
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There's a run for sports scores at the breaking point as we've some Packer and Dolphin fans in the mix or just some serious betters. One more minute until we resume play and our final 5 take their seats once again. Blackpool chef boon8 is making a run for chip lead against sn-ale and the Professor's strategy of risking it all has built up his stack from Break 3's $600k to over $1 mill. Professor77 puts a word out to his Paradise pals Dr.Irony, Jammin, Cyzr, Timdog & Cockasauras (hey folks, we don't name em). The Prof is letting you know that Lisa is here helping him out.
05/09/25: CHIP COUNT
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
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We're headed to level 4 with SB at 50k and BB 100k. Antes 10k and will resume play after a brief break.CHIP COUNTS:sn-Ale $2.5 (Arizona)boon8 $2.5 (Blackpool, UK)StiMi $1.9 (New Mexico)Professor77 $1.1 (Kansas)judgetim $500k (Utah)
05/09/25: Today's lesson...
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
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....put your opponent to a decision!Professor77 is doing just that. He's putting all of his chips into the pot forcing players to make a big decision as to whether or not they want to risk a good portion of their chips. So far, no one does. Professor77 now has just over 800k in chips.
05/09/25: Fab Five
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
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We're officially down to five players. One will walk away a fresh Millionaire and the other 4 will take hom $10K.OUT:6th LordTranIII7th Mastershake.8th jerryfoam9th docshoggs
05/09/25: Stimi vs LordTranIII
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LordTranIII makes it $200k to go. StiMi goes in to deep thinking mode and asks how much the Lord has left. Minutes pass and we get a re-raise from StiMi who makes it another $200 to go. Lord calls it and we see the flop:9d 7c 3cChecked to the turn, which comes 5c. StiMi checks and LordTranIII instantly moves all-in. The river comes 9s and we see StiMi flip up pocket 3s for a full house beating the Lords K 5.And we're down to 5.
05/09/25: Mute
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
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Did someone turn off my speakers? It's so quiet in this room it's as if we've been placed on mute. Players are keeping chatter to a minimum as the stakes get higher with only 5 more outs to $1,000,000. Even the crowd is forced to communicate by barely audible whispers as to not disturb the action.
05/09/25: LordTranIII vs sn-ale
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Flops 9 9 4. sn-ale bets out $100k. LordTranIII makes it $300k to go and sn-ale announces he's all-in without hesitation. The Lord thinks about it...looks down and disgustingly mucks his cards.
05/09/25: Chef boon8 stirs up the pots
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boon8 makes it 120 to go and judgetim in BB calls. Flop comes down Qc Ac 8s. Judgetim checks it and boon8 makes it 90k to go. Again, the judge calls. Turn 9h and we see the same action..judge checks, and boon8 takes it up a notch for another 120k. The judge calls and mucks his card seeing boon8's 2 pair, A's and 8's. The chef from Blackpool, UK takes in a 500k pot.
05/09/25: Taking them to school
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
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Proffessor77 is teaching the table a little bit about blind stealing. With 150k on the table (blinds and antes) he's picked up a few of these with uncontested raises.
05/09/25: Mastershake. out
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The first hand back from the lunch break saw another player fall.Mastershake pushed all of his chips (300k) in from the small blind. sn-Ale who already had 150k in the pot called. Mastershake turned over a pair of 2's. sn-Ale showed A7o. The flop came 9510 rainbow. The turn brought a 6. The river...that cruel last card....brought an 8 giving sn-Ale a runner-runner straight knocking out Mastershake.Quote of the tournament came from Mastershake immediately following the river:"I let you guys win so I could keep my amateur status." And then there were 6.
05/09/25: Players Be Seated
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We're finished lunch and players are once again taking their seats. Boon8 sends a hello to all his friends..that's 'mates' in the UK, and family watching for updates! For those of you who didn't tune in to blogville yesterday, boon8 missed his mate's wedding to play in the online tournament. When his girlfriend returned that evening, he was alive and ready to hit day 2 of the online portion..only he had to break it to her that he'd be leaving her Grandfather's 90th birthday party early to resume play. Needless to say, all is foregiven now and he's well stacked as we enter Level 3.We're back in a few minutes with Level 3, SB $30k, BB $60k.
05/09/25: CHIP COUNT - 2nd break
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Here's the chip count going into the second break:judgetim = 2 millionboon8 = 1.75 millionsn-Ale = 1.66 millionLordTranIII = 1.12 millionStiMi = 1.1 millionProfessor77 = 600kmastershake. = 385kTime for lunch!!!
05/09/25: boon8 vs sn-ale
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sn-Ale raises preflop to 150k. boon8 comes over the top making it 300k to go. A quick call from sn-Ale. Flop comes TT8. Check. boon8 fires out 300k. sn-Ale had mucked his hand before the chips were in the pot.
05/09/25: Professor77 - hanging around
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
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The professor is slowly building his stack. He's come over the top of a few players putting his stack on the line. No one is ready to take him on just yet!
05/09/25: Mastershake. shaking things up
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
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Judgetim raises it to 120k from the button. Mastershake. is on the big blind (40k) thinks for a moment before announcing that he's All-in for another 225k. Judgetim goes into the think tank. 10 minutes pass and the judge is still deliberating. Another 5 minutes pass....Mastershake hasn't moved (in fact I don't think he took a breath). The verdict is in...the judge mucks his hand. Mastershake immediately calls for a cocktail. We'll never know what he had!
05/09/25: Stalling at Seven
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sn-Ale remains chip leader but LordTranIII and English Chef boon8 are close followers..all holding off other players with stacks over the mill mark. sn-Ale placed 3rd in the recent Washington State Championships and won a Microsoft poker tourney. For all you Office users, he helped create those handy toolbars on Excel and Word. No kidding.
05/09/25: LordTranIII vs. boon8
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boon8 doubles the big blind from under the gun. It's folded around to LordTranIII who calls. Flop comes 456 rainbow. LordtranIII checks and boon8 bets out 80k. LordtranIII quickly calls. Turn is a 7. Lord checks again, boon8 bets out 100k, Lord quickly calls. River is a Queen and both players check. boon8 turns over the dreaded pocket Aces. LordtranIII shows an A3 for a straight. 3 players have shown Aces so far. They've only held up once. Memo to self....fold Aces!
05/09/25: StiMi doubles up
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LordTranIII has just doubled up StiMi. With a flop of Js9cJc the Lord bet out and was quickly raised all-in by StiMi. After a bit of hesitation LordTranIII called and flipped over KdQh. StiMi turned over pocket Aces. LordTranIII was drawing dead when the turn brought another Ace.
05/09/25: Professor Fans ....
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Good news for all you Professor77 fans as he's just doubled up. Professor77 (SB) moves all-in pre-flop and gets StiMi (BB) calls, getting in another pot. Professor flips up A 5 to StiMi's Kh Jd.Flop comes all hearts: 4 5 Q and the Professor gets nervous! Turn and River bring no heart or love for StiMi and Professor77 doubles up in one of the only hands he's played this game.
05/09/25: Judgetim doubles up!
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We’ve got three players in pre-flop and it comes down:8c 2s 6dStimi (SB) checks and Judgetim (BB) makes it $120k to go. Chip leader sn-ale calls without hestitation and StiMi gets out the way folding. Turn brings a 4c and Judgetim bets $200k. Again, sn-ale makes a quick call. River brings 9d to the board and Judgetim makes his move all-in. Sn-ale calls and mucks his cards upon seeing Judgetim’s 5 7 for a straight.
05/09/25: Gimme Something!
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Says Professor77 who’s in need of some luck…at this point, Professor77 isn’t too picky and says he’ll even accept pocket 5s from the card gods. Anything! He sends a HEY out to Jit (his wife)..wish him luck out there!Players are now taking their seats for Level 2
05/09/25: Chip Count
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
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At the first break and finale of level 1, here’s our chip stack count:Sn-ale $3 millBoon8 $2 millLordTranIII $1.07 millStiMi $950kMastershake $760kJudgetim $600kProfessor77 $280kWe’ll start up Level 2 with SB 20k and BB 40k in a few minutes.
05/09/25: Player Bios
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
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While players continue to fold..let's take a few minutes to meet the gang. Visit our Masters Bio page here. http://www.paradisepoker.com/promotions/2005/million_freeroll/bios.html
05/09/25: Classic
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
Posted by: Paradise Girl
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It's a dark and stormy day. The winds are howling, the rain is pouring..it's a tropical storm outside as our players battle it out. Good to know they aren't missing any sunshine out there as we may be strapping in for awhile. Few playes are willing to take on the big stacks of sn-Ale and LordTranIII.
05/09/25: Big Stack Attack
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
Posted by: Paradise Girl
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The big stacks at the table are controlling a lot of the action right now. We haven't seen very many showdowns lately. The 1st break will be in 40 minutes. We'll have a chip count at that time.
05/09/25: Lord indeed
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
Posted by: Paradise Girl
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LordTranIII is taking blinds like noboby's business and is quickly becoming table Lord making off with the last three blinds in uncontested raises.
05/09/25: Jerryfoam is out!
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
Posted by: Paradise Girl
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On a flop of As 8s 10h player's Jerryfoam and LordtranIII got all of their chips into the pot. When the cards were flipped Jerryfoam showed Jh10d and LordtranIII Ah8c. The turn was a blank. The river brought another 8 adding more chips to LordtranIII's stack. We're down to 7 players.
05/09/25: Can You Hear Me Now?
Category: Team Paradise News
Posted by: Paradise Girl
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With a table of 8 remaining players battling it out for a $1,00,000 top prize, you could hear a pin drop. Spectators and cheering sections remain in a nervous hush while the clanging of chips is all that's to be heard.
05/09/25: LordTranIII makin moves
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
Posted by: Paradise Girl
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After doschoggs was sent packing, hand #3 brings more all-in action. WIth a flop of <10> LordTranIII moves all-in with one caller, StiMi who has him covered. StiMi flips up K 8 to LordTranIII's K 10. Turn brings a 9, river a 6, no help to StiMi and LordTranIII's top pair survives. Our first big pot of game play.
05/09/25: docshoggs OUT
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
Posted by: Paradise Girl
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You heard that right. First hand has been played and we're down to 8. docshoggs, coming to the table as low stack, moves all-in. Chip leader sn-Ale quickly calls and Mastershake joins the action.Flop: Kd Kc Jc With docshoggs all-in, sn-Ale and Mastershake check to the turn. Turn: 4cChecking all around. River comes for a board ofKd Kc Jc 4c 6sChip Leader sn-Ale bets out $100k and Mastershake folds. docshoggs is pained to see sn-Ale flip over a K 7 putting him out first hand with pocket A's.
05/09/25: Shuffle Up & Deal
Category: Team Paradise News
Posted by: Paradise Girl
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WHOOHOO. Let the game begin !!High card goes to jerryfoam and the first hand is being dealt.
05/09/25: 10 MIN Countdown
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
Posted by: Paradise Girl
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Players are posing for their final group shot with the giant sized Million Dollar check and will take their seats for game start in just a few minutes.Dealing will be brought to you today by Hugo..the official dealer of Paradise. Blind Structure:Level 1: SB $10k BB $25K. Ante 0. 90 minutesLevel 2: SB $20k BB $40k Ante $5k. 90 minutesLevel 3: SB $30k BB $60k Ante $10k. 90 minutesLevel 4: SB $50k BB $100k Ante $10k. 90 minutesLevel 5: SB $80k BB $160k Ante $15k. 90 minutesLevel 6: SB $120k BB $240k Ante $30k. 90 minutesLevel 7: SB $200k BB $400k Ante $50k. CAPPEDRandy Holland our Tournament Director is making a few final comments.....get ready for action folks !!
05/09/25: In the Money
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
Posted by: Paradise Girl
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Let's review the prize structure for today:Cost to enter Freeroll: $0Cost to enjoy an all-inclusive trip to Costa Rica: $0A 1 in 9 shot at a $1,000,000 payout: pricelessPrize Money:Winner: $1,000,0002nd-9th: $10,000As we're 25 minutes from deal time, "Your Time is Gonna Come" chimes in on the speaker system....
05/09/25: Final Countdown...under One Hour !
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
Posted by: Paradise Girl
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The Final preperations are being made to the final table here in Costa Rica. A mix of Abba's "The Winner Takes it All" (so true Bjorn, so true) fills the room along with ..."If I had a $1,000,000 Dollars"...which someone here will have by the end of the day. Players seem quite relaxed this morning depsite the game day ahead of them. Perhaps it was the hours of blackjack they took in last night at the resort casino under the spell of the deadly dealer Leonardo - Luckily he's not dealing today.The final table will start at the top of the hour, NOON EDT. Players will soon take their seats as follows:Seat 1: Professor77: $405Seat 2": StiMi: $1.36Seat 3: Judgetim $1.09Seat 4: jerryfoam $190Seat 5: sn-Ale $2.72Seat 6: mastershake $720Seat 7: docshoggs $35Seat 8: LordTranIII $505Seat 9: boon8 $1.58We'll high card for the button . Blinds kick off with SB at $10k and BB $25k. Level lasts for 90 minutes.Good luck players !!!
05/09/25: Game Day !
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
Posted by: Paradise Girl
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It's game day and one of these lucky and skilled players will walk away with an oversized Happy Gilmore check for ONE MILLION DOLLARS...The question of the day is..What would you do with $1,000,000 ?For the family & friends of Mastershake he's all about sharing. A poker deal himself, Mastershake is no stranger to live game play as has taken down a few Casino Employee tourneys. docshoggs thanks Marjorie for painting a lucky rock that he's grasping hold of this morning as he enters the game in 9th spot. As for thoughts of spending $1,000,000, he's going to take Kenny's advice and won't start counting his chips til it's over. Professor77 sends a hello to all his Paradise buds who are sending their luck...if Mark takes home this top prize he's headed to Vegas (and so are they!) for a Palms celebration bash on September 28th !!Chip Leader sn-Ale is betting on a donation to the lucky Arizona Humane Society (awwwww) and LordTranIII will likely rid himself of any debt and let the rest ride !! I mean, invest it.
05/09/24: Shakin the Nerves
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
Posted by: Paradise Girl
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docshoggs, boon8 among others were already kicking off the gaming event with a late evening of Costa Rican Blackjack Rummy at the resort's casino. Luck so far has been on their side.Each player is finding their own way to relax today and sn-Ale beat the morning light to join a river tour in the hunt for monkies and crocs. No stranger to the tourney scene, sn-Ale's tournament acolades include taking 3rd in the Washington State Poker Finals and first in the Microsoft tourney. A retired tech from Microsoft, you can thank sn-Ale and Paradise pal Shardvarks for those tool bars on Excel and Word however the creator of Clippy the paperclip helper known to cause computer rage is apparently classified information. jerryfoam hit the golf course yet again today while mastershake survived the Canopy Tour.It's no secret here that Professor77 enjoys a good Coheba...seen purchasing Cohebas in the resort he could be stocking up for a final table $1,000,000 celebration. That's being prepared.
05/09/24: Final Countdown
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
Posted by: Paradise Girl
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It's a day of rest and stragegy for the final players who'll battle it out tomorrow for the top prize of ONE MILLION DOLLARS. Game play will kick off Sunday at NOON EDT and the following players will take their seats :Seat 1: Professor77 $405,000Seat 2: StiMi $1.36Seat 3: judgetie $1.09Seat 4: jerryfoam $190Seat 5: sn-Ale $2.72Seat 6: mastershake $720Seat 7: docshoggs $35,000Seat 8: LordTranIII $505Seat 9: boon8 $1.58Level 1 kicks off at Noon with SB $10,000 and BB $25,000 and will run for 90 minutes.We will call high card for the button.
05/09/23: Buenas Tardes from Costa Rica
Category: Million Freeroll Final Table
Posted by: Paradise Girl
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We're getting down to the final countdown of the final table battle and crowning of our first Millionaire in Paradise !!Not even a few rainshowers can dampen the spirits of this crowd who are off taking in the sites and sounds of Conchal Resort in Guanacaste, Costa Rica. Some have hit the waters on Amazon-esk river treks while others are simply playing it cool..as cool as you can get in the tropics. sn-Ale has a cheering section that includes his girlfriend and fellow Paradise player Shardevarks - an extreme luger and bowler whom we can guess from that mix of activities will be up for anything! sn-Ale is sitting comfortably as our chip leader heading in to Sunday with 2.72 mill.boon8, representing the UK, made a committment to this tournament from the start! To the dismay of his girlfriend, Lee skipped his friend's wedding to play in the online tournament..not an easy sacrifice but one that just may pay off. When the online tourney entered Day 2, he had no choice but to leave his girlfriend's Grandfather's 90th birthday to continue his chip reign to the final 10! He's got his famiy's support now and is ready for Sunday with 1.58 mill.StiMi and his brother have arrived but remain quiet in the midst of this group. Strategy? Perhaps...The youngest of the group, Mastershake also brings his brother Keith to cheer him on. A poker dealer back home, you can bet Mastershake is not afraid of live game play and is set to gamble his 718,889 stake in hopes of cashing in big!An avid poker blogger, Professor77 should perhaps be called Profession77. With past jobs that include a dancing role in the film Jesus Christ Superstar, a rollerstaking gig as the Cookie Monster (that's right kids!!), a rocker in a 1950's R&R band and now a teacher and Attorney..we wonder is there anything this guy can't do? His father is on-hand as coach and cheering section ready for Sunday's action.jerryfoam is happy to be back in Costa Rica with his wife, a native Costa Rican and our new Spanish translator! Jerry will rid himself of any nerves out on hole 8 at Conchal - watch out for Crocs Jerry!docshoggs cancelled his wedding aniversary trip to make the trek to Costa Rica...he's more than happy to postpone that trip for a shot at one million dollars!

Paradise Poker Million Minor Calamity

2005-09-24T21:10:00.000+07:00

Greetings all from the Paradisius Conchal Resort, site of the Paradise Million final table at 10 a.m. mst Sunday. We have already had our first player bust out and only a single card has been dealt. The age card. ZappAA, Brian Carney, was booted out of the tourny for being underage. His 1.3 million chips have been removed from the tourny and his $10,000 will be donated to charity, Katrina Relief Fund I think, by Paradise Poker. WOW! Sitting here with 405k I have to thank ZappAA for zapping himself and his 1.3 million. On the other hand, if I was BigLick, the player who went out on the bubble, I might be out looking to zap ZapAA.
On a lighter note, the whole experience thus far has been made amazingly enjoyable by the good folks from ParadisePoker.Com. Steve, Brook et al. have been great hosts and have convinced me that all casinos should be run by Canadians just like Paradise. They have bent over backwards to make this an all around pleasurable experience. The one nonCanuck, tournament director Randy Holland, must have been spending alot of of time north of the border studying up on Canuckese and Canuckian cordiality as he also has gone far beyond the call of duty in assisting all the players and their guests and making us comfortable and answering all of our lame questions in good humor.
It has been kinda like being at a summer camp for poker players. No forced group activities but lots available for those who so choose. Golf, horseback riding, jungle tours, deepsea fishing or eating vast quantities of good food and chain smoking havanas. I have chosen to pursue the eating-smoking merit badge and am well on my way. I am pretty sure I will have consumed 1 million calories prior to sitting down to play poker tomorrow morning, a key to physically dominating the table.
If you want to follow the action at noon esatern, 11 cst etc. tomorrow go to http://pokerblog.paradisepoker.com/index.php?catid=6 and hit refresh every few minutes to watch as the hands at the final table are played out. All for now as the siren song of my breakfast Cohiba Robusto calls me. Wish me luck!
Professor77

Paradise Poker Million Press Release

2005-09-21T20:53:00.000+07:00

Press Release
Source: ParadisePoker.com
ParadisePoker.com player will win world's first free million dollar poker tournamentMonday September 12, 12:01 pm ET
First ever $1 million prize to be awarded in an online poker tournament
NEW YORK, NY, Sept. 12 /PRNewswire/ - ParadisePoker.com will award $1 million, the world's largest online poker prize ever, when its first Million Dollar FreeRoll tournament concludes the weekend of September 24, 2005 at a mystery tropical location in Costa Rica.
The final table, made up entirely of amateurs who beat out thousands of competitors on ParadisePoker.com includes a software engineer who processes images of Mars, a law clerk, a poker dealer, a professional chef and a number of entrepreneurs.
"The players who made the final table are extremely talented amateurs who have the ability to take their game to the next level", said Bruce Stubbs, marketing manager, ParadisePoker.com. "The free buy-in gave unheralded amateurs the opportunity to compete for professional-sized stakes, and they've stepped up. The competition is fierce!"
The tournament began on July 1st with three free heats per day until August 26th. Each Heat averaged over 1,000 players with each player only eligible to win one seat in the $1,000,000 main event. On August 27th 3,900 players began the main event showdown, playing until nine finalists remained.
Those nine finalists will now be flown to a five star resort in Costa Rica to play the final table face-to-face, with the winner taking home the largest online poker tournament prize in history, $1,000,000. All finalists will have their travel expenses paid and runners up will earn a share of $150,000 in secondary prizes to be split among the top 500 finishers.
ParadisePoker.com's free $1,000,000 final table will include:
Mike Darweesh, a software engineer from Tempe, Arizona
Lee Biddulph, a chef from Blackpool, UK
Chris Steudle, supervisor for a family painting business in Albuquerque,
New Mexico
Tim Williams, a law clerk from Salt Lake City, Utah
Kameron Petsche, a poker dealer from S. Lake Tahoe, California
Thu Tran, an entrepreneur from Revere, Massachusetts
Mark Pinsker, an attorney and teacher from Leawood, Kansas
Gerald Anderson, manager of a foam fabrication shop from West Hills,
California
Steven A. Detrick, a sales associate from Columbus, Ohio
Prior to this tournament, none of the players had played poker professionally, though many hope to try their hand at the professional tour if they're successful at the final table.
While most are hesitant to speculate what they will do with the $1,000,000 prize for fear of jinxing themselves, Kameron Petsche wants to send his sister and new brother-in-law on a honeymoon and help out other members of his family. Mark Pinsker would send money to the children of a fellow poker player who died recently while others would donate some to charity and all would pay some bills.
"The overwhelming response from players has made the free $1,000,000 tournament a huge success," said Stubbs. "We hope to find a new, elite poker player in our final table."
The huge success of ParadisePoker.com's first free $1,000,000 tournament has prompted the company to do it all over again, with heats for the second freeroll already in progress. To find out more about ParadisePoker.com and the how to participate in the second $1,000,000 freeroll tournament visit: www.paradisepoker.com
About ParadisePoker.com (www.paradisepoker.com):
ParadisePoker.com is one of the original Online Poker Rooms offering the safest and most secure entertaining environment for customers. Established in 1999, ParadisePoker.com joined forces with Sportingbet PLC in 2004, (LSE: SBT - News). Sportingbet is headquartered in London, England and is the world's largest publicly traded online betting, gambling and gaming company.

Paradise Poker Million Final Table Player Photos and Biographies

2005-09-21T20:32:00.000+07:00

Paradise Poker Million Final Table Player Photos

Q & A Paradise Poker Million

2005-09-10T08:29:00.000+07:00

On September 25th, I will be in Costa Rica playing the final table of a poker tournament for one million dollars. This is the climax of the Paradise Poker Million Dollar Freeroll I am very excited about the whole thing.

Q: Are you going to be on TV?
A: Yes, we are taping for future broadcast. Though, they have not yet told us the date or channel of the broadcast.

Q: Can I come watch you during the final table in person?
A: Yes, if you're willing to pay your own way. Here's the official word:
You may have family or friends come down, but they will have to make their own arrangements separately. I have included the link below for the resort so that your family may contact them directly. Also, please note that the closest airport to where we will be is the Liberia International airport (LIR), not the San Jose airport. San Jose is about a 5 hour drive from where we will be. Your family is most welcome to be a part of the tournament day and there will be lots of space for spectators. http://www.paradisusplayaconchal.com/home.htm

Q: When exactly will you be in Costa Rica?
A: We arrive on Sept 22nd and depart on Sept 27th.

Q: Why Costa Rica?
A: Costa Rica is where Paradise Poker has their headquarters. Plus, it's a great vacation spot .

Q: Is this some sort of internet scam?
A: No, Paradise Poker is an internet poker room established in 1999 and owned by a company traded on the UK stock market.

Q: Will you wear my T-shirt, hat, shoes, etc. while you're on TV?
A: No, the regulations are pretty strict.

Q: How much did you pay to buy-in to this tournament?
A: In order to get into this tournament, I had to come in the top 30 out of 2500 players in a qualifying tournament. That was the only way to get into the main event.

Q: How many people started in the Main Event?
A: 3990. Now there are ten left. Each started with 2500 chips. I now have 403,944 tournament chips.

Q: Why don't you just cash in your chips and walk away with 403,944 dollars?
A: Tournament chips have no cash value. They are a score-keeping method. The last person with chips wins.

Q: Can you tell me more details about the current status of the tournament?
A: Take a look at http://groups.msn.com/PokerNation .

Q: What will you do if you win one million dollars?
A: I have pledged 10% to Red Cross Hurricane Releif Fund and 5% to Phil Gordon and Rafe Furst's "Put A Bad Beat On Cancer". The remainder will be used for family, friends, poker and to help Lisa " the Q" Polk's kids (Lisa died recently).

Q: Are you really this good at poker?
A: Hmmmm.

Thanks to sn-ale, Mike Darweesh, for this excellent q & a which I modified to fit my own info.

Paradise Poker Million Suggestions?

2005-09-02T09:44:00.000+07:00

Thanks all for your congrats and support in the Paradise Poker Million final table! Im at 400k , 1st is 2.7 million, last is 34k, 12k/24k blinds and 3k antes. What do strategy u suggest?

Thankyou Note to Paradise Poker

2005-08-30T15:44:00.000+07:00

In real life I am a teacher, a husband and a Dad. I am blessed with a wonderful family and a good life. However, I am not rich. We basically meet the bills monthly and thats about it. Paradise Poker and the game I love have just given me the chance to take my Dad to a tropical paradise to watch me do something I've dreamed of for years. Just being able to give this 80th birthday gift to my Dad, who I don't get to see often enough, and to compete at the highest level of poker makes me so grateful I, believe or not, can't even find the words to express it! He has sacrificed alot to help my sister and I over the years and I am blessed with this chance to give him a little back.

To All the Great Folks at Paradise Poker: THANK YOU !!!!!!!!!

Paradise Poker Million Announcement

2005-08-30T15:35:00.000+07:00

The World’s First Million Dollar Freeroll and Your pal Professor77, Mark Pinsker, is there

!
The stage for the firstParadise Poker Million Dollar Freeroll final table has been set. After 10 hours of play we have the 10 finalists. Here they are:

1
sn-Ale
Mike Darweesh
2,720,000

2
boon8
Lee Biddulph
1,580,000

3
ZapAA
Brian Carney
1,370,000

4
StiMi
Christopher Steudle
1,360,000

5
judgetim
Tim Williams
1,090,000

6
mastershake.
Davis Pool
718,889

7
LordTranIII
Thu V. Tran
506,388

8
Professor77
Mark Pinsker
403,944

9
jerryfoam
Gerald Anderson
188,672

10
docshoggs
Steven A. Detrick
34,705

On September 15th, these 10 players will be going on an all-expenses paid vacation to the sunny beaches of our mystery tropical location where they will play out the final table on Sunday, September 18th.

Here’s what they’ll be playing for:

1st = $1,000,0002nd = $10,0003rd = $10,0004th = $10,0005th = $10,0006th = $10,0007th = $10,0008th = $10,0009th = $10,00010th = $10,000

To follow the final table action live, make sure you check out our Million Dollar Freeroll blog on September 18th where we’ll try to post as many updates and photos as we can.
Good luck players!

Professor77 makes Paradise Poker Million final table

2005-08-29T11:23:00.000+07:00

Professor77 , a.k.a. Mark Pinsker, after winning the Paradise Poker Million qualifier tourny on the first day they began, played with 3900 other winners on August 26th for over 10.4 hours and on the 27th with the 25 remaining players for a couple hours more and has just made the final table with aprox. 400k. WOOOOOHOOO! All 10 of us are flown with a friend to a "tropical paradise" to playout the final table. 10th - 2nd pays 10k and 1st pays a cool million....

Who Is (cheat-at-poker.com)?

2005-08-23T08:22:00.000+07:00

WhoIs (cheat-at-poker.com)?

How about an email to Ken telling him what you think about his scam and about poker cheats?

Registrant:Online Services
1057 Steeles Ave. W
Suite #509
toronto, ON
m2r3X1CA

Domain name: CHEAT-AT-POKER.COM
Administrative Contact:Chan, Ken
kenchanpoker@gmail.com
1057 Steeles Ave. W
Suite #509
toronto, ON
m2r3X1CA
4162345677 Fax: 000-000-0000

Technical Contact:Chan, Ken
kenchanpoker@gmail.com
1057 Steeles Ave. W
Suite #509toronto, ON
m2r3X1CA
4162345677 Fax: 000-000-0000

Party Poker Spyware?

2005-08-21T19:35:00.000+07:00

I have been sent screenshots of a Zonealarm(antispyware program) system warning that Party Poker client was attempting to record keystrokes and examine the system of a player/webmaster. This is not the 1st time I have heard about an online poker room using spyware. Be sure to keep a good antispyware monitor in place. Microsoft offers a free antispyware software package that is very effective.

Certified Top Quality Online Poker Rooms

2005-08-19T22:10:00.000+07:00

Certified Top Quality Online Poker Rooms
(use these links for automatic bonus & rake rebate [where allowed] )
NOTE: High Volume Players, please email me for higher bonuses and special rake rebate deals

Please Support This Site By Using These Links

DoylesRoom.Com PokerStars.Com UltimateBet.Com PlatinumPoker.Com TheFishTank.Com VCPoker.Com FullTiltPoker.Com AbsolutePoker.com PacificPoker.Com RoyalVegasPoker.Com PokerRoom.Com Crazypoker.com PokerHeaven.Com 7SultansPoker.Com BetonBetPoker.Net EmpirePoker.Com HollywoodPoker.Com GoldenTigerPoker.com CaptainCooksPoker.com Virtualcitypoker.com Pokerrewards.com Bugsysclub.com
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OnlinePokerSites.Bravehost.Com MyPokerRoom.BlogSpot.Com BestPokerSites.BraveHost.Com Blog w/ 600 pics(Bad Beat Therapy)
OnlinePokerTop1000

Suggested Poker Books

2005-08-18T14:23:00.000+07:00

Phil Gordon's Final Table Poker

2005-08-11T10:07:00.000+07:00

G E T I N S I D E T H E M I N D O F A P R O

I've seen every single poker tutorial video on the market. From Caro to Lederer. Most have some worthwhile content but are difficult to watch. I guess the problem is in the production values. Strong emphasis on content and a singleminded approach to the delivery thereof. It results in a viewing experience thats not disimilar to an hour in the dentist's chair.

Well, poker education doesn't have to be painfully boring! Phil Gordon and the Expert Insight Team, headed by Rafe Furst, have learned from the mistakes of their predecessors and proved that learning poker can be fun. Final Table Poker is 100 minutes of learning/viewing pleasure. It allows us to sit on Phil's shoulder and to hear his reasoning process as he plays a 6 player final table during a faux tournament. Final Table Poker is actually 200 minutes because there are two viewing modes, beginner and advanced. This DVD is timely for any online player, with the explosion of 6 player tables at all the poker sites. For live poker play, it is valuable in training you how to make good choices during your tournament endgame, an oft overlooked part of most instructional materials and many players' bag of tricks.

I've been a poker room regular for 30 years and have already improved my game because of Final Table Poker. Kudos to Phil Gordon and the Expert Insight Team on giving us this important and enjoyable addition to our poker libraries.

Scam = / Poker Xray Tool / Cheat-At-Poker / pokercheatsexposed / No Rules Poker/ pokerbot-pro

2005-08-07T22:23:00.000+07:00

To read No-Rules-Poker and see the poker xray software join Poker Nation http://groups.msn.com/PokerNation , a free MSN Poker Group. It's in the Documents section, a free online poker library, and is titled "cheatpoker".
_______________________________

Warning Scam Alert!
You are about to enter the BS Zone.http://www.cheat-at-poker.com/ or http://www.pokercheatsexposed.com/ will lead you to a link that for 59.95 promises to allow u to cheat at online poker and make $25,000 a week OR YOUR MONEY BACK!!! (don't bother going to the sites because someone has posted the complete book in the documents section at http://groups.msn.com/PokerNation. )The following is from the advert:

"For a small investment of $59.95 you can download the most effective method of making enormous profits playing online poker. Guaranteed. All you have to do is click on the PayPal button on the bottom of this page, and safely and securely place your order with any credit card. Any information you submit is completely safe and will never, ever be shared. Once you complete the order you will have access to The Online Poker Cheaters Tool-Kit instantly. You will then be able to fiercely dominate any player out there! Just imagine what an edge you will have once you learn all these tactics. You will be able to make huge cash at will, whenever you feel like playing.The Online Poker Cheaters Tool-Kit will change your life forever! Hurry before you miss out on the best opportunity that will ever come your way. *Introductory price of $59.95 will change at any time. **Limited time offer. But wait...we have more for you As was mentioned earlier, we have access and knowledge of all the latest methods and 'underground' tools that are available. If you order The Cheaters Tool-Kit today, we are going to include a FREE BONUS. This is the most radical poker technique available today...X-Ray Poker Tool- (See what everyone is holding) Information FREE for ordering right now!*Not recommended to use or even attempt. We in no way endorse the use of this tactic. Information for educational and entertainment purposes only.For only $59.95 you really can't go wrong. Is today the day you decide to make a change and start dominating the poker room? There is absolutely no reason anymore to play with fear, anxiety and ignorance. Will you remain the sucker? The decision is yours. *WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO PULL THIS OFFER OFFLINE AT ANY TIME."

( he has moved the time back 4 or 5 times so far)Well, what you get is an ebook and a link to http://www.pokerbot-pro.com/ that for 59.95 more (and the after you buy that another $90 .oo for the required upgrade) offers you "pokerbot-pro" a winholdemish program that apparently doesn't do as promised, read the following exchange of e-mails between Ken Chan/David Glazen and a "satisfied" and not so bright customer:

From: "David Glazen"To: "tom shue" Subject: Re: the poker bot your refund has just been issued and is on the way!On Apr 11, 2005 7:55 PM, tom shue david wrote: Hi tom, I am sorry that you feel taken advantage of as that certainly was not my intention. Unfortunatley there is no single winning profile you need to use different ones under different circumstances. I feel bad that you have lost money so if you send me the transaction ID I will send you a refund.-----

Original Message-----From: tom shue Date: Mon, 11 Apr 2005 16:23:25 > To:David Glazen Subject: the poker bot Well I am completely disappointed in the poker bot... I used it for 48 hours on a 1 to 2able in the solid mode i have lots over 75 dollars... I paid you 59 .00 then i had to pay 89 to up grade the inspector and have lost 75 dollars.. wow it was a huge loss... I would think that if you wanted me to make money as you did you would recommend a profile on the inspector a limit that i should of tried and all information that you have on how to manage the supposed income it generates... I have tried several profiles like the maniac it plays the big hands very aggressive which is great but It plays> too many hands.. If you choose the solid profile it plays way to soft when it has a premium hand like fold ace king off suit in the small blind for no raise... I think the exact specs of the inspector profile u used to make all of this money should of been disclosed....its like the inspector can be modified to work but it should be included information .. I know that the scrip! t that ! you wrote was some work but considering you are selling share ware and a demo inspector you are making a killing.... I feel taken advantage of....I play way better than the bot but i just wanted to play poker when i am asleep and revenue money .. the concept is awesome but the end result is very weak .. I hope you will refund my money or give me information that you used (exact specks and all available information on your limits and strategy).. oh by the way does poker in specotr know you are selling there demo for money oe the makers of auto it just wondering... I am sure you have made a fortune on this idea... Oh by the way I saw the interview u had with poker pages. I thought to told me not to tell anyone. please respond to this email as the last email was left UN answered , My money must of cleared,.
Tom Shue ( i feel taken advantage of) "These people are selling someone elses free demo of Poker Inspector and an upgrade to it w/ a malfunctioning bot!

In the advert they have screen shots from party poker and it shows his username as "steveglazer".
It also shows "$5000 new player freeroll""Make your first deposit to register!" and the "Cash Out" Button is disabled in his party poker account.
Hmmm, play money? No cash account? Freeroll? Steve Glazer(3 names so for for the same guy)? A little suspicious...
What about his magic "X-Ray Poker Tool- (See what everyone is holding)" according to his tome you first download and then run the client/server software at http://www.tightvnc.com/ ). Then ...:
"This software will actually allow you to see another computer as if you were right in front of it. Now it does not take a computer scientist to understand the obvious implications of what you can do with this software and how someone could perhaps use it to gain a massive advantage playing online poker. Let’s just say that me and you were playing heads up on party poker for example and that you were able to use the TightVNC software to see the desktop of my machine. Well that would mean that you can see whatever I can see. So as long as my hole cards were visible to me they would also be visible to you! "
"In order to connect to a target computer the target machine will have to have the TightVNC server running on the computer and you will need to know the password. This can seem like a major stumbling block to those who are not really determined to make massive amounts of cash. But I know that is not you. So if you really are willing to do whatever it takes to win then I know you will find a way around this. It can be done easier then you think believe me."

Hmmm, password and casino server running tightvnc...doesn't seem so magical. If had an in to the poker room's server and a password allowing me unlimited access why do I need your f***ing book and software???
But Ken Chan/David Glazen has more to share with us:

"I must caution you though that it is not legal to install it on someone’s machine without there knowledge so you will have to get their permission first. I cannot and will not encourage any illegal activity whatsoever. I wish you the best of luck and know that your poker success in now at your fingertips.Well that’s it my friend. Just remember that winning online is all about attitude! So don’t be afraid to do whatever it takes to win. You now have to tools all you need is the will and determination. Best of Luck, Ken Chan." please note all the spelling errors and bs are from the original text which I obtained free via P2P.

You're asking yourself who is this clown?
He appears to be a...drumroll please...

A Former Candian Cop & Current Employee of The Candian Ministry of Health...

I know you don't believe me so
here's the link to his resume:
http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/difa/Resumes/KenChan.pdf
It appears that his e-mail address is:
balmon@hotmail.com or
kenchanpoker@gmail.com or
propoker@gmail.com
ONLINE POKER PLAYER, John Maynor,tel # 648-908-4531, E-mail Information is spamming for him.
What you do with this information is up to you. I discourage any illegal activity such as administering a "columbian necktie" or giving him a forced 5 gallon hot soapy enema. But, if you do go against my advice and contact him, tell Ken Chan/David/Steve Glazen or John Maynor that "Professor77" says hi.

Note: I absolutely do not endorse cheating at poker or any of the online cheating programs or books that are foisted on an unwary buying public. Although, some say that the buyers are probably getting what they deserve. If you go against my advice and buy these products I suggest you first buy a condom and then apply KY Jelly or Vaseline to your nether regions because you are about to get royally screwed.

To read No-Rules-Poker and see the poker xray software join Poker Nation http://groups.msn.com/PokerNation , a free MSN Poker Group. It's in the Documents section, a free online poker library.

Beginners Winning Low Limit(up to 3-6) Holdem Strategy

2005-08-03T23:25:00.000+07:00

You need A-A, K-K, Q-Q, J-J, A-K, or A-Q suited, to raise, reraise, or cap it. In short, just put more money in. If you have 10-10, 9-9, 8-8, any suited blackjack or suited 20-point hand, you can call one bet. But if it’s raised to you and you can’t reraise, you can’t call two bets cold; you have to fold. After the flop, you can continue if you have top pair (or could beat top pair), an open-end straight draw, or a flush draw. Anything else, you are done with the hand!

Poker Players

2005-08-02T10:10:00.000+07:00

Erick Lindgren doesn’t lock the doors of his home, which is in a gated community in North Las Vegas. This way, his friends, who are mostly professional poker players, like him, can drop in anytime, to swim, shoot hoops, play snooker, or watch sports on a sixty-one-inch projection television—or on any of six smaller plasma screens—in his living room. Lindgren’s place is a bachelor pad in the literal sense: it’s usually filled with single men. On my first visit, in December, several young Swedes and Danes, in town for the Five Diamond World Poker Classic tournament at the Bellagio casino, sprawled on a vast sectional couch in Lindgren’s living room, tracking N.F.L. bets on their laptops and playing online poker. Lindgren, a beefy, blond twenty-eight-year-old from Burney, California, sat at a pedestal desk in the middle of the room. He was wearing flip-flops, a T-shirt, and baby-blue pajama bottoms, and was simultaneously watching the football lineup on the seven TVs and playing online poker.
On a Saturday evening in May, by contrast, the mood in the room was almost ascetic. Lindgren’s friend Daniel Negreanu, a thirty-year-old Canadian player who writes frequently about poker and is currently ranked No. 1 in lifetime tournament earnings by the Hendon Mob Poker Database, a Web site that gathers statistics about the game, sat on the couch leafing through a Swedish poker magazine that included a translation of one of his columns: “Den största pott jag någonsin förlorat” (“The Biggest Pot I’ve Ever Lost”). Negreanu, who is pale and lean, with a scruffy Caesar cut that he colors blond, laughed and read the title aloud in a convincing Swedish singsong; he can imitate anyone he’s played with, which, he says, gives him a feel for how an opponent thinks. Soon, Lindgren showed up, to take a shower. He had just lost seventy thousand dollars in a golf game—by playing for ten thousand a hole—against his friend Phil Ivey, another poker pro, but he seemed remarkably cheerful. He said that he had lost fifteen pounds in the past month and was likely to cash in on a twenty-thousand-dollar weight-loss wager that he had made with another friend.
For Lindgren and Negreanu, this was an unusually quiet weekend, the last before the World Series of Poker, an annual event, which runs this year from the beginning of June through the middle of July and culminates in a week-long championship in no-limit Texas hold ’em, currently the most popular version of the game. But the living room seemed different, too. DVDs that had been scattered on the floor in December were now neatly filed in a caddy by the fireplace, and, above the mantelpiece, an oil painting of Kramer, from “Seinfeld,” and an oversized presentation check for a million dollars, from PartyPoker.com, were arranged in crisp right angles. Lindgren had hired a housekeeper.
For professional poker players, engaging a housekeeper is not a simple task, largely because of their relationship to cash. They keep a lot of it around, in loose wads; the game both provides and requires it. “It’s the silliest thing,” Negreanu said, “but I feel naked unless I have some money on me. If I was going to the Rite Aid right here, just to get some shampoo, I would bring six or seven thousand, just in case. Like if, on the way, I had to buy a car.” On my first visit, Lindgren’s roommate, Ryan Bambrough, had left a tournament buy-in, or entry fee—in this case, three thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills—on the marble island in the kitchen. The money sat there all afternoon, while Lindgren’s guests traipsed in and out, fetching slices of takeout pizza during commercial breaks. To tidy a house that contains so much cash that you have to tidy the cash itself requires a housekeeper who is part saint. Lindgren’s friend Jennifer Harman, who may be the best female poker player in the world and lives a few miles away with her husband and four dogs, recommended her housekeeper, Maricarmen Soria. Now Negreanu employs her, too.
Poker is experiencing a cash boom. In the past five years, the first-place prize in the World Series of Poker’s championship event has grown from a million dollars, in 2000, to an estimated eight million this year, an increase that can be traced to developments in television and on the Internet that have attracted new players in unprecedented numbers. In 1998, the first online-poker sites made it possible for people to log on from anywhere, at any time. The money flowing into poker sites padded the bankrolls of young players like Lindgren, who won his first online tournament when he was twenty-two and was soon earning seven times what he had been making at his local casino. But the Web sites didn’t really take off until professional poker tournaments began appearing regularly on television, early in 2003. Television producers used reality-show-style editing and clever camera angles to make the game look exciting and deceptively easy. Viewers responded by taking out their credit cards, sitting down at their computers, and playing the game online. Poker sites returned the favor by rewarding winners of Internet tournaments with entry fees to televised tournaments, and the accumulation of those fees—which can be as much as fifteen thousand dollars—has resulted in multimillion-dollar purses on the pro tour. In tournament play alone, Negreanu has earned more than six million dollars since 1997. (He estimates that he has won another six million in online games and at casino cash games.) Lindgren, who is currently twenty-third on the Hendon Mob site, has collected more than three million since 1999.
Winnings are no longer the only source of revenue for successful poker pros. Draped over the back of Lindgren’s couch were three unworn jerseys, in basketball, baseball, and football versions—the latest merchandise from FullTiltPoker.com, which pays him to wear clothes bearing the company’s logo when he plays in tournaments. (He has a similar deal with Knob Creek Bourbon.) Negreanu is in greater demand. His poker-related side ventures include—in addition to his columns, which appear in the magazine Card Player and in twelve newspapers—a Web site and blog, fullcontactpoker.com, which receives a hundred thousand visitors a month; a video game called Stacked, which goes on sale this fall; a how-to book, which is to be published next year; an instructional DVD; a poker-chip set; and a bobble-head doll in his likeness. In February, he signed an agreement with FocusonPoker.com to endorse Clear Edge, an adrenaline blocker that is being marketed as a “poker vitamin” and has been popular with nascar drivers, because it keeps them relaxed. “I was laughing the first time I heard that,” Negreanu said. “Then I took them and I said, ‘You know what? They kind of work.’ ”
“I can count on more than one hand the guys who did speed and went from average players to making million-dollar bankrolls,” he added. “But then they became dependent on it, and they wound up going broke and being in debt.” (In poker circles, Negreanu is famous for his meat-free and caffeine-free diet, and he swears that he has never taken drugs.)
Between tournaments, Lindgren and Negreanu often play pool together, or visit comedy clubs. When Negreanu, a Toronto native, flew home to throw the first pitch at a Blue Jays game in May, Lindgren went along, and Negreanu complained affectionately in his blog about how loudly his friend had snored in the plane seat next to him. But although the two players are only a couple of years apart, they come from opposite sides of poker’s generational divide. Negreanu, a former teen-age bookie, who was thrown out of high school for running a study-hall poker game, was one of the last poker stars to emerge from the world of casino halls and private games. Lindgren, who worked briefly as a casino dealer, owes his career almost entirely to the Internet, and until recently earned most of his money playing online.
Inevitably, the two meet at poker tables. In February, at a tournament for élite players in Los Angeles, they faced each other at the final table, and Lindgren pulled off what he called a “monster bluff” against Negreanu. The cards almost don’t matter: Lindgren started off with a bet of seventy thousand dollars, and Negreanu, sensing a weak hand, raised him two hundred thousand. “I put two hundred and seventy thousand in, so I have two hundred thousand left,” Negreanu said. “And Erick looks over my chips and says, ‘How much you got left?’ And he moves all in”—wagering all he had. Under the special betting rules governing the tournament, Negreanu had only ninety seconds to decide whether to call the bet, and risk losing all his money if Lindgren wasn’t bluffing, or to fold, and give up the hefty sum that he had already put into the pot.
“I didn’t think he could be so stupid,” Negreanu said. “But it wasn’t stupid. It was like a step above. He knows that I know that he wouldn’t do something so stupid, so by doing something so quote-unquote stupid it actually became a great play.”
Negreanu folded, and Lindgren went on to win the tournament and its quarter-million-dollar first-place prize.
Poker favors players with heads for numbers, those who can coolly calculate from the incomplete information before them—the cards in their hand, the cards dealt face up on the table, and the size of an opponent’s bet—their likelihood of winning. But in its most sophisticated form, the games in which Lindgren and Negreanu earn their wealth, poker requires a gift for psychological insight and a flair for making unexpected moves. Lindgren and Negreanu are scornful of the players they call the “math guys,” who rely on game theory and probability at the expense of intuition. Still, math is at the core of poker’s basic strategies, and Negreanu believes that these can be quickly and profitably learned.
“I went to speak at Ohio State and I ended up jokingly saying that I’m starting my Stay Out of School program,” he said. “I was totally kidding, but, realistically, it’s not that far-fetched an idea. For kids that are eighteen, nineteen years old, that are going to go to college, get a dead-end job where they make fifty or sixty thousand dollars a year, I can take that same kid, teach him how to play poker, and in three months show him how to make more money than he would ever make in that dead-end job.
“The stock market is gambling, right?” he continued. “This kid studies and he makes money in the stock market, and this is considered by society O.K. A poker player, a kid, sees all these idiots making poor investments on these poker hands and says, ‘Wow, I could do a better job than they’re doing,’ and he studies, and he makes it. How is that different, realistically, than a stockbroker? I mean, I don’t see the difference.”
“Well,” Lindgren said, “there’s more cheating and collusion in the stock market.”
The latest generation of players is changing the face of poker, literally. You can spot the people who still come to the table with the old poker face—slack, unblinking, inscrutable. Doyle (Texas Dolly) Brunson is one of the best practitioners of this look. He grew up on the prairie fifty miles west of Abilene, and in the nineteen-fifties he drove around the state playing no-limit Texas hold ’em in private games with Thomas (Amarillo Slim) Preston and Brian (Sailor) Roberts. The three often played in professional surroundings with high rollers—oilmen, cattlemen, and financiers—but in some back rooms their opponents proved less than honorable. “I’ve been hijacked a few times,” Brunson wrote in “Super System: A Course in Power Poker,” which was first published in 1978, “and I can tell you it’s not a pleasant experience to be looking down at the business end of a shotgun.”
For most of Brunson’s career, poker’s reputation could be reduced to its old nineteenth-century nickname: the cheating game. (The word “poker” comes from “je poque,” meaning “I knock” or “I bet,” a phrase used by French-speaking gamblers in New Orleans in the early eighteen-hundreds.) During one rigged contest on a Mississippi steamboat in 1832, James Bowie allegedly pulled his hunting blade—the original bowie knife—on a fellow-player who was holding six cards; he should have had five. Poker flourished in frontier towns, where it incorporated elements of established games, like the British bluffing game brag, and acquired additional rounds of betting, which made it possible for skillful gamblers to wrest larger amounts of money from inexperienced players. But by the end of the nineteen-twenties, poker and its many local variants—stud, spit in the ocean, Kansas City lowball—had been banned, along with other forms of gambling, in most of the West.
Nevada legalized casinos in 1931, and in the early nineteen-sixties several “road gamblers” from Texas introduced no-limit Texas hold ’em to Las Vegas. Hold ’em proved simple to grasp and difficult to master, even for experienced gamblers. Major Riddle, who booked the first topless show in Vegas, lost his controlling interest in the Dunes casino after he lost several million dollars playing hold ’em. In 1970, Binion’s Horseshoe Casino hosted the first World Series of Poker, and the original trophy went, by peer vote, to Johnny Moss, a Texas veteran who had seen the need, on one occasion, to point his gun at a peephole in a poker-room ceiling and inquire, “Now, fellas, do I have to go and shoot a bullet in the ceiling? Or you going to send your boy down without any harm?”
Hold ’em did not become a watchable pastime in this country until March, 2003, when Steve Lipscomb, a television producer, created the World Poker Tour, an annual championship series, and began broadcasting it in weekly installments on the Travel Channel. The shows incorporated an obscure English innovation: hidden cameras that allowed the television audience to see each player’s two “hole” cards, which, in hold ’em, are combined with the five community cards dealt face up in the middle of the table to make the best possible five-card hand. (Players bet on their likelihood of having the winning hand, first after the hole cards are dealt, then on three more occasions, after the dealer introduces the third, fourth, and fifth community cards.) The hole-card cams, along with on-screen graphics that instantly calculate each hand’s odds of winning, cut viewers in on the action: once you know who’s bluffing and who’s holding the best hand, players’ facial expressions become legible and entertainingly full of portent.
Veteran players objected to the hole-card cam, arguing that it divulged signature moves and made it possible for practically anybody to try them, and, in a sense, that’s exactly what happened. According to PokerPulse.com, which tracks online play, when the first W.P.T. tournament aired some eighty-eight thousand players were betting almost sixteen million dollars in online poker games every day. Today, those figures have increased more than tenfold: in May, 1.8 million players bet two hundred million dollars online every day. Nearly every televised poker event now includes an unknown online winner playing for the big money at the final table with the pros. These players tend to eschew the flamboyance of the traditional poker costume—cowboy hats and belt buckles, loud Vegas jackets, two-fingered gold rings—in favor of student wear: baseball caps, T-shirts, and wraparound sunglasses. Suburban, clean cut, and frequently college-educated, the Internet winners are helping to turn poker into a respectable, almost wholesome career choice—the latest version, after dot-com startups and day trading, of the American get-rich-quick scheme, a lotto for the thoughtful, and with better odds.
The Bellagio, which added ten tables to its thirty-table poker room and refurbished a separate area for high-stakes cash games in April, has been more responsive than most casinos to the influx of flush, young players. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the Bellagio offers a series of qualifiers and specialty tournaments culminating in the Five Diamond World Poker Classic, one of the casino’s contributions to the W.P.T. The prize pool for the Five Diamond last December was nearly five and a half million dollars, making it among the largest purses on the poker calendar that year, and three hundred and seventy-six people had paid fifteen thousand dollars each to compete for it.
Most of the players arrived at the casino well before the event, and spent the week leading up to it playing in one tournament or another, sometimes around the clock. To accommodate the play, the casino had set up more than fifty tables on a broad swath of paisley carpet outside the poker room. Poker can be grimly serious—especially hold ’em, which allows players to bet all their chips on the turn of a single card—but it can also be as giddy as a three-Martini lunch, and there was a holiday-party atmosphere in the tournament area. Tobey Maguire was playing in a cash game next to the poker-room office, and Marcel Lüske, a European champion, who was dressed in a handmade suit from Austria, was singing Christmas carols at a table nearby. Negreanu circulated through the poker room, wearing pavé-diamond earrings and a sweater the color of orange Circus Peanuts. He posed for pictures and talked with fans. He autographed whatever he was handed, usually an ace of spades.
Everyday casino poker is rigidly stratified by disposable-income bracket (from the one-to-three-dollar table to the four-thousand-to-eight-thousand-dollar table), but in tournaments everyone starts out even. In the Five Diamond, each player began with a rack of thirty thousand dollars in chips, and the only way to get any more was to win. Tournaments project a rosy, telegenic social ideal, a class-levelling hurly-burly in which luck and guile can win you millions—what players refer to as “life-changing money.” Even those who don’t walk away rich can enjoy an affirmative-action effect, since low-stakes players, who would not normally have contact with the game’s deepest pockets, routinely get into the sort of heavy action in tournaments that convinces them that they can hold their own against wealthier opponents.
Within the first hour of play on the first day of the Five Diamond, Antanas (Tony G.) Guoga, a circuit regular from Lithuania by way of Melbourne, was standing over an older Southeast Asian man with little command of English, and shouting, “That was the worst laydown”—or fold—“of your life. Five nine off-suit! See? And you had queens? You can’t play with me! You can’t play with me!” As players at other tables stood up to watch, the older man sat motionless, staring at the table, his bald head reddening with embarrassment.
Many of the better players tune out during the early rounds. Lindgren’s friend Phil Ivey, a twenty-eight-year-old African-American who may be the most focussed cash-game player in the world, sat hooked up to an iPod. His mouth was half open, and except for his eyes and the blinking red light on his Bose noise-cancelling headphones he was completely still. He looked cold-blooded—not murderous, but indifferent. A scrap of paper next to his iPod turned out to be a check made out in his name, for a hundred thousand dollars.
Because bad players can get lucky, many good ones favor a conservative approach during the early rounds, playing only solid hands and not risking chips on fancy bluffs. Others start their endgame early, knowing that the best way to win is to arrive at the final table with a huge lead in chips. They take risks, trying to build their chip lead against players with no chance of winning—a group referred to as “dead money.” Lindgren was eliminated from the tournament this way, and many of the top players followed. “If I’m going to get there, I’m going to have chips,” Lindgren said philosophically. “And that separates the really good tournament players from the guys that just make a living.” (Using the same approach in three tournaments in January and February, he placed first, second, and fifth.)
When play stopped, at 10:30 p.m., a hundred and forty-three people had been eliminated. Tony G. was in first place, with $224,500 in chips, and Negreanu, who stood a good chance of becoming the magazine Card Player’s Card Player of the Year if he could finish in the top nine, was second, with $217,175. Trevor Buboltz, who had just turned twenty-one in early November and was probably the youngest entrant in the tournament, was in twenty-seventh place, with $82,425. His parents, who had come from Tinley Park, Illinois, to watch their son play, snapped pictures of him posing with various poker pros. Most players, however, left the casino quickly, to eat and rest before reconvening for another long day.
Negreanu is one of the most fascinating examples of the new poker face. During most games, his face is so confusingly animated—with friendly gibes, eyebrow arching, snatches of song, and sudden mimic impulses—that his rare spells of straight-faced concentration seem like just another ironic stratagem. Like many of the game’s younger players, he has started to review tournament footage the way football coaches do game tapes, scanning for behavioral tics, or “tells,” that suggest whether an opponent has a strong hand or is bluffing, and then tracking these findings, about which he is very secretive, on Excel spreadsheets. This combination of traits—part geek, part hustler, part bookie—has made Negreanu arguably the most respected tournament player of the past few years, and the first big star to emerge in the era of televised poker.
His reputation could hardly be more at odds with his table manner—joking, giving advice, snacking from Tupperware containers of vegetarian food prepared by his mother, who moved to Vegas to be near him. Negreanu weighs about a hundred and forty pounds and has the build—some days, it seems, even the outfits—of an Olympic ice dancer. Nearly every poker player reads his blog, in which he talks with unassuming charm about his game, his mom, his off-again, on-again engagement to a woman he met on a cruise ship, and his interactions with strangers, including a man who drove him to the airport in San Diego after his car broke down (they traded jokes and Negreanu paid the man’s rent) and a pair of Italian tourists in Vegas who sold him leather jackets from the trunk of their rental car (he gave them a thousand dollars and took a dozen coats).
Men (the Master) Nguyen, who came to California from Vietnam in 1978, took a seat next to Negreanu early on the third day of play. Pointing at Negreanu, he announced to the table, “I have been up all night reading his articles. I’m here to win tournament!” Negreanu, who was singing along to a Nelly song coming from a nearby club, nodded affably as Nguyen continued to talk. “I read all last night,” he said. “I didn’t learn a thing. I’d already learned it. Lot of people scared of you. Me, I’m first in line.”
The day before, Negreanu had lost his position among the chip leaders, on a hand that he analyzed that night in his blog. Around 6 p.m., he had lost two hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars to Johnny Chan, a two-time winner of the World Series of Poker, which put Chan in second place and left Negreanu with just eighty-one thousand, an amount he nevertheless managed to double, to finish the day in twenty-second place. But within three hours on the third day, Negreanu was securely back in the chips—about half a million dollars’ worth, arranged in a flying wedge in front of him—and he kept getting hands so good that they made him laugh. He forced out one player when he filled a straight draw with a king on the last card, and then he hit the rarest and most unbeatable hand in poker, a straight flush, again on the last card dealt. “That was pretty crazy. Never try that one again,” he said. He later eliminated David Singer, of White Plains, New York, whom he had been beating soundly, in an all-in confrontation that began with Negreanu lightheartedly saying, “Rematch! Let’s see if I get the same deal.” Afterward, as he raked in the pot with his long, darting fingers, Negreanu looked up at Singer and said, “Sorry about that,” with what sounded like genuine regret.
Whenever he folded a hand, Negreanu took a brief walk around the room, to goad or to socialize, keeping close tabs on the progress of his friend Jennifer Harman. As the field of players thinned, the two were playing at opposite extremes of fortune: Negreanu, with his huge chip lead, was bullying his table—one player called it “money whipping”—scaring people into folding their hands with large, seemingly arbitrary bets and doing so with such regularity that the announcer, Jack McClelland, who had begun to narrate over a microphone for the benefit of the crowd that had gathered near the velvet ropes, said, “Daniel raises the pot. Daniel takes the pot. This is a recording.” A couple of hours before play stopped for the evening, Lindgren appeared, to cheer Negreanu on. (“Late night,” he explained sheepishly. “I earned a hundred thousand dollars online last night.”)
Harman, on the other hand, was barely hanging on. As her holdings dwindled, she had been obliged to commit all of her chips on carefully chosen hands, risking everything she had, in the hope of “doubling up”—that is, winning a pot that contained all her chips and a matching amount from her opponent. At the end of the day, she told a friend who dropped by her table how crazy the pressure was making her: “I want to go home. I’m sleepy. I’m full of adrenaline. I want to stay here. I want to knock people out.”
Harman, who is in her mid-thirties, is known as a cautious player, who rarely gets into hands that she’s not favored to win. She has an intimidating ability to read people: she sits on two stacked chairs to be at eye level with her opponents, and peers at them through highlighted bangs, twitching her nose. Most of the time, she can tell by looking whether someone is bluffing. “I don’t know if life helped me with that,” she says, “or if poker helped me with life.” She started playing for fun at the age of sixteen, in Reno, her home town, where she would sneak into a casino and get instruction from a group of regulars, who took her under their wing. When she moved to Los Angeles, in 1988, she began rapidly improving, spending a few weeks at the five-and-ten-dollar table, a month at the ten-twenty, three months at the fifteen-thirty. She liked the life style so much—getting up when she felt like it, going to the beach, playing a little poker, hanging out with friends—that it didn’t dawn on her for quite a while that she was a professional.
She nearly died last year, when a kidney that she had received in a transplant as a teen-ager suddenly gave out, and she began to waste away. The day after she got a new kidney, in May, Harman, who is five feet two inches tall, weighed eighty-five pounds. That experience may partly explain her discipline at the poker table in long-odds situations, which tend to inspire bets that are foolishly risky. “I’m just hanging on like a money tick!” she said after surviving one all-in encounter. She raised her hand to show how it was shaking. After another all-in—this one against Richard Brodie, the author of Microsoft Word—Harman, wearing a sweater with fuzzy pink letters that spelled “love,” “true,” and “forever,” slid to the floor in mock collapse. “Shew!” she said, and then added, sweetly, “That’s always a good sign when Richie doubles me up. That means I might go far.”
Harman was still in the game on the fourth day of play, when enough players had been eliminated that the remaining field of ten could sit down at a single poker table. Steven Rassi, a coin-shop owner from Morton, Illinois, kept talking about all the “famous people” around him, and the announcer said, “So give them your chips, Steve. Maybe they’ll all sign your hat.” When Negreanu eliminated Eric Weiner, of Miami, thereby clinching the title Card Player of the Year, players and bystanders began shaking his hand and offering their congratulations. Johnny Chan, who was wearing a red Versace shirt and a fanny pack, said facetiously, “Why am I playing against the Card Player of the Year? I don’t belong here!” A few minutes later, Negreanu eliminated him, too. Lyle Berman, the C.E.O. of Lakes Entertainment, which provided the startup money for the World Poker Tour, stopped by to see which six players were likely to make it to the televised final table. Eying Negreanu’s stack of chips—about six million—Berman said, “I think Daniel might become a bully.”
“Don’t give him any ideas,” Harman said.
For the Five Diamond final, the table was set up in a Bellagio conference room, on a travelling studio set, between glowing pillars fitted with colored lights. Spotlights raked the players and the studio audience, in knowing homage to “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” and, in the wings, Shana Hiatt, a former Playboy playmate, who is now the host for the W.P.T., recorded intro segments over and over (“Wanna play in the World Poker Tour? Just come on down”).
Then the players and their chip counts were announced. Unlike casino chips, tournament chips have no real cash value: they’re a financial fiction and a dramatic convenience. Usually, though, the chip stacks have a rough relation to the actual prize at stake. But, at $6.865 million, Negreanu’s lead was so great—Vinny Landrum, in second place, had just $1.14 million—that the fiction had become a farce. “Let’s see,” he would say when it was his turn to bet, looking up to the ceiling and pensively thumbing his chin. “How much shall I bet? Anyone got a suggestion? How about 4.2 million?” To amuse himself and the crowd, Negreanu played a few hands without looking at his cards. At one point, he pushed all-in, causing the other players at the table to fold, and a friend of his in the audience yelled out, “O.K., cut it out, now.”
“What?” he called back. “It’s fun!”
It didn’t take long. First Nam Le, an accomplished newcomer from Huntington Beach, California, went down, followed by Rassi, the coin-shop owner, and Harman, who took $299,492 for fourth place. (The casino offered cash or chips; she chose chips.) After Landrum was eliminated, leaving Negreanu and Humberto Brenes, a veteran player from Costa Rica, three women, dressed in black gowns and stiletto heels, brought out the winner’s share: $1,770,218 in cash, piled on silver platters. During the celebration afterward, Brenes, the runner-up, hugged Negreanu’s mother, a round woman dressed in vintage jewelry and a red leopard-print shirt. “Mama, you have a good son,” he said.
Negreanu’s command over money in the game is accompanied by a strange indifference to it in everyday life. The huge prize, he said, didn’t change a thing for him. “You know what I bought with my winnings?” he said. “Three Xbox games and four CDs. Went out for, like, five hundred bucks.”
A few days after his victory, he philosophized in his blog about depression, in a polite Canadian way, remarking on how closely the lows follow the highs, and then he was back on the poker circuit, stopping in Toronto, where his reception surprised him. The night before a charity hockey game, at which he was scheduled to act as the celebrity coach, Negreanu followed three players—Eric Brewer, of the Edmonton Oilers; Mike Comrie, of the Phoenix Coyotes; and Steve Montador, of the Calgary Flames—out the door of the Sheraton hotel and was the one mobbed by the fans. “It was pretty surreal, knowing it’s a hockey town, and I’m with some of the most famous hockey players in the world, and they schlep to the limos and nobody recognizes them, and I’m bombarded. And I’m, like, ‘Wow, poker has arrived.’

by K.CONLEY

Poker Monkey

2005-07-29T15:13:00.000+07:00

Phil Gordon shows up at the Bellagio poker room with a monkey sitting on his shoulder. The monkey jumps down on an empty seat and the Phil buys him a rack of chips.As the dealer starts to pass the monkey by, Phil says, "Hey, deal my monkey in!" Everyone looks rather askance but they deal him in.To everyone's surprise, the monkey picks up the cards and begins to play! After a few hands one of the players says, "Say, that's amazing! Your monkey ought to be in the Guiness Book of Records!" Phil replys, "Nah, he sees too many flops and is a sucker for a check-raise."

Understanding Body Language For Poker Players

2005-07-20T19:42:00.000+07:00

ADAM'S-APPLE-JUMP
AFFERENT CUE
AGNOSIA
AKINESIA
AMPHIBIAN BRAIN
AMYGDALA
ANATOMICAL POSITION
ANGER
ANGULAR DISTANCE ANIMAL SIGN
ANTIGRAVITY SIGN
APOCRINE ODOR
APRAXIA
AQUATIC BRAIN & SPINAL CORD
ARM WEAR ARM-CROSS
ARM-SHOW
ARM-SWING
AROMA CUE
ARPEGE®ART CUE
ARTIFACT
ATNR
AUDITORY CUE AUTISM BALANCE CUE
BARBIE DOLL®
BASAL GANGLIA
BASELINE DEMEANOR
BEAUTY BEND-AWAY
BIG MAC®BITE
BLANK FACE
BLUE JEANS
BLUSHING BODY ADORNMENT
BODY ALIGNMENT BODY DYSMORPHIC DISORDER
BODY LANGUAGE
BODY MOVEMENT
BODY WALL
BODY-BEND
BODY-SHIFT
BOOT BOW
BRANCH SUBSTITUTE
BROADSIDE DISPLAY
BUSINESS SUIT CANDY CHAIR CHIN JUT
CINGULATE GYRUS
CLEM CLEVER HANS PHENOMENON CLOTHING CUE
COCA-COLA®
COLOR CUE
CONFERENCE TABLE
CONSUMER PRODUCT
COURTSHIP
CROUCH CROWDING
CRY
CUE CUT-OFF
DANCE
DECEPTION CUE DECISION GRIP
DISGUST
DOMINANCE
EFFERENT CUE
EMOTION
EMOTION CUE ENTERIC BRAIN
ERGONOMICS OF THE MIND EXISTENTIAL CRUNCH EXPECTANCY THEORY
EYE CONTACT
EYE-BLINK
EYEBROW-LOWER EYEBROW-RAISE
EYES
FACE FACIAL BEAUTY
FACIAL EXPRESSION
FACIAL FLUSHING
FACIAL I.D.
FACIAL RECOGNITION
FEAR
FEET
FIGHT-OR-FLIGHT
FINGERTIP CUE FIST
FLASHBULB EYES
FLEXION WITHDRAWAL FOLD-ARMS FOOTWEAR
FREEZE REACTION
FROWN
FRUIT SUBSTITUTE
GAZE-DOWN
GESTURE
GLUTAMATE
GOLF
GOOSE-STEP
HAIR CUE HANDSHAKE
HANDS
HAND-BEHIND-HEAD
HANDS-ON-HIPS
HAPPINESS
HAT
HEAD-NOD
HEAD-SHAKE HEAD-TILT-BACK
HEAD-TILT-SIDE
HERBS & SPICES
HIGH HEEL
HIGH-STA ND DISPLAY HOMUNCULUS HUMAN BRAIN HYPOTHALAMUS
IMMEDIACY
INFORMATION INTENTION CUE INTERIOR DESIGN INVISIBILITY ISOPRAXISM
ISOTYPE
JAW-DROOP
JUICE SUBSTITUTE
KINESICS KISS
LAUGH
LAWN DISPLAY LEG WEAR
LIMBIC SYSTEM
LIPS
LIP-COMPRESSION
LIP-POUT
LIP-PURSE
LIP-TOUCH
LOOM
LOVE LOVE SIGN
LOVE SIGNAL
LOVE SIGNALS I
LOVE SIGNALS II
LOVE SIGNALS III
LOVE SIGNALS IV
LOVE SIGNALS V
LUNCH MAMMALIAN BRAIN
MEATY TASTE
MEDIA
MEN'S SHOES MESSAGE
MESSAGING FEATURE
MIME CUE MINT
MOTION ENERGY MAP MUSIC
NECK DIMPLE
NECKWEAR NEO-SAVANNAH GRASSLAND
NEW CAR SMELL NICOTINE NLD NONVERBAL APPRENTICESHIP
NONVERBAL BRAIN
NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION NONVERBAL CONSCIOUSNESS NONVERBAL FILMS NONVERBAL INDEPENDENCE NONVERBAL LEARNING NONVERBAL LEARNING DISORDER NONVERBAL RELEASE NONVERBAL SURVEILLANCE
NONVERBAL WORLD NOSE
NUT SUBSTITUTE
NUTTY TASTE
OBJECT FANCY ORIENTING REFLEX
PAIN CUE
PALEOCIRCUIT
PALM-DOWN
PALM-UP
PHARYNGEAL ARCH PLEASURE CUE
POINT
POSTURE
POWER GRIP
PRECISION GRIP PRIMATE BRAIN
PROBING POINT
PROXEMICS
RAPPORT
REPTILIAN BRAIN
REST-AND-DIGEST
SADNESS SECONDARY PRODUCT
SELF-TOUCH
SHELLFISH TASTE SHOES SHOPPING
SHOULDER WEAR
SHOULDERS
SHOULDER-SHRUG
SHOULDER-SHRUG DISPLAY
SIGN
SIGNAL SILENCE
SIT
SMILE
SNEAKER
SOFT SIGN
SOLITARY DINER'S GLANCE SPACE
SPECIAL VISCERAL NERVE
SPEECH
SPEECH ERRORS
STARTLE REFLEX
STEEPLE
STEINZOR EFFECT
STOMP
STRANGER ANXIETY
SUBMISSION SUPERBALL ®SWAGGER-WALK SWEATY PALMS
TABLE-SLAP
TACTILE CUE
TACTILE WITHDRAWAL
TASTE CUE
TENSE-MOUTH TERRITORY
THROAT-CLEAR TICKLE TONE OF VOICE
TONGUE-SHOW TOUCH CUE TREE SIGN
UNCERTAINTY
VEHICULAR GRILLE
VEHICULAR STRIPE VERBAL CENTER VINYL
WAITING TIME WALK
WOMEN'S SHOES
WORD
YAWN
ZYGOMATIC SMILE

New Player's Guide To Internet Poker Rooms, Games, Bonus and Rakeback

2005-07-18T23:02:00.000+07:00

·DoylesRoom.Com
Receive a 25% deposit bonus up to $135 or a collector's edition hardbound copy of Doyles "Super System II". DoylesRoom uses the most secure, state-of-the-art software, managed by one of the world's leading online gaming organizations. This combination ensures you can play on-line interactive poker in a secure environment with a name you can trust. In addition, DoylesRoom offers a variety of promotions, bonus specials, give-a-ways, freerolls, Action Points, and other extras.
Holdem and Omaha Hi-Lo and High (all available in both limit, pot-limit and Holdem in no-limit as well). Table stakes are from $0.02/$0.04 to $50/$100. There are both single- and multi-table tournaments. Within shortly seven-card stud High and Hi-Lo will be added.
·PokerStars.Com
There are frequent re-deposit bonuses where you typically get 20-25% bonus match of deposits up to $600 for $100-$120 bonus. There are a lot of special event tournaments, which can be found at the home page. There are tons of free rolls.Poker Stars is the runner up in online poker tournaments.
Holdem, Hi and Hi-Lo versions in Omaha as well as seven-card stud. The site also offers no-limit Omaha Hi-Lo games. Poker Stars started the trend with with their micro-limit tables, going as low as $0.01/$0.02 in Holdem, and Omaha Hi. At these micro-limit tables there is no rake! The "sit-and-go" tournaments have a 10-minute increase in blinds, instead of 10 hands at many other sites. The players also get 1500 worth of chips.
·UltimateBet.Com
There are frequent re-deposit bonuses where you typically get 20-25% bonus match of deposits up to $600 for $100-$120 bonus. There are a lot of special event tournaments, which can be found at the home page. There are tons of free rolls.Poker Stars is the runner up in online poker tournaments.
Holdem, Omaha Hi and Hi-Lo, 7-Card-Stud Hi and Hi-Lo, Crazy Pineapple and Lowball. There are no-limit and pot-limit in Holdem and pot-limit in both Omaha variants. There are 1-on-1 tables in both Holdem, Omaha and 7-Card-Stud.
·PlatinumPoker.Com
Receive a 25% deposit bonus, up to $135 on your first deposit using Neteller. It uses the most secure, state-of-the-art software, managed by one of the world's leading online gaming organizations.
Holdem and Omaha Hi-Lo and High (all available in both limit, pot-limit and Holdem in no-limit as well). Table stakes are from $0.02/$0.04 to $50/$100. There are both single- and multi-table tournaments. Within shortly seven-card stud High and Hi-Lo will be added.
·TheFishTank.Com
Receive a 25% deposit bonus, up to $135 on your first deposit using Neteller. It uses the most secure, state-of-the-art software, managed by one of the world's leading online gaming organizations.
Holdem and Omaha Hi-Lo and High (all available in both limit, pot-limit and Holdem in no-limit as well). Table stakes are from $0.02/$0.04 to $50/$100. There are both single- and multi-table tournaments. Within shortly seven-card stud High and Hi-Lo will be added.
·VCPoker.Com
Receive a 25% deposit bonus, up to $135 on your first deposit using Neteller. It uses the most secure, state-of-the-art software, managed by one of the world's leading online gaming organizations.
Holdem and Omaha Hi-Lo and High (all available in both limit, pot-limit and Holdem in no-limit as well). Table stakes are from $0.02/$0.04 to $50/$100. There are both single- and multi-table tournaments. Within shortly seven-card stud High and Hi-Lo will be added.
·FullTiltPoker.Com
Receive a 100% deposit bonus, up to $600 on your first. It uses the most secure, state-of-the-art software, managed by a group of the most well known poker pros.
Holdem, Omaha Hi and Hi-Lo, 7-Card-Stud Hi and Hi-Lo. There are no-limit and pot-limit in Holdem and pot-limit in both Omaha variants.
·AbsolutePoker.com
Receive up to $350 Free on your first deposit. 100% deposit bonus! Absolute Poker Management acts solely as the host, ensuring fair and honest online poker games. They offer a large selection of the most popular online poker games available. You can choose between Texas Holdem, Omaha High, Omaha Hi/Lo, Seven Card Stud, Seven Card Stud Hi-Lo, One on One, and Tournaments.
Texas Hold’em (1 on 1, PL, NL, Limit, and short-handed), Omaha, Omaha Hi-Lo, Seven-Card Stud, and Seven-Card Stud Hi-Lo.
·PacificPoker.Com
Receive up to $100.00 free on your first deposit. Pacific Poker offers players the chance to play the most popular Poker games and is easily downloaded within 7-10 minutes, free of charge. The graphics are smooth and the gaming sharp, fast and hassle-free. Pacific Poker has been around for a long time and is a very respected poker room.
There are Holdem, Hi and Hi-Lo in Omaha and seven-card stud. There are also 1-on-1 tables. There are micro-limit tables down to $0.05/$0.10. Max limit is $15/$30 in all games, except for 1-on-1 ring game which still has only $3/$6.
·RoyalVegasPoker.Com
Royal Vegas Poker is an established, well-respected and trusted online poker room. It is a member of the Fortune Lounge Group, one of the oldest and largest online casino groups, and which was voted Best Casino Group by CasinoMeister. You enjoy all the support, security, integrity and service that go with playing at a Fortune Lounge poker room. The game play interface brings all the tension, excitement and strategy of the legendary Vegas poker rooms right to your desktop. Use the link and receive up to $200 deposit bonus and !to claim your free $10 to try it out. Royal Vegas has a 100,000 Free-Roll Tournament, no deposit is required!
Holdem, Omaha, seven-card stud and five-card stud, but there are no Hi-Lo versions.
·PokerRoom.Com
20% Deposit Bonus up to $100 to every new player on your first purchase! A wide selection of safe and secure no-download games, a real sense of community amongst members, and a pioneering attitude in the poker industry. PokerRoom.com introduced Mobile Poker wherin anyone with a registered PokerRoom.com account and a supported phone model can obtain the Mobile Poker for free!
Texas Holdem, Draw, pot- and no-limit games as well as Omaha and seven-card stud (both Hi and Hi-Lo) were launched in the spring and summer 2004. (Omaha is both available in fixed-, pot- and no-limit where the no-limit version is rather unusual for Omaha, in particular in the Omaha High version).
·crazypoker.com
Crazy Vegas Poker has all the support, security, integrity and service that go with playing at a Prima Poker room. The game play interface brings all the tension, excitement and strategy of the legendary Vegas poker rooms right to your desktop. Use the link and receive 40% deposit bonus and !to claim your free $40 to try it out.
Holdem, Omaha, seven-card stud and five-card stud, but there are no Hi-Lo versions.
·7SultansPoker.Com
Receive up to $200 Free! Download the 7 Sultans Poker software and open a new account, and you get up to $200 in bonuses. Play their real money cash games and for every 600 Bonus Redemption Points (BRP) you earn they will credit your NEW Poker Account with a $20 Bonus. Thereafter, every time you earn an additional 600 BRPs they will again credit your Poker Account with a further $20. Keep earning BRPs and they'll give you up to $200 free!
Holdem, Omaha, seven-card stud and five-card stud, but there are no Hi-Lo versions.
·BetonBetPoker.Net
You will receive a 20% deposit bonus on your first deposit up to $ 500! All you have to do is deposit and bet at the exchange, play poker or casino games and you will earn the bonus. Win up to $5000 on one single hand! If you get a Royal Straight Flush of any suit in one of the Texas Hold'em real money tables you will get an extra bonus of 100 times the big blind for that table! One pocketcard required but no showdown.
Texas Holdem, Draw, pot- and no-limit games as well as Omaha and seven-card stud (both Hi and Hi-Lo) were launched in the spring and summer 2004. (Omaha is both available in fixed-, pot- and no-limit where the no-limit version is rather unusual for Omaha, in particular in the Omaha High version).
·EmpirePoker.Com
Shares the same players as Party Poker and Multi Poker. Download and deposit to receive up to $100.00 free. Thousands of players play poker daily on EmpirePoker, and there are many good reasons why! They offer a variety of games and tournaments. They also offer free play at their play money tables, for as long as you like. Play on their free software live with other players at no cost.
Holdem, Omaha and 7-Card-Stud in both High and Hi-Lo. However, Party Poker does not offer certain games such as heads-up matches, draw poker, crazy pineapple, etc. Moreover, there is no pot-limit version in any of the 7-Card-Stud games or the Omaha High.
·HollywoodPoker.Com
At Hollywood Poker, when players make their first deposit, there are a variety of bonus choices. You can also get a 'Swag Bag' promotion. With $1,000.00's made available in potential winnings, your chance to score just got 10 X BIGGER than a boring deposit bonus! ONE Red Carpet tournament ticket, ONE Michael Woods Invitational tournament ticket and entry into numerous weekly Freerolls. Anytime you play and hit a Royal Straight Flush on any Texas Hold’em Real Money ring game, Hollywood Poker will give you a special Royal Money bonus -- a juicy payout equal to 100 TIMES the big blind of the table where you landed your Royal Straight Flush
·goldentigerpoker.com
50% matching bonus of up to $200 ! That means when you make a first deposit of $400, Golden Tiger Poker will give you another $200, absolutely free! Simply download the software, register your real account and deposit. Golden Tiger Poker is part of the Prima Poker Network.
Holdem, Omaha, seven-card stud and five-card stud, but there are no Hi-Lo versions.
·captaincookspoker.com
50% matching bonus up to $200. Live Poker 24/7, lots of Single and Multi-Player tournaments and guaranteed prize pools.
Holdem, Omaha, seven-card stud and five-card stud, but there are no Hi-Lo versions.
·virtualcitypoker.com
When you make your first deposit you will receive a 50% matching bonus of up to $200 . At Virtual City Poker, they pride themelves in offering you an exciting, reliable and trustworthy service. Using their advanced gaming software they are able to bring you the thrill of playing online poker against REAL people in REAL time. As well as an unbeatable selection of Multitable tournaments, Virtual City Poker has thousands of players at 10 and 6 seat tables playing games like Texas Holdem, Omaha, Omaha Hi/Lo, 5 Stud and 1 on 1 play!
Holdem, Omaha, seven-card stud and five-card stud, but there are no Hi-Lo versions.
·pokerrewards.com
Download the PokerRewards Room today, and receive a 50% matching bonus of up to $200 FREE! That means when you make a first deposit of $400, PokerRewards will give you another $200, absolutely free!
Holdem, Omaha, seven-card stud and five-card stud, but there are no Hi-Lo versions.
·bugsysclub.com
Join BugsysClub Poker, and the first time you deposit money and play, you will earn a first time 20% deposit bonus. up to a maximum of $100 bonus! Just deposit money, play, reach the required number of bonus points and you will earn the bonus.
Holdem, Omaha and seven-card stud (Hi and Hi-Lo), with pot- and no-limit games where feasible. Both single- and multi-table tournaments are offered. Heads Up games are currently only offered for holdem NL.
·CarribeanSun.Com
All new players will receive a 30% match bonus on their initial deposit of $20 or more (maximum bonus of $100). Part of the Omni Casino company , an award winning online gaming company.
Texas Holdem, Omaha Hi and Hi-Lo and seven-card stud - besides fixed limit games, there are no-limit and pot-limit offered in Texas Holdem and pot-limit in both Omaha versions. Games can be played in dollar, pound or euro.
·OnlinePokerSites.Bravehost.Com
·Poker Links & Shopping Unlimited
·My MSN Blog w/ nearly 500 pics
·OnlinePokerTop1000 Links Site
·expertinsight.com
·realpokertraining.com
·pokerschoolonline.com

How Do You Start Playing Online?
Beginning your poker playing experience at an Online Poker Room is a simple and easy process. To play, you need to download the Poker Room by clicking on the banner add or link at this site. Once you have downloaded the Poker Room , you double-click on the icon and the Poker Room will self-install on your computer. When it completes installing, it will connect to the Poker Room where you will see a registration window. Once you connect to the Poker Room, you will see the Lobby area. You can look around without registering. To play for free or for real money, you must register. Registration takes just a few moments. Select a unique screen name. Other players in the Poker Room will know you by your screen name. You must also select a password. To play for real money, you must open a cage account with the poker room also. That's all ... you are now ready to sit at a table, get chips, and begin playing poker. We know you enjoy yourself and we wish you the best of luck.

What About Bonus?
A bonus is extra money the poker room will give you for buying in and playing for real money. It ranges from 20% to 40% of the amount you buyin for at the well established and popular poker rooms up to 100% at the newer poker rooms that are trying to get started. If the the bonus is 25% and to deposit $100 you geta total of $125. I strongly suggest the older and well established poker rooms. One of the deposit options all these poker rooms is a company called netteller. If you use them you normally will get a 10% higher bonus.You can go from poker room to poker room getting the bonuses and it is a fairly common practice known as "bonus whoring". The bonus is for new customers only although from time to time the poker rooms offer a reload bonus. Some people earn their bonus, cashout and move on to the next poker room and bonus.

Rakeback or Rake Rebate?
You must earn your bonus by playing a certain amount of real money poker hands, which varies from room to room. Below is Doyle's Rooms explanation of their bonus and how you earn the bonus. I earned their bonus in 4 days of heavy play.The poker rooms make their money off of "rake". That is a percentage of each pot that the house keeps, ranging from 2% up to 10%. The well established older poker rooms all have rakes at the lower end of the spectrum. "Rake rebate" or "Rakeback" is when an affiliate of the poker rooms, like me, offers you a refund (so to speak) of part of the money that the poker rooms take from your pots. I give all players who use the links at my sites a rake rebate of 20%-40% depending on the site they download. In other words I split what I earn with you in order to encourage you to support my websites and to come back anytime you need another poker room download. For example if you play $25/$50 nolimit holdem you will be refunded about $100 per week for average play. So, at all of my sites you get both the bonus, with no code words required, and rake back too.

WSOP Champ Joseph Hachem's Prior Tournaments

2005-07-16T21:15:00.000+07:00

Joe Hachem Australia

June 2005 Special Weekend
No Limit Holdem
3rd
AUD$ 3,050

Crown Series 2 2005
No Limit Holdem
7th
AUD$ 595

March 2005 Special Weekend
No Limit Holdem
3rd
AUD$ 3,545

Crown Series 1 2005
Pot Limit Holdem Terminator
1st
AUD$ 402

2005 Crown Australian Poker Championship
Pot Limit Holdem
15th
AUD$ 1,650

APA NSW CHAMPIONSHIPS 2004
Limit Omaha No Rebuy
3rd
AUD$ 1,410

Crown Victorian Poker Championship
No Limit Holdem Main Event
9th
AUD$ 2,850

Crown Victorian Poker Championship
Pot Limit Holdem
15th
AUD$ 230

Melbourne Holdem Championships
Terminator
6th
AUD$ 393

Melbourne Holdem Championships
Pot Limit Holdem
5th
AUD$ 983

Melbourne Holdem Championships
No Limit Holdem
18th
AUD$ 125

Poker Bluff Detection 101 : FBI Style

2005-07-11T11:12:00.000+07:00

Bluff Detection 101 : FBI Style
(Thanks to the FBI and Joe Navarro)

Lord let me be as a cool window pane set in a church door.
The breath of the hopeful fogging my surface,
While I remain transparent to their sight.
So that I might condense fact
From the vapor of nuance,
In the tremor of their hands
Or the sound of their voice.
Give me vision into their hearts and minds,
As they offer prayers on your green-felt altar.
Let me be your alderman in the poker room,
So that I may gather their donations,
Like the whale strains krill from the sea.
by Mark Pinsker

How do we detect a bluff?
Is it "[f]rom the vapor of nuance,in the tremor of their hands or the sound of their voice?"In fact, many people still misinterpret a significant amount of nonverbal behavior as indicia of a bluff when, in fact, it just may be nervousness or such behavior as face touching that also can indicate honesty.
Traditional methods of detecting bluffs succeed only 50 percent of the time. Going strictly on "gut instinct" or flipping a coin has an equal success rate. However, we can use an alternative approach for detecting a bluff based on four criteria that will significantly improve your odds of detecting a bluff: 1. comfort/discomfort, 2. emphasis, 3. synchrony, and 4. perception management.

Comfort/Discomfort
Comfort is readily apparent in conversations with family members and friends. People sense when others have a good time and when they feel comfortable in their presence. Experiencing comfort in the presence of strangers becomes more difficult, especially in stressful situations, such as during a poker tournament. A person’s level of comfort or discomfort is one of the most important clues players should focus on when trying to establish veracity. Tension and distress most often manifest on bluff. Attempting to disguise their bluff places a distressing cognitive load on them as they struggle to fabricate a "reasonable bet" or answers to what otherwise would be simple questions. When comfortable, an individual’s nonverbal behavior tends to mirror the other players present. For example, if one player leans forward, the opponent in the hand tends to do so as well. Or, if one leans to the side with hands in pockets and feet crossed, the other person may do the same. Subconsciously, people demonstrate their comfort with whom they are playing. When touched, people may touch back to emphasize a point. Some may display their comfort more openly, such as showing more of their torso and the insides of their arms and legs. Players who speak the truth more often display comfort because they have no stress to conceal nor do they have a bluff to make them feel uncomfortable. While seated at a table, players comfortable with each other will move objects aside so that nothing blocks their view. Over time, they may draw closer so that they do not have to talk as loud, and their breathing rhythm, tone of speech, pitch, and general demeanor will become similar. Subtleties of comfort contrast with discomfort. People show discomfort when they do not like what is happening to them, what they are seeing or hearing, or when others compel them to talk about things that they would prefer to keep hidden. People first display discomfort physiologically—heart rates quicken, hairs stand up, perspiration increases, and breathing becomes faster. Beyond the physiological responses, which are autonomic and require very little thinking, people primarily manifest discomfort nonverbally instead of vocally. They tend to move their bodies by rearranging themselves, jiggling their feet, fidgeting, or drumming their fingers when scared, nervous, or significantly uncomfortable. If, while the bluffer appears relaxed and poised, the bluffer continually looks at their hand, sits tensely, or does not move (“flash frozen”), may discern a lack of comfort even though everything may appear normal to the untrained eye. Bluffers show discomfort when they repeatedly talk about finalizing the hand or when disruptions appeal to them. People tend to distance themselves from those with whom they feel uncomfortable. Even while sitting side by side, people will lean away from those with whom they feel uncomfortable, often moving either their torsos or their feet away or toward an exit, which nonverbally exhibits displeasure. These actions can occur in a game due to the subject matter discussed. Likewise, people create artificial barriers with either their shoulders and arms or with inanimate objects in front of them such as their chip stacks. For example, by the end of one session, a very aggressively bluffing player had built a little barrier in front of himself using soda cans, chip stacks, and various piles of stuff. Other clear signs of discomfort include rubbing the forehead near the temple region, squeezing the face, rubbing the neck, or stroking the back of the head with the hand.10 Interviewees often will show their displeasure by rolling their eyes out of disrespect; picking lint off themselves (preening); talking down to their opponent; giving short answers; becoming resistant, hostile, or sarcastic; or displaying “micro gestures” with indecent connotations, such as “giving the finger.” Eyes also serve as formidable communicators of discomfort, yet players often ignore them during a hand. People use their eyes as a blocking mechanism similar to folding their arms across their chest or turning away from their opponent. In a similar response, when people do not like something they hear, they usually close their eyes as if to block out what they just heard. They do this subconsciously and may do it so often that you do not pay attention to it. People may close their eyes before touching or rubbing them as if to further block or relieve themselves of what they just heard. In most cases, eye blocking proves extremely accurate in highlighting issues problematic to your opponent.
Additionally, when people feel troubled or frustrated or they have a subdued temper tantrum, their eyelids may close or flutter rapidly as an expression of their sentiment. Research also has shown that when people are nervous or troubled, their blink rate increases, a phenomenon often seen with liars under stress. In one case catalogued the bluffer’s blink rate increase from 27 times per minute to 84 times a minute during stressful hand. People learned to look down or away from parental authority as a form of respect when questioned or scolded. You should remain aware of changes in eye contact and eye behavior during hands. They should establish the opponents default pattern of eye behavior during benign questioning then look for changes or indicators of discomfort as the interview progresses, which often gives clues to deception.

Emphasis
When people speak, they naturally incorporate various parts of their body, such as the eyebrows, head, hands, arms, torso, legs, and feet, to emphasize a point for which they feel deeply or emotionally.This movement proves important because, as a rule, people emphasize when genuine.Liars, for the most part, do not emphasize with nonverbals. They will think of what to say and how to deceive, but rarely do they think about the presentation of the lie. When compelled to lie, most people do not realize how much emphasis or accentuation enters into everyday conversations. Emphasis accurately reflects reality or the truth. When blufferrs attempt to fabricate a response, their emphasis looks unnatural or is delayed; they rarely emphasize where appropriate, or they choose to do so only on unimportant matters. People accentuate both verbally and nonverbally in their interactions. They emphasize verbally through voice, pitch, tone, or repetition.On the other hand, they When interpreting eye contact, however, many misconceptions still exist. Little or no eye contact is perceived erroneously by some as a classic sign of deception, especially during a hand, while the truthful should “lock eyes.” This may be accurate for some but not for all. For instance, research shows that Machiavellian people actually will increase eye contact during deception. This may occur because they know that many players look for this feature. Also, some emphasize nonverbally, which can prove even more accurate and useful to you. People who typically use their hands while speaking punctuate their remarks with hand gestures that emphatically illustrate or exclaim. They also may thrust forward, point, or pound the table as they emphasize.Others accentuate with the tips of their fingers, either touching things or gesturing with them. Hand behaviors compliment speech, thoughts, and true sentiments. Raising eyebrows (eyebrow flash) or widening eyes also emphasizes point. When interested, people lean their torsos forward and, often, employ gravity-defying gestures, such as raising up on the balls of their feet as they make a significant or emotionally charged point. While sitting down, some emphasize by raising the knee to highlight important points. Occasionally, people will add emphasis by slapping their knee as it comes up, indicative of emotional exuberance. Gravity-defying gestures symbolize emphasis and true sentiment, both of which liars rarely possess. In contrast, people de-emphasize or show lack of commitment by speaking behind their hands or showing limited facial expression as if to control their countenance because they are not committed to what they are saying. Deceptive people often show deliberative, pensive displays, such as touching fingers to their chin or stroking their cheeks, as though they still are thinking about something. They are evaluating what they did and your reponse, which is inconsistent with honest behavior.

Synchrony
In detecting deception, synchrony plays an important role. Ideally, synchrony (e.g., harmony, congruence, and concordance) should occur between players between what is said vocally and nonverbally; between the circumstances of the moment and what the bluffer is saying; and between events and emotions, including synchrony of time and space. When answering yes/no questions should have congruent head movement supporting what they say. Lack of synchrony often occurs when after you fold people say, “I had the nuts,” while nodding their heads right and left as if to say, “no, I didn't.” Or, when asked, “Are you bluffing?” their heads may bob up and down as they deny. Upon catching themselves in this faux pas, they then reverse their head movement. When observed, these instances are almost comical and amateurish. More often, a mendacious statement, such as “I had the nuts,” precedes a noticeably delayed and less emphatic negative head movement. These behaviors are not synchronous and, therefore, more likely to be equated with a lie. Synchrony should occur between what is being said and the events of the moment. If your opponent interjects with superfluous information or facts totally irrelevant, you should note the disharmony. When the actions are asynchronous with the event and the situation, you may assume that something likely is wrong or the person is stalling for time to perhaps looking for cues from you. Last, synchrony should exist between events, time, and space. A person who delays their actions should come under suspicion.

Perception Management
Perception management occurs both verbally and nonverbally. During a game, liars often use perception management, a concept with which psychopaths are well acquainted, to influence their intended targets of deception. For instance, nonverbally, subjects will yawn excessively as if to show that they feel bored. If the person is sitting, they may slouch or splay out on a couch, stretch their arms, and cover more territory as if to demonstrate their comfort. Verbally, liars will try to vocalize their honesty, integrity, and the implausibility of their bluffing. They will try to “look good” to theother players, so-called close friends. Further, bluffers may self-medicate through the use of alcohol or prescription drugs to appear placid and content. They may change their clothing or hair styles to appear more genuine or more socially conventional. In all of these examples, subjects attempt to manage your perception. People practice perception management every day, such as getting dressed for a date. However, when it manifests itself in a game setting, players should recognize such efforts and question the intent. They may use perception management statements, such as “I can't bluff,” “I am a terrible bluffer", "I am a rock”, “I have never bluffed,” “I would never bluff,” or “I would never do such a thing,” all of which should alert you to the possibility of deception. Other statements, such as “to be perfectly frank,” “to be honest,” “to be perfectly truthful,” or “I was always taught to play the cards not the players,” are solely intended to influence perception.

Conclusion
The detection of deception remains a difficult task. Poker players can enhance their ability to detect deception by focusing on four domains —comfort/discomfort, emphasis, synchrony, and perception management—rather than merely trying to detect traditional signs of deception, which, in some cases, may be misleading. The research in this area over the last 20 years is unequivocal. Nonverbal behaviors, in and of themselves, do not clearly indicate deception. However, when you notice a display of discomfort and a lack of comfort, emphasis, synchrony, and perception management, a greater certitude for assessing deception exists. You can expect players to react poorly in one or twoareas. But, to do so in all four domains indicates communication problems, which may originate from the bluffer’s antipathy toward you or result from guilty knowledge of their bluff.

2005 WORLD SERIES OF POKER Winners' Circle

2005-07-04T18:42:00.000+07:00

Click the player or event name to see a photo and a win report!

Event #1 Casino Employees World Poker ChampionshipBuy-in: 500 + 0; Entries: 662; Prizepool: $297,900; Date: 2005-06-021. Andy Nguyen Las Vegas, NV $83,390

Event #2 No Limit Hold'emBuy-in: 1,500 + 0; Entries: 2305; Prizepool: $3,180,900; Date: 2005-06-031. Allen Cunningham Las Vegas, NV $725,405

Event #3 Pot Limit Hold'emBuy-in: 1,500 + 0; Entries: 1071; Prizepool: $1,477,980; Date: 2005-06-041. Thom Werthmann Bloomfield Hills, MI $369,535

Event #4 Limit Hold'emBuy-in: 1,500 + 0; Entries: 1049; Prizepool: $1,447,620; Date: 2005-06-051. Eric Froelich Los Angeles, CA $361,910

Event #5 Omaha Ho-Lo SplitBuy-in: 1,500 + 0; Entries: 699; Prizepool: $964,620; Date: 2005-06-061. Pat Poels Mesa, AZ $270,100

Event #6 Short Handed No Limit Hold'emBuy-in: 2,500 + 0; Entries: 548; Prizepool: $1,260,400; Date: 2005-06-071. Isaac Galazan Bangkok, Thailand $315,125

Event #7 No Limit Hold'em with RebuysBuy-in: 1,000 + 0; Entries: 826; Rebuys: 1495; Prizepool: $2,201,810; Date: 2005-06-081. Maciek Gracz Raleigh, NC $594,460

Event #8 Seven Card StudBuy-in: 1,500 + 0; Entries: 472; Prizepool: $651,360; Date: 2005-06-091. Cliff Josephy Syosset, NY $192,150

Event #9 No Limit Hold'emBuy-in: 2,000 + 0; Entries: 1403; Prizepool: $2,581,520; Date: 2005-06-101. Erik Seidel Las Vegas, NV $611,795

Event #10 Limit Hold'emBuy-in: 2,000 + 0; Entries: 569; Prizepool: $1,046,940; Date: 2005-06-111. Reza Payvar Los Angeles, CA $303,610

Event #11 Pot Limit Hold'emBuy-in: 2,000 + 0; Entries: 540; Prizepool: $993,600; Date: 2005-06-121. Edward Moncada Tulsa, OK $298,070

Event #12 Pot-Limit Omaha w/ RebuysBuy-in: 2,000 + 0; Entries: 212; Rebuys: 395; Prizepool: $1,180,080; Date: 2005-06-131. Josh Arieh Atlanta, GA $381,600

Event #13 No Limit Hold'emBuy-in: 5,000 + 0; Entries: 466; Prizepool: $2,190,200; Date: 2005-06-141. T.J. Cloutier Richardson, TX $657,100

Event #14 Seven Card Stud Hi-Low SplitBuy-in: 1,000 + 0; Entries: 595; Prizepool: $541,450; Date: 2005-06-151. Steve Hohn Overland Park, KS $156,985

Event #15 Limit Hold'em ShootoutBuy-in: 1,500 + 0; Entries: 450; Prizepool: $621,000; Date: 2005-06-161. Mark Seif Incline Village, NV $181,330

Event #16 No Limit Hold'em ShootoutBuy-in: 1,500 + 0; Entries: 780; Prizepool: $1,076,400; Date: 2005-06-171. Anthony Reategui Chandler, AZ $269,100

Event #17 Limit Hold'emBuy-in: 2,500 + 0; Entries: 373; Prizepool: $857,900; Date: 2005-06-181. Quinn Do Seattle, WA $265,975

Event #18 7 Card Stud 8 or BetterBuy-in: 2,000 + 0; Entries: 279; Prizepool: $513,360; Date: 2005-06-191. Denis Ethier NC, $160,682

Event #19 Pot-Limit OmahaBuy-in: 1,500 + 0; Entries: 291; Prizepool: $423,405; Date: 2005-06-191. Barry Greenstein RPV, CA $135,500

Event #20 Pot-Limit Hold'emBuy-in: 5,000 + 0; Entries: 239; Prizepool: $1,123,300; Date: 2005-06-201. Brian Wilson Ft Myers, FL $370,685

Event #21 Omaha 8 or BetterBuy-in: 2,500 + 0; Entries: 359; Prizepool: $825,700; Date: 2005-06-211. Todd Brunson Juarez, TX $255,945

Event #22 No Limit Hold'emBuy-in: 1,500 + 0; Entries: 2013; Prizepool: $2,777,940; Date: 2005-06-221. Mark Seif Incline Village, NV $611,145

Event #23 Seven Card StudBuy-in: 5,000 + 0; Entries: 192; Prizepool: $902,400; Date: 2005-06-241. Jan Sorensen Odense, Denmark $293,275

Event #24 No Limit Hold'emBuy-in: 2,500 + 0; Entries: 1056; Prizepool: $2,428,800; Date: 2005-06-251. Farzad Bonyadi Aliso Viejo, CA $594,960

Event #25 Pot-Limit Hold'emBuy-in: 2,500 + 0; Entries: 425; Prizepool: $977,500; Date: 2005-06-251. Johnny Chan Las Vegas, NV $303,025

Event #26 Ladies No Limit Hold'emBuy-in: 1,000 + 0; Entries: 601; Prizepool: $546,910; Date: 2005-06-261. Jennifer Tilly $158,335

Event #27 Pot-Limit Omaha with Re-buysBuy-in: 5,000 + 0; Entries: 134; Rebuys: 224; Prizepool: $1,765,568; Date: 2005-06-271. Phil Ivey Las Vegas, NV $635,603

Event #28 Limit Hold’emBuy-in: 5,000 + 0; Entries: 269; Prizepool: $1,264,300; Date: 2005-06-271. Dan Schmiech Houston, TX $404,585

Event #29 No-Limit Hold’emBuy-in: 2,000 + 0; Entries: 1072; Prizepool: $1,972,480; Date: 2005-06-281. Lawrence Gosney Leeds, UK $483,195

Event #30 - RazzBuy-in: 1,500 + 0; Entries: 291; Prizepool: $401,580; Date: 2005-06-291. O'Neil Longson $125,690

Event #31 No-Limit Hold’em Six HandedBuy-in: 5,000 + 0; Entries: 301; Prizepool: $1,414,700; Date: 2005-06-291. Doyle Brunson Las Vegas, NV $367,800

Event #32 Omaha Hi-LowBuy-in: 5,000 + 0; Entries: 224; Prizepool: $1,052,800; Date: 2005-06-301. David Chiu Rowland Hts, CA $347,410

Event #33 No Limit Hold'emBuy-in: 3,000 + 0; Entries: 1010; Prizepool: $2,787,600; Date: 2005-07-011. Andre Boyer Las Vegas, NV $682,810

Event #34 Seniors No-Limit Hold'emBuy-in: 1,000 + 0; Entries: 825; Prizepool: $750,750; Date: 2005-07-02 Paul Mckinney Kingsport, TN $202,725

Event #35 Pot Limit OmahaBuy-in: 10,000 + 0; Entries: 165; Prizepool: $1,551,000; Date: 2005-07-03 Rafi Amit Holon? $511,835

Event #36 Limit Hold’emBuy-in: 3,000 + 0; Entries: 406; Prizepool: $1,120,560; Date: 2005-07-03 Todd Witteles Las Vegas, NV $347,385

Event #37 No Limit Hold'em with Re-BuysBuy-in: 1,000 + 0; Entries: 894; Rebuys: 1584; Prizepool: $2,350,020; Date: 2005-07-04 Joe Heneghan Safety Hatbor, FL
$611,015

Event # 39 Limit Deuce to Seven Draw with Re-buysBuy-in: 5,000 + 0; Entries: 65; Rebuys: 139; Prizepool: $986,860; Date: 2005-07-06 David Grey Henderson, NV $365,135

EI & Phil Gordon's excellent daily podcasts from WSOP

2005-07-04T09:44:00.000+07:00

Phil's Donation of a Portion of His 2005 WSOP Winnings to Fight Cancer!

EI & Phil Gordon are bringing you excellent daily podcasts from this years WSOP. Have a listen!

No-limit Hold'emInterviews with James Woods, Erick Lindgren, Annie Duke
$1,500
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Play

Pot-limit Hold'emInterviews with Daniel Negreanu, Greg Raymer, Mark Seif
$1,500
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Wooohooo! Way To Go Doyle: Dynamic Poker Father & Son Duo Rule WSOP!

2005-07-02T10:58:00.000+07:00

Congrats to Todd Brunson and Johnny Chan!

2005-07-01T20:10:00.000+07:00

Your Online Poker Money:Questions and Answers

2005-06-29T10:35:00.000+07:00

Where is my money held? All money is managed by the poker room.

How do I get paid? They can send checks or transfer the money directly into your bank account.

Which currencies can I play in? They accept deposits in all major currencies. The poker room currency is US Dollars, and other currencies will be transferred to the poker room using a fair exchange rate (the exchange rate used can be seen in the Cashier section of the poker client); no profits will be made on currency exchanges, and the same rate is applied to both withdrawals and deposits.

Is my transaction secure? Yes it is. Online poker rooms use secure server technology and industry standard encryption to ensure that their financial transactions are as secure as possible.

What is the minimum deposit? Minimum deposits range from $20.00 up to $50.00 depending on the poker room.

Are the online poker rooms secure and honest? Yes! They have made certain that neither your money nor the integrity of the games is compromised. From sophisticated random number generation, to 128-bit encryption, to a range of other measures they have implemented the poker rooms with security as a number one priority.

Do they have promotions, and how do I find out about them? They frequently hold promotions. You will be informed of them by email, the Welcome window when you enter the game, and their Home Page.

Is there a credit card processing fee? No, not at the rooms on this page.

How do I get money onto the site? You must first set up a real money account and then make a deposit using one of the various supported payment mechanisms. When you register with the poker room, your screen name becomes tied to your money account and whenever you take a seat at a real money table you request chips from your money account.

How do I get money out of the poker room? You cash out. Money in the actual poker table is automatically returned to your money account whenever you leave a table. You can make withdrawls from your money account at any time.

Can I transfer money to another player? Yes at most online poker rooms.

Ode To My Best Poker Pal "Q"

2005-06-23T16:16:00.000+07:00

The room is cheap, the furnishings stark.
The florescent light is so damn dark.
When I look up, I fill with fear.
The end of this hand is drawing near,
this lonely table, a troubled place,
their cold dead stares, dealer's empty face.
Well, I see no reason to persevere,
no reason to laugh or shed a tear,
no reason to ponder or even to wait,
no cards to come, it's much too late.
And so this night I will raise my eyes
to imagine the clear but mysterious skies
that arch above us, so far from sin.
Are you there Q cuz I'm goin' all in?

Seeking Tells : A Poker Poem

2005-06-23T14:28:00.000+07:00

Seeking Tells

Lord let me be as a cool window pane set in a church door.
The breath of the hopeful fogging my surface,
While I remain transparent to their sight.
So that I might condense fact
From the vapor of nuance,
In the tremor of their hands
Or the sound of their voice.
Give me vision into their hearts and minds,
As they offer prayers on your green-felt altar.
Let me be your altarboy in the poker room,
So that I may gather their donations,
Like the whale strains krill from the sea.

Beginners Guide To Downloading An Online Poker Room, Bonus and Rake Rebate

2005-06-23T01:08:00.000+07:00

How Do You Start Playing Online?

Beginning your poker playing experience at an Online Poker Room is a simple and easy process. To play, you need to download the Poker Room by clicking on the banner add or link at this site. Once you have downloaded the Poker Room , you double-click on the icon and the Poker Room will self-install on your computer. When it completes installing, it will connect to the Poker Room where you will see a registration window. Once you connect to the Poker Room, you will see the Lobby area. You can look around without registering. To play for free or for real money, you must register. Registration takes just a few moments. Select a unique screen name. Other players in the Poker Room will know you by your screen name. You must also select a password. To play for real money, you must open a cage account with the poker room also. That's all ... you are now ready to sit at a table, get chips, and begin playing poker. We know you enjoy yourself and we wish you the best of luck.

What About Bonus ?

A bonus is extra money the poker room will give you for buying in and playing for real money. It ranges from 20% to 40% of the amount you buyin for at the well established and popular poker rooms up to 100% at the newer poker rooms that are trying to get started. If the the bonus is 25% and to deposit $100 you geta total of $125. I strongly suggest the older and well established poker rooms. One of the deposit options all these poker rooms is a company called netteller. If you use them you normally will get a 10% higher bonus.
You can go from poker room to poker room getting the bonuses and it is a fairly common practice known as "bonus whoring". The bonus is for new customers only although from time to time the poker rooms offer a reload bonus. Some people earn their bonus, cashout and move on to the next poker room and bonus.

Rakeback or Rake Rebate?

You must earn your bonus by playing a certain amount of real money poker hands, which varies from room to room. Below is Doyle's Rooms explanation of their bonus and how you earn the bonus. I earned their bonus in 4 days of heavy play.
The poker rooms make their money off of "rake". That is a percentage of each pot that the house keeps, ranging from 2% up to 10%. The well established older poker rooms all have rakes at the lower end of the spectrum. "Rake rebate" or "Rakeback" is when an affiliate of the poker rooms, like me, offers you a refund (so to speak) of part of the money that the poker rooms take from your pots. I give all players who use the links at my sites a rake rebate of 20%-40% depending on the site they download. In other words I split what I earn with you in order to encourage you to support my websites and to come back anytime you need another poker room download. For example if you play $25/$50 nolimit holdem you will be refunded about $100 per week for average play. So, at all of my sites you get both the bonus, with no code words required, and rake back too. Note: there is no rake rebate for Party Poker or its skins.

The following is Doyle's Room(one of my favorites) explanation of their bonus and how you earn it:

ACTION POINTS / PROMOTIONS Our Action Points system automatically rewards you while you play! You accumulate Action Points by playing in real money games, including single- and multi-table tournaments. Additionally, from time to time, we may offer additional opportunities for you to earn Action Points that are redeemable for a variety of cool prizes and stuff.The more you play, the more Action Points you earn!
If you want to get your hands on Super/System 2, you can get it FREE just by playing. Earn 10,000 action points and get your hands on Super/System 2 absolutely free.Sign up for Doyle's Room and select the Super/System 2 (SS2) option from the registration page. Then accumulate 10,000 Action Points in 90 days and the book will be shipped to you.
What if I prefer to receive a signup bonus?Doyle's Room is currently offering a 25% SIGNUP BONUS to all new customers!Upon initial signup to Doyle's Room, players are given a choice between Doyle Brunson's long awaited Super/System 2 or a 25% signup bonus.Make your initial deposit with Neteller and we'll increase your sign-up bonus to 35% -- automatically!Please click here for more details on our bonus program.How Action Points are awarded
A pool of Action Points is generated per hand. Each time a bet is made, the Action Points pool increases.
So, the larger the pot, the more Action Points there will be *.
The available points per pot will be distributed to all players who are dealt a hand in the pot on a pro-rated (percentage) basis.
The more you bet, the larger your share of the hand's available Action Points will be -- and it doesn't matter whether you win or lose the pot!
Currently, Action Points awarded for tournament fees are credited towards the Action Points usable for freeroll entries and prizes.
* For every real money hand that is dealt a maximum of 300 Action Points will be awarded.

NPR Presents "Making A Living At Online Poker"

2005-06-17T11:35:00.000+07:00

Have A Listen!
http://www.npr.org/dmg/dmg.php?prgCode=DAY&showDate=03-May-2005&segNum=8&mediaPref=RM&getUnderwriting=1

All the best online poker rooms, bonus, rake rebate and poker info on the net.
http://onlinepokersites.bravehost.com/
Tells you where to find the good online sites and what online sites to avoid!

Melissa "Lisa" Michele Polk Obituary

2005-06-16T11:20:00.000+07:00

Melissa "Lisa" Michele Polk, Mom, "IamtheQty" and Poker Queen

Recent Deaths

Melissa "Lisa" Michele Polk
Melissa "Lisa" Michele Polk, 32, of Elgin passed away Friday, June 10, 2005 in Crossville, TN. She was born November 29, 1972 in Elgin the daughter of Dale and Carla Adkerson.Survivors include: Her parents, Dale and Carla Adkerson of Elgin; four daughters, Kayla, Kristin, Breanna and Rain; two sons, Zachery and Travis; three sisters, Tosha, Amanda and Tiffany; two brothers, Jack and Dustin; a Grandmother, Geneva Simpson of Elgin; God parents, Paula Kovacs of Poplar Grove & Elmer Wacker of Belvidere.Preceded in death by her great-grandparents.Funeral services will be held at 7:00 PM on Wednesday, June 15, 2005 in the Laird Funeral Home, Elgin with the Rev. Steve Srock officiating. Burial will be private. Visitation will be held on Wednesday from 3:00 PM until the time of services in the funeral home.

http://onlinepokersites.bravehost.com = Online Cheats Black List

2005-06-16T00:10:00.000+07:00

http://onlinepokersites.bravehost.com

Online Poker Sites Central
Promises The Best Online Poker Sites, Bonuses & Rebates & Which Sites To Avoid!

Whitelist of Safe and Recomended Poker, Casino & Book Sites
and
A 4 Page Black List of Cheating Online Poker Players IDs,

Online Poker, Casino, Investment and Sports Book Sites to Avoid!

http://onlinepokersites.bravehost.com

Goodbye Q

2005-06-14T02:05:00.000+07:00

Melissa Polk, known in pro online poker circles as "IamtheQ" and "Jumbone" among other Ids and know simply as Lisa to her many friends, died last wednesday of a gunshot wound to the stomach. She leaves her beautiful 4 year old daughter "Rain" behind and the many friends whose lives she touched. I am proud to say that I loved my online poker buddy "Q" and I was lucky to have known her. She was a loving friend and wonderful mother. I am sorry I wasn't there when she needed someone. She always was there for everyone else and her true colors always shined through. We were blessed to have had her in our lives.

Goodbye and good luck Lisa. We will miss you and the sun will shine a little less brightly without you...

Albert Einstein and Edgar Allen Poe Teach Online Poker Mastery or Know This and Win the WSOP Main Event

2005-06-12T08:27:00.000+07:00

That's right! Professor77 delivers it here first. Old Al and Eddie defined the basis for online poker success. If you incorporate these pearls in your poker strategy you will own the table!

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

Albert Einstein

"The measures, then," he continued, "were good in their kind, and well executed; their defect lay in their being inapplicable to the case, and to the man. A certain set of highly ingenious resources are, with the Prefect, a sort of Procrustean bed, to which he forcibly adapts his designs. But he perpetually errs by being too deep or too shallow, for the matter in hand; and many a schoolboy is a better reasoner than he. I knew one about eight years of age, whose success at guessing in the game of 'even and odd' attracted universal admiration. This game is simple, and is played with marbles. One player holds in his hand a number of these toys, and demands of another whether that number is even or odd. If the guess is right, the guesser wins one; if wrong, he loses one. The boy to whom I allude won all the marbles of the school. Of course he had some principle of guessing; and this lay in mere observation and admeasurement of the astuteness of his opponents. For example, an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and, holding up his closed hand, asks, 'are they even or odd?' Our schoolboy replies, 'odd,' and loses; but upon the second trial he wins, for he then says to himself, the simpleton had them even upon the first trial, and his amount of cunning is just sufficient to make him have them odd upon the second; I will therefore guess odd'; --he guesses odd, and wins. Now, with a simpleton a degree above the first, he would have reasoned thus: 'This fellow finds that in the first instance I guessed odd, and, in the second, he will propose to himself upon the first impulse, a simple variation from even to odd, as did the first simpleton; but then a second thought will suggest that this is too simple a variation, and finally he will decide upon putting it even as before. I will therefore guess even' guesses even, and wins. Now this mode of reasoning in the schoolboy, whom his fellows termed "lucky," --what, in its last analysis, is it?" "It is merely," I said, "an identification of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent." "It is," said Dupin;" and, upon inquiring of the boy by what means he effected the thorough identification in which his success consisted, I received answer as follows: 'When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.' This response of the schoolboy lies at the bottom of all the spurious profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucauld, to La Bougive, to Machiavelli, and to Campanella." "And the identification," I said, "of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent, depends, if I understand you aright upon the accuracy with which the opponent's intellect is admeasured." "For its practical value it depends upon this," replied Dupin; and the Prefect and his cohort fall so frequently, first, by default of this identification, and, secondly, by ill-admeasurement, or rather through non-admeasurement, of the intellect with which they are engaged. They consider only their own ideas of ingenuity; and, in searching for anything hidden, advert only to the modes in which they would have hidden it. They are right in this much --that their own ingenuity is a faithful representative of that of the mass; but when the cunning of the individual felon is diverse in character from their own, the felon foils them, of course. This always happens when it is above their own, and very usually when it is below. They have no variation of principle in their investigations; at best, when urged by some unusual emergency --by some extraordinary reward --they extend or exaggerate their old modes of practice, without touching their principles."

Edgar Allen Poe, The Purloined Letter

http://mypokerroom.blogspot.com

Quick and dirty holdem odds calculation for my holdem buddies at the online poker rooms

2005-06-07T19:36:00.000+07:00

Quick and dirty holdem odds calculation
On the flop multiply your number of outs by 4. On the turn, multiply your number of outs by 2. This gives you a rough figure. If you have a gutshot straight draw after the flop you have 4 outs.With two cards to come, you multiply the 4 by 4 and you get 16% chance of making the straight(true odds are 17%). On the turn, with 1 card to come you multiply the 4 by 2 and you get 8% chance of making the straight(true odds are 9%).

OUTS and ODDS on FLOP and TURN
15 OUTS-openend strt flush draw->strt or flush or strt flush-54%, 33%
12 OUTS-gutshot strt flush draw ->straight or flush 45%, 26%
9 OUTS-four flush->flush 35%, 19%
8 OUTS-open ended straight-> straight-32%, 17%
7 OUTS-set->fullhouse 28%, 15%
6 OUTS-no pair->pair 24%, 13 %
5 OUTS-one pair->twopair or set, gutshot & backdoor 20%, 11%
4 OUTS-gutshot->straight 17%, 9%
3 OUTS-single overcard draw 13%, 7%
2 OUTS-pocket pair-> set 8%, 4%
1 OUT-3 of a kind->4 of a kind 4%, 2%

courtesy of Professor77
http://mypokerroom.blogspot.com/

The Man Responsible For 100s of Online Poker Cheaters: He developed and sells WinHoldEm poker cheating software

2005-06-05T21:21:00.000+07:00

Ray Edward Bornert II is responsible For 100s of online poker cheats; he developed and sells WinHoldEm poker bot cheating software.

Look at where the immoral s.o.b. who developed and sells WinHoldEm poker bot cheating software went to school, Oral Robert's University and Christ For The Nations Institute. He's an evangelical Christian theologian for Christ's sake! First we learned that a police officer developed and is selling cheat-at-poker and pokerbot-pro, and now we find out that the motherf###er who sells winholdem is a priest. What's this world coming to?

I uge you not to contact him and tell or show him what you think of online poker cheating and how much we all appreciate having our hard-earned money stolen. Note: I absolutely discourage any illegal activity such as giving him a "columbian necktie" or a forced 10 gallon hot soapy enema.

P.S. Be sure read his hobbies to see how this immoral cheating priest wannabe used his "blood money" to buy a " jogging track" , "swimming pool" and a "2001 Convertible Corvette." If you go against my advice and have a "thoroughly... life changing conversation" with him, tell him "Professor77" says hi!

Date : 2003-AUG-4
Name : Ray Edward Bornert II
Address : 4143 Red Laurel Way
City/State/Zip : Snellville, GA 30039
Phone Home : 770-736-7870
Phone Fax : 770-736-7890
Phone Mobile : 770-309-7870
E-Mail : ray.bornert@hixoxih.com
DOB : 1961-OCT-02
Family : Wife & Two Children

Education History
Oral Roberts University Tulsa, OK 1987 Bachelor Degree Computer ScienceI was able to finish a 4 year degree in 3 years while maintaining a 4.0 GPA in my major with a 3.1 overall.
Christ for the Nations Institute Dallas, TX 1981 Associate Degree Theology
Plano Senior High School Dallas, TX 1979 High School Diploma

Poker Professional
Currently involved in developing professional online poker client/server system. I fully developed the entire client/server technology and it can be seen at http://www.pokerprofessional.com. This is an excellent example of the caliber of my graphics ability as well as client server communications and n-tier development. Project developed entirely with VisualC++ and SQL 2000 on a Win2K platform.

Realtime Gaming
For 2 years I was a Senior Project Engineer for Realtime Gaming. I was involved in all aspects of the development/production n-tier client/server systems. I developed several new technologies. I performed end user market analysis and database research. I developed 6 new Blackjack games that are currently in production in 40 online casinos worldwide. I invented 2 entirely new casino games both in production. I was also involved in staffing decisions and managed the third party contractors.

Heuristic Park
I worked for over a year as a Senior Systems Developer & Designer for Heuristic Park in Atlanta on a large cutting edge 3D game. During my time there I developed the following game systems.

Origin Systems
I took a full time job at Origin Systems, Inc. as a Senior Systems Consultant. During that time I worked on their core technology for their star products - Wing Commander & Ultima. I assisted the programming staff with developing new technology and provided advice to the producer groups and tools groups company wide. We worked with Win95 platforms using Visual C++, C and Assembly.

HixoxiH
SoftwareI am currently the President of HixoxiH Software. I founded the company 1993-JAN-1. I started this company as a means to enter the Computer Video Game Industry. In the beginning our primary asset was a 3D first person graphics engine called ‘XOX’. I completed the first version in late January 1993 and sold my first license in February 1993. We worked with PC platforms using C++, C and Assembly. We currently do a wide range of software development.

Hobbies
In my spare time I usually enjoy playing real-time strategy PC games. My wife and kids and I love the movies and we collect our favorite DVD's. Once in a while I tinker with a chess program I wrote that plays at or near a rating of 2000. I also evangelize 3D chess from time to time especially the version I invented seen here at http://www.hixoxih.com/games/chess/3D8.htm. I own a jogging track next to my house and I enjoy running 1-6 miles on a regular basis and then swimming laps in the pool afterward. I would ski regularly if it were possible. When I turned 40 I bought a 2001 Convertible Corvette - something I wish I'd done when I was 30. We also love to BBQ and entertain friends and family in a relaxed atmosphere. Our idea of a fine night out is sushi and a movie followed by a cup of coffee and a book in the Borders coffee shop. I also thoroughly enjoy life changing conversation
(Portions were deleted to save space)

posted by Professor77
http://mypokerroom.blogspot.com

Requiem for WSOP Dead Money

2005-06-05T17:58:00.000+07:00

Requiem for WSOP Dead Money

What glory for those busted out as dead money?
The clatter from their departing former chips.
Only the death rattle mutters of “nice hand”,
Will patter out the losers' heartbroken trips.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of frustration’s hell;
And their hearts' despair of lost lifelong desire.
What applause may be given to speed them all?
Not from the hands of hopeful fans but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of unsaid goodbyes.
The pallor of railbirds’ brows shall be their pall;
Their trophy the tenderness of patient minds.
They all know that they have given their all,
And each new deal brings a posting of the blinds.

By Professor77
http://mypokerroom.blogspot.com

Online Poker Cheating Scam Exposed: Cheat-At-Poker/pokercheatsexposed/No Rules Poker/pokerbot-pro

2005-05-31T13:41:00.000+07:00

Visit the Largest Free Online Poker Library at Poker Nation for a Complete Copy http://groups.msn.com/PokerNation/

Warning Scam Alert! You are about to enter the BS Zone.

http://www.cheat-at-poker.com/ or http://www.pokercheatsexposed.com/ will lead you to a link that for 59.95 promises to allow u to cheat at online poker and make $25,000 a week OR YOUR MONEY BACK!!! (don't bother going to the sites because someone has posted the complete book as a comment at the bottom of this post. Click the comment to read it. )The following is from the advert:

"For a small investment of $59.95 you can download the most effective method of making enormous profits playing online poker. Guaranteed. All you have to do is click on the PayPal button on the bottom of this page, and safely and securely place your order with any credit card. Any information you submit is completely safe and will never, ever be shared. Once you complete the order you will have access to The Online Poker Cheaters Tool-Kit instantly. You will then be able to fiercely dominate any player out there! Just imagine what an edge you will have once you learn all these tactics. You will be able to make huge cash at will, whenever you feel like playing.
The Online Poker Cheaters Tool-Kit will change your life forever! Hurry before you miss out on the best opportunity that will ever come your way. *Introductory price of $59.95 will change at any time. **Limited time offer. But wait...we have more for you As was mentioned earlier, we have access and knowledge of all the latest methods and 'underground' tools that are available. If you order The Cheaters Tool-Kit today, we are going to include a FREE BONUS. This is the most radical poker technique available today...
X-Ray Poker Tool- (See what everyone is holding) Information FREE for ordering right now!*Not recommended to use or even attempt. We in no way endorse the use of this tactic. Information for educational and entertainment purposes only.For only $59.95 you really can't go wrong. Is today the day you decide to make a change and start dominating the poker room? There is absolutely no reason anymore to play with fear, anxiety and ignorance. Will you remain the sucker? The decision is yours. *WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO PULL THIS OFFER OFFLINE AT ANY TIME." ( he has moved the time back 4 or 5 times so far)

Well, what you get is an ebook and a link to http://www.pokerbot-pro.com/ that for 59.95 more (and the after you buy that another $90 .oo for the required upgrade) offers you "pokerbot-pro" a winholdemish program that apparently doesn't do as promised, read the following exchange of e-mails between Ken Chan/David Glazen and a "satisfied" and not so bright customer:

From: "David Glazen"
To: "tom shue"
Subject: Re: the poker bot your refund has just been issued and is on the way!

On Apr 11, 2005 7:55 PM, tom shue

david wrote: Hi tom, I am sorry that you feel taken advantage of as that certainly was not my intention. Unfortunatley there is no single winning profile you need to use different ones under different circumstances. I feel bad that you have lost money so if you send me the transaction ID I will send you a refund.

-----Original Message-----
From: tom shue
Date: Mon, 11 Apr 2005 16:23:25 >
To:David Glazen

Subject: the poker bot Well I am completely disappointed in the poker bot... I used it for 48 hours on a 1 to 2able in the solid mode i have lots over 75 dollars... I paid you 59 .00 then i had to pay 89 to up grade the inspector and have lost 75 dollars.. wow it was a huge loss... I would think that if you wanted me to make money as you did you would recommend a profile on the inspector a limit that i should of tried and all information that you have on how to manage the supposed income it generates... I have tried several profiles like the maniac it plays the big hands very aggressive which is great but It plays> too many hands.. If you choose the solid profile it plays way to soft when it has a premium hand like fold ace king off suit in the small blind for no raise... I think the exact specs of the inspector profile u used to make all of this money should of been disclosed....its like the inspector can be modified to work but it should be included information .. I know that the scrip! t that ! you wrote was some work but considering you are selling share ware and a demo inspector you are making a killing.... I feel taken advantage of....I play way better than the bot but i just wanted to play poker when i am asleep and revenue money .. the concept is awesome but the end result is very weak .. I hope you will refund my money or give me information that you used (exact specks and all available information on your limits and strategy).. oh by the way does poker in specotr know you are selling there demo for money oe the makers of auto it just wondering... I am sure you have made a fortune on this idea... Oh by the way I saw the interview u had with poker pages. I thought to told me not to tell anyone. please respond to this email as the last email was left UN answered , My money must of cleared,. Tom Shue ( i feel taken advantage of) "

These people are selling someone elses free demo of Poker Inspector and an upgrade to it w/ a malfunctioning bot!

In the advert they have screen shots from party poker and it shows his username as "steveglazer".
It also shows "$5000 new player freeroll""Make your first deposit to register!" and the "Cash Out" Button is disabled in his party poker account.
Hmmm, play money? No cash account? Freeroll? Steve Glazer(3 names so for for the same guy)? A little suspicious...
What about his magic "X-Ray Poker Tool- (See what everyone is holding)" according to his tome you first download and then run the client/server software at http://www.tightvnc.com/ ). Then ...:
"This software will actually allow you to see another computer as if you were right in front of it. Now it does not take a computer scientist to understand the obvious implications of what you can do with this software and how someone could perhaps use it to gain a massive advantage playing online poker. Let’s just say that me and you were playing heads up on party poker for example and that you were able to use the TightVNC software to see the desktop of my machine. Well that would mean that you can see whatever I can see. So as long as my hole cards were visible to me they would also be visible to you! "
"In order to connect to a target computer the target machine will have to have the TightVNC server running on the computer and you will need to know the password. This can seem like a major stumbling block to those who are not really determined to make massive amounts of cash. But I know that is not you. So if you really are willing to do whatever it takes to win then I know you will find a way around this. It can be done easier then you think believe me."
Hmmm, password and casino server running tightvnc...doesn't seem so magical. If had an in to the poker room's server and a password allowing me unlimited access why do I need your f***ing book and software???
But Ken Chan/David Glazen has more to share with us:
"I must caution you though that it is not legal to install it on someone’s machine without there knowledge so you will have to get their permission first. I cannot and will not encourage any illegal activity whatsoever. I wish you the best of luck and know that your poker success in now at your fingertips.
Well that’s it my friend. Just remember that winning online is all about attitude! So don’t be afraid to do whatever it takes to win. You now have to tools all you need is the will and determination. Best of Luck, Ken Chan." please note all the spelling errors and bs are from the original text which I obtained free via P2P.
You're asking yourself who is this clown?
He appears to be a...drumroll please...
law enforcement officer!
A Clown Cop...
I know you don't believe me so
here's the link to his resume:
http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/difa/Resumes/KenChan.pdf
It appears that his e-mail address is:
balmon@hotmail.com or
kenchanpoker@gmail.com or
propoker@gmail.com
ONLINE POKER PLAYER, John Maynor,tel # 648-908-4531, E-mail Information is spamming for him.
What you do with this information is up to you. I discourage any illegal activity such as administering a "columbian necktie" or giving him a forced 5 gallon hot soapy enema. But, if you do go against my advice and contact him, tell Ken Chan/David/Steve Glazen or John Maynor that "Professor77" says hi.
Note: I absolutely do not endorse cheating at poker or any of the online cheating programs or books that are foisted on an unwary buying public. Although, some say that the buyers are probably getting what they deserve. If you go against my advice and buy these products I suggest you first buy a condom and then apply KY Jelly or Vaseline to your nether regions because you are about to get royally screwed.

WSOP Winning Hands List

2005-05-29T11:32:00.000+07:00

70 - n/a
71 - n/a
72 - n/a
73 - Pearson, As7s [no pair, beat KJ]
74 - n/a
75 - Roberts; 9s9h [beat AK]
76 - Brunson; Ts2s [full house, beat AJ 2 pair]
77 - Brunson; Ts2h [full house, beat 85 2pair]
78 - Baldwin; QdQc [set, beat 99 - also a set]
79 - Fowler; 7s6d [str8, beat AA]
80 - Ungar; 5s4s [wheel; beat A7 2 pair]
81 - Ungar; AhQh [1 pair Q's, beat T9 str8 draw]
82 - Strauss; AhTc [1 pair T's, beat A4]
83 - McEvoy; QhQs [beat KJ]
84 - Keller; TsTh [beat 64]
85 - Smith; 3s3h [beat A3]
86 - Johnston; AsTh [beat A8]
87 - Chan; As9c [beat 44]
88 - Chan; Jc9c [str8, beat Q7 1 pair]
89 - Helmuth; 9s9c
90 - matloubi - 6s6h [beat 44]
91 - Daugherty; KsJs [beat 73]
92 - Dastmalchi; 8h4c [str8 beat J7 2 pair]
93 - Betchel; Jc6h [beat 74]
94 - Hamilton; Ks8h [beat 85 with 1 pair 8's]
95 - Harrington; 8d9d [1 pair 8's, beat A7]
96 - Seed; 8d9d [2 pair, beat K8]
97 - Ungar; Ah4c [wheel, beat A8]
98 - Nguyen; Jd9c [full house]
99 - Furlong; 5c5d [set, beat 66]
00 - Ferguson; As9c [1 pair 9's, beat AQ]
01 - Mortensen; KcQc [st8, beat AA]
02 - Varkonyi; QdTs [made a full house]
03 - Moneymaker; 54 [made a full house]
04 - Raymer; 88 [made a full house]

Online Poker Cheaters: Good News and Bad News

2005-05-27T20:41:00.000+07:00

Here's the good news: If these losers can't play a single hand at a single table well enough to win then if they try playing multiple hands it stands to reason that, even with their ill-gotten knowledge, they will still lose…

Here’s the bad news:
Winholdem allows them to cheat in 2 primary ways:
1. To manually play multiple hands at 1 table or multiple tables under more than 1 account/ID.
2. To program and use "bots" to automatically play hands for the user. Allowing the user to play many more hands than normal and to play multiple accounts/IDs simultaneously.

The following is from Pokerbot.com(their website)
"Supported Online Poker Casino Sites: Paradise Poker, Party Poker and Poker Stars.
WinHoldEm has complete support for the poker game of Texas Hold'Em including real money, play money, limit, no-limit, regular play and tournaments.
"AutoPlayer has the ability to play Hold'Em for you and in fact it probably plays Hold'Em better than you. Obviously the AutoPlayer has nothing to do until you are seated and playing Hold'Em at a WH supported site. It does this by visually reading and analyzing the Hold'Em game state and deciding on a course of action Allin, Bet/Raise, Call/Check or Fold. It will automatically press the necessary button in the poker casino table window for you."
"Online poker casinos do not want you to run WinHoldem. Some poker clients actively attempt to detect WinHoldem on your computer. There is nothing you can do to control how far they will go to do this. If they detect WinHoldem you are essentially at their mercy. Their reactions can range from just simply closing the poker software to closing your account and possibly conscripting your entire bankroll. "
"WinPP is the solution to the problem. WinPP is a remote window control application. Essentially, WinPP is a very basic instance of PCAnyWhere. WinPP gives you the ability to see a copy of a window that is running on another computer. You avoid detection by running your poker software on a machine where WinHoldem is not installed. And you use WinPP to let your WinHoldem machine see the poker window. "
"You need two computers. You must have physical access to two computers connected to a fast network such as a LAN. The idea is to run WinHoldem on one computer and run the online casino software on another computer.
If you want absolute maximum chances to avoid detection, then make sure that WinHoldem is NOT installed on the casino computer. Technically speaking, there is nothing you can do to control exactly what the casino software can or cannot see on the computer where it is running unless you downloaded/installed all casino software to a restricted windows user account and you're running it from that restricted account. "

Professor77 sez "May God have mercy on our enemies because I won't."

Complete List of Winholdem Poker Cheats User IDs

2005-05-27T08:27:00.000+07:00

If they're stupid enough to buy, use poker cheat software and then to post about it, I might as well publish they're online IDs (obtained from winholdem support). They appear to be primarily focused on the site Party Poker. If you know any of the following people or have more information please contact me and I will publish it here and post it to the recpoker and twoplustwo forums after I verify it. I suggest that if u play w/ 1 of the mentioned IDs and u r suspicious; get a hand history and forward to me via my blog and I will start crossreferencing IDs that appear at tables together frequently and publish this info here and to the affected poker sites.

The following link will take you to the membership list at Winholdem. Many have email links(dropem a line and tellem what you think, let them know Professor77 said hi!) and a few website links. There are at this time 390 members.
http://www.winholdem.net/forum/memberlist.php

The Following is a complete list of all user id's from winholdem

jcb
RB1
-P-
Zoodoogie
gregg
yukonsm
swiftrhett
NoWay
j_happy
Zabulus
BlackDog
swedencheat
zippy
betme
dreamer
1outer
blobbo
apaul
Gordon
The Bot
jrs
jmags
FTN4Ever
joey3002
foldem
foldem2
jmoe
cheech
airbornemofo
Relevance
Wise1
brianmarc
Robast
xyz123
ezalog123
brianmarK
Rawr
express
tiptop66
Cooterbug
Pokerwise
fuddyduddy
Winpoker
Johnnyboy
LowLimitSoldier
low limit soldier
Tylius
stu_unger
suidmach
gusser
kcj.poker
manos
manos_
benny
Nackademin
holdme
rd3500
sickz
bcherb2
maddog2030
unsmashed
thrain
AndysDad
BettingB
halbemehal
MWM66
Paco
mossman76
PokerEly25
stancan
mildoh
Tophat
Kalin35
cjlax5
timmak
crispvx
Zee
slay2k
bad_dog (UK)
Axcssr
murda024
HowlMan
galaxyqueen
galaxyqueen50
mlamma
kalle66
Scotsman
Smooth
Chasmaster
Str8flush
zero
nenver
j21w
hatchfan
bigbad
albyitaly
andrew25
San Po
snikey
cDeli
Rage
Robert6902
sillywilly
corbyt
j0eYz
maxstax
Foyanontario
fullrange
gregson
jaygee
polkator
jugador615
BSGJunkie
Omar www.wizardshandicapping.com
ditrying
rideoffsoldier
TheStalk
stalker1
menoottawa
YippySkippy
Big_Dog_NY
TenFootBong
bmoney
rjnitto
resuna
samaj
Bot Anic
tkauto
marv
bot-town
knife44
jgsam
Gregatron
Phil
jrz1972
markyD
pokerjet
Cheat_Is_Fun
youcanownland
kd2559
skin1d
pokerslut
botnovice
franklinJ
dispatcher
Aries
masond24
gp
mhornnt
RayPlay
sesik
snowman
brrrblizzard
guiltyspark
kippe
Lormanthe
Wayfarer
Rump Ranger
mmind
neverlose
jdc
accordexi
lAggy
Majik
dvpoker
1TimePost
usernametaken
test
Nova
cOnfESed
bancode
Diamond
PB123
conman
pork
pokerman411
dunn1977
sublime
makewayhomer
whe123
John Jay
holdembotmaker
fishy
TheCoder
Cowheart
Wanderer
botman
albedoa
iplaypoker
shaft
hansol
STLBUM
Basil
cyma
dell
finpot
Pokah
zoz
very lame
White Rabbit
emotive
idinaahuy payse.boom.ru
Helix
Gigolo
GigoloRR
kidchicago
Godzilla99
RaiseManiac
jmt78
SmellyTuna
jmt1778
repco243 www.repco.ru
longrun
Rjdeliman
mike1212
brad
azlb
sjumper
liquidsyphon
WHODATDOOD
TheMagnus
Jim
dupont2br
RF
carapaufrito
baad_ass_grappler
940Johanny www.italian-charms-textbook.com
glue20
Monster
OscarTheGrouch
cubs-freak
ferox
Quadpants
Onionman England
Max In Montreal Canada
bjhuff
Serguei-Roudnevwww.multipureusa.com
cout
NLTyan
ArnoldEsNumeroUno
georgeggg
pmertens
Betty
Gster UK
aalves
Probot
mr poker
Lucian
MunkeySpaz
pokerplayer2005
anjur
opher
panzer
Gamer
LOD
Rabbot
kbzon
kaykad
ilikeaces86
PokerBot www.thenextgames.com
project_jason
cryonix
john@hotmail.com
thecollector510
philanthrope
ABreaux
DUstb2000
botist
george
JollyJoker
floppy
n_mitch
KaZhaR www.phportal.net
hejhej
Sven
mjaou
vectigal1994 www.chi-origin.be
akzeno
adonicane
Trinston
henrhuse
ILoveLamp
sweaver
sandog05
shrwater
curiousgeorge
ccgeorge
housetown
pokstorr
pokstor
lmkpresidio
Vampman
discordia
kinlog
Mart
mts
wild onion
suitedaces
luckbox
kristiangbg
Rikitiki
Maglun1
Serge_FT
stripclubgm
mattie6030
shortywib
rollallday
brm
Phrozt
weirdian
785785785
ht95134
Intexusa
chrismc
stinkypete
futurescrub
pokerpunk
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