1. Venetian Deep Stack Extravaganza

The Venetian was one of the first properties to begin hosting a summer tournament series that coincided with the big show over at the Rio. The room has one of the best reputations in the business, making the Venetian a popular place to play all summer long. The fields at the DSE tend to be pretty tough, possibly even tougher than the fields at the WSOP in some events. They’re heavily attended by the online contingent, and even most of the amateurs who play there tend to have at least some notion of how to handle themselves at a poker table.

This summer’s DSE schedule has a tournament at noon every day between May 24th and July 15th, including five two-day no-limit tournaments; 30 afternoon events, including bounty tournaments and Omaha events; and nightly $200 second-chance tourneys. The buy-ins for most of the noon and afternoon tournaments run anywhere between $400 and $1,100, with a few events ranging between $2,500 and $5,000 and one $10,000 High Roller tournament. With deep starting stacks and good structures, the Venetian’s series is one a lot of players swear by.

The full Venetian Deep Stack Extravaganza schedule can be found here.

2. Caesars Palace Mega Stack Series

Do you like to play poker tournaments with lots of chips? With, dare to say, a “mega stack”? Then Caesars Palace’s tournament series was made for you.

The daily noon Mega Stack Series tournaments won’t win any prizes for variety since they’re all no-limit hold’em, but the daily 4pm tournaments feature heads-up, shorthanded, and turbo no-limit formats in addition to the occasional pot-limit Omaha event. No matter the start time, none of the 92 tournaments on the schedule at Caesars from May 25th to July 17th gives players any less than 15,000 chips to start on the 50/100 blind level; most have 20,000-chip starting stacks, and some even players as much as 30,000 chips. The buy-ins are more affordable than some of the other series, too, mostly ranging from $130 to $350 with a few $560 tournaments also in the mix.

For players who want to play in the WSOP Main Event but can’t afford its $10K buy-in, the Mega Stack Championship is a solid alternative. For $1,080 you get 30,000 chips, one-hour blind levels, and your choice of three starting days. The tournament also features re-entry until the 6th level each day – something you won’t find at the WSOP ME – so a bad beat doesn’t have to mean the end of your chance at big money.

View the full Mega Stack Series schedule here.

3. Wynn Summer Classic

If Goldilocks were looking to play a tournament in Vegas, there’s a pretty good chance she’d head to the Wynn for its Summer Classic; everything about it seems to hit that “just right” sweet spot between all the others.

It features 30 tournaments – not too much, not too little – running from early June to early July. Most of the tournaments are no-limit hold’em affairs, but there are also limit hold’em and various Omaha tournaments on the schedule. On the spectrum of average buy-ins around Las Vegas, the Wynn Summer Classic falls right in the middle with lots of $340 events, a smattering of $550 and $1,070 events, and a $2,600 championship event. Most of its tournaments have 40-minute levels, while the championship’s are 90 minutes long. And for most events the chip stacks, while deep, aren’t quite “mega”.

The full Wynn Summer Classic schedule is available here.

4. Bellagio Cup VIII

“This isn’t just poker. It’s poker at Bellagio.”

So goes the Mad Men-like tagline for the latest summer tournament series at one of the most iconic poker rooms in Las Vegas. Even when you strip away its sales-pitchiness, there’s something to be said for playing in a setting as gorgeous as the Fontana Room. And when you play at Bellagio, you’ll almost assured to be playing against tough competition (the occasional whale notwithstanding) that can afford big buy-ins; nightly $40 tourneys these ain’t.

If you’re looking for a slate of different poker variants, the Bellagio Cup won’t be for you; all 27 of its tournaments are no-limit hold’em. What it might lack in variety, though, the Bellagio makes up for with the rake; at just 10 percent for the lower buy-ins and less than 7 percent on the high-dollar tourneys, it’s lower on average than anywhere else in Vegas. And if you manage to survive long enough to play at night, you’ll get quite a background show when the fountain show begins outside.

You can view the Bellagio Cup VIII schedule here.

5. 6th Annual Binion’s Classic

The birthplace of tournament poker hasn’t played host to the WSOP since 2004, but that doesn’t mean there’s no action there during the summer. As its name suggests, this series is entering its sixth year, and the schedule continues to evolve. The games on offer for the events include stud, stud hi-lo, HORSE, pot-limit Omaha, limit and pot-limit Omaha hi-lo, and shorthanded no-limit hold’em tournaments featured alongside the old standby of full-ring no-limit hold’em. It’s more variety than you’re likely to find in just about any offline tournament series outside the WSOP.

There are 45 tournaments on schedule at this year’s series; the vast majority of them feature buy-ins of $150 or $200, though there are a handful of $500 events and one with a $1,000 price tag. Perhaps not so unexpectedly for a series with mostly low buy-ins, the levels are a bit shorter than in some of the others – mostly 35 minutes, with some at 45 minutes and only the top-dollar events getting 60 minutes – and you’ll only get a full starting stack in most events if you pay an extra (though small) “bonus buy.” The good news is that the competition isn’t quite as stiff downtown as it is at some of the Strip properties, though most players will still find winning a tournament at Binion’s a challenge.

You can check out the full schedule for the Binion’s Classic here.

Poker News

Two months is a long time for things to go wrong, though, and for every big winner at the Series there are plenty of players who aren’t doing well at all. When you’re on that end of the spectrum all the pluses start to look minuses. The tournaments can become a money pit if you play for volume without a score, and the 24-hour availability of high-stakes cash games can become a siren’s song for players on a bad run in the lower-stakes games and looking for a quick fix. And if you find yourself continuously snatching defeat from the jaws of victory while pursuing that aforementioned easy money.

If you don’t do something to see the light, a bad run can turn into a nightmare. If you find yourself seeing only the dark side of the WSOP – or if you want to preempt seeing it – consider these tips.

1. Don’t chase your losses

If things aren’t going your way, chances are you’ll think about stepping up the stakes to make up for your losses. This is a bad idea.

To be sure, playing above your everyday level isn’t always bad; if you’re in full control of your faculties and playing your A-game, taking a shot can actually be a very good thing. But players in a WSOP funk are rarely in full control of their faculties. They tend to practice poor table selection, they become overly aggressive in bad spots, they stay at the tables too long trying to get even – in short, they become exactly the kind of player that winners take advantage of at the tables. That’s exactly what you don’t want to do if you’re playing higher stakes. There might be an occasional big fish at those tables, but there’s also a full complement of sharks looking to make a meal of that big fish. If you show up in the wrong mindset, they’re likely to turn you into an appetizer – or if you’re really in poor shape, perhaps the main course.

If you have to play through your bad streak, the better option here is to step down in stakes. The players are almost certainly worse, which means your decisions should be much easier than normal. If you’re a tournament player, consider giving satellites a go for a few days.

2. Play somewhere else

One of the beauties of playing poker in Las Vegas is the sheer amount of options you have available to you. Just because you came out for the WSOP doesn’t mean you have to play there all the time.

There are usually several tournament series running around town – events at the Bellagio and the Venetian are on the high end of the scale, while the smaller series that run at downtown casinos and some of the more touristy Strip properties sit on the other end. The money in most of these – at least outside of the Bellagio Cup and the Deep Stack Extravaganza – isn’t anywhere near as good as it as at the WSOP. But then again, neither is the competition. That means the games are at least a level of magnitude easier, and your chances of turning your bad summer around with a win should improve accordingly.

If you’re mostly playing the cash games, you can certainly find softer games all over Vegas. The Strip in particular, with its overflow of schlubby tourists and other amateurs who have seen the game on TV but never tried it in a real life casino, is home to some of the best fish dinners in the entire poker world.

3. Look out for your health

A lot of poker players have a hard enough time taking care of themselves when there’s always a game to be had and they’re doing well. But when you’re in Vegas for a long period of time and you’re losing, looking after your own health can become even more difficult. Focusing on your losses can lead you to neglect proper meals and the rest your body needs, and the easy availability of alcohol and drugs in Vegas means it’s easy to get lost in a depressive spiral if you’re prone to that sort of thing.

If you’re committed to looking out for your health, a lot of the time you could spend wallowing in the despair of losing can instead be spent pulling yourself out of it with exercise. Most of the hotel-casinos in Vegas have a gym, and even if they charge for it’s a lot less costly than a night of drinking or chasing your losses at the table. If you’d rather get your exercise outside, the mornings are a good time to get in a round of golf or a match of tennis before the heat becomes too excruciating to bear. And matching up a healthy diet with that exercise can help you to maintain high energy levels throughout the long days at the WSOP. Chances are you’ll find yourself focusing better, and that might just make the difference between a loss and a win.

4. Make friends (or take them with you)

A stay for the duration of the WSOP is almost always easier if you don’t have to do it alone. It’s common for groups of players to go in on a house for the entire WSOP, and it’s easy to see why. Having someone around to talk to while you’re at the WSOP can be extremely valuable. Talking strategy with others can help you see any obvious holes in your game that you’re overlooking due to tunnel vision. A little moral support – or a kick in the ass, if that’s what you need – isn’t hard to come by when you’re surrounded by people who understand your plight.

If you’re going it alone at the WSOP…don’t. Make a point of finding someone you can talk to. Whether it’s at the tables, or in one of the Rio’s many dining areas, you’ll find yourself surrounded by all sorts of people who have a lot in common with you. Poker players are a gregarious lot in general, so it shouldn’t be too hard to strike up a conversation. Even if you don’t make a friend for life, the human interaction (without money on the line) can do you a lot of good when you’re in a rut.

5. GTFO

Any poker room can be a poisonous environment when you’re unable to put yourself in the right frame of mind. But a poker room with no limits that runs 24 hours a day – well, that’s just dangerous if you’re incapable of self-control. When nothing is working for you at the WSOP, the cure is to get the fuck out of the Rio. Studies have shown that, even though they often feel the need to continue butting their heads against the wall until they achieve their goals through brute force, time away from a task is actually highly valuable for problem-solvers. Since poker is nothing if not one problem to solve after another, this applies to you.

If things aren’t going well for you at the WSOP, go do something else – anything else. There are all sorts of activities within your reach when you’re in Las Vegas. Go see the Grand Canyon or Hoover Dam. Catch a summer blockbuster movie at the Palms’ theatre with some of your friends who have busted out or aren’t playing on a given day. Lounge by the pool for an afternoon. It doesn’t particularly matter what the activity is, so long as it allows you to relax and take your mind off the game. When you come back the results you want may not necessarily follow – variance respects no one, after all – but you’ll almost certainly make better decisions.

Poker News

In order of their appearance, here’s a look at five events on the 2012 WSOP schedule that are guaranteed to grab the poker world’s attention.

1. Event 12: Heads-Up No Limit Hold’em – $10,000 buy-in

The first event of the 2012 WSOP with a five-figure buy-in, this tournament is guaranteed to draw a field filled with poker’s best. From touring tournaments pros to online heads-up specialists to the occasional hometown champion looking to make his mark, this tournament draws all kinds of poker players. And with the 512-player cap, basically anyone who wants to test their one-on-one skills will have the opportunity.

There isn’t a accepted world championship for high-dollar, heads-up tournaments, at least not in the same way that the WSOP Main Event is accepted as poker’s world championship for NLHE. But this tournament is as close to a heads-up world championship as we’re likely to get. First, there’s the price tag, which doubles the entry cost of most similar tournaments in the world. Second, there’s the strength of the field: all the world’s greatest heads-up players tend to already be on location when the tournament runs. And third, there’s the difficulty of winning the tournament: a player has to win nine matches in order to claim the championship, meaning that a win represents a true accomplishment.

2. Event 45: The Poker Players Championship – $50,000 buy-in

After the early boom years it became apparent that the WSOP Main Event, which had once been too expensive for anyone but the world’s best players to enter, had forever changed. Thanks to satellites all over the world, thousands of players began to turn out every year for their shot at the poker world’s most exalted title. The game’s elite players needed a new venue to face off against each other, so in 2006 the WSOP put together a HORSE tournament – featuring alternating games of hold’em, Omaha hi-lo, Razz, stud, and stud hi-lo – with a $50,000 buy-in. Poker legend Chip Reese won that event after a marathon final table, and since his passing in 2007 the David “Chip” Reese Trophy has been awarded to the event’s winner every year.

The game choice irked some, who said that HORSE wasn’t the best test of skill, especially in the modern era of big-bet games. So in 2010 the format for the event was changed to the current eight-game mix to better reflect the tournament organizers’ intent to test all-around poker skill. The five HORSE games were augmented with no-limit hold’em, pot-limit Omaha, and 2-to-7 triple draw, but the Chip Reese Trophy still goes to the winner. Outside of the next event on this list, the Poker Players Championship is without a doubt the best tournament to watch if you want to see truly elite poker players face off against each other.

3. Event 55: The Big One for One Drop – $1,000,000 buy-in

The WSOP has toyed around with high-dollar events for some time now, with the $50K HORSE and Players Championship events and the 40th Anniversary $40K NLHE event. But when Cirque du Soleil founder and amateur poker enthusiast Guy Laliberté suggested upping the ante, the result was a bit more than probably anyone had expected. The largest buy-in in poker history will help to benefit Laliberté’s charity, One Drop, which works to provide clean water in developing countries. One out of every nine dollars in the prize pool will go to the charity.

The $1,000,000 price tag on this unique event means that it is going to draw a much different field than the average WSOP tournament. There will be the usual high-rolling poker pros, of course, but there will also be rich businessmen who can afford to light seven figures’ worth of Federal Reserve Notes on fire just to sit with the world’s greatest poker players. There might also be a satellite winner or two in the field, as the WSOP is holding a mega-satellite with a $25,300 buy-in to award seats.

More than 30 players have already committed to play, and with a 48-player cap we’re likely to know the lineup of players well in advance of the July 1st starting date. That means there will be more than enough time to line up bets with your friends before ESPN begins streaming the event live on a 15-minute delay.

4. Event 57: No-Limit Hold’em Six-Handed – $10,000 buy-in

Few games typify the action of online poker more than shorthanded no-limit hold’em. Where casinos are usually loathe to spread the game because it leaves usable seats at the table open, online rooms have catered to their players and given 6-max games a vibrant life they wouldn’t have had otherwise. The $10,000 NLHE 6-max event, then, serves as sort of a live-game world championship for online poker’s typifying game. It’s a relatively new event for the WSOP – 6-max events have been aorund for several years, but big buy-ins have only been in play since 2010. The first tournament featured a $25,000 buy-in, but that was dropped to $10K for last year and remains there for this year.

It won’t purely draw online players – after all, 6-max tournaments are more common in casinos today than they used to be, and many of the world’s top live cash-game players are used to playing at shorthanded tables. But online players will be heavily represented in the field given the amount of practice at shorthanded poker the online game has given them. The last two final tables have featured several ridiculously accomplished practitioners of the online game, including 2010 winner Dan “djk123” Kelly, 2011 winner Joe “ender555” Ebanks, Chris “moorman1” Moorman, Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier, Tristan “Cre8ive” Wade, Jason “JCarver” Somerville, Mike “Sowerss” Sowers.

5. Event 61: No-Limit Hold’em World Championship – $10,000 buy-in

There is no doubt: on the mountain of tournament poker, this event is the summit. The Main Event, the original freezeout poker tournament, the same event won three times by Stu Ungar and twice by Doyle Brunson and Johnny Chan, is the one tournament every poker player in the world aspires to win. Over the last two decades it has grown from an event that attracted a few hundred players and awarded $1 million to the winner to a two-week tournament that draws thousands and pays out life-changing sums of money to its champion. And for the last half of that run, it has become a cultural force as well through seemingly unending reruns on ESPN.

This year’s Main Event will be the fifth consecutive running to feature the “November Nine” format, where the final table is delayed for four months and then shown nearly live on television and the web. The wait will once again be a long one, though this year’s version is actually running in late October, one week earlier than in previous years, due to the US presidential election. The winner of the tournament may not be the most skilled player in the field, or the most naturally talented, or any number of other superlatives, but there’s one guarantee: he’ll be the most envied player in poker for the next year.

Poker News

1. Doyle Brunson – 78 years old

There is no single figure in the game of poker more universally respected and admired than Doyle Brunson. Known as “Texas Dolly,” Brunson was a road gambler in the 1950s, traveling across Texas and the Southwest to make his living playing in back-room poker games. He was also one of the original gamblers invited to play at the inaugural World Series of Poker in 1970. He has won 10 events, including the Main Event in 1976 and 1977, good for the second most all-time despite having taken an extended break from tournaments during the 1980s and ‘90s when they weren’t in vogue. He wrote a book called How I Made One Million Dollars Playing Poker, which sold for $100 per copy upon its publication in 1978; its name was later changed to Super/System, the poker strategy guide that forever transformed the landscape of professional poker.

During the poker boom years he had his own online room, Doyle’s Room. He was a regular in the highest-stakes games in Las Vegas, and he was a member of The Corporation that took on billionaire banker Andy Beal in a $100,000/$200,000 Limit Hold’em match at Bellagio in 2004. He appeared on television more than 99.99 percent of American septuagenarians thanks to shows like High Stakes Poker and Poker Superstars Invitational. He also continued to win in tournaments, adding a WPT title and two WSOP wins to his $6.1 million resume.

Brunson became the 16th member of the Poker Hall of Fame upon his election in 1988. He is its oldest living member.

2. Berry Johnston – 76 years old

In the high-variance world of poker tournaments, not many players have demonstrated the long-term consistency of Oklahoma’s Berry Johnston. From 1982 to 1985 he was within striking distance of the WSOP Main Event title three times, finishing 3rd (1982), 4th (1984), and 3rd (1985) against top competition. He then won the 1986 WSOP Main Event, taking home $570,000. Though he never again finished any closer to a win in that event than 5th place, he has cashed in it a total of 10 times, more than any players in the tournaments’ history. He has also earned money at least one WSOP event in every year from 1982 to 2010, with multiple cashes in 21 different years. All told Johnston has made the money in 59 WSOP events, tied for 7th place all-time.

Away from the WSOP, where he has won $2 million, Johnston has also been a long-term success in tournaments. He was a consistent presence at final tables in Las Vegas tournament series from the 1980s and ‘90s through the early 2000s, earning another $1.4 million.

Johnston became the 29th member of the Poker Hall of Fame upon his election in 2004.

3. TJ Cloutier – 72 years old

There was a time when Texan TJ Cloutier was the most feared poker player in the world. That fearsome reputation is slightly diminished today, but he remains one of winningest players of all time with $9.9 million in lifetime earnings despite lean years since 2007.

Beginning with a victory in a $2,500 event at the Plaza in Las Vegas in April 1983, the former tight end for the Canadian Football League’s Toronto Argonauts and Montreal Alouettes built a reputation as a winner. In the years between 1990 and 2007, Cloutier had six-figure earnings in poker tournaments every single year, a streak that would have extended all the way back to 1985 if he had earned another $25,000 in 1988 and 1989. He has 59 cashes at the WSOP, tying him for 7th all-time with Berry Johnston and Chau Giang.

Cloutier’s place in WSOP history was almost magnified on several different occasions. He twice finished 2nd in the 1985 WSOP Main Event, to Bill Smith in 1985 and to Chris Ferguson in 2000. He also finished 3rd in 1998, when Scotty Nguyen won, and 5th in 1988 when Johnny Chan repeated as champion. He turned his knowledge of final tables into an influential series of strategy guides written with Tom McEvoy, including Championship No-Limit and Pot-Limit Hold’em.

Cloutier became the 32nd member of the Poker Hall of Fame upon his election in 2006.

4. Billy Baxter – 72 years old

Georgia’s Billy Baxter might just be the best lowball player in WSOP history. All seven of his gold bracelets have come in lowball events, with five of them coming in No-Limit Deuce-to-Seven Draw – no surprise given the popularity of lowball games in the American South. He’s also just a good big-bet player in general, which has come in handy in the age of No-Limit Hold’em; his total lifetime tournament winnings, mostly from hold’em and lowball draw, total $2.3 million.

Away from the tables, Baxter probably did more for elite poker players than anybody in American history by fighting the government over taxes on his own poker winnings. His case, William E. Baxter, Jr. Vs. The United States, established that pro poker players’ winnings are earned income, which is taxable at a lower rate than unearned gambling income. Baxter also helped one elite player in particular, putting up the $10,000 for former champion Stu Ungar when he won the 1997 WSOP Main Event for a record third time.

Baxter became the 33rd member of the Poker Hall of Fame upon his election in 2006.

5. Dewey Tomko – 65 years old

Not many former kindergarten teachers have finished runner-up at the WSOP Main Event. In fact, there’s only one who’s ever done that – but he’s done it twice.

Florida’s Dewey Tomko already had one WSOP bracelet to his credit when he finished 2nd to the legendary Jack “Treetop” Straus in the 1982 Main Event. By the time he finished 2nd to Carlos Mortensen in the 2001 Main Event, he was a three-time bracelet winner and highly regarded professional player, having been one of its most consistent finishers in tournaments throughout the 1980s and having returned to form just in time for the poker boom. Though his activity has slowed since 2008, Tomko has still won $4.9 million in his tournament career.

Tomko became the 36th member of the Poker Hall of Fame upon his election in 2008.

Poker News

Though scandal clouded his reputation during his later years, Slim is still best remembered as the champion of the 1972 WSOP Main Event. Quite opposite in demeanor from the event’s only previous champion, the legendary Johnny Moss, Slim used the win as a springboard to the pop-culture limelight. He appeared on the Tonight Show, Good Morning America, and numerous game shows, and his larger-than-life personality and effortless charm won over TV hosts like Johnny Carson. Slim’s PR tour was one of the very first steps on the long road of popularizing – and thus legitimizing – the game of poker in an era of mass communications.

On TV, Slim played the role of pitchman, using his personality to sell the game of poker to a potential ocean full of fish. As historical curiosities those appearances are great, but they are lacking when it comes to allowing the audience to see a poker legend in his natural environment. Luckily for those of us who care about poker’s history, Amarillo Slim was popular enough at the time to be asked to play a part in legendary director Robert Altman’s 1974 film California Split. Even more luckily, poker’s first pitchman was constitutionally incapable of saying anything but “yes” to such an opportunity.

Nearly 40 years after its release, the film is still a great watch. It follows the exploits of a full-time hustler and a degenerate gambler writer, played by Elliott Gould and George Segal, who wager their money in nearly every conceivable way during the film’s 108-minute runtime. They shoot dice, they play the horses, but more than anything else they play poker. In a lot of ways the film serves today as a time capsule. Its settings – the card rooms of Gardena where limit Draw was the big game, the horse tracks where the Sport of Kings hadn’t yet begun its long, slow decline – have forever faded into history, and the people who were there are beginning to leave us as well.

The majority of the action takes place in California, but toward the end of the film Gould and Segal, fed up with the roller-coaster ride and ready to end it one way or another, head to Reno. After a big (and unlikely) winning streak in the casino, Segal decides to take his shot and sit in a big cash game. As Segal and Gould walk into the room and sit at the bar they begin scoping out the competitors in the game. They can pin down exactly what types of players they’re dealing with, but when they come to an empty seat it’s all speculation. “Who could tell?” Gould says. “Very tall stack of chips, it’s a little impressive.”

The seat’s absent occupant arrives on the scene moments after Segal is called over to the game – and lo and behold, it’s Amarillo Slim. He’s completely decked out in his Texas cowboy hustler uniform, Stetson perched atop his head and ostrich-skin boots on his feet, red suit jacket with black pinstripes draped over his lanky frame. His dark hair is just beginning to gray at the ends, and his sideburns reach down below his ears. Slim’s air is smooth and confident; he looks like the kind of man whose gambling knowledge is vast, earned through hard experience, and liable to end up expressed in homespun colloquialisms.

Talking with the bartender, Slim pulls an enormous stack of $100 bills from his jacket, probably worth upward of $10,000, and asks her to put some bets for him on a horse at Santa Anita. (“Ol’ Blue out of chute number two!”) Gould, who’s sitting nearby at the bar while Segal plays their money in the poker game, raises his eyebrows and shakes his head in disbelief. Then he asks Slim if the tip on the horse is reliable, saying he might put “get a taste of that” himself. Slim lights up at this, sensing that Gould may be a man with money to burn. “You want to risk it in that poker game?” he asks Gould, nodding toward the table with an easy smile. Gould tells him he’s already in the game, having part of his partner’s action; Slim promises him, “I won’t play at you too hard.”

Remarkably, watching him in action for the few minutes he’s on-screen, it never feels like Slim’s acting. Part of that can be attributed to Altman’s naturalistic style of filmmaking. But even with that taken into consideration, it’s easy to see that Slim is the perfect man for the part. His entire mode of functioning in his natural environment is an act: his constant, almost subconscious, scanning of the crowd for a sucker; his familiarity with the staff in the poker room; his nonchalance with enormous sums of cash money. But beyond that, he is a poker player. The spark in his eye when he thinks Gould might be an easy mark is a telltale sign of the sense that enabled him to make a living in back-room poker games all across Texas back in the old days.

For the viewer, getting the chance to see that look, and the dance he engages in with Gould, without losing a large sum of money directly afterward is akin a gazelle getting the chance to walk past a sleeping lion. Given that this particular lion has now moved on to the great savanna in the sky, this scene is now nothing less than a priceless historical relic.

Poker News

1. Gabe Kaplan

In 1980 Kaplan won Amarillo Slim’s Super Bowl of Poker, which was at the time one of the biggest tournaments in the world, populated by top competition. That same year he finished 6th at the WSOP Main Event, again proving his mettle against the world’s top players in the event that served as Stu Ungar’s poker-world coming out party. Unfortunately for Kaplan 6th place earned no money, since the field only had 73 players. But it proved he belonged at the table regardless of the competition.

Over the years Kaplan has collected 11 WSOP cashes, with six of them coming at final tables. He hasn’t won a bracelet, but he did finish second in the 2005 $5,000 Limit Hold’em event and 3rd on two other occasions. He also held his own on NBC’s Poker After Dark, winning three times. In recent years Kaplan lent his presence and poker knowledge as the host of High Stakes Poker.

2. Jennifer Tilly

An Oscar winner in for Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway, Tilly first hit the poker radar in 2005, when she won the WSOP Ladies Event. That win remains her biggest score to date at $158,335. But Tilly’s success track record at the tables has been steady ever since. She has 7 WSOP cashes since 2005, deep runs at the WPT’s Borgata Poker Open and LA Poker Classic, and a win in a $5,000 side event at last year’s Bellagio Cup. All told she has more than $699,000 in tournament winnings.

She’s at home playing with big pros and outclasses the competition when she’s playing against other celebrities. And when she’s not at the tables, she can often be spotted sweating her boyfriend, high-profile poker pro Phil Laak.

3. Guy Laliberté

With a net worth of more than $2.6 billion, Cirque du Soleil founder Laliberté is rich beyond most people’s imaginations. It’s no wonder, then, that when he plays poker, he only plays big.

His biggest splash in a tournament came in the $25,000 WPT Championship back in 2007, when he finished 4th and won $696,220. Laliberté’s showdowns with Tom “durrrr” Dwan were rumored to have been the source of the bankroll that let the phenom play for the highest stakes around, and the billionaire was a regular in some of Full Tilt Poker’s biggest games. He played the biggest pot in the history of High Stakes Poker with David Benyamine, and he’s also been sighted at nosebleed-stakes cash games in Macau with Dwan, Phil Ivey, and a host of gambling Chinese businessmen.

Laliberté is one of the driving forces behind the Big One, a tournament to be held at this year’s WSOP featuring a $1 million buy-in. Part of the tourney’s prize pool will go to his One Drop Foundation to provide access to clean water around the world.

4. Ben Affleck

Affleck’s Good Will Hunting co-writer Matt Damon may be better known in poker thanks to a starring role in the seminal poker film Rounders, but Affleck is the one who’s enjoyed success at the poker table in the real world. In 2004 he was one of 90 players to enter the $9,900 California State Poker Championship main event. Using the poker knowledge he’d picked up from mentors Annie Duke and Amir Vahedi, he outlasted the field and claimed the $356,400 top prize.

Affleck was often spotted in California’s card rooms over the next year, but after his marriage to actress Jennifer Garner in 2005 he stopped frequenting poker rooms. His 2004 triumph remains the only entry on his tournament resume.

5. Jason Alexander

The former Seinfeld star Alexander was sponsored by PokerStars for a time and competed in the WSOP Main Event in 2007 and 2009. He made it to Day 2 on his first try and Day 3 on the second run, but wasn’t able to cash in either tournament. In 2010, though, he did make the final table of a WSOP Circuit event in Atlantic City, taking Costanza’s luck has been a little better when the money has gone to good causes. He finished 10th in the 2007 WSOP Ante Up For Africa event, and in 2006 he had his biggest success at the tables when he won the eighth tournament of Bravo’s Celebrity Poker Showdown, earning $500,000 for his charity.

Honorable Mentions:

American literary legend Mark Twain, who was regarded as a gentleman poker player of some skill and once wrote, “There are few things that are so unpardonably neglected in our country as poker. I have known clergymen, good men, kind-hearted, liberal, sincere, and all that, who did not know the meaning of a ‘flush.’ It is enough to make one ashamed of one’s species.”

American Pie star Shannon Elizabeth, who made the semifinals of the 2007 NBC Heads-Up National Poker Championship before losing to eventual champion Paul Wasicka.

Saturday Night Live alumnus Kevin Nealon and his Weekend Update successor Seth Meyers both won season-ending championship tournaments on Celebrity Poker Showdown. Fellow SNL alum Norm MacDonald didn’t have the same success on that show, but he was an online poker regular and made a deep run in a $3,000 event at the 2007 WSOP; he also hosted a season of High Stakes Poker.

Baseball player Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees got into a lot of hot water for frequenting high-stakes games in New York City, where the game is illegal. His fellow former big leaguer, Jose Canseco, made his biggest splash in poker by crashing a women’s tournament in Los Angeles a few years back; some reports at the time said he even showed up in a miniskirt.

Poker News

If the game is to continue to grow in popularity, it’s going to have to come from somewhere outside the United States. Most other countries don’t have many decades’ worth of casino infrastructure built up, which is a disadvantage when it comes to sheer ability to attract participants to poker tournaments. The US won’t lose its edge in that category for a very long time, if ever. But poker has begun to take hold in some less traditional markets over the last few years, markets could serve to grow the game globally for the next decade or two if it can make any kind of inroads at all. They’re poker’s new frontiers.

1. Latin America

So far as international markets go, nobody outside of Europe and Australia has responded to the introduction of poker the way Latin America has. Online poker caught on strong within a few years of first being promoted there, especially in Brazil, and has helped produce a wave of successful professional players that have conquered tournaments around the world.

From online poker, it was a natural step to move on to a land-based tour in the Latin American Poker Tour. Now with four seasons in the books, the LAPT has grown in participation every year of its existence and has nurtured growing poker scenes throughout Central and South America. And the participants themselves have cultivated a reputation as more lively and colorful than their counterparts in may other markets. It hasn’t all been smooth sailing for the LAPT, though. Some popular tournaments held in one location one year might not return the next year, as the legal landscape for gambling is always shifting. In the case of Mexico, sometimes the landscape actually shifts while a tournament is going on, as it did with an LAPT held there a few years back.

There’s still a lot of untapped potential in Latin America. The political situation in most countries there continues to grow more stable, and the population continues to rise. It’s also been dominated so far by one poker tour, a situation which could be ripe for change within a few years if the growth continues.

2. Macau

It’s glitzier than Las Vegas. It’s just hours away from some of the largest cities in the world. It’s the next frontier for poker: the Chinese enclave of Macau.

Poker isn’t native here, but since it was introduced in Macau’s casinos during the 2000s it has taken hold and grown a dedicated audience. A big contributor to the game’s popularity has been the presence of two competing poker tours: the PokerStars-backed Asia Pacific Poker Tour, and the independent Asian Poker Tour. Both tours’ tournaments in Macau have proven very popular with players from throughout the region as well as around the rest of the world. The side games during the tournaments are known for matching up elite poker luminaries from the West like Tom Dwan and Phil Ivey with rich businessmen from China who want to play against the world’s best. These games are rumored to be played for some of the highest stakes in the world – and have also been the subject of some of epic threads on poker forums in recent years.

Macau’s poker market is still in its infancy. The differences between poker and traditional Chinese gambling pastimes mean there’s no guarantee it will ever really explode in popularity the way it has in some other cultures. But even if it reaches just a small fraction of the potential market, the sheer numbers say that Macau could end up becoming a player in international poker for some time to come.

3. Philippines

The Philippines is never going to compete with places like Macau for glamor points. For a potential poker market, though, it does have some upside. With a population of more than 92 million, poker operators willing to build the game here have a big base to draw from as they take a long approach. And given that the Philippines’ history has been so intertwined with the United States’, that population has a much closer relationship with American culture than many other Asian countries.

Still, the market in the Philippines right now is all about the long game. When the Asian Poker Tour started running its tournaments there it had to do so with an eye toward increasing the base of poker players in a country where the game isn’t native and the population is relatively poor compared to a lot of others. That meant building partnerships with various casino resorts and teaching them how to run their own events, which usually feature smaller buy-ins than for comparable tournaments in some other markets.

The stakes are lower in the Philippines than in some other markets, but companies that put in the right kind of work today could be rewarded down the line.

4. Eastern Europe

After spending most of the 20th century in the shadow of centrally planned economies, much of Eastern Europe embraced capitalism in the 1990s and raced to catch up with the West. Casinos were a natural part of the transition, and online poker was a more modern addition. Poker made its way into former Iron Curtain territory like Marlboros, cassette tapes, and blue jeans before it.

Cue the poker boom. It wasn’t long after the European Poker Tour began that it was expanding into Poland; then came the Czech Republic, and the floodgates opened to Hungary, the Ukraine, and Estonia. The World Poker Tour also got in on the action, expanding to Slovakia, Slovenia, and Romania. Not only did some of the world’s biggest tours come to the players of Eastern Europe, the players hit the road, too. Seeing winners from Russia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and other Eastern European countries has become commonplace.

Long-term, the biggest problem in some of these countries may end up being that poker has been too successful, too soon. The nation of Hungary made news last year when its largest land-based poker club was raided by authorities twice in six months, as well as when it rolled out legislation banning home poker games and instituting a 20 percent tax on net revenues for all legally licensed online gambling sites. Other countries in Eastern Europe have been quick to change laws in the last few years to take advantage of poker’s popularity; it’s not hard to see how the same process could end up enabling more punitive laws in different circumstances.

5. South Africa 

With a population of just over 50 million, South Africa is the smallest market I’ve talked about in this piece. Thanks to its location on the globe, it is also pretty far removed from other regional markets that could bring in more poker players. But even a small population can incubate a poker scene if enough players’ imaginations are driven by the game.

Raymond Rahme’s third-place finish in the 2007 WSOP Main Event was the catalyst for his country’s poker scene to begin growing. Not only was the Piggs Peak Casino player the first South African to make the final table of the world’s most prestigious poker tournament, but he was also the first player from the entire continent of Africa to earn that achievement. His success spurred the growth of the All Africa Poker Tournament.

Since Rahme’s WSOP run the game has continued to grow slowly but steadily in South Africa. Seven more players have crossed the $500,000 threshold for career tournament earnings, including EPT final tablists, WSOP bracelet runners-up, and several players who have made deep runs in the WSOP Main Event. The world’s most established poker brand has also held its own events in South Africa, bringing the WSOP Circuit to Emerald Casino for two events in October 2010 and six events in February 2012. The South African poker market is relatively small, but the WSOP’s faith in it speaks volumes about its potential for growth over the long term.

Poker News

Before that, though, I played a lot of poker.

I’ve been a recreational poker player since 2004, when, with no previous experience, I started playing limit hold’em online after learning that was a thing people could do. (Thanks, TV!) What a revelation that was! Predictably, I was very bad at poker back then. Losing, however, irritated me, and my irritation led me to find poker books and poker blogs. In a short enough time I’d gathered enough knowledge to stop losing.

I wasn’t steadily winning yet, because I wasn’t a good poker player, but I was able to stay afloat by being just a little better than the truly terrible poker players taking up all the other seats. I eventually made back the few hundred dollars I’d lost in the beginning. I had progressed: I now had a hobby that wasn’t costing me any money.

I continued to read and play and learn about what I was finding to be a fascinating game, hoping I might actually develop some skills if I stuck with it long enough. As I worked my way up the from $.50/$1 limit hold’em tables (the smallest at the time) to $3/$6, I started writing about playing the game almost as much as I actually played. At about that time a stroke of fortune led from writing that blog to writing about other people playing poker. I kept playing poker recreationally, and poker kept paying for itself and lots of other things, too. Before UIGEA, between playing online and in the occasional live tournament, my winnings paid for a used car, a dog, several computers, and frequent traveling around the country with my wife, with whom I played a lot of low-stakes poker and met some incredible people.

After UIGEA came along my work shifted away from traveling to cover tournaments and more toward writing from home. At the time I was living in a rural area where the only high-speed internet service available came by satellite. The slow nature of the technology was just fine for sending articles to people and continue writing about poker, but frequent service timeouts made it hard to actually play the game anymore. I cashed out most of my online bankroll and left a little online to play around with if I happened to be somewhere with better internet access. My remaining account balances soon went dormant and I essentially stopped playing poker outside of the occasional home game.

I spent a few more years out there in the country, so by the time I moved to the city and had broadband available to me again I was eager to get back to playing online poker. Thrifty bankroll management, not to mention taking advantage of numerous bonuses, kept me playing on the little bit of money I had left in my accounts. I had to shake off the rust and adjust to a level of play that, even at some of the lowest stakes, was better than what I remembered from the early poker boom days. Then came Rush Poker, where all I had to do was play solid and let everyone else make mistakes. Everything changed.

Looking back, Black Friday couldn’t have come at a more disappointing time for me as a recreational player. In the months leading up to it I had gotten into a steady rhythm of playing several thousand hands of Rush Poker each week and, factoring in rakeback, turning a small but regular profit. I started dabbling in the micro-stakes Rush tournaments that Full Tilt introduced and eventually found a variety that I enjoyed, an on-demand tournament running nearly around the clock with a $1.10 buy-in and the opportunity to play up to four entries at a time. Within the first three months of the year I played more than three times as many tournaments as I had the entire previous year, with a higher cashing percentage and more final table appearances. By the middle of March my bankroll was starting to reflect the time I’d put in at the tables.

Just as I was beginning to become satisfied with my level of play and results, though, I had to take a little time off to write a magazine feature that paid a lot more than grinding micro-stakes online poker tournaments. I promised myself I’d get back to the tables once I had all my work out of the way and really push myself to start making money playing poker again. Then the government pulled the plug.

To say my poker-playing options have been limited since then would be like saying Doyle Brunson has been playing poker for a few years, or that Phil Hellmuth has blown up in front of the TV cameras once or twice. It used to be that the closest place to play was no further away than my laptop. Now I can only a handful of options. I can drive three and a half hours to southern Indiana, where there’s been a bustling regional scene for some time now. Or I could opt to take an extra hour, making the trip four and a half, and try my luck in Tunica, Mississippi. Aside from those two choices, I’d have to hop on a plane to go somewhere that has friendlier poker laws.

All of those options would require me to spend significant money on travel and lodging just to play in any of those places, and then on top of that I’d essentially be taking a shot above my bankroll any time I played since the stakes are far above. Given the steeper costs of playing live, the chances of me making a profit in my situation are pretty slim unless I have a monster session. It’s not unthinkable, but it’s pretty far from a sure bet – and one of the most appealing things to me about online poker was being able to build something from nothing by playing sure bets. I didn’t have to gamble at the table before Black Friday, but that’s exactly what I’d have to do now just to sit down at the table.

Poker changed my life, but then my government changed poker. Life kept on going for me, as it does for everyone in any circumstance, but poker wasn’t in the middle of it anymore. I’ve continued to write about the game, which is something I enjoy and I’m very glad to be able to do. But it will surprise me if I get back to the tables the way I’d planned to before Black Friday, trying to build something out of next to nothing.

Poker News

1. Full Tilt Poker

On Black Friday it wasn’t clear yet how everything would shake out with regard to the sites named in the DOJ’s indictments. At the time Full Tilt Poker was a respected name in the business and had all the appearances of being a successful company, so there was no reason to expect that there wasn’t enough money to cover its players’ balances. There was even less reason to expect the debacle that the DOJ-brokered sale of the company to Groupe Bernard Tapie became. The breach of trust at Full Tilt, and the fallout from it, will be a black mark on the reputations of its principals for a long time to come.

Speaking of the people in charge of Full Tilt, they lost out on a lot more than just public goodwill. They clearly had a very, very good thing going for themselves financially, taking millions of dollars out of the company while it operated without enough cash on hand to cover player balances. If Black Friday hadn’t come along they conceivably could have continued to keep the room afloat for at least the near term. That would have allowed them to either right the ship or continue taking more money out of the company, either of which would have been much better for them than being indicted.

2. American Poker Players

Americans who played recreationally had their pastime ripped right out from under them. Overnight the American online poker marketplace was reduced to free-play offerings, subscription-model “no gambling” sites, and a handful of smaller real-money room willing to continue operating in spite of a clearly aggressive DOJ. For many, there may as well have been no poker at all.

Those who played professionally were confronted overnight with more consequential decisions than most of them had ever faced down at the tables. Online poker had opened up opportunities for all sorts of smart young Americans dissatisfied with what the modern labor market had to offer them. Now that those opportunities had dried up, what to do? Continue to play online poker, but leave your home country to do so? Stay home and switch to live poker, or even change careers?

Regardless of why they played, a pretty significant chunk of American players are still out money, too. Anyone who had money tied up in any of the Black Friday rooms other than PokerStars is still waiting for a refund, which may or may not ever come.

3. International Poker Players

Poker players all around the world have continued to play online over the last year, so they’re not as bad off as their American counterparts are. The environment they’ve playing in, though, has changed just as significantly since Black Friday as it did after UIGEA was first enacted back in 2006.

The number of players online at any given time today is much lower than it used to be. That has deep effects throughout the online poker economy, whether that means smaller guarantees, changes in the rake, elimination or reduction of rakeback, or changes to players’ club programs. On their own those effects would be bad enough, but making it all even worse is the fact that the country that left the marketplace happens to be the richest in the world.

Though there are arguably more great poker players from the US than anywhere else in the world, not all of its citizens are fearsome warriors at the virtual felt. A lot of them (some people would even say most of them) are fish. Sharks all over the world felt the pinch when they found themselves suddenly swimming in a smaller, less reliably stocked pond. They’re all hoping that when the United States allows it players back online, there won’t be a wall between them and the rest of the world.

4. Ancillary industries

Unlike most other forms of gambling, a poker player can actually become better over time with some study and hard work. That’s what makes it possible to define people as good or bad poker players. So unlike with, say, online bingo, where being good means being lucky, online poker spurred the development of a market of ancillary products designed to help players improve their game.

Books, training videos, coaching services, and analytical software packages all sold well in the United States after Chris Moneymaker convinced an entire country that it could bluff its way to easy money at the tables. The bottom dropped out of the market for all that knowledge on Black Friday, when knowing your way around the felt suddenly became much less valuable to an awful lot of people.

5. American TV poker programming

As the triumph of reality programming over scripted shows attests, there’s nothing TV networks love better than programming that’s cheap to produce. And when it comes to cheap, there’s not many kinds of programming that come in ahead of poker. The players put up their own money and it’s nearly unheard of for sponsors to kick in anything extra. Production costs are minimal; a studio floor, a poker table, cameras, lights, and microphones are enough to get you going. Perhaps best of all, a little creative editing can save even the dullest table from becoming unwatchable.

In recent years much of the poker programming on American television came in the form of “time buys,” where a sponsor purchases airtime much like it would advertising and then puts on its own production. There’s no risk for the network, which makes it money up front and doesn’t worry about ratings, and the sponsor gets wide exposure for a fixed price. Poker After Dark, which was produced by the Full Tilt PR machine, was a good example of time-buy programming that disappeared after Black Friday. Since most of the time-buy poker programming in the U.S. was funded by PokerStars and Full Tilt, there’s been very little of it on American television over the last year. The Epic Poker League’s deal with CBS was an exception, but the bankruptcy of Epic’s parent company has exiled the EPL, too, to TV poker purgatory.

Essentially all that’s left for poker fans to watch on American TV these days is what they had back in 2003: the World Series of Poker and the World Poker Tour. That’s not bad, especially given the quality of those productions and the current state of the market, but it’s a far cry from the game’s heyday.

Poker News

1. Annie Duke

Annie Duke’s $4.27 million in career tournament earnings rank her third all-time among women. Perhaps a little surprisingly, nearly half of that total came as the result of a single-table sit-and-go – albeit against some pretty tough competition.

In 2004, Duke won the inaugural WSOP Tournament of Champions. The invitation-only, winner-take-all event saw Duke outlast eight of the top players of the day, including Chip Reese, Phil Ivey, Daniel Negreanu, and Duke’s brother, Howard Lederer, to face off against Phil Hellmuth in the heads-up duel. Hellmuth came unglued for ESPN’s cameras in classic fashion, while Duke claimed the unprecedented (and since unmatched) $2,000,000 prize.

Six years later, in 2010, Duke would showcase her one-on-one skills for the cameras again. This time they belonged to NBC and the tournament was the network’s glitzy Heads-Up Poker Championship. After having been knocked out in the first round by comedian Brad Garrett the previous year, Duke was on a mission. After getting past Andy Bloch in the first round, she drew and won matches with 2009 WSOP Main Event runner-up Darvin Moon, 2007 NBC Heads-Up champ Paul Wasicka, 2007 WSOP Main Event winner Jerry Yang, and 2008 WSOP Main Event runner-up Dennis Phillips. Despite taking on an entirely different caliber of poker player than her previous opponents when she faced Erik Seidel in the final, Duke triumphed to take home $500,000.

2. Gus Hansen

Not many players have appeared on as many made-for-TV poker broadcasts as the aggressive man from Denmark known as “The Great Dane” – and fewer have turned those appearances into big piles of cash the way he has.

The original Poker SuperStars Invitational was filmed in early 2005 and broadcast on FOX Sports. It featured Hansen, Johnny Chan, Phil Ivey, TJ Cloutier, Chip Reese, Howard Lederer, Doyle Brunson and Barry Greenstein. Each man put up a $400,000 entry fee, then the largest of all-time, and played a series of no-limit hold’em tournaments. The results of those determined chip counts for a further series of no-limit hold’em tournaments, which were used to determine chip counts for an ultimate no-limit hold’em tournament, the Grand Final. (And since this was 2005, the producers included a segment in every one of those tournaments explaining “how to play Texas Hold’em.”) At the end of the Grand Final Hansen was the last man standing, winning a cool $1 million.

In 2010, Hansen added another big TV win to his list of tournament successes with a victory in ninth installment of Sky Sports’ Poker Million. The field he had to overcome was significantly bigger at 48, but the payout after he defeated Tony Bloom heads-up was exactly the same: $1 million. Together with his Poker SuperStars win, high finishes on Late Night Poker and the NBC Heads-Up Poker Championship, and a few assorted early-season WPT filler events, that Poker Million win makes Gus Hansen one of the winningest players ever in made-for-TV events.

3. Erik Seidel

Erik Seidel has won a lot of tournaments over the years, but he’s also racked up a lot of second-place finishes. There was, of course, the 1988 WSOP Main Event, made famous in Rounders. In the 2000s he also finished second at Jack Binion’s World Poker Open, the US Poker Championship, and the Aussie Millions Main Event. So when Seidel met Annie Duke in the final of the 2010 NBC Heads-Up Championship he was no stranger to taking home the smaller of the final two prizes. He lost the best-of-three final to Duke 1-2, but the $250,000 runner-up prize was fine consolation.

By itself that wouldn’t really be enough to make note of. But the next year, Seidel would work his way through another tough roster of players to reach the final. He defeated Allen Cunningham, Jennifer Harman, Phil Gordon, Vanessa Selbst and Andrew Robl en route to an ultimate matchup with 2003 WSOP Main Event winner Chris Moneymaker. Seidel won the match against poker’s living embodiment of the American Dream, securing the tournament-record top prize of $750,000 and making himself an NBC Heads-Up millionaire.

4. Johnny Chan

At the dawn of the poker boom, Johnny Chan was already legendary for two things: winning the WSOP Main Event back-to-back, and getting bluffed out of one pot against Matt Damon’s character in Rounders. He was as marketable a player as there was in poker, so Chan got invitations to all the best made-for-TV events. The 10-time WSOP bracelet winner made the most of them, too.

In the first Poker SuperStars Invitational, he finished second to Gus Hansen and won $750,000 on a $400,000 buy-in. In the second Poker SuperStars series, Chan improved on his performance by winning against a larger field of 24 players. His payout for the win was $400,000, but with cash prizes for wins in a few preliminary rounds his overall take in the second series totaled $515,000 – not bad for a $40,000 buy-in.

Before Black Friday, Chan also appeared six times on Poker After Dark. He won four of those tournaments, the most among all players on the series, and his net gain of $360,000 was the most of any player not named Huck Seed. With more than $1.5 million in winnings from such invitation-only events, Johnny Chan will be looking forward to the day TV networks start producing inexpensive poker programming again.

5. Huck Seed

Like several of the other players on this list, Huck Seed enjoyed great success at the NBC National Heads-Up Championship during that tournament’s seven-year run. During its early seasons he was its most consistent competitor, finishing 9th in 2005, 3rd in 2006, 9th in 2007, and 3rd in 2008 before finally winning the event in 2009 to bring his all-time winnings in the tournament to $800,000.

Seed was one of 20 living WSOP bracelet winners selected by a public vote for inclusion in a 27-player field for the 2010 WSOP Tournament of Champions. He made the most of the freeroll, walking away with $500,000 after defeating Howard Lederer in the heads-up match.

As member of Team Full Tilt, Seed got to play in plenty of that poker room’s sponsored TV events. He scored in a few of the bigger ones, winning a $100,000 buy-in episode of Poker After Dark for $600,000 and taking down the Doubles Poker Championship for $500,000. Even on non-Full Tilt events, Seed was a formidable opponent; in the UK he won one episode of The Poker Lounge and the finals on Late Night Poker in 2009, good together for $320,000. His total earnings on made-for-TV events of more than $2.7 million are the best of all time.

Poker News

Those trailblazing women made it possible for those who followed to become a more integral part of the game over the last few decades. Here’s a look at five women who have made lasting impressions in this “man’s game” in the last 20 years.

1. Jennifer Harman

Despite being known primarily as a cash game player, Jennifer Harman has $2,632,611 in lifetime tournament winnings dating back to 1994. She’s cashed for at least six figures nine different years in her career, including an unbroken stretch from 2004 to 2010. Her best year came in 2005, when she finished 2^nd in the WSOP Circuit Rio Las Vegas main event and cashed five times at the WSOP.

Harman has made 11 WSOP final tables and wontwo bracelets, the $5,000 NL Deuce-to-Seven Draw (2000) and the $5,000 Limit Hold’em (2002), making her the only woman in WSOP history to win two open events. She has also made two WPT TV tables, finishing 4^th (2004 Five Diamond World Poker Classic) and 3^rd (2008 Bay 101 Shooting Stars).

Away from the tournament trail, Harman is a long-time regular at Bobby’s Room, the high-limit room at Bellagio in Las Vegas. That room has served as the home of some of the world’s biggest cash games. Harman has squared off there against the likes of Doyle Brunson, Chip Reese, Phil Ivey, Barry Greenstein and Patrik Antonius. Along with some of those luminaries, she was a member of the Corporation , a team of high-stakes poker pros who took on billionaire banker Andy Beal as detailed in Michael Craig’s book The Professor, The Banker and The Suicide King.

2. Kathy Liebert

A former stock analyst for Dun & Bradstreet, Kathy Liebert started her poker career in the 1990s as a prop player in a Colorado casino. From there she moved on to small tournaments, building a resume littered with final-table finishes in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, as well as on the East Coast. Her first big breakthrough came at the 1997 WSOP, where she took 2^nd place for $123,960 in the $3,000 No-Limit Hold’em event.

Then, in 2002, Liebert became the first woman ever to win $1 million in a poker tournament when she conquered the Party Poker Million. That was the first year of eight straight in which she would cash for at least six figures. Among the highlights of her career are seven WSOP final tables, including a win in the $1,500 Limit Hold’em Shootout in 2004, and five WPT TV tables, finishing 3^rd twice (2005 Borgata Poker Open, 2008 North American Poker Championship) and finishing 2^nd once (2009 Bay 101 Shooting Stars).

Today Kathy Liebert holds the distinction of being the winningest woman in the history of tournament poker, amassing $5,827,393 lifetime winnings since 1994.

3. Vanessa Selbst

No woman has compiled as impressive a track record in live poker tournaments as quickly as Yale University and Yale Law School alumna Vanessa Selbst. Her $4,911,582 in lifetime tournament winnings dating back to 2006 includes six consectuvie years with six-figure earnings. The best of those years came in 2010, when she won both the NAPT Mohegan Sun main event ($750,000) and the Partouche Poker Tour main event ($1,823,430).

Success has come to Selbst seemingly wherever she has played. She has made 2 WSOP final tables, winning the bracelet in the 2008 $1,500 Pot-Limit Omaha event, and has twice finished 3^rd in the WSOP Heads-Up Championship. She followed up her 2010 NAPT Mohegan Sun win with another victory at the 2011 running of that tournament. And most recently she made her first WPT TV table, finishing 3^rd at the 2011 Five Diamond World Poker Classic.

Like Harman, Selbst is also proficient in cash games. She got her start playing cash both online and live in 2004, working up to games with blinds as high $25-$50, $50-$100 and occasionally $200-$400. Her reputation precedes her at coaching site DeucesCracked, where she charges $650 per hour for her services.

4. Annette Obrestad

Legend has it that Annette Obrestad, then just 15 years old and living in her hometown in Norway, won her first online poker stake in a freeroll. Since then she has built a big reputation for herself through relentless aggression and consistently excellent performances.

Before she was old enough to play in casinos, Obrestad was dominating online poker; lifetime, she has won more than $2.3 million playing at the virtual felt. Since 2006 has also competed in live tournaments, racking up $3,738,569 lifetime earnings. She has cashed for at least six figures every year since 2007, when she won the WSOP Europe Main Event ($2,013,734) and finished 2^nd at EPT Dublin ($429,181). In recent years she has enjoyed success at the Aussie Millions, winning a Pot-Limit Omaha event in 2010, and at the Wynn Classic, winning a No-Limit Hold’em event this year and finishing 2^nd in the 2011 main event.

With more than $6 million in winnings between online and live tournaments, few players of either gender can boast the kind of record the 23-year-old Obrestad has. And she has left her mark on the history books, too, remaining the youngest player ever to win a WSOP bracelet: she was just 18 years old at the time of her big victory in London.

5. Vanessa Rousso

It’s safe to say that Vanessa Rousso is driven. She maintained a perfect grade-point average in high school, graduated from Duke University in two and a half years with a major in economics, and moved on to law school at the University of Miami by the age of 21.

If she hadn’t been within driving distance of live poker at the Hard Rock Casino, she might have kept playing online and finished law school, taking her drive to America’s courtrooms and remaining a mostly recreational player.

Instead Rousso went pro and has gone on to become one of the most recognizable women in poker, winning $3,471,294 in live tournaments dating back to 2005. Her big breakthrough came in April 2006 when she finished 7^th at the WPT Championship for $263,625. Since then she has won at least six figures every year, including $1.29 million in 2009 when she finished 2^nd in the NBC National Heads-Up Championship and won the EPT Grand Final High Roller tournament. In addition to her live tournament success, she has won an additional $870,000 playing online, including a 2^nd-place finish out of a field of 2,998 players in the 2007 PokerStars WCOOP Main Event.

Rousso is one of the few female poker players to gain lucrative sponsorship opportunities outside of the game. She signed on with domain registrar GoDaddy, which also sponsors race car drivers Danica Patrick and Dale Earnhardt, Jr., in March 2009.

Poker News

Of all the poker books ever written, most of them are eminently forgettable. But some stand out from the crowd, for a number of reasons. They may serve as historical documents, painting a particularly vivid picture of bygone people and times. And in some cases, they may still offer advice that can help one win at the tables.

In order of their year of first publication, here are five old poker books that still hold up well in 2012.

1. The Education of a Poker Player by Herbert O. Yardley (1957)
Despite the inclusion of some casual racism that sadly marks it as a product of its times (Yardley lived from 1889 to 1958), this book, written by an honest-to-goodness secret agent, still works on a few levels.

Yardley’s advice is fundamentally sound enough that you can still win using it. You won’t beat really good players by relying solely on the lessons he relates here, but winning at poker really isn’t about beating good players. It’s about maximizing your odds at all times, and the best way to do that is to play against people worse than you. If you can find some bad players willing to play Five-Card Stud or Five-Card Draw against you, Yardley can help you run them over.

Education also works as an historical document. Yardley learned to play poker in the first decade of the 1900s, a time from which not a lot of poker literature remains. From telling us how poker players thought to how they selected games and tables to what games they spent their time playing, the book does a fine job of describing a world that ceased to exist many decades ago. It also describes the rules for variations on Stud and Draw with or without the joker, the kinds of games that people used to learn playing around the kitchen table before online poker streamlined the games of choice and made the Joker card obsolete.

But most of all, it’s an entertaining read. From turn-of-the-20th-century American saloons to pre-Communist China, Yardley spent his life in interesting places surrounded by interesting people. Mix that in with his method of delivering poker advice through telling stories specific to each game and you’ve got the recipe for an entertaining read.

2. Super/System: A Course in Power Poker by Doyle Brunson (1979)
Big-bet games have been the standard in poker for nearly a decade now, reversing the long dominance of limit games and emptying the bankrolls of tens of thousands of impatient players along the way. If you want to trace the advanced strategies of today’s winning big-bet players all the way back to the source, you need go no further than Super/System. Like The Art of War, only for for poker players, the book describes Doyle Brunson’s “power poker” approach to the game. It’s immediately recognizable as the forebear of today’s typically hyper-aggressive no-limit hold’em players.

Like The Education of a Poker Player, though a bit less dated, the advice for many of the games is a good enough blueprint to help you develop a solid winning strategy. This is especially true for the older limit variants, some of which haven’t seen much more advanced analyses widely published in the intervening decades. As for the no-limit hold’em advice, it’s a mixed bag these days; savvy players will see your tricks coming a mile away, but you’ll demolish less-advanced opponents the same way Brunson did in the old days.

The book also provides an insight into the life and times of Brunson himself. He may not be out there running over tournament fields or dominating big-bet cash games the way he used to, but the 10-time World Series of Poker bracelet winner and two-time Main Event champion is still one of the most successful players ever to take to the felt. The chance to read about his experiences as a Texas road gambler in the man’s own words is a priceless portal to another bygone era.

3. The Biggest Game in Town by Al Alvarez (1982)
Alvarez’s book isn’t a poker book in the same way as the first two entries on this list. There’s hardly a mention of poker strategy in this slim volume – fitting, since the author is the only one among the five here who was an amateur poker player. As a literary writer, however, the highly respected Alvarez brings a poetic flair and an outsider’s eye for detail to his descriptions of the 1981 WSOP.

Much of the early WSOP history taken as gospel today comes straight from The Biggest Game in Town. Alvarez had the ear of the Binion family, not to mention plenty of the game’s early forces, from Jack “Treetop” Straus to Doyle Brunson. That led to the inclusion of some self-serving stories as legitimate history, but the tales are related so well that they’re entertaining if not always altogether true in the strictest sense. He also didn’t make much mention of then-rising star Stu Ungar, who won the Main Event that year and would go on to become one of the game’s most legendary figures.

The early WSOP era was already giving way to the expansion of the game in 1981 when Alvarez arrived in Las Vegas. His book still stands today as a singular look at that time and place.

4. Improve Your Poker by Bob Ciaffone (1997)
Probably the least-celebrated book on this list, in some ways Ciaffone’s tome is the most indispensable in terms of practical poker advice that still holds up today.

Part of the lasting appeal of the book is that it’s a collection of short essays about a wide variety of topics rather than a volume that attempts to explain one variant or another in exhaustive detail. There’s as much attention given to general concepts and gambling basics, like reading your opponents or managing a bankroll or understanding the value of an overlay, as there is to the ins and outs of any specific poker game like hold’em or Omaha.

As Ciaffone notes in the introduction, he had been playing poker for 47 years by the time the book was published. Most of that time was logged in medium-to-high-stakes cash games, though he also played in tournaments from time to time (and finished in third place at the 1987 WSOP Main Event). All that experience, combined with the knack for explaining things simply that earned him the nickname “Coach,” will prove invaluable to anyone looking to build a solid foundation for a lifetime at the poker tables.

5. Positively Fifth Street by James McManus (2001)
McManus’ book mixes two stories into one riveting read. The first is the trial of Sandra Murphy and Rick Tabish, accused of murdering Ted Binion, son of Horseshoe casino owner and World Series of Poker founder Benny Binion. The second story is the tale of McManus’ own unlikely journey from working a magazine assignment to winning a single-table satellite tournament to making the 2000 WSOP Main Event final table.

McManus, a novelist and college writing instructor at the Art Institute of Chicago, spins the two threads together so seamlessly that the 400-page book breezes by. Thanks to his close attention to detail, the book serves as a time capsule of the very end of the pre-online poker era. Back in 2000 the stars of the previous 15-20 years, like TJ Cloutier, were still shining bright. Meanwhile some of the players who would shape the post-poker-boom era, like McManus’ tablemate and eventual champion Chris Ferguson, were only beginning to come into their own. The past and future of poker were regularly rubbing elbows at the tables, not knowing at the time that the game they played would change forever within just a few short years.

Poker News

If you win but your tournament resumé is essentially blank, the question becomes even more complicated. You could just be a fish who got lucky; there are plenty of winners who rely more on luck than skill and never make it back to a major stage. Or you could be a real player, the kind of guy who’s going to be taking everyone’s money for years to come. There are far fewer people in this category, which makes them stand out from the crowd. Elite members of this group come along every once in a while and tend to make their presence known in short order.

From the Department of Next Big Things, here’s a look at five players who made very big first impressions.

1. Stu Ungar

In 1979, 22-year-old Stu Ungar was already thoroughly dominating the competition in his game of choice – but that game wasn’t poker. It was gin, and Ungar was so much better than the other players that tournament organizers asked him not to play anymore. A meeting with poker player Danny Robison, and Robison’s best friend Chip Reese, drew Ungar into high-stakes poker cash games. He quickly became known in Vegas for his utter fearlessness and preternatural card-playing ability.

By 1980 Ungar was ready to move from cash games to tournament and take on the World Series of Poker. Unleashing the abilities that served him so well at the cash tables, he carved up the competition. First he announced his arrival with a 2^nd-place finish in the $5,000 Seven Card Stud event. Then he made his mark on poker by defeating two-time champion Doyle Brunson in the Main Event, becoming the youngest player ever to win that prestigious tournament.

Ungar came back in the spring of 1981 and outdid his previous year’s accomplishments, winning the $10,000 No-Limit Deuce-to-Seven Draw bracelet and then following that up by conquering the Main Event for the second year in a row. In the space of just 13 months, the 24-year-old kid from New York had already established himself as one of poker’s all-time greats.

2. Jason Mercier

In the early months of 2008, Jason Mercier was grinding out Supernova status on PokerStars by playing 12 tables of $1/$2 NLHE at a time. One of the perks of that status was free entry into a few big land-based tournaments. The second one of those ended up being a life-changer for the former Florida high school basketball standout, as he turned it into $1.1 million with a win at the EPT San Remo.

Mercier took to the circuit and enjoyed modest success at first, cashing in three WSOP events and a weekly Bellagio tournament. But in August his return to Europe was rewarded with a 6^th-place finish at EPT Barcelona for another $324K. Before the year was done he had made the final table of a WSOP Europe Pot-Limit Omaha event and won the EPT London High Roller event for another $944K. All told his debut year earned him $2.75 million.

In a sense, Mercier’s splashy debut never ended – he has won more than $7.68 million, including seven figures in each year of his four-year tournament poker career. He has added two WSOP bracelets and three more final tables to his record since 2008, and he was named the Bluff Magazine Player of the Year for 2009. His consistent excellence has made him a fixture at the top of the poker power rankings virtually since his EPT San Remo win.

3. Tom Marchese

Playing under the screen name “kingsofcards,” Tom Marchese had already won more than $350K playing online poker tournaments before the start of 2010. A transition to live tournaments made his budding professional poker career far, far more lucrative.

Marchese got started in his home state of New Jersey, taking 3^rd place in the championship event of the Borgata Winter Open for $190K. Three weeks later he made his big splash, winning the first North American Poker Tour main event at the Venetian in Las Vegas for $827K. By the time the WSOP rolled around in May he had added another $443K to his already impressive winnings thanks to a Wynn Classic final table, an EPT Grand Final High Roller final table, and a cash at the WPT Bay 101 Shooting Star main event.

From there the 21-year-old just kept rolling. A cash in the $5,000 Six-Max NLHE event and a Pot Limit Hold’em Championship final table appearance made his WSOP debut a success, and he made his mark on the EPT with a final table in London. He made the TV table at the Foxwoods World Poker Finals in October, cashed in the main event and bounty shootout at the NAPT Los Angeles in November, and closed out the year by winning a side event at the Bellagio in December. All told his 2010 winnings totaled $2.11 million. On top of that he won the Card Player Player of the Year award and finished second for the Bluff POY award. Not a bad way to start a career!

4. Andy Frankenberger

A Duke University-educated derivatives trader for BNP Paribas, Andy Frankenberger decided in 2010 to leave his job and give poker a try while he figured out what he wanted to do next. He got a taste of success in Atlantic City tournaments at Borgata and Caesars Palace during the winter before heading to Las Vegas for the WSOP. He managed a cash in the always tough $5,000 NLHE event, but it was at the Venetian that he first began to get attention when he won a $2,000 Deep Stack Extravaganza event for $162K.

His bankroll newly flush, Frankenberger again moved west in August for the WPT Legends of Poker at Bicycle Casino in Los Angeles. That turned out to be an excellent decision, as he won the tournament and its $750,000 top prize. Two months later he made the final table of a WPT main event at Bellagio, finishing 5^th, and another two months after that a 16^th-place finish at another WPT event at Bellagio gave him enough points to eventually become the WPT Player of the Year. With the addition of a 6^th-place finish at the WSOP Circuit Regional Championship in Atlantic City in late December, Frankenberger had earned in excess of $1.2 million – and a major Player of the Year award -during his first 12 months as a traveling tournament poker player. No wonder he decided to stick with it.

5. Andrey Pateychuk

When the 2011 WSOP began, there was little reason for most people there to have ever heard of Russia’ Andrey Pateychuk. Some of the online contingent might have known he was the player behind the MHE DOEDET screen name that won an FTOPS event on Full Tilt the previous autumn, but to most he was probably just another face in the vast sea of the WSOP. Then came the Main Event. Pateychuk had his share of facetime on ESPN since he started Day 8 fourth in chips among the 24 remaining players. Things went wrong in three big hands against eventual champion Pius Heinz, sending the Russian home in 15^th place with $478K – but no November Nine appearance.

That didn’t get him down – or if it did, he didn’t show it. Now that he could buy into nearly any tournament he wanted, Pateychuk was ready to make the most of his situation. A trip to Italy in August resulted in $937K and his first EPT title when he bested 837 players in San Remo. After a late October final-table appearance on the Russian Poker Tour, Pateychuk scored again, this time at WPT Prague. His win over a field of 571 there was good for $599K, bringing his total winnings for the year north of $2.08 million. He’s now just one WSOP bracelet shy of the Triple Crown – pretty solid work for the second half of a single year.

Poker News

Though I’m not a huge college basketball fan myself, I do understand the tournament’s appeal. I also have a fertile imagination, which got me to wondering: if poker went over even half as well on American television as basketball does, what might a March Madness tournament for poker look like? With that in mind, I started drawing up a design for my ultimate poker tournament.

Like the NCAA basketball tournament, this annual poker version of March Madness would feature 64 players selected for the tournament by a committee of tournament directors and poker media considering a wide range of criteria to determine seeding. The Card Player, Bluff, WPT, and WSOP Player of the Year winners for the last three years would earn the only automatic bids; all other selections would have to earn their way in through excellence at the tables. Overall career results would be important, but the most recent ones would carry the most weight. And since this would be a live tournament, brick-and-mortar results would factor in far more heavily than online, with results against bigger fields being more important than success with bigger buy-ins.

The game would be heads-up no-limit Texas hold’em, and thus it would look a lot like the old NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship. Unlike that tournament, though, there would be no sponsor exemptions or casino host qualifiers or celebrities other than the kind poker makes. The structure of the game would also be slower than the made-for-TV NBC production, allowing skill to become a bigger factor. Only the best poker players of the last few years would be invited to take on their peers in this one-of-a-kind event. And as a rule the game’s history would be fully embraced, from little things like each bracket being named after the host site of one of poker’s richest tournaments to more noticeable touches like the featurettes about the players and their accomplishments airing between matches on TV coverage of the tournament.

Here’s how I imagine the first round of a 2012 version of this tournament might play out.

Binion’s Bracket

(1) Vanessa Selbst v (16) David Steicke – Selbst plays true to her 2010-2011 form and takes the match down quickly against the China-based High Roller specialist.

(2) Ben Lamb v (15) Luca Pagano – Reigning WSOP Player of the Year Lamb takes an early lead in the match and subsequently wears down Pagano, the most successful player in the EPT’s history.

(3) Eugene Katchalov v (14) Alessio Isaia - Fresh off his best year since 2007 with $2.57M in winnings and his first WSOP bracelet, Katchalov makes quick work of the Italian WPT Venice champ.

(4) David “Doc” Sands v (13) Shannon Shorr - Sands, who has more than $2.4M in earnings since last January, actually falls behind in the early going but mounts a comeback to defeat the steady Shorr, who cashed a career-best 18 times in 2011.

(5) Phil Hellmuth v (12) Doyle Brunson – 10-time WSOP bracelet winner Brunson gives Hellmuth lots of good-natured ribbing, but the only player in the world with more bracelets than Brunson walks off with the win thanks to a slow-played set of aces.

(6) Eric Baldwin v (11) Matt Waxman – The 2009 Card Player Player of the Year and former college baseball star makes the right moves at key moments and outlasts the 2011 WPT Rendez-Vous a Paris winner in a hard-fought match.

(7) Andy Frankenberger v (10) James Dempsey – Former Wall Streeter and WPT Season IX Player of the Year Frankenberger’s relentless aggression sees him fall behind several times before hitting a few big hands and getting paid on them, giving him the momentum needed to knock out the British WPT Five Diamond winner.

(8) Pius Heinz v (9) Martin Staszko – In a rematch of the 2011 WSOP Main Event final, the Czech chess master Staszko gets his revenge when the reigning world champ Heinz gets his money in way behind and can’t catch a miracle.

Rio Bracket

(1) Erik Seidel v (16) Allen “Chainsaw” Kessler – In one of the most lopsided victories of the first round, eight-time WSOP bracelet winner and all-time leading money winner Seidel steamrolls a too-tight Kessler, cracking Chainsaw’s pocket kings with 8-7 suited on the last hand of the match.

(2) Phil Ivey v (15) Frank Kassela – The second-winningest player of all-time, Ivey has impressed since getting back to the tables earlier this year; he takes out the 2010 WSOP Player of the Year in short order when a Kassela bluff goes horribly wrong.

(3) Jonathan Duhamel v (14) Chris Moneymaker – In a surprisingly close matchup of two WSOP Main Event winners, the red-hot Duhamel comes out ahead of a determined Moneymaker in the longest match of the first round.

(4) Sorel Mizzi v (13) Freddy Deeb – Deeb won their first heads-up match at the 2010 Grand Prix de Paris High Roller tourney, while Mizzi beat Deeb in that same tournament in 2011. This time Deeb gets the best of the 2010 Bluff Player of the Year.

(5) Michael Mizrachi v (12) Scotty Nguyen – A rematch of the 2006 WPT World Poker Open final, which Nguyen won. This time the Grinder, poker’s sixth all-time leading money winner, gets revenge in an entertaining match between two telegenic pros.

(6) Tom Marchese v (11) Roberto Romanello – Former EPT and WPT winner Romanello has run well heads-up recently, winning five tournaments in the last two years, but he can’t withstand the 2010 Card Player Player of the Year’s relentless attack.

(7) Steve O’Dwyer v (10) Matt Gianetti – O’Dwyer’s momentum from a career year in 2011 has carried over to 2012 with a WPT Denmark win, giving him the confidence to survive a tough match with Gianetti, the WPT Bratislava champ and November Niner.

(8) Dan Kelly v (9) Elio Fox – One of the winningest online poker players of all-time who is transitioning well to the live game, Kelly catches the 2011 WSOP Europe Main Event winner in a big bluff early on and leans on him for the rest of the match.

Bellagio Bracket

(1) Jason Mercier v (16) Roger Hairabedian – The 2009 Bluff Player of the Year and Global Poker Index Top 5 staple takes his fearsome game to the Frenchman Hairabedian, the 2008 WPT Rendez-Vous a Paris champ and one of the most consistent international players of the last five years.

(2) Sam Trickett v (15) Noah Schwartz – The reigning Partouche Poker Tour champion and winner of more than $5.6M in the last two years, Trickett, finds himself in a dogfight with one of Florida’s most consistent pros before winning the match on a Kings-versus-Queens cooler.

(3) Shawn Buchanan v (14) Dwyte Pilgrim – The Canadian Buchanan has been one of the most consistent players in all games for the last few years, but Pilgrim, the the fan-friendly WSOP Circuit favorite and 2010 WPT Borgata Poker Open champion, catches a few lucky breaks and rides the momentum to the biggest upset of the opening round.

(4) Scott Seiver v (13) Martin Jacobson – The 2011 WPT Championship title helped Seiver to a career-best $1.97M in winnings last year, but four-time EPT and two-time WPT final tablist Jacobson plays the heads-up match of his career to score another big Bellagio Bracket upset.

(5) Daniel Negreanu v (12) Faraz Jaka – Negreanu, poker’s third all-time leading money winner, draws a tough opening match against the highly aggressive WPT Season VIII Player of the Year, but a classic moment sees him move on to the next round when he deliberates for five minutes before talking himself into making the right call with middle pair to pick off a Jaka bluff on the final hand.

(6) Chris Moorman v (11) Olivier Busquet – The winningest online poker player of all-time (and 2011 WSOP Europe Main Event runner-up) faces off with high-stakes heads-up specialist and 2009 WPT Borgata Poker Open winner in the longest match of the first round, which only ends when Moorman flops a straight and Busquet misses 13 outs twice.

(7) Galen Hall v (10) Joe Hachem – Hall followed his 2011 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure win up a final-table appearance at the WPT Championship, but the 2005 WSOP Main Event and 2006 WPT Five Diamond winner’s drive to prove he’s still got game helps him to a tough victory.

(8) Brian Rast v (9) Isaac Haxton – Two WSOP wins (including the $50K Poker Players Championship) pushed Rast to a career year in 2011, but losing an early pot results in an insurmountable deficit against high-stakes specialist Haxton.

Monte Carlo Bracket

(1) Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier v (16) Pierre Neuville – Fresh off the second-best year of an already storied career, the Triple Crown winner and all-time leading money winner from France runs over serial EPT casher Neuville in a lopsided match.

(2) Jake Cody v (15) John Racener – Cody shows off the skills that helped win the 2011 WSOP heads-up championship to complete his Triple Crown, backing the 2010 WSOP Main Event runner-up into a corner early and never letting off the pressure.

(3) Sam Stein v (14) Carlos Mortensen – One of the brightest young stars in the game with more than $3.2M in winnings over the last two years, Stein makes quick work of the streaky Mortensen, the only player ever to win both the WPT Championship and WSOP Main Event.

(4) Andrey Pateychuk v (13) Jeff Lisandro – Pateychuk, who spun a 15^th-place finish in the 2011 WSOP Main Event into an EPT and WPT title by the end of the year, stays true to form against in a relatively quick match against the 2009 WSOP Player of the Year.

(5) Benny Spindler v (12) Men “The Master” Nguyen – One of the most dangerous players on the EPT circuit over the last few years, EPT London champ Spindler takes an early lead and then manages not to make any mistakes against – or be intimidated by – Nguyen, the talkative seven-time WSOP bracelet winner.

(6) Mike McDonald v (11) McLean Karr – Coming off his best year since winning EPT Dortmund in 2008, McDonald trades the chip lead back and forth with the 2010 WPT Bay 101 Shooting Star winner in a see-saw match before flopping the nut flush and outrunning Karr’s open-ended straight-flush draw on the final hand.

(7) Yevgeniy Timoshenko v (10) David Williams – In a showdown between two former WPT Championship winners, Williams shows he’s determined to make up for an off year in 2011 by bringing his A-game and defeating the 2011 WSOP Heads-Up Championship runner-up.

(8) Matt Glantz v (9) Will “The Thrill” Failla – In a matchup of East Coast grinders, career $4M man Glantz gets the best of 2011 Legends of Poker champ and Borgata mainstay Failla in a short but entertaining match.

Click here to read part 2.

Poker News

Of course, the first round is only the beginning of March Madness. The longer the tournament goes on, the more unpredictable the matchups become and the less likely it is that any one player holds a huge advantage over another. Then it’s all about who catches the right breaks at the right time, whose game is the most consistently excellent, and, ultimately, who has the will to win. So who would be able to string all those factors together to come out on top of our hypothetical tournament? Let’s have a look and see.

Binion’s Bracket

Second Round

(1) Vanessa Selbst v (9) Martin Staszko - Selbst rolled over David Steicke in the first round, while Staszko had a much tougher match against his 2011 WSOP Main Event nemesis, Pius Heinz. The Czech player falls behind early and, without any lucky breaks from the deck, can’t find his way back into the match.

(2) Ben Lamb v (7) Andy Frankenberger - Frankenberger’s game involves a higher percentage of high-risk, high-payoff plays than most players’, and against the average poker pro that’s proven to be a potent weapon. Lamb, however, matches up well thanks to his penetrating stare and his knack for making the right decision in tough spots. Frankenberger finds himself all-in while making one of those high-risk plays on the second level of the match, and Lamb hands him his walking papers when he makes the correct call.

(3) Eugene Katchalov v (6) Eric Baldwin - Katchalov’s first-round victory over Alessio Isaia was a breeze, but in the second he draws a highly motivated opponent. Baldwin, who played a lot in 2011 but had little to show for it compared to his 2009 Player of the Year campaign and 2010 WPT Championship runner-up finish, comes out with guns blazing. The chip lead changes hands a number of times but in the end it’s Baldwin who defies the seeding to come out victorious.

(4) David “Doc” Sands v (5) Phil Hellmuth - Sands has been on a roll since last year and scored a comeback win against Shannon Shorr in the first round. Hellmuth, coming off the best year of his long career, is still smarting from failing to win a record-setting 12^th bracelet in three tries at the 2011 WSOP. Sands pushes Hellmuth to the limit but in the end the Poker Brat emerges victorious.

Sweet 16

(1) Selbst v (5) Hellmuth – The Phil Hellmuth show finally comes to a close against the top-seeded Selbst. Confident and fearless, she effortlessly needles the 11-time WSOP bracelet winner; he takes it with a smile and a shrug at first but appears increasingly perturbed as the match goes on. After a misdeal when he was going to be dealt pocket aces, Hellmuth jumps from his seat and launches into a classic tirade. Meltdown ensues and Selbst wins the match in short order.

(2) Lamb v (6) Baldwin - After his upset victory over Eugene Katchalov, Baldwin is highly motivated but fatigued. Lamb, on the other hand, had a quick match against Andy Frankenberger and plenty of time to ready himself for this round. That rest comes in handy as the two play level after level, with Lamb’s sharper focus allowing him to avoid more mistakes than Baldwin

Elite 8

(1) Selbst v (2) Lamb – The seeding said these two players, two of the most impressive in poker over the last few years, ought to meet in the bracket final. And so they did. The end result is a heads-up match worth studying for insights into how top poker minds operate as every trick in the book finds its way into the proceedings. In the end a cooler with pocket kings against pocket queens does Lamb in and sends Selbst to the Final Four.

Rio Bracket

Second Round

(1) Erik Seidel v (8) Dan Kelly - The Rio Bracket was the only one with first-round results that accorded with the seedings, but things change in the second round when Kelly eliminates top seed Seidel. The aggressive young online pro presses the preflop betting with K-K early in the match, and Seidel welcomes the chance to raise the stakes while holding his own K-K. But the board brings four hearts, matching up with Kelly’s hand to give him a flush and crippling Seidel in the process. That’s poker.

(2) Phil Ivey v (7) Steve O’Dwyer – O’Dwyer has been one of the most consistent players in the world since leaving the United States and moving to Europe to continue his pro poker career. But dominating European competition isn’t really preparation for facing one of the most formidable players ever to sit at a poker table.

(3) Jonathan Duhamel v (6) Tom Marchese – Duhamel has one of the best track records of any WSOP Main Event winner in recent years with two other wins and $1.92M in earnings since his big victory. Marchese, meanwhile, had one of the most impressive debut years in recent memory and became the 2010 Card Player Player of the Year, but was unable to repeat that level of success in 2011. In the end Duhamel, worn down from a hard-fought first-round match with Chris Moneymaker, succumbs to an aggressive and motivated Marchese.

(4) Michael Mizrachi v (5) Freddy Deeb - Few players have enjoyed as much long-term success in tournament poker as Mizrachi, and almost as few have been as consistently good for as long as Deeb. This ends up being one of the more entertaining matches of the second round, as both men bring a loose and easy demeanor – and their A-games – to the proceedings. Deeb outlasts the Grinder to move on to the next round.

Sweet 16

(5) Deeb v (8) Kelly – Though separated in age by several decades, Deeb and Kelly have similar levels of experience; the difference is that Deeb’s took a lifetime to earn, while Kelly got his in just a few years of dominating online poker. There’s a lot of back-and-forth in the early going of this match. When Deeb gets on a roll he can be hard to stop, though, and once he finds his groove against Kelly he never looks back.

(2) Ivey v (6) Marchese – Ivey barely broke a sweat in the first two rounds against Frank Kassela and Steve O’Dwyer. For Marchese, overcoming Roberto Romanello and Eric Baldwin was one class of feat; conquering one of the most fearsome players ever to sit at the table proves to be another one altogether. Ivey’s task isn’t the walk in the park of his first two rounds, but his wealth of experience helps him win the day against the young Marchese.

Elite 8

(2) Ivey v (5)Deeb – It’s not the bracket-final matchup that the seeding called for, but this one proves to be highly entertaining both for the players and the fans. The table chatter during this long back-and-forth battle is classic, and the level of play is world-class. In the end Ivey is the one who makes all the right moves and advances to the Final Four.

Bellagio Bracket

Second Round

(1) Jason Mercier v (9) Isaac Haxton – Since turning an online satellite win into an EPT title on his first try back in 2008, Mercier has made everything look easy. He does the same here against high-stakes pro Haxton, getting the best of every confrontation en route to a win during the second level of play.

(2) Sam Trickett v (10) Joe Hachem – Trickett, who has racked up 9 tournament wins and $6.3M in earnings in just four years, with most of that coming in the last two. Hachem is like an older version of Trickett, having enjoyed a similar rise to the top in 2005-06, when he won the WSOP Main Event and WPT Five Diamond Classic. In this matchup, youth prevails and Trickett’s the man with his ticket punched.

(6) Chris Moorman v (14) Dwyte Pilgrim – Minor-league champ Pilgrim scored the biggest upset of the first round when he took down #3 seed Shawn Buchanan. It’s hard enough to capture lightning in a bottle twice, but it’s even harder when doing so means knocking off the most successful online poker player in history. Moorman makes relatively quick work to move on to the Sweet 16.

(5) Daniel Negreanu v (13) Martin Jacobson – Other than a long track record of winning, one of Negreanu’s claims to fame is his ability to talk out a problem at the table and figure out his opponents’ holdings, especially against top competition. The flip side of this ability is that sometimes he gets too curious for his own good and talks himself into bad calls. Against serial EPT final tablist Jacobson, with whom he has little table experience, Negreanu falls into that trap and makes several calls with the worst of it. He never recovers from these setbacks and Jacobson advances.

Sweet 16

(1) Mercier v (13) Jacobson – Former satellite winner Jacobson has four EPT final tables, two WPT final tables and a WSOP final table to his credit in the last three years, but a win has proved elusive for him so far. This trend holds when he finds himself up against the unstoppable force of Mercier, who takes an early lead and mercilessly grinds him down from there.

(2) Trickett v (6) Moorman - Trickett’s meteoric rise has given his resume some pretty gaudy winnings figures. Moorman’s numbers are even gaudier, but they’ve come over the long haul through thousands of online tournaments. As a result, Moorman has the edge in experience despite the two being separated in age by only one year. Along with the rest he got after his relatively short second-round match against Dwyte Pilgrim, that’s all Moorman needs to pull off an upset against one of the hottest players in poker at the moment.

Elite 8

(1) Mercier v (6) Moorman – Moorman looked comfortable at the table in his first three matches, as did Mercier while he rolled over his opponents. This match, unsurprisingly, is the most difficult to this point in the tournament for both players. The turning point comes when Mercier rivered a jack-high flush against Moorman’s eight-high flush, giving Mercier a 4-to-1 chip lead and the momentum he needs to progress to the Final Four.

Monte Carlo Bracket

Second Round

(1) Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier v (8) Matt Glantz – Glantz is a deep thinker and a talented poker player by any measure. ElkY is more like an alien being with poker superpowers. It’s almost an unfair fight, but it’s the way the bracket lines up and ElkY moves on with another quick win.

(2) Jake Cody v (10) David Williams – Cody might be the only player ever to take a $10 online deposit and run it up into a Triple Crown; he’s certainly one of the msot successful young players of recent years. Williams, who has enjoyed success on and off since taking second at the 2004 WSOP Main Event, has been more off than on since his 2010 WPT Championship win. Both players’ form carries over and Cody moves on to the Sweet 16.

(3) Sam Stein v (6) Mike McDonald – Sam Stein had an impressive 2010 year at the live tables in 2010 but was overshadowed to a degree by another young player in Tom Marchese, who defeated him at NAPT Venetian. Since then his track record has smacked of a man on a mission with a PokerStars Caribbean Adventure final table, a WSOP bracelet and two WSOP third-place finishes, and a side event win at EPT San Remo to his credit. Meanwhile, McDonald has been one of the most consistent high-level players in the world since his initial EPT Dortmund win in 2008. The match goes long and Stein eventually comes out on top.

(4) Andrey Pateychuk v (5) Benny Spindler - After four years on the circuit, Spindler finally won his first big title at last year’s EPT London. Pateychuk, on the other hand, seemed to come out of nowhere with a deep run at the WSOP Main Event and subsequent wins on the EPT and WPT. Spindler’s EPT win came after he grabbed an early lead and held it the rest of the way, but in this match he falls behind early. That allows the aggressive Pateychuk to step on the gas and make surprisingly quick work of Spindler.

Sweet 16

(1) ElkY v (4) Pateychuk – In theory, the kind of run Pateychuk has been on since last summer has to end at some point. In this case, it ends where so many other poker dreams have concluded: at the hands of ElkY.

(2) Cody v (3) Stein – It’s the United Kingdom versus the United States – not to mention stylish hair versus stylish ballcaps – in this matchup of two of poker’s most talented young players. The lead swings back and forth from Cody to Stein and back again throughout the course of a three-hour battle, with the all-in player winning each confrontation until Stein finds himself in the lead. He ends the match with a hero call on the river of a dangerous board to pick off a big Cody bluff.

Elite 8

(1) ElkY v (3) Stein – When you find yourself up against a superhuman poker player, no matter how good you are yourself you’re going to hope to run good. Stein finds himself behind the eight-ball on several occasions, but a bit of card luck at the right times keeps him in the match against ElkY. After a flopped flush holds up against ElkY’s flopped top set, Stein’s trip to the Final Four is booked.

Final Four

(1) Selbst v (3) Stein - Stein’s record over the past two years has been undeniably excellent, but even with three tournament wins to his credit his heads-up resume pales in comparison with Selbst’s. Not only has she won seven poker tournaments outright since 2008, she has progressed to the semifinals of four heads-up tournament, including two WSOP heads-up championships. In a head-to-head battle, Selbst rarely makes the wrong decision – and that holds true in this case to send her to the championship round.

(1) Mercier v (2) Ivey - More than a few people have called Ivey, winner of eight WSOP bracelets and $16M, the greatest ever to play the game. If that’s the case, this is a match between the greatest of all-time and the greatest of right now. While Ivey was sitting on the sidelines post-Black Friday, Mercier was stringing together another set of impressive finishes – including his second gold bracelet – for his fourth straight year with seven-figure winnings. Neither player has an ounce of fear in his body, so this two-hour match is one for the ages. In the end Mercier gets the better of the deck and advances to the championship round.

Championship

(1) Mercier v (1) Selbst – It’s fitting that two of the most consistent players in poker would face off in the final of this poker version of March Madness. Both Mercier and Selbst had excellent results in 2011 and have already seen their success carry over into 2012. Both are seemingly immune to pressure, both have a firm grasp on how to play in nearly any situation, and both have an impressive will to win. Situations like this almost always come down to who catches breaks and who doesn’t; even the smallest bit of good fortune can make all the difference against a tough opponent. In this case it comes down to Mercier grabbing the lead for good when he flops a set of sevens against Selbst’s set of sixes. She doesn’t go broke there, but it does prove to be the last time she gets within striking distance of the chip lead. A little while later, Jason Mercier has proven yet again that he’s the best player in the world right now with a big win in poker’s version of March Madness.

Click here to read part 1.

Poker News

1. EPT Madrid, Casino Gran Madrid, Madrid, March 12 − 17

Spain has been on the poker map ever since Carlos Mortensen won the WSOP Main Event back in 2001, but the arrival of the European Poker Tour gave the country a case of poker fever.

Barcelona has been a tournament mainstay for some time now, both for the EPT and the WPT, but Madrid only got its first internationally significant tournament when the EPT held its Grand Final there last year. Though that tournament has moved back to its old home in Monaco this year (see below), the stop in the Spanish capital was such a success that EPT management couldn’t resist scheduling a regular-season event there for Season 8.

A full complement of side events is on the schedule for EPT Madrid, including a €10,000 8-max event with a single reload option and a €3,000 heads-up tournament. But the big draw is the €5,000 EPT main event, which is almost sure to meet the 600-player cap given the EPT’s continuing popularity throughout Season 8 and Madrid’s status as one of the finest cities in Europe.

2. WPT Seminole Hard Rock Showdown, Hard Rock Casino, Hollywood, April 18 − 23
and
3. WPT Jacksonville Best Bet Open, Orange Park, Jacksonville, April 28 – May 2

There is no faster-growing poker market in the United States right now than Florida. Thanks to the state legislature’s decision in 2010 to lift the caps on tournament and cash-game buy-ins, the Sunshine State has become one of the few bright spots in an otherwise dark time for American poker. Several Floridians, including all-world tournament pro Jason Mercier, had already made names for themselves in the poker world, but the legal shift made it possible for others to stake their claim to fame without leaving home.

The WSOP Circuit (in Palm Beach) and the World Poker Tour (both up north in Jacksonville and down south in Hollywood) have cashed in on the game’s growing popularity in Florida this season. The buy-ins for those tournaments were relatively low at $1,600 (WSOPC) and $3,500 (WPT), but now the WPT is prepared to test the market with back-to-back events featuring bigger buy-ins at the same poker rooms where it had success earlier this season.

The Seminole Hard Rock Showdown in south Florida will sport a $10,000 buy-in, a first for the state, while players at the Jacksonville Best Bet Open will have to pony up $5,000 to play. The last Hard Rock event drew 295 players and the last Jacksonville tourney attracted 393. If these new tournaments can register even remotely similar numbers, that would put them on par with WPT events in other American locations. Should that happen, Florida events could become a mainstay on the WPT for the foreseeable future.

4. EPT Grand Final, Monte-Carlo Casino, Monaco, April 23 – May 1

The setting, the size and strength of the field, the amount of money up for grabs, the chance to go down in poker history – in nearly every respect, the EPT Grand Final is the definition of modern poker tournament prestige. After calling Madrid its home last season, the EPT Grand Final returns to Monte-Carlo Casino in Monaco this year. It’s one of the single most impressive venues in the world for a poker tournament, and a fitting one for the richest poker tournament in all of Europe.

Over the seven years of its existence, the EPT Grand Final has seen its field grow from 211 players in 2005 to as many as 935 in 2009. The last few season have seen slightly smaller fields – 848 in 2010 and 686 last year in the smaller Madrid venue – but the prize money up for grabs has remained greater than in any other European tournament. The seven winners have collected a combined $15,073,320, with the 2008 champion, Canada’s Glen Chorny, claiming the biggest share at $3.196 million. (Pieter de Korver’s 2009 win was larger in euros, but those euros were worth less in 2009.)

The schedule for this year’s EPT Grand Final includes a total of 37 events, including one Super High Roller and two High Roller tournaments and the €10,000 Main Event. With the EPT Player of the Year award still very much up for grabs – Ondrej Vinklarek and Roberto Romanello are in a virtual dead heat, with Martin Finger, Steve O’Dwyer and Jonathan Duhamel still within striking distance – there should be plenty of drama in Monaco as the month of April draws to a close.

5. WPT Championship, Bellagio, Las Vegas, May 4 – May 26

There was a time when this tournament was one of the single most prestigious events outside of the WSOP Main Event. The $25,000 buy-in guaranteed a field stacked with star players, the Bellagio provided a picturesque setting for high-stakes poker, and the WPT’s television presence made it a sure bet that the event’s winner would enjoy a boost to his reputation. From Tuan Le winning his second title of the season in 2005, to Carlos Mortensen becoming the only player to win the WSOP Main Event and the WPT Championship in 2007, to David Chiu’s come-from-behind win over Gus Hansen in 2008, the WPT Championship has provided plenty of memorable moments over the years.

It still holds on to some of its prestige thanks to a long history, but the WPT Championship has definitely fallen a few notches over the last few years. Many of the factors leading to its decline have been beyond the WPT’s control – a sluggish economy and a US government crackdown on online poker haven’t helped much – but regardless of the cause, turnout has been a problem for the WPT Championship the last two years. The 2010 installment won by David Williams drew only 195 players, easily the smallest field for the event since Alan Goehring defeated 110 other players in 2003. In 2011, champion Scott Seiver and 219 other players turned out, a step up from 2010 but a far cry from the tournament’s poker-boom heyday.

The WPT has been on the upswing lately so there’s a good chance that this year’s field will grow once again. But even if it remains in the same neighborhood as the last two events, the winner isn’t going to complain – even last year’s relatively anemic turnout was still enough to build a prize pool worth $5.3 million.

Poker News

1. Barney Frank and Ron Paul

Congressmen Barney Frank (D-MA) and Ron Paul (R-TX) have been the voice of poker players in Washington for several years now. On paper they’re unlikely bedfellows – one is a big-government liberal, the other a small-government conservative – but in action they’ve been one of the few While it hasn’t resulted in successful legislation to keep American poker players from having their game of choice cut off from them, the Frank-Paul alliance has been the engine that has pushed poker forward in D.C.

Their joining of forces despite a difference in personal politics is symbolic of the diversity within the poker community, one of its greatest strengths. It’s also been the most reliable conduit to getting the issue of legalization to the House floor because both men are philosophically predisposed to support personal freedom. Unfortunately there’s one big problem with having these men as allies: neither is running for reelection. Paul has chosen to push his philosophy on the presidential campaign trail, which could be the seed of a much brighter future for poker players down the road but isn’t going to do much to affect legislation in the short term. As for Frank, he isn’t running for president but he has already announced he will retire from the House at the end of this year.

At this point Frank and Paul are like retiring veterans who have carried a sports club into the playoffs numerous times but never gotten within sight of a championship. They’ve served the team well and it’s absolutely worth celebrating them for that service. But at the same time, the game moves on; you have to constantly be on the lookout for advantageous positions unless you want to cede ground to your opponents. Online poker players can’t afford such a cession.

2. Joe Barton

Outside of Paul and Frank there’s really only one voice on Capitol Hill speaking up for poker players right now, and it belongs to Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX).

So far as allies go, Barton is a curious one for online poker players. He is a poker player himself, though not of the online variety. He has introduced legislation that would relieve states of having to worry about federal intervention if they choose to get into the business of regulating online poker, even though the states already have the authority to regulate businesses within their own borders. He has given online poker issues a greater profile in Washington through multiple Congressional hearings, but the testimony in those hearings has focused almost exclusively on issues with only the loosest connection to players’ concerns. He appears to make all the right moves, but he doesn’t have a lot to show for making them.

While he’s not the most divisive figure, there also isn’t a true consensus in the community about Barton. Some are more than happy to have Barton on its side – after all, he is championing a bill that would theoretically get American poker players on the fast track to returning to the online tables – but some of the support for him is rather tepid. Others aren’t convinced that the Congressman, who has enjoyed a boost to his campaign coffers since taking up the cause of poker players, is entirely good for them. Some, like I. Nelson Rose, have even wondered aloud whether Barton is playing the players for all they’re worth – and then caught flak from the rest of the community for doing so.

To carry my earlier metaphor one step further: if Paul and Frank are veteran leaders heading into retirement, then Barton is the player who logged one good season and had the good sense to employ an agent who could land him a sweetheart deal at the expense of a team in desperate need. Some of the fans are happy to have him, and others hope the team will get rid of him. He’s going to hold down a roster spot for a while and most likely put up serviceable numbers. But if a chance came along to land a bargain or a true star player, management would probably look to offload him at the first opportunity.

3. The Poker Players Alliance

There’s one notable group with the express stated goal of promoting the interests of poker players, and that’s the Poker Players Alliance. Despite this raison d’être, the online poker community’s support for the PPA has varied from weak to middling for all sorts of reasons.

If the sole measure of effectiveness is passing a bill to get poker players back to the online tables, the PPA has not been very effective at all. But looking at the bigger picture, the PPA most certainly has value for poker players. It has put significant effort into identifying who poker players’ friends and enemies are in Washington. And while it’s impossible to prove, it’s highly likely that the PPA’s amplification of the voices of poker players through a persistent presence on Capitol Hill has at the very least held off even more damaging legislation than UIGEA. That certainly counts for something.

Perhaps the biggest problem for the PPA is that it can only be truly successful if significant numbers of poker players jell into an organized mass. That’s an uphill battle to say the least. It’s unlikely that you could find a group less suited than poker players to speaking with with one voice. (This is, after all, a group of people capable of using “it depends” as an answer to just about any conceivable question.) Yet poker players desperately need to be able to present a united front, given that their interests are last on a list behind those of social conservatives who oppose gambling for opposition’s sake, big-government types who hate the idea of anyone not paying for the privilege of being free, and casino corporations whose mission of padding the bottom line can many times run directly counter to what’s best for players. Even if the community can’t always get its act completely together, the PPA still stands as the best vehicle for representing player interests.

4. Writers

One of the biggest obstacles facing American poker players is that their voices are nearly mute when compared to the booming bravado of the forces aligned against them. Luckily there are always writers out there looking for a good story – and some of them are capable of reaching wide audiences.

For a solid example of how writers help American poker players, one need look no further than an article entitled “Online poker kings get cashed out” published yesterday in a number of American alternative weeklies, including Miami’s New Times, Denver’s Westword, Dallas’ Observer and Los Angeles’s LA Weekly. In the article, writer Chris Parker tells the stories of a cross-section of those hit hardest by Black Friday: American poker players.

Parker sketches out the tales of online players Walter Wright, Maxwell Fritz, Michael LaTour, Brian Mogelefsky, and Vanessa Peng, all of whom have moved away from their previous homes in order to continue plying their trade. He also explores the reach of Black Friday into ancillary markets by telling of how business has fallen off for gambling bookstore owner Michael Minkoff. In the middle of these tales of livelihoods devastated and families separated by the fallout from Black Friday, Parker asks a pointed question: “Why are the feds chasing honest, taxpaying citizens out of the country? Especially for something as benign as playing cards, an act committed by nearly every American?”

That sort of questioning is invaluable; when it comes to the online gambling industry the mainstream press rarely bothers to delve any deeper into the story than the latest PR release from government or big-business sources. It’s not hard to understand why they’re so shallow in their reporting – most journalists know next to nothing about online gambling, so in a way it’s almost better for them to write nothing at all than to craft something damaging. But their inability to to counter the more outlandish claims of online gambling’s opponents is easily exploited by those looking to exercise power at the industry’s – and players’ – expense.

Every time a writer from outside the poker press publishes a story about the hardships faced by Americans who once made their living playing the game, the public gets to see a different side of the issue that has nothing to do with casino companies or the machinations of government. They get to see the human side of an issue that is normally only discussed in the terms set out by agents of government. For most people, unless they personally know someone affected by Black Friday, these kinds of stories can be a first glimpse into how cracking down on online poker has more impact than just burnishing some aspiring US Attorney’s resumé. Given that players are fighting against a very powerful assortment of enemies, there’s no underestimating the PR value of writers penning these kinds of stories for publications outside of poker’s orbit.

5. The players themselves

Retiring representatives, representatives who can’t muscle bills through Congress, an advocacy group that can’t assemble a critical mass, and writers whose work takes a long time and doesn’t always reach large audiences: if each of these people and institutions were a card in a poker hand their collective strength would be middling at best and very poor at worst. That’s the kind of hand you’re likely to fold in an awful lot of situations. Yet in the fight for explicitly legalized online poker in the United States, most poker players simply aren’t willing to consider folding an option. That leaves them in the kind of situation where coming out a winner requires determination and wits of the highest degree.

One of the oldest truths in poker is that the only person who can truly look after a poker player’s best interests is the player himself. (As the old saying goes, “Trust everyone, but always cut the cards.”) If they want things not just to change but to actually get better, American online poker players have to marshal all their resources. They need to seek out true allies in every level of government. They need to get their stories out to the media. They need to do what they can to organize. And most of all, they need to not roll over for their opponents.

In the spectrum of parties interested in the future of online poker in the U.S., there are undoubtedly individuals and groups that have an interest in protecting players. But it’s equally undoubtable that those interests are all motivated by something other than being the one whose bankroll is on the line every hand. If players get thrown under the bus those interested parties may shed a tear… but they certainly won’t feel the pain of being run over.

Poker News

Such was the case a few weeks ago when Roger Gros of Global Gaming Business tweeted 138 characters that supporters of online poker could get excited about: “Source: NV Gov. Sandoval calls top casino execs and tells them of agreement between Reid & Kyl, adding internet poker to payroll tax bill.” The information from the tweet spread across Twitter and the poker news landscape like wildfire. Never mind that the source was unnamed, or that there was no further confirmation of such a deal from the named parties’ representatives, or even that: the hope of America’s great mass of former online poker players had been confirmed! Then, almost as if on cue, a rebuttal of that information came later in the day from the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Washington correspondent, who quoted Gov. Sandoval’s spokesperson as labeling the Gros tweet “patently false.” Less than two weeks later the possibility of attaching a poker bill to a payroll tax bill was officially declared dead and poker players were back to waiting for good news again.

We know now that the news wasn’t true, but for a moment, let’s think back to when it hit. Trying to assess how reliable the information is became essentially impossible, because both sides of the question insisted they were telling the truth; try to make sense of that and you’ll end up right back where you started. It’s a microcosm of the entire struggle to get our favorite game up and running online once again. After all, this is precisely the sort of exchange that’s become old hat for Americans following the progress (or lack of it) on the online poker issue: a source couches supposedly “insider” information in terms specifically designed to get online poker supporters excited, online poker supporters get excited, and a denial from an official source (followed by a lack of action consistent with that denial) leaves online poker supporters right back where they started.

One big problem here is that people will happily click on anything that suggests to them that the goal of legalization is close at hand. The hype machine of news sources and users has been hungry for information about legalization since 2006 and has only become hungrier sinceBlack Friday; it immediately pounces upon anything that even begins to resemble a move toward legalization and quickly spreads such “news” across social networks and drives traffic to the sites that deal in it. Even if the news turns out to be false hope, there’s no reason for the press side of the machine to be concerned: the audience always comes back for more because they’re that invested (either emotionally or financially) in the return of online poker.

Besides leaving them unfulfilled, the end result is that American online poker players are in a very uncomfortable position politically. Our pastime isn’t considered wholesome enough for a large number of powerful people to agree to legalize it. That means the menu of options for pushing that legalization through is extremely limited: we can attempt to build a coalition with people who are normally opposed to us and will probably impose their stringent morality on any workable compromise, or we can use a stealth approach the way the architects of UIGEA did. The first is highly unlikely to work, and the second is nearly impossible to achieve in the current environment because nobody can keep quiet long enough to allow the dirty work to be done. Gov. Sandoval didn’t actually call casino executives with good news as suggested by the Gros tweet, and Sen. Reid didn’t pull a quick one in Washington. But one has to figure that at some point the senator may find himself in a position to do so, and that the governor will also be in position to pass the good news on to the casino companies who backed all that legislation in the first place. And on that day, they’ll have to choose between either letting that information go public without a denial and possibly harming the cause, or lying to cover it up just so they can get the job done.

That rock-and-a-hard-place is no good for anyone who loves poker – or for anyone who loves living in a representative democracy. If you happen to love both, you could be forgiven for considering yourself screwed for the foreseeable future.

Poker News

Luck is the creation of David Milch, the man behind such lauded series as Deadwood and NYPD Blue. Far from being just another project for the celebrated writer/producer, Luck is the product of Milch’s lifelong love affair with horse racing. His father began taking him to Saratoga when he was just six years old, and he has owned two different Breeders’ Cup-winning horses of his own. “It’s a subject which has engaged and some might say has compelled me for 50 years,” Milch told Variety back in 2010, when the show was still in development. “I find it as complicated and engaging a special world as any I’ve ever encountered, not only in what happens in the clubhouse and the grandstand, but also on the backside of the track, where the training is done and where they house the horses.”

Milch’s passion for the subject bleeds through nearly every frame in the form of an ardent dedication to realism. The show’s action revolves around Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia, Calif. (often called “the most beautiful race track in the world”), which served as the actual shooting location for the show’s first season. Some of the show’s poker scenes were shot at Larry Flynt’s Hustler Casino in Gardena, and the Commerce Casino is also mentioned when poker comes up. The character of Ronnie, an aging jockey, is played by Gary L. Stevens, a Hall of Fame jockey who won the Kentucky Derby three times, the Preakness Stakes twice and the Belmont Stakes three times. And numerous side players in scenes from the show’s many intertwined stories, from horse trainers to poker-room floormen and dealers, give off the vibe of people who got their roles on the show because of their real-life experience.

This dedication to visual realism bleeds over into the realm of the show’s characters. As gorgeous as the show is to watch – and thanks to the input of director Michael Mann, it really is gorgeous – it’s the emphasis on character that really makes it shine. The scope of Luck is wide enough to include characters from nearly every aspect of horse racing, from the track owners to the horse owners to the trainers to the jockeys, all the way down to the gamblers who bet on every race. All of them have their own stories, hopes, dreams and motivations, and whether or not they ever meet their lives are all tied together by the races at Santa Anita. And all of them are treated with equal importance, giving the world Milch has created a sense of coherence no matter which characters are on-screen at any given moment.

These characters feel like real people, perhaps none more so than the surrogate family of four gamblers who hit it big in the pilot episode. Disabled Marcus, gigolo Lonnie and unemployed Renzo are regulars at the track, as is skilled handicapper and mediocre poker player Jerry. When it comes to picking winners at the races Jerry is pure brilliance, but things don’t go nearly as well for him when he gets away from the horses and has to begin interacting with people at the poker table. He’s prone to tilting when needled, leading him to make poor decisions that only exacerbate his problems. When his group wins the Pick Six jackpot at Santa Anita and he suddenly finds himself able to sit down at poker tables with much higher stakes than he’s used to playing, Jerry’s tilt-prone nature becomes a major problem and he begins losing almost immediately.

Jerry clearly has serious issues when it comes to chasing his losses, as shown in his showdowns with restaurant owner Lester Chan. (In one of them, the floorman makes a ruling that allows Jerry to bet an extra $25,000 that wasn’t on the table at the start of the hand; once the cards are turned up, it’s revealed that Jerry has pocket kings, while Chan has Ah-Qh for top two pair on an As-Qd-8d flop.) And he also uses turmoil in his personal life – such as arguments with Marcus over how to use the money they’ve won – as an excuse to become self-destructive at the tables. But whatever his problems, Jerry is clearly also a man with great skill – it’s his picks that allow the group to win their millions in the Pick Six, and as bad a poker player as he may be he always has money to play because he’s so good at picking horses. Most importantly, Jerry has plenty of positive traits that have allowed him to surround himself with people who care about him – when he finds himself going down the rabbit hole in a private game with Chan, his three friends from the track show up to pull him away from the table.

Most gambling characters in film and television either have to be outsized villains or massive losers with all the complexity of an after-school-special. Luck doesn’t make this mistake, instead allowing its gambler characters to simply be who they are. They win, they lose, they make great decisions, they make mistakes – and in the end, they feel like people you know. When it comes to making great television, that’s a winning ticket.

Luck airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on HBO.

Entertainment News

Then there’s the presence of two former government officials on its Board of Directors. These two men – former FBI director Louis Freeh and former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge – are the names that get trotted out anytime FairPlay USA decides to pop its head up and make a statement about “protecting” consumers. Almost without fail, those statements go unchallenged – both by the mainstream media, which has an allergy to challenging the statements of well-known former government officials, and by the poker industry’s in-house media, which has an allergy to challenging just about anything. It’s a shame, too, since a deeper look at the careers of Ridge and Freeh shows that they’re not primarily interested in protecting people.

From the Department of Who Needs Enemies?, here are five reasons not to trust these two public faces of FairPlay USA.

1. Louis Freeh doesn’t understand technology.

Louis Freeh became the fifth Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1993. Computers were beginning to become commonplace throughout American society and the roots of today’s internet were taking hold. Yet Freeh’s gaze looked backward, not forward. He didn’t place any priority on upgrading the Bureau’s outdated computer systems; in fact, the National Geographic special The FBI says that upon assuming his position at the head of the Bureau, Freeh actually had the computer in his office removed. Some critics charged that the outdated computer systems in place when he left the FBI in the summer of 2001 contributed to the FBI’s inability to “connect the dots” and foresee the 9/11 attacks.

Freeh couldn’t see the usefulness of computers in solving crimes while heading up the country’s top law enforcement agency. Why, then, should anyone believe that he understands the kinds of deeply technical issues that lie at the heart of online gambling?

2. Tom Ridge has a history of obfuscation.

When Tom Ridge was the head of the Department of Homeland Security on the eve of the presidential election in 2004, the nation’s terror alert level was set to yellow. Ridge wrote in his 2009 book The Test of Our Times that he was pressured by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft to raise the terror alert level to orange, hinting that their desire for the change was based on political reasons. Ridge said this incident was one of the factors leading to his decision to resign from the government on November 30, 2004. But in his resignation letter, he made no mention of his principled stand against the manipulation of the terror alert for political ends. Instead he said fell back on the time-tested reason of giving “personal and family matters a higher priority,” only five years later revealing his true motives for leaving the government.

Later, Ridge was named to the board of Exelon Corporation, one of the largest nuclear power corporations in America. By 2010 he had received compensation of more than $530,000 and held nearly $250,000 in the company’s stock. Yet when he appeared on cable TV channel MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews to promote nuclear power as part of a “green energy” plan that would help the economy, he never let on that he could receive a huge windfall if the government were to begin spending heavily on nuclear power.

Tom Ridge has a history of not telling the whole truth. That means he shouldn’t be trusted to present a well-rounded picture of the wide range of issues surrounding the legalization of online gambling.

3. Louis Freeh’s tenure at the FBI was marked by scandal.

For nearly his entire tenure as its director, Louis Freeh’s FBI was plagued by scandals, political infighting, and public relations nightmares:

• A Justice Department inquiry recommended that Freeh be censured for the FBI’s mishandling of the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff in Idaho, which resulted in the deaths of two civilians and one Deputy US Marshal.

• The FBI’s handling of the investigation of the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, was highly criticized and led Attorney General Janet Reno to send US Marshals to FBI headquarters to seize undisclosed tapes of federal agents “asking for and receiving authorization to fire” heat-generating tear-gas rounds into the compound.

• Freeh’s FBI also oversaw the investigation of Chinese-American scientist Wen Ho Lee. Lee was arrested and held without trial for 278 days while the FBI tried to . In an internal Justice Department report, federal prosecutor Randy I. Bellows called the Lee case “a paradigm of how not to manage and work an important counterintelligence case.”

It’s not hard to understand why one former White House staffer from the Clinton years has called Freeh “a guy who was wholly incompetent but who held on to power by making himself useful to the press and Republicans on the Hill” and “a political opportunist who played Clinton, and managed to escape the judgment of history for his mismanagement of the FBI.”

4. Freeh is weak on electronic privacy.

Though he wasn’t big on using computers, Louis Freeh was plenty willing to seize the authority to spy on citizens’ computers. In 1997 the FBI began using the Carnivore system, a system installed at the ISP level to spy on email and web traffic. Demonstrating a lack of understanding of how the internet works, the FBI claimed that Carnivore was analogous to old-school wiretapping technology despite fundamental differences between the technologies. But the Electronic Frontier Foundation testified before Congress in 2000 that Carnivore was “collecting more information than it is legally entitled to collect” because of the FBI’s equation of the old and new technologies. Either Freeh and his subordinates didn’t understand the difference between telephone systems and the internet, or they played dumb because they wanted to lay claim to broader powers than the law allowed.

With Americans’ online privacy now at its nadir, the last person online poker players should want in their corner is Louis Freeh.

5. Ridge and Freeh are serial corporate consultants.

All that’s being considered when either Tom Ridge or Louis Freeh makes a statement on behalf of FairPlay USA is what the corporations backing that group want. Beyond their necessity to make any online poker system successful, player considerations never even enter the conversation. As it turns out, there’s good reason for that: both Freeh and Ridge have a long history of using their status as former government officials to become consultants to, and board members of, large corporations.

Freeh served as a director for credit card issuer MBNA before that company was acquired by Bank of America, and also as a director for pharmaceutical corporation Bristol-Myers Squibb. He also worked with the Gavel Consulting Group, which offered to corporations the expertise of “current and former federal judges and high-ranking government officials,” before later forming the similar Freeh Group International Solutions.

Ridge, meanwhile, has been even more active in selling himself and his connections to the private sector. He has served as a consultant or board member for no less than seven corporations since entering the private sector in late 2004, including several companies whose main line of business is in selling products to the federal government. Like Freeh, Ridge founded his own “advisory firm,” Ridge Global.

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