Riding the F Train

Why the F Train Makes Me an Elitist Jerk

2012-02-10T12:55:00.000-08:00

Riding the F train yesterday I couldn't avoid a print advertisement for Manhattan Mini-Storage, a storage company that's been operating in NYC for what seems like forever. Their print ads tend towards elitist humor in their attempts to elicit a chuckle and make the brand memorable. The ad I saw declared, "New Yorkers aren't better than anyone else. We just dress like it." An ad last year poked fun at the woeful New York Mets (left); another warned New Yorkers, "Remember, if you leave the city, you'll have to live in America."

I wish someone had warned me about that before I left New York three and a half years ago.

I never wanted to be a big fish in a small pond. I've spent my whole adult life swimming in the deepest oceans and, not surprisingly, that's what makes me feel most satisfied. Of 27 global cities ranked "Alpha", "Alpha+" or "Alpha++" by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network, I've lived in four and have spent significant time in another eight. Against that backdrop, most of the world seems like a small pond -- and some places are going to seem smaller than others. Like Las Vegas. Smaller, scummier, and with that layer of unidentifiable gray-green sludge floating on the surface of the water.

I gave Vegas an honest effort. I took some time for myself after things went to shit in early 2010, but then I gave Vegas the old college try. After a year and a half I came to the conclusion that Vegas just doesn't have what I require it to have: an ocean of amazing, intelligent, ambitious people (the main stumbling block I see to Zappos founder Tony Hsieh's ambitious plan to re-imagine and revitalize downtown Las Vegas). In that regard Vegas is at best a brackish puddle.

Is it elitist to feel that a place like Vegas doesn't offer the same depth of lifestyle, the same access to intellectual capital, that New York offers? Probably. But that doesn't mean it's not true.

And so last week I rode the F train several times. Then I rode it again Tuesday. And Wednesday. And yesterday. Today I will ride the F train. Tomorrow and Sunday I will ride the F train. And I will continue to ride the F train until someone gives me a damn good reason not to.

Having seen what's out there in the rest of America, I'm perfectly happy living on my small island off the coast of Europe. That may make me an elitist jerk, but at least it makes me a happy elitist jerk.

Full Tilt Poker: Back of the Envelope Calculations

2011-11-03T10:30:00.000-07:00

aka "Why GBT May Be Smarter Than We Think"

The finances of Full Tilt Poker, a closely held corporation that didn't have to answer to any meaningful regulatory authority, were always opaque. Every once in a while the curtains briefly parted, giving us a glimpse of what was going on behind them. But it was only a glimpse, to the point that many in poker were surprised by allegations the DOJ made in September about FTP's finances.

One number I've seen tossed around in a few places: after Black Friday, but before June 29, 2011 (the day the AGCC suspended Tilt's gaming license), ROW players on Full Tilt were generating $1 million in revenue for the company. Daily.

Think about that. Without the US, estimated to be 60% of Tilt's revenue, and after the chilling effect on the "Big Three" caused by Black Friday, Tilt was still doing $1 million of business a day from ROWers. How much money was the company grossing *before* Black Friday? It boggles the mind.

$1 million a day. $365 million a year. $1.825 billion in 5 years. If you assume that Groupe Bernard Tapie are able to cut costs (they've already started by making certain employees redundant, and they won't have to worry about Ray Bitar ordering $500 bottles of wine with every meal) GBT could easily achieve profit margins of 20-25%, generating $400 million in EBITDA over the next five years. And at that point the value of the company could be close to $500 million dollars.

That's with no growth. If the company is able to grow, revise both of those projections upwards. At modest 5% annual growth, add $60 million to EBITDA and $100 million to the company's valuation. The five-year return on GBT's $600-$650 million investment ($300 million to cover player deposits; potentially $300 million to the DOJ paid over three or four years; $50 million in operating capital) could be as much as $1.060 billion, or roughly a 12% annual compounded ROI. That'd be great in any market, never mind one marked by as much volatility and uncertainty as exists today.

These projections assume, of course, that ROWers will return to Full Tilt if/when it begins operating again. Not having a license for the last four months, and thus not being able to operate, has undoubtedly hurt Full Tilt's market share. For that matter, the entire scandal that has precipitated the potential acquisition of FTP has also hurt its market share. There are no guarantees if/when FTP resumes operations that it will be able to generate anything close to $1 million a day in revenue.

Still, when you look at the raw numbers, you can see why GBT is interested in acquiring the company, even in light of its damaged brand and reputation. A little bit of luck and a lot of hard work could make GBT a big winner a few years down the road.

Was Epic Poker League's First Event a Success?

2011-08-16T08:34:00.000-07:00

Time to don the asbestos jumpsuit and prepare for a torrent of hate mail.

I don't understand the hype behind the Epic Poker League's first event that was held last week at the Palms Casino in Las Vegas.

I'm glad the players had mostly positive things to say about the event. In fact that part of the "hype" doesn't surprise me at all. In my time around the poker circuit I can't say that I ever saw players treated all that badly or wrongly, but who wouldn't want to be comped in ways that are bigger and better than they've ever been comped before?

And I partially understand where Jeffrey Pollack and Annie Duke are coming from. Caesars built a brand and product -- the WSOP -- on the backs of the players. All the while the players paid Caesars for that privilege without receiving much in return other than the opportunity to play in poker tournaments.

Jeffrey and Annie are seeking to build a brand and a product -- the Epic Poker League -- on the backs of the players. And so they feel the players should get something in return: limousine transfers, free hotel rooms, $100 food comps and paying only 2% juice (staff tokes) instead of 5% (house rake plus staff tokes). Kudos to Jeffrey, Annie and EPL for trying to make the game of poker better for the players of poker. [Edited to add: of course don't forget the $400k overlay at each event and the $1 million freeroll at the end of the season.]

Yet outside of the natural player reaction to such generous comps, there seems to be an unusual level of hype around the league. That's what I don't understand. To be blunt, what has EPL accomplished to this point in the game? I can sum it up in one sentence.

They ran a poker tournament.

Admittedly they did a great job running that poker tournament and deserve commendations for doing so. But running a solid poker tournament isn't that difficult if you're good at logistics and understand the first thing about tournament structures. That's what makes or breaks most poker tournaments. Nail the logistics and design a good structure and your event will run smoothly. Having hired some talented people, it's not surprising that EPL ran a great poker tournament.

All the same, some people are treating the first EPL Main Event as if it's a game-changer for poker. But I believe that the success of this organization isn't going to be measured by how good a poker tournament it runs. It will be measured in dollars and cents. Right now the organization is spending lots of money without (yet) taking much back in.

I understand that you have to spend money to make money. And I acknowledge that the EPL money inflow/outflow situation could change in the future. Sponsors? Advertisers? Social media gaming? Licensing? Merchandising? All of those things could re-balance the equation. But unless I'm overlooking something major, right now they're *not* re-balancing the equation.

It's true that it's early. I am by no means judging the EPL a failure after one event. But neither am I judging it a success.

This money inflow/outflow issue is not a new problem for poker. Consider three poker businesses from the last three years: The Real Deal, Dream Team Poker and the Asian Poker Tour.

I was perplexed by The Real Deal when it was first announced several years ago. Poker is a niche game/entertainment/sport. Did it really have the broad popular appeal needed for a successful Vegas stage show?

The answer turned out to be a resounding no. The Real Deal flopped so badly that you couldn't give away tickets to it by the time the producers pulled the plug. The Real Deal was a case of people being too far "inside the bubble" to realize just how insignificant the game and culture of poker are to the rest of the world.

Almost every poker business I've seen in the last four years has over-estimated the game's mainstream reach and appeal. EPL certainly wouldn't be the first poker business to commit that sin.

Businesses have been trying to attract mainstream advertisers and sponsors to poker for years, without a ton of success. It's commendable that EPL is trying again, but they *may* be suffering from some of the same "inside the bubble" mindset that plagued The Real Deal. The hard truth is that the world at large just doesn't care very much about our unique little sub-culture.

With Dream Team and Asian Poker Tour, it was a simple question: How will this make money?

Everyone loved Dream Team. They thought it was great fun, innovative, good for the players, all those things that you want a poker product to be. But I remember being at the Dream Team party in the Caesars Poker Room, chatting with Matt Showell and Liz Lieu and wondering how the business would make money. I guess the people behind Dream Team never figured that out either.

In 2008-2009, the Asian Poker Tour decided to make itself a force on the Asian poker scene with a series of $5,000 NLHE tournaments around Asia. The organization, drunk with cash after its parent company held a successful public float, went all out: top talent like Matt Savage and his crew; crack live reporting from PokerNews and others; huge guarantees; numerous satellites with big overlays; tons of swag; lavish parties (actually, the sickest poker party I've ever been to in my life). You name it, the APT spent money on it. The whole time, that nagging little question. "What's the endgame here for these guys?"

I see a lot of parallels between the APT and the EPL. That's not good for the EPL. Two years later, the APT scaled back its ambitious plans. It now runs a series of three or four very tame, very modest $1,000 NLHE tournaments each year, almost exclusively in the Philippines where APT is based. The organization appears to be surviving only because the costs of doing business in the Philippines are stupidly low and because the nation already had a huge built-in poker and gambling culture.

Does any of this mean that Jeffrey and Annie haven't figured out how to make money with EPL? Of course not. They've been asked about this point repeatedly, each time mentioning sponsorship, advertising, licensing, merchandising and social media gaming. Hell, let's throw real-money gaming in there for good measure. Jeffrey and Annie haven't mentioned that but it almost certainly has to at least be "on the table".

Despite those responses from EPL, I have my questions and my doubts. I've read the pressers. I've spoken to both Jeffrey and Annie. I've looked at the facts as they've occurred and added my own estimation that EPL will have spent $10 million by the end of Year 1. I've filtered all of those things through my own experiences in the industry and it's left me unsure of the organization's prospects for success.

Look, I want EPL to succeed. I've said as much to Jeffrey and to Annie. I think it would be good for poker if EPL succeeded. I'm just not convinced yet that it will. Call me a cynic or a "hater" if you want, but I've seen lots of poker businesses fail spectacularly in the last four years. Considering the facts available at present, I'm going to continue to observe the EPL proceedings with some "healthy skepticism".

All of which brings us back to the $20,000,000 question: was EPL's first event a success?

In my opinion -- and really, this is just my opinion, take it or leave it -- we're not going to be able to determine that for a while. If the event helps to attract the advertisers and sponsors that seem to be a critical component of the money-making strategy EPL has outlined to the press, then it will have been a success.

If not... I'd be happy to run the Boracay office of the league.

Some Thoughts on the Girah Scandal

2011-08-11T07:59:00.001-07:00

Spent a fair bit of time yesterday following the Jose Machedo / Haseeb Qureshi / Dan Cates online poker scandal. For the purpose of this post I'll assume you're familiar with the salient details. If you're not, skim over these links:

NEW Cliffs/news of the ongoing Jose "girah" Macedo scandal
The Portuguese Poker Prodigy Jose "girah" Macedo scammed HSNL players

To be clear about this, not much has been proven. Macedo has admitted trying to "superuse" HSNL regulars by teamviewing their screens while playing against him or an account to which he was feeding information. Cates is allowing rampant speculation to fill the void left by his silence (the Full Tilt problem). Qureshi seems to be caught in a pile of conflicting lies, with most signs pointing to some shady dealings in the high-stakes poker world, but at this point has said he won't answer any further questions and is "done" with poker world.

Cates, at 23, is the oldest of the three. Qureshi is 21 and Macedo is 18.

I hate to draw a comparison to professional athletes but we often see young professional athletes make grave lapses of judgment. To an extent it is part of the maturation process, part of the "growing up" process. People make mistakes.

The difference between those athletes and young poker players is that in addition to the reputational hit an athlete takes, there are real repercussions for their transgressions: team and league discipline (which can take the form of fines and suspensions); the inability to avoid the unrelenting eye of the public and the press; perhaps even jail time and the loss of their careers, depending on the nature of the offense.

Professional athletes have handlers and team and league personnel to help guide them away from such lapses of judgment -- and to force them to deal with the fallout when those lapses do occur.

Young poker players, on the other hand, have no such guidance. They also don't have to deal with most of the repercussions, because the industry is so poorly regulated. One immutable truth that has come out of the online poker industry over its roughly ten years of existence is that most scandals drift away on the winds of time with, at most, a reputational hit to the perpetrators. Russ Hamilton and the lingering stench of whatever really happened at UB is the lone exception, but even UB got a pass from many players who continued to play on the site.

When you've worked hard for a significant number of years to develop a sterling reputation, losing that reputation can be devastating. The perpetrators of most online poker scams, however, haven't worked hard to develop much of anything. They all tend to (a) be incredibly young (early 20s); (b) lack "real world" experience; and (c) have spent the last 2-3 years making hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars playing what, to them, is often viewed as a video game. Their reputations, such as they are, don't mean much to them, so losing those reputations in the face of a discovered scam isn't a deterrent.

I'm not saying that better regulation will solve the problem. As long as there are substantial sums of money involved, people will look for shortcuts. But in the absence of any tangible, significant repercussions -- some of which regulation would surely provide -- fewer people will be deterred from those shortcuts than would otherwise be the case.

Poster "otis_nixon" summed it up perfectly:

The great thing for [Qureshi], Jungleman and Girah is that poker players have very short memories and in 6 months most people will barely remember this. There is no better group of people to try to steal money from because people forget so fast and there are very rarely any real-world repercussions.

WSOP Live on ESPN2 Doesn't Deliver

2011-07-15T08:37:00.000-07:00

Last night the wireless internet crapped out at the Rio. We were told that some of ESPN's equipment for the livestream was the culprit, as it was interfering with the wireless frequencies. Today the problem will be solved, but yesterday there was no choice but to grin and bear it. That meant either work off an aircard or head home.

I chose to head home, partially so I could watch the "live" (ok, 30-minute delayed) broadcast on ESPN2 myself. The companion livestream on ESPN3 wasn't available from the press box -- a total boggle.

Anyway, I watched the "live" broadcast of the 2011 PCA final table back in January. I knew the WSOP broacast wasn't exactly breaking new ground but I was still curious how the sucker would turn out.

The good: the production itself is very slick. ESPN and Poker PROductions have learned a thing or two in the 8 years since the hole-card cam changed televised poker. It's incredibly easy to follow the action.

The bad: live poker is boring.

Here's the thing. I've been watching live poker all over the world for the last three years. I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that live poker is boring, especially when there's no big money (yet) on the line. It only appeals to the most hardcore of the hardcore poker fans.

If live broadcasts are the future of televised poker, then televised poker is in deep trouble.

Some viewers complained that the on-air talent stumbled at times last night. And while they did, I believe it's simply a case of growing pains. Making the transition from a canned product to a live product is incredibly difficult -- and filling up all those hours of air-time is no easy matter either. The on-air talent will get demonstrably better day by day as we get deeper into the Main Event. The PCA didn't have that problem because the on-air talent had already been doing EPT Live for years.

What won't get any better, however -- at least until we get to the last 2 or 3 tables -- is that live poker is incredibly boring. I say that as a poker fan and as someone who covered 75 to 100 separate poker tournaments between 2008 and 2011.

I know that part of understanding why the "big hands" happen the way they do is all the "little hands" in between. At times in previous WSOP broadcasts, viewers were robbed of much of the story between all-in hands. But I'd be surprised if those little hands retain much broad viewer interest. It's not that fun to watch "raise it and take it" or a single c-bet take down the pot on the flop for 30 minutes at a time, even if it does shift the table dynamic.

Making things even worse is ESPN's / Poker PROductions' curious decision not to reveal players' hole cards until the end of a hand, even though the stream is on a 30-minute delay. This may be required by Nevada regulators -- I'm not sure -- but it robs hands that were already not very interesting of any gravitas they might possibly have. It effectively removes the hole-card cams from the production until the end of the hand (and sometimes even then Poker PROductions doesn't reveal what the players were holding), thereby returning the production to the late 80s or 90s, before the hole-card cam was invented.

I've been told by ESPN personnel that the goal of the livestreams and the broadcasts is to "get younger", that the only way the WSOP on ESPN can survive and work is to attract a younger audience. They are making the bet that this is the way to do it. But poker is an incredibly niche market to begin with. In my mind, ESPN should be looking at ways to make the game appealing to the wide demographic it attracts at the tables themselves, to grow the market beyond that young grinder niche.

Showing every single hand from now until Tuesday seems like a curious way to do it.

[For a great companion piece, re-read Wicked Chops Poker's take on the 2011 PCA livestream.]

About That River in Egypt

2011-06-07T14:25:00.000-07:00

Contrary to popular belief, Struthio camelus -- your garden-variety ostrich -- does not bury its head in sand to avoid danger. It does what any living thing does when its survival is threatened. It gets the hell out of Dodge.

So far the only person I've seen take this incredibly reasonable approach to the Full Tilt situation is Phil Ivey. The rest of the world seems to be sitting around thinking that things will get better with time. Or at least, that they're not going to get any worse.

Reality check:

1. This is not an accounting issue. It's not merely a matter of convincing the DOJ that the seized money is really non-segregated player funds. That's never going to happen. The DOJ response to that line is, "Tough titties kid. Looks like non-segregated operational funds to us."

2. This is not a payment processing issue. If Tilt had the money, they'd be able to set up the banking relationships necessary to pay out U.S. players. Fuck, when I was in the corporate world we used a barely competent 22-year-old paralegal who couldn't speak English and preferred to spend her working day playing Mafia Wars to set up the dozens of corporate banking relationships we needed. And you know what? It got done! We didn't even need an agreement with the DOJ specifically authorizing it.

3. This is not a public relations issue.

Well, that's not entirely true. It *is* a PR issue, as so eloquently stated by Jesse May's "You Sanctimonious Little". When Michelle Clayborne is your lead publicist everything is a PR issue. But that's not the cause of the problem. It's a symptom of the true issue: mis-management.

4. This is not a Phil Ivey issue. Sure, Ivey feigning some sort of nobility about skipping the WSOP is all smoke and mirrors. But lets apply Occam's Razor to the situation. Tilt didn't get anything accomplished for six weeks, and basically didn't utter a peep other than to feed the 2+2 forum account "FTPDoug" to the ravenous masses. Are we now supposed to believe that a deal was imminent and was de-railed by Ivey? Really? The same Ivey that had a huge vested interest in Tilt's continued survival?

Look, the facts have been staring us all in the face since at least April 20, the day it became startlingly clear that FTP might not, in fact, have been segregating player accounts. Not to go patting myself on the back, but I tweeted that day, "Not a fan of the latest FTP news re frozen accts and player funds. Seems like a short leap from there to the word 'commingling'."

I may have more access than most when it comes to FTP operations, but all I did that day was read a few pressers and make some logical intuitive leaps. Prognosis: negative. I looked longingly at my FTP account balance one more time ($1,142.60) and then consigned it to the abyss.

Last week Ivey painted the proverbial writing on the wall in fluorescent letters six feet high. Tilt is seriously fucked. What other conclusion can we possibly draw from the fact that the greatest poker player in the world felt it was time and necessary to get out -- even if it was for his own purely business-related reasons?

And then Tilt, in all their blessed, bumbling incompetence, responded by trying to scapegoat Ivey.

Scapegoat Ivey! Scapegoat the most recognizable poker player in the world and the face of their site for eight years. You'd think Ray Bitar would have sent an underling to stand outside Ivey's trailer, the one Ivey usually keeps parked in the back of the Rio Convention Center at this time of year, to hold a boom box over his head playing "In Your Eyes".

Ivey had no use for Tilt outside of the money it provided him. You're kidding yourself if you think he did. Nobody but Howard could get Ivey to do Tilt promotional work. With such disdain for the promotional side of the business, Ivey certainly couldn't be bothered to stick his nose into the operational side. Yet Tilt was *blessed* to have Ivey on the team. He's the one guy who can transcend poker and make a blip on ESPN's SportsCenter. Now somehow this is suddenly all Ivey's fault?

Ivey acted like the true ostrich in all of this. He used his powerful legs and remarkable speed to get the fuck out while the getting out was good.

5. This IS a survival issue. PokerStars had the proper safeguards in place to evolve and adapt to changed conditions. In my first Black Friday post, I wrote, "I envisioned a minion of Isai Scheinberg walking around the Stars corporate headquarters with the nuclear football handcuffed to his wrist. Another would break the emergency glass and start distributing the contingency plan -- prepared for this very eventuality -- to all employees." This week I learned that my tongue-in-cheek description wasn't far from the truth.

Of course! That's what any sane business would do.

On the other hand, a culture of mis-management has permeated Tilt for years. That kind of administration doesn't have the nuclear football handcuffed to their wrists in case those pesky Soviets launch a pre-emptive strike. That kind of administration venerates the ostrich effect and pretends that the Soviets don't exist. And judging from Tilt's (lack of) response the last six weeks, if they did have the football handcuffed to their wrists, Ray Bitar forgot to put the launch codes inside of it.

That's all well and good as long as the Soviets never strike. But when they do, it's game over man.

I know that, for a lot of people, people with significantly more money tied up online than my paltry $1,142, the idea that Tilt is never coming back is a bitter pill to swallow. But if you ignore the elephant in the room, don't be surprised when he tramples you.

Where I RISE to a New Challenge

2011-05-30T10:13:00.000-07:00

Since my Martin Luther King-like announcement of two weeks ago ("Free at last!") I've been busy. There was a 6-day trip to NYC for a wedding and a funeral, where Dawn Summers made me watch more shitty TV in 2 days than I've watched in a year. There's been the arrival to Las Vegas of good poker friends for the WSOP and all the drinking, pai gow, and golf that such arrivals entail. There's also been all the work on my new project.

New project, you ask? Well of course. You didn't think I kissed PokerNews and all that WSOP money goodbye without having something else lined up, did you?

Tomorrow RISE Poker will go live. RISE is a collaboration between Poker Royalty, RISE Clothing, and the ZEN Entertainment Network. It's a membership-based poker site, which means it's perfectly legal in the US of A.

Let's throw Pokerati some link-love with a link to the RISE Poker launch press release.

Getting this sucker off the ground isn't going to be easy. In fact it's going to be bloody difficult. I'm very aware of that. But we've got some talented people working on the project. And me. Plus the point man, Chops, isn't a *total* dick. I feel like we've got a better shot than most.

To coincide with the launch, we're running a few promotions -- some freerolls, a bounty tournament, a WSOP Main Event promotion -- that should help get a few people in the door. At least, they *better* get people in the door or I'll be looking for work again sooner rather than later. So give us a whirl. You don't want me to be unemployed do you? (Dawn Summers is prohibited from replying to this question.)

This is the one. Stops time. ~~Freeze ray.~~ RISE Poker. Tell your friends.

The Finishing Nail

2011-05-16T09:44:00.000-07:00

A month ago yesterday the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed indictments against the Big Three poker sites. At the time I was covering the 2011 LAPT Peru Main Event in Lima. Stunned by the news and justifiably concerned about the future, Shamus and I spent some time at dinner one night estimating the number of live tournaments each of us has covered since we simultaneously broke into the biz in 2008.

There's a hook in the wall of my home office. Well, not a hook really. It's a finishing nail that sticks halfway out of the wall, about three feet below the ceiling. I can't remember if it was there when I moved in or if I put it in the wall myself.

Hanging from that finishing nail is every media badge I've accumulated in the last three years. They are 33 in total and represent five different continents, from my first gig at the 2008 WSOP, to EPT San Remo and APPT Cebu in 2009, to 2010 ANZPT Queenstown, to one of my most recent gigs at LAPT Peru last month. Add in festivals for which I never received a badge, and festivals at which I covered multiple events, and you're looking at roughly 90 live poker tournaments that I've covered in the last three years.

Live reporting wasn't my only income during that time. I wrote for multiple magazines and multiple web sites. I consulted for major poker sites and performed legal work for various individuals and organizations on the edges of the poker scene. The live-reporting work, however, was a significant chunk of the money I made.

Was. Is no longer.

The last lanyard is on the nail. Time to try something else for a while. I'll still be doing some "scribbling", as Shamus calls it. And I'll still be floating around poker tournaments like the upcoming 2011 World Series of Poker. You just won't see me on media row, furiously pecking out how 9-9 held against A-K and trying to figure out if there's any way I can work a "triple range merge" joke into the update. You'll probably run into me trying to charm the latest raven-haired (female!) railbird to catch me eye.

Until then, you can find me at the bar.

Where You've Been, Where You Are, and Where You're Going

2011-05-10T08:13:00.001-07:00

The scene was a nondescript casino floor-side bar in the Monte Carlo casino, a bar not much different than dozens of others that sprinkle the Las Vegas Strip like freckles on an Irishman. The time was 5:30pm on a Tuesday, a time when respectable folks with respectable jobs are either wrapping up work for the day or already on their way home to their respectable families.

Dan Michalski, Stu Hoegner and I were seated around one corner of the bar with four Blue Moons (theirs) and two Fat Tires (mine) between the three of us. I don't know how respectable Stu is – he *seems* respectable, at least – and I won't speak for Dan, but I don't neatly fit that description.

Stu asked me about my "career trajectory". It's an odd one. It's not just that I turned a page a few years ago and moved from one line of work to the next in a tangential direction. No, I put the book down mid-sentence and picked up an Xbox controller. What came before: eight years of corporate and commercial lawyering for the finance and real estate sectors in the greatest city in the world. What came after: a poker industry jack-of-all-trades (master of none?) in a city of tract-housing subdivisions separated by cookie-cutter strip malls for 20 miles in every direction. The connections between the two careers are tenuous, at best; the only connection between the two cities is that they're polar opposites.

And yet there I was in 2008, packing up my life to head west. Again. I even wrote a long post about some of the thinking that led to the decision. Once I'm on board with something I commit 100%. To do anything less is to do a disservice to myself.

There's plenty I could say about that trip, from its emotionally wrought beginning to its predictable end. Little backstage anecdotes that never made their way into the critical reviews of the show. It's not ancient history – what's a year or three, really? – but it's sufficiently in the past that dredging up those anecdotes now would do nothing but hurt feelings and point up the capacity of otherwise intelligent people (like me) to turn obvious facts into the illusory narrative that they most want to read. I'm no stranger to ritual self-disembowelment but I try not to splatter other people with my entrails.

So I brushed by all of that as neatly as I could and told Stu that I moved to Vegas for what were probably the wrong reasons. The 2008 post is a great reminder not to put on rose-colored glasses, not to see the grass on the other side as greener (rosier?) than it actually was. But it also doesn't mean that the specific reasons I had at that specific time for moving specifically to Vegas were the right ones. Specifically.

Stu nodded, then asked me if I'm happy where I am now. Which, to remind you, at the time of his question was a nondescript casino-floor bar in the Monte Carlo at 5:30pm on a Tuesday – a city I moved to for the wrong reasons – two weeks after the poker industry's "Black Friday". ("Why's it gotta be black?" --Dawn Summers)

I gave Stu a lengthy response about the quality of Vegas and the quality of its inhabitants, a response that Dan echoed. I might have said something about respectability that's now lost in a Fat Tire haze dulled by the passage of a week's time.

Yet I've been thinking about Stu's question since he asked it. See, there's no guarantee that anything would be better or worse in NYC right now. The investment fund that I worked for was heavily invested in the Russian market and in Eastern European real estate, both of which peaked the very day I left the fund (obviously I was the lynchpin). My replacement was laid off six months later.

The simple fact is that there's no going back. You can't compare the present with anything but itself. There's no "presumed present" of an alternate life, especially three years after the relevant decision point that created the new branch. Nobody knows what my life would be like if I hadn't left NYC, not even me. You can only live the life you're living.

Am I satisfied with this current life? Well, there are levels of satisfaction. I doubt I'd be completely satisfied with any life. I'm constantly looking to improve things. But as I look both ways up and down the road, am I happy where I am now?

You know, it's been a long time since anybody asked me that. I'm great. Thanks for asking, Stu.

Where Do We Go From Here?

2011-04-27T15:49:00.000-07:00

"Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again."

"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

--J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, Book I, Chapter II

(There it is, for those who were wondering. Hack-y references to pop culture disguised as literature. Prepare for a turd of a post.)

We're now 12 days on the wrong side of Black Friday. The initial shock of the DOJ indictments against the Poker Sites is gone, replaced for Americans by a gnawing emptiness that online poker used to fill and an uneasy dread of what the immediate future may bring.

On our last day in Lima last Monday, Shamus and I spent some time musing about the future of poker and our little writer's corner of it. Then as now the future was uncertain and bleak (at best), but we both more or less shrugged. We engaged in some gallows humor and assumed that we'd adapt somehow -- whether by transitioning within poker or turning our attentions elsewhere -- and get through it.

I've written before that one of the great cosmic ironies of the universe is that human beings are incredibly adaptable yet highly resistant to change. It's easier to live in the past, or to point fingers at what went wrong, than to try to adjust to an uncertain future. That blame game is now turning its attention to Caesars CEO Gary Loveman.

Loveman wrote an op-ed yesterday that put forth a clear, powerful message in favor of regulating online poker. Instead of celebrating that -- FINALLY! -- somebody is hitting the strongest talking points for online poker regulation, people are fixating on Caesars' pre-Black Friday efforts to kill intra-state regulations. Did that happen? Sure. Does it matter now? Not really. Why not?

Because like it or not, it's now Caesars' world. We're just living in it. (If I wanted to be super hack-y today, I'd figure out how to tuck in a [second] throw-away reference to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer tv series. "The hardest thing in this world is to live in it.")

Yes, Caesars acted in its own interests. Is that so surprising? To expect Caesars to have done anything else is, in a word, silly. State regulation with the Poker Sites still in the market was not in Caesars' interests. Where does everyone think the blackout period in the Reid Bill came from?

Most players seem to be making the error that Bill Rini recently accused me (mistakenly, I feel) of making: thinking online poker regulation should be about what's fair or what's good for the players. To be blunt, nobody gives a shit about the players. Corporations exist to make money. That is what they care about. Period. The successful ones (like Caesars) are very, very good at it. Caesars clearly calculated that it was more in its own interests to try to elbow Tilt and Stars out of the market before throwing its weight behind regulation. Now, having successfully done that, the next logical step is -- regulation!

Obviously nobody associated with the industry pre-Black Friday wanted the current state of affairs. There is a measurable loss associated with the departure of online poker from the U.S. Where before there was 12-table, 6-max grinding and Poker After Dark, now there is... whatever it is that's replaced those things. Call of Duty and late-night infomericals for SPANX, I guess.

Caesars, MGM and the other land-based casino interests now have the pole position. It's time to accept that fact and figure out what the road map to regulation is from here. Unless they performed some masterful post oak bluff, I sincerely doubt that Caesars and MGM contributed 650 Gs to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's 2010 re-election effort to have a multi-billion dollar industry shrivel up and die overnight. They've purchased influence and now they're going to try to use it.

Are there obstacles? Of course. The House leadership remains a big stumbling block. But the casino industry's been around the block more often than the PPA has. I would guess the casino industry actually have a semblance of a plan for where to go from here. Using talking points that the industry has been begging the PPA to use is a great first step.

The fear of the unknown is powerful. It's where denial comes from. It's tough to see the sky falling and the world undergoing cataclysmic upheaval when your head's in the sand (although you'd think the vibrations would give a clue).

Yet the unknown, the falling sky, and the cataclysm isn't just barreling down the pike; it's here. Now we need to decide what to do with the time we have given us. The winners are going to be the people who adapt to the new reality the fastest.

The Search for the Real Victim

2011-04-23T09:00:00.000-07:00

Been thinking some more about what the future will bring for online poker in the United States. As The Entites at Wicked Chops Poker pointed out yesterday, it's a minimum of two years until licensed, regulated online poker returns to the U.S. It would be a shame if Poker Stars and Full Tilt Poker weren't let back into the country by then.

Look, I remain convinced that the fraud and money laundering charges against the Poker Sites are damning. The lawyer in me says a crime is a crime, whether "justified" or not. Nobody with any experience processing payments (even from a player perspective) should be surprised by the charges in light of the allegations. The payment processing facts are not in the Poker Sites' favor.

But the court of public opinion SHOULD be in their favor. As Todd Witteles wrote yesterday, this was a victim-less crime. Try to find a victim here. I dare you. Was it poker players? Certainly not. The actions of the payment processing departments allowed players to continue playing a game that is arguably not illegal under Federal law[FN 1] and that has no consequent societal, and no or few consequent individual, harms that derive from it. In fact, charging the Poker Sites with these crimes has victimized poker players more than the crimes themselves ever did by destroying a great source of entertainment and, for some, destroying their livelihoods, whether they were pros or were employed by the coterie of poker-related industries that online poker sustained.

[FN 1 - We can re-visit the circularity of the definition of "unlawful internet gambling" under the UIGEA another time but the statute could be unconstitutional for that definition being vague. Check out a piece I wrote in September 2010 for more information.

EDIT: Grange brings up iMega in the comments, a case from 2 years ago I had forgotten about. While it's not good precedent, it's also not binding in the 2nd Circuit where these charges have been brought.]

Were the banks and the payment processors the victims of the crimes? Only if your definition of a victim includes someone who was tricked (perhaps winking and nudging at times along the way) into doing something that he'll never be prosecuted for -- and for which he has an affirmative defense anyway -- and that netted him millions of dollars in profits. Yes, the banks sound very victimized. God, can you imagine ANYONE having any sympathy for the banks even if they were the victims here?

The poker sites couldn't have been the victims. They're the ones charged with crimes.

That leaves the government, where we get to the real rub. The government was victimized in that it lost out on its share of the (large) poker regulatory and tax pie by enacting the UIGEA in the first place. The government was victimized in that the Poker Sites stuck their tongues out and said, "Nah nah nah nah you can't touch us!" What we have is the DOJ protecting the rights and the ego of the federal government to get its cut and to put the Poker Sites in their place. The DOJ certainly isn't protecting any of its citizens, be they natural or juridical.

At one time I thought this case would end in a settlement, as most of these cases tend to do. But the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced it will go the other way. The government is going to have a tough time trying to extradite Ray Bitar or Isai Scheinberg or most of the other named defendants. Countries generally don't like going along with extraditions for charges that aren't crimes on their own soil. That won't create much pressure on the poker sites to ease the plight of their fearless leaders.

Without any real threat of jail time, there's nothing to be gained by the Poker Sites from a settlement. A settlement would almost certainly take the form of a hefty fine [FN 2], the possibility of some jail time for some of the individual defendants, and (this is the killer) an admission of guilt. Any admission of guilt by the Poker Sites will seriously jeopardize their chances of being licensed in a regulated future. If the Poker Sites are going to be shut out of the US market anyway, they might as well tell the DOJ to F itself in the A and tie this thing up in the court system for the next two years.

By then maybe regulation will have come to the U.S. and the DOJ will want this embarrassment of a case to just go away.

[FN 2 - As I said on Twitter last night, I note that the last installment of the PartyGaming DOJ settlement money is to be paid in September 2012. If 18-24 months is a realistic timeframe for regulation (and who knows), that is an interesting coincidence.]

The PPA Needs to Be Stopped

2011-04-22T10:47:00.001-07:00

Earlier this week I intended to write a post un-packing the PPA response to Black Friday and why it has been woefully inadequate. My post was going to start from the premise that, of all people and organizations, the PPA should have seen this calamity coming and been prepared for it. Instead they appeared to be caught with their pants down.

Unfortunately things got away from me in the crunch of other obligations. In the meantime many other voices took up that torch, to the point that my post was redundant. Consider this short list:

Bill Rini: The PPA is Pathetic; I Don't Get the PPA
Wicked Chops: The PPA Still Doesn't Get It: Reshaping the Online Poker Regulation Message
Grange95: The PPA Meets or Exceeds Expectations

But today PPA Chairman Al D'Amato authored a jaw-dropping Op-Ed that appeared in the Washington Post. It showed that the PPA is *still* muddling the message and still stuck on the wrong arguments to make for regulated online poker.

Let's start with the headline (which, I will concede, may have come from WaPo and not D'Amato himself): "Make online poker legal? It already is."

As a practical matter, people in the poker community know that a case can be made that online poker isn't illegal under current U.S. law. Certainly that's the position that PokerStars and Full Tilt took while they continued to operate in the U.S. post-UIGEA. But that's not the issue that online poker players really want addressed. We want the government to license, regulate and tax the game so that it exists in a black-and-white area of federal law, with strict government oversight akin to that existing in B&M casinos. Doing so would create jobs and would remove online poker from the legal twilight zone that it's inhabited for the last five years.

The headline of the Op-Ed confuses this issue right from the outset. If I were to read D'Amato's headline with no knowledge of the poker industry prior to last week's indictments, I might easily think that the status quo is fine, that indeed there must have been some shady business going on for the Big Three to have been indicted. So right away we have uninformed readers potentially taking the wrong message from D'Amato's piece.

[And if WaPo was responsible for the headline... well what does that say about what WaPo editors took away from the Op-Ed?]

D'Amato spends the first four paragraphs of the Op-Ed telling a few unrelated anecdotes about his own experiences with poker. A sharp reader can see that he's trying to set up the "poker is a skill game" argument that the PPA has been repeating ad nauseum for five years and, I might add, taking up too much column space to do it.

Five paragraphs into the piece we get the first useful piece of rhetoric. D'Amato writes,

"This is an attack on Internet poker and American poker players like me. Through these strong-arm tactics, prosecutors think they can ban Internet poker. Instead, they are making millions of Americans victims in an attempt to make online poker illegal without the support of legislators or the public."

Great! I like this paragraph a lot. D'Amato is attempting to frame the facts in a light that is beneficial to his main argument, which is that Americans should be free to play government-sanctioned and government-regulated poker on the Internet. Instead, the actions of the government have had an opposite and direct effect on average Americans. Beautiful.

Unfortunately, D'Amato doesn't explain why the game should be regulated in language to which the Average Joe can relate. Instead of making prohibition comparisons, llibertarian arguments and delving into the benefits of regulation for all parties involved -- consumer protection for players, revenue generation for governments, job creation for average Americans and bright line regulations for operators -- D'Amato starts in on the "game of skill" argument. Poker isn't gambling; it's a game of skill. Thus it should be legal.

This argument has been the PPA's standard tactic for the last five years. What has that tactic accomplished? According to Grange, more harm than good. I won't repeat Grange's arguments; just go read his well-written post and know that I agree with everything contained therein.

Back to D'Amato. In that one brilliant rhetorical paragraph of this piece that I referenced above, D'Amato suggested that the indictments were an attempt by the Justice Department "to make online poker illegal without the support of legislators or the public." But when he does finally come around to making a quick, weak libertarian argument in favor of online poker, he leads it by contradicting his own earlier position. "No one, including [Attorney General Eric] Holder, suggests that it is illegal for an individual to play poker on the Internet," D'Amato writes.

Well, which is it? By shifting his ground on this argument in the space of three paragraphs, D'Amato calls into question the credibility of his entire piece.

It isn't until the ninth(!) paragraph of the piece that D'Amato offers a clear, concise statement of what action the government should take:

...it is time to clarify federal law: Online poker is legal. Congress should license and regulate Internet poker and allow Americans to play the game they love on trusted, safe online Web sites without fear that the FBI will come knocking.

Unfortunately, by the time the reader reaches this clear and concise statement, he or she has had to wade through the muddled masses of the previous eight paragraphs. And D'Amato still leaves out the job-creation, revenue-generation and consumer-protection benefits of regulation.

The fact is that while 50 million American may play poker at one time or another, far fewer play online. I've seen estimates that range from 3 million to 15 million. The 15 million number at the high end of the range represents only 5% of the total U.S. population. Nobody is going to convince the other 95% of the population to remotely care about this issue by stating that poker is a game of skill -- especially when it's obvious that, in the short term, chance plays a large role. However, if you frame the argument in terms of jobs, tax revenue, and consumer protection, more people are going to sit up and take notice.

To date the PPA has refused to explore this alternative (and in my opinion more compelling) line of argumentation in favor of online poker regulation. If they remaining unwilling to do so then maybe it would be best if the PPA said nothing at all. Right now they're not helping the cause.

Domain Name Agreements Are Only a Step

2011-04-20T10:03:00.000-07:00

In part of the ongoing PR battle between the DOJ and the "Poker Companies", this morning the DOJ announced it was restoring use of the pokerstars.com and fulltiltpoker.com in order "to facilitate return of U.S. player funds".

The DOJ has a PR problem. They want the Poker Sites to look like the bad guys, but by seizing the domain names and dropping a nuclear bomb on US online poker, the DOJ is the one who looks bad. It has frozen all of the US players (that the DOJ is theoretically acting to protect with this case) out of their funds. That's not very good PR.

Solution: offer the domains back to PokerStars and FullTilt so that they can start processing withdrawals. Everything's fine now, right?

Not so fast. Under the UIGEA it's still illegal for banks to process gambling transactions. Just because the DOJ gives the domains bank doesn't change the law of the land. The best the DOJ can do is say "we won't enforce the law with respect to these types of transactions."

Meanwhile, every bank in the country has been operating for 5 years under the UIGEA model of "decline gambling transactions". Many of them may not even be *aware* of this announcement by the DOJ. It's big news to poker players, sure. But in the banking world it's a blip. It's going to take time for the banks to change their method of doing business. They're going to want to be triple-convinced. And I doubt the DOJ is interested in actively helping the Poker Sites get the transactions accomplished. It serves the DOJ's PR interests too much to *appear* to be the good guys (hey, here are your domains back. Give the players their money!) and to let the "bad guys", the Poker Companies, twist in the wind a while longer trying to figure out how to get U.S. players their money back. I'd expect calls from U.S. banks to Preet Bharara's office in Manhattan to go un-returned for a while.

Believe it or not, banks are risk-averse. They price risk and act accordingly. If the price that they're getting is good enough, they'll justify a risk and act on it. At that point it is no longer a "risk". But in the case of "violating black-letter law of the land", the risk is unpriceable and therefore huge. The banks are going to take a lot of convincing. The domain name agreements simply say that they "expressly allow for" the Poker Companies to use the domains to process withdrawal transactions without referencing any outside authority or statute (like, say, the UIGEA). That's a very thin reed on which to ask banks to hang their hats. They're going to need some time.

This doesn't mean that I think FTP and Stars players won't eventually get their money back. They will. But it's going to take a lot more time than people in the poker world think. These domain name agreements are just the first step down a very long road for PokerStars, Full Tilt, and U.S. players.

[Edited to add: I would expect what will happen is that Stars/Tilt will look to do business with a few main intermediary banks. Those intermediary banks will seek explicit written confirmation, addressed to them, from the DOJ that the DOJ will not bring UIGEA charges against them for processing the transactions.]

House of Cards

2011-04-15T22:13:00.000-07:00

You might be expecting some legal analysis from me tonight. For tonight, at least, you're not going to get it. I'm in Lima, Peru, trying to grasp the enormity of what happened today.

Like many in the poker industry, I have known about the online poker-related grand jury proceedings in the Southern District of New York for a long time, since April of last year. I had second-hand knowledge of the proceedings through someone I know who was subpoenaed by the Department of Justice. All of the questions that person was asked by the FBI pertained to payment processing and how payment processing transactions were coded post-UIGEA.

I made oblique reference to that knowledge in a December 2010 post called "What's Next for U.S. Online Poker?". At the time I wrote, "At this very moment, the Southern District of New York is investigating payment processors and how they code online poker transactions... The government is starting to catch up to what the UIGEA intended four years ago. The DOJ is getting itself up-to-speed so it can shatter the backbone of the U.S. online poker industry -- money movement."

Anyone who spent five minutes around the industry in the last few years knew that payment processing was the weakest link in the online poker operational chain. It seemed to be verging nearer and nearer to collapse, ready to take down the whole online house of cards with it.

Then PokerStarsWynn happened, followed by FullTiltStation. NJ came close to passing intra-state poker and other states were working on the same thing. All the money was lining up in favor of regulation. Typically in the U.S., as the money goes so goes the policy. It seemed like the return of regulated online poker in the U.S. was a matter of time. Who cared that PartyPoker settled with the DOJ and set a horrible precedent? We'd soon have a second boom!

Except nobody told the SDNY, and the SDNY felt that the principals of the online poker sites were nothing but a bunch of cards.

To be honest I don't think Full Tilt forgot about the SDNY. Tilt has been stockpiling cash for a long, long time for this fight. No doubt Stars and UB/AP have done the same. All three sites knew that the SDNY was asking questions about payment processing. So although this indictment has seemingly come out of left field, I doubt that PS, FTP and AP/UB were caught completely unaware. They have had to guess that something like this might be coming.

I joked with Pauly and Shamus that I envisioned a minion of Isai Scheinberg walking around the Stars corporate headquarters with the nuclear football handcuffed to his wrist. Another would break the emergency glass and start distributing the contingency plan -- prepared for this very eventuality -- to all employees.

Yet it may not matter. The case laid out in the indictment and the complaint is as damning as it is accepted fact to anyone who's been involved in any facet of the online poker industry (player side or industry side) in the last five years. Payment processing was increasingly becoming dicey. The way payments were processed was, from a certain viewpoint, fraudulent and illegal under U.S. law. It has little to do with whether or not online poker constitutes "unlawful internet gambling" under the UIGEA. The specter of the UIGEA was enough to cause banks to decline gambling-related payment processing transactions, which in turn forced the online poker sites to become more "creative" in how those transactions were moved through the system.

In business, "creative" is often a euphemism for "not entirely legal." Deliberately mis-coding a transaction is against U.S. law. After five years the government finally huffed and puffed and blew the payment processing and online poker houses down.

Now I sit in a loft in Lima, Peru with three colleagues and friends in the poker industry. We've spent the last two days covering a poker tournament that has instantly become a footnote to the biggest poker story in the last five years. Ocean's Twelve is on the television. It's the scene where each of the co-conspirators is arrested by Italian police and thrown in jail.

It seems a fitting end to one of the most trying days of my poker career.

Laying Low

2011-04-11T12:47:00.000-07:00

I'm still here. The last few weeks have been mostly quiet in terms of the poker industry and incredibly quiet for me personally. Shadows of things are swirling within the poker river (as they often are) but whether/when any of them surface is anybody's guess.

I continue to watch all of the developments on the poker legislative front. There's nothing out there which is earth-shattering, game-changing or even rises to the level of meriting comment. The gist of the status quo is that federal regulation languishes while certain states press on intra-state gaming. The money (which means B&M operators and their online counterparts) would prefer a federal solution.

Any state that comes even close to implementing an intra-state scheme backs down in the face of intensive lobbying efforts by members of the gaming industry. Pressure is clearly building in favor of regulation in the U.S. but again, it's anybody's guess when the dam finally bursts.

What's not a guess: 2011 LAPT Peru starts on Thursday. I'll be joining fellow scribes and friends Elissa, Shamus and Pauly south of the equator for tournament poker, fantastic Peruvian food, and maybe even some Woolly Bastards.

Surveying the Potential Regulated Online Poker Landscape

2011-03-28T12:37:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I did any theorycrafting so let's theorize about PokerStarsWynn and the potentiality of FullTiltStation.

Back in December, when the poker industry was running amok during the Reid Bill saga, Union Gaming Research published a research note about what legalized online poker might look like and who would benefit.

At the time, UGR posited that "MGM has the most to gain" due to "a large player database, multiple highly recognizable brands, and a significant number of physical venues". The note also suggested that "the Venetian and Wynn brands will be ripe for participation"; that Harrah's / Caesars would certainly be in the mix by leveraging the WSOP; that the Palms might "disproportionately benefit" because of its customer demographics; and that Station Casinos could be "helped by the Fertittas' UFC ownership."

When you jump ahead to last week the state of the poker market looks like this:

* Harrah's / Caesars - partnered with 888, WSOP.com in play
* Wynn - partnered with PokerStars
* Stations - rumored to be partnering with Full Tilt
* Palms - hosting Federated tournaments, getting cozy with Zynga?

That leaves MGM and LVS as the two biggest B&M operators not currently rumored to be getting into bed with anyone. If FTP does sign with Stations, the leftover pickings for MGM and LVS will be slim.

According to PokerScout, PartyPoker is the #3 online poker operator in the world, ranked by players online. But it's a steep drop from #2, Full Tilt, to #3. If US-facing sites are broken out into their own group, the drop-off from #2, Full Tilt, to #3, Cereus, is even more pronounced. Party, of course, stopped taking US players in 2006.

I have to believe that MGM, a company that has been pushing aggressively for regulated online poker, has an action plan in mind for the day regulation becomes a reality. You don't spend as much time and effort pursuing something as MGM has without knowing exactly how you're going to tackle it if you succeed. Maybe MGM will go it alone; maybe it has a handshake agreement with Party. Who knows, but I'd bet some sort of plan is in place.

Where does that leave LVS?

The only thing that the remaining US-facing online sites can offer LVS is a software platform. The sites in spots #3 through #10 based on players online -- including the likes of Cereus, Cake, Merge and Bodog -- don't even add up to Tilt's #2 ranking. They don't offer a B&M operator access to much of a player database or much of an instant revenue stream. They provide ready-made software which can (presumably) be easily skinned for LVS's needs and that's it.

I don't know much about the pros and cons of the software of those online sites. I do know that I can't see any U.S. B&M operator wanting anything to do with Cereus. The taint of the super-user scandal is strong and ongoing and could be a serious impediment to Cereus being granted a license. Maybe Cake, Merge and Bodog can play three-way RPS for the privilege of partnering with LVS.

Or maybe LVS goes it alone too. But, unlike MGM, I don't recall LVS ever having shifted away from being "neutral" on internet gaming. Are they ready for it? Or will they be the outfit left without a chair when the regulatory music finally stops?

Who knows. Like usual, I'm probably out to left field.

Epic Wynn?

2011-03-25T10:45:00.000-07:00

(With all apologies to my colleague Chris Hall for lifting his pun. You were right. It's a good one.)

Yesterday Wynn Resorts -- yes, that Wynn -- announced a partnership with PokerStars. The two companies will work together to secure passage of federal-level regulation for online poker in the United States. Assuming that regulation occurs, they'll then seek out a license to jointly operate an online poker site under the name PokerStarsWynn.com.

Steve Wynn, the Chairman of Wynn Resorts, had long been against any form of online gambling, one of the few operators in the Vegas space that held that view. The largest, like Caesars and MGM, have been pro-online gambling for a while; many others were at least neutral. That Wynn has now shifted his stance all the way in favor of online gambling is sea change.

Back in December I said that I expected 2011 would reveal who is making what bets on online poker in the United States. We now have a savvy entrepreneur and highly influential member of the Vegas gambling community aligning himself on the side of regulation. And let's not forget that Stars isn't some fly-by-night operation that most have never heard of. It's the world's largest online poker site not named Zynga Poker. In America, as the money goes so goes the policy.

I did find one sentence of the LVRJ article amusing: "Wynn said he is now convinced Internet gaming is taking place in the U.S. and it's time to legalize the activity." Only now Steve? What took so long? I know your vision isn't the best but come on!

Seriously though, file this one under G for "good for poker".

The You in Community

2011-03-24T09:26:00.000-07:00

It all started innocently enough, as these things usually do. Kevin Mathers tweeted a link to a consolidated "Joe Sebok" thread on the 2+2 forums. Sebok is the son of Barry Greenstein and president of PokerRoad. About a year and a half ago he joined scandal-plagued UB as a sponsored player and a media and operations consultant. Since then, and as details continue to trickle to light about the UB cheating scandal, Sebok has been a favored whipping boy for many at 2+2.

I rarely read 2+2. Although there are interesting and useful nuggets of information that can be mined there, the signal-to-noise ratio is so bad that it kills any desire I have to go prospecting. When someone I trust links a thread I will usually at least scan it but that's as far as my participation goes.

During yesterday's scan I noticed Mason Malmuth posting in the thread. Two statements he made caught my eye. "2+2 is where the poker community is," and "our site is now essentially the discussion center of everything poker". Malmuth has always struck me as extremely egotistical (par for the course with 90% of the moderators and participants at 2+2, Kevmath excepted) and those statements fit right into the mold.

I tweeted back at Kevmath, "I find it hilarious that Mason thinks 2+2 is the poker community. I know so many people who won't set foot in there."

I was surprised at what followed -- a rather lengthy Twitter-discussion of what the poker community is and is not, and how it means different things to different people. I thought The Entities at Wicked Chops put a nice period on the discussion by closing it out with the statement, "65M+ people play poker in US alone. 20-25k go to 2+2 daily? Important but not central hub & not [a] thorough representation of poker community" (Caveat: I have no idea about the accuracy of their numbers.)

I should be fair to Malmuth. It's natural to have a self-centered view of the world. We can only experience the world through our own eyes and our own ears. It often leads us to make erroneous assumptions that the world we experience is the world everyone experiences.

There's no doubt in my mind that for some people, like Malmuth, 2+2 is their poker community. There's also no doubt in my mind that many other people (I can list players, industry types, fans) don't even know of 2+2's existence or believe that 2+2 represents everything detestable about the poker community. And this doesn't even touch upon the other poker forums -- PocketFives, for example -- that capture a similar segment of the community that 2+2 represents.

In Las Vegas, there is a community of local grinders, spanning all manners of limits. Yet there are regulars in the Vegas poker scene who would be offended to be included in that community and associated with people that they find offensive (for whatever reason and in whatever manner).

For many people with whom I regularly interact, the poker community is the tournament circuit. Yet what percentage of poker players or even industry types will ever spend more than a few days on the circuit? And how exactly do you define "the circuit" these days, with so many different tournament offerings spanning the globe?

What about people who are recreational players online and/or live but who never look at poker training sites, poker forums, or anything having to do with poker's internet presence (besides the poker sites themselves)? I'm willing to bet those people represent a larger segment of the industry than many would expect.

The point I'm trying to make is that there is no one poker community. Poker represents different things to different people, based in no small part upon their own demographic background and their own experiences. The industry may be small, in terms of "percentage of people in the world who regularly play poker in some form", but it is incredibly diverse, both in the types of people it brings to the table and the manner in which they experience the game. That's one of the beauties of poker.

In my opinion, Malmuth is dead wrong. 2+2 is not where the poker community is. 2+2 is where a certain segment of the poker community is. Focusing on the I in community, as Malmuth has done, misses everything that is fantastic about the game of poker. For that, we need to look at the you in community.

Some Quick Thoughts on Zynga PokerCon

2011-03-21T10:51:00.001-07:00

Zynga is a name that many people don't know. It's the company behind several popular Facebook games, including Mafia Wars, Farmville and Zynga Poker. It's also the name of the company that hosted its first ever live-poker event at the Palms this past weekend, a two-day convention called Zynga PokerCon.

I didn't attend PokerCon because I'm a big fan of virtual goods or play-money poker or even Facebook. I attended because Zynga Poker has become the 800-pound gorilla in the poker industry room. Zynga holds itself out as "the world's largest online poker room" (37 million total players; 7.6 million players daily) and speculation has been rampant in the industry about Zynga's future business plans. Also the convention featured a $125 turbo tournament with a $100,000 prize pool that was capped at 500 players. Overlay!

I wasn't the only industry member whose curiosity was piqued by PokerCon. A very wide cross-section of "insiders" attended the two-day soiree, all with the same basic question: What is Zynga up to? What does Zynga hope to get out of this event?

The answer isn't any clearer after PokerCon than it was before.

At time the convention felt like it was transporting us all back to poker circa 2006. At other times it felt like a Star Trek convention (I presume -- I am not nearly geeky enough to have ever been to a Star Trek convention), and at still other times it felt like a bit of a flop. Throughout, Zynga's angle was never clear.

With PokerStars taking the lead on Nevada intrastate regulation (as reported by the Las Vegas Sun and noted by Wicked Chops), I'm content to put this one on the back burner for now. It's unlikely Zynga will contribute to any regulatory efforts. Until those efforts bear fruit Zynga is likely to remain in the back corner of the room, making everyone else slightly edgy by its mere presence.

Three Questions about the Onyx Cup

2011-03-15T10:16:00.001-07:00

Even if you've been living under a rock the way I've been for the last few weeks you probably heard Full Tilt's announcement yesterday regarding the Onyx Cup Series. It's a series of six high buy-in tournaments ($100k to $300k) that will take place in Macau, Las Vegas and London. High finishers will receive points; the player with the most points at the end of the series will be awarded the Onyx Cup. Online qualifying for the series starts today.

Full Tilt created a promotional video for the series hosted by Ali Nejad. The video stressed that this series allows "pros to play against pros" and therefore will highlight who is the best.

Like many, I have a number of questions about the series.

1. Is the move towards "super high-roller events" an acceptable way to highlight the best players? There are plenty of pros out there who can't afford to shell out $1 million for a tournament series. Good bankroll management (if there is such a thing anymore) suggests a bankroll of $15-20 million is needed to play such a series comfortably. Not a net worth of $15-20 million. A bankroll.

Instead what this event may do is give a very small number of players with extraordinarily deep bankrolls and/or other income streams the opportunity to play in a club-like environment with similarly situated pros. There will likely also be a handful of super-rich amateurs who don't mind dusting off $200k to play in a small-field event with Tom Dwan and Phil Ivey. The recent cash games in Macau are instructive on that point.

Restricting the field by buy-in does not necessarily highlight the best players in the world. It highlights the richest players in the world. While there is some overlap in those two categories (as there should be), many of today's richest players in the world have become that rich through ownership interests in online poker sites. Good for them, but those ownership interests give them a cushion the rest of the poker world lacks. To me the format does nothing for determining the best of the best.

2. Who is going to qualify for this event? The FTP promotional video mentions that online qualifying for the series starts today. I'm trying to imagine who will want to qualify for this series. To the average FTP grinder, $100k (or more) is a sizable chunk of money. Will that type of qualifier really want to burn six figures just to play in a small-field event with a dozen of the world's top poker players?

For mid-level pros the prospects are only marginally better. These players can't afford the $100k buy-in. How many will want to put a syndicate together or take other backing or, on their own money, play the online satellite equivalent of an EPT Main Event (let's say the buy-in is $8,000) for a 1-in-13 shot at qualifying for just one of the Onyx Cup events? Some will, no doubt. They'll eschew proper bankroll management for the fairy tale of coming through a satellite field for $8,000 and turning that into $1 million or more at the Onyx Cup. But I'd bet that it will be a tiny number of players.

For those that do, likely what will happen is their six-figure buy-ins will disappear into the bankrolls of Erik Seidel or Phil Ivey or _____ [insert your own Full Tilt Pro], never again to return to the lower echelons of the poker economy from whence it came. Not because those players are necessarily the best, but because they're very good and sheer numbers dictate that outcome more often than not.

3. Is this series "good for poker"? My guess is that it's good for Phil Ivey. It's good for Patrik Antonius. It might even be good for Full Tilt Poker. But what's good for Full Tilt isn't necessarily good for poker.

The branding potential for players like Ivey and Antonius is through the roof. They are already recognizable quantities. Now they'll have the opportunity to play in small field, high buy-in events. Along the way they'll probably attract some Chinese businessmen or other super wealthy amateurs who won't mind dropping six large to play with them. Even if they go 0-for-the-series, there's an upside for them.

But this strategy also risks stunting the growth of the rest of the poker industry. What poker should be doing is nurturing the growth of the next generation -- the ElkYs, the Jason Merciers, the (ugh, Lord help me for saying this) Sorel Mizzis of the world. It helps keep the game fresh, which in turn helps keep TV viewers' interest.

Last year a colleague who was working the NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship with me said, "Ah, now I can see what poker was like in 1996." It was a brutal remark that had the ring of truth. There was some change this year at NBCHU but the field still felt overly reliant on "old-school" players. That will eventually become a problem for the brand. Televised poker doesn't need to move away from the old-guard players who were around 10 years ago when the boom hit, but relying on them exclusively will cause the product to become stale.

Is the Onyx Cup good for poker? Look. I'm no seer. I can only make an educated guess right now based on limited information. My intuition says, "No," but I'd love for Full Tilt to prove me wrong. I guess we'll see.

The BLUFF Power 20

2011-02-24T10:38:00.000-08:00

This morning the 2011 Bluff Power 20 list was released on the BLUFF Magazine website. The list is supposed to represent a snapshot, as of December 2010, of the 20 most influential people in poker. After some criticism of the list last year the process was opened up this year. 101 voters received ballots, "consisting of online operators, land-based operators, agents and media".

I put a fair deal of thought into my ballot and was curious to see how it measured up against the final list. Such lists, after all, are ready-made for debate. In fact that's probably their main purpose -- to get people talking. I was pleased to see that nine of my top 10 choices made the final list, and that overall 13 of my choices were there.

The names that appeared on my ballot but not on the final list I ranked 8th, 11th, 15th, and 17th-20th. No real surprise on 17th-20th as those were the slots I found the most difficult. They're also the slots where there should be the least amount of consensus. My #8 and #11 were "outside the box" choices. I stand by them but I'm not surprised they didn't make the final cut.

I debated the idea of sharing my ballot and the thought process that went into it but I don't think it would accomplish much. Different people view the concepts of "power" and "influence" in different ways. My view is neither right nor wrong. It's merely mine.

Still, I have to wonder what some of the other voters were thinking in order to produce this final list. I find the inclusion of one particular person in the Top 10 to be appalling. In other cases I feel like voters may have used last year's list as a starting post for casting this year's ballot without thinking, "Are these people influential and/or powerful in poker in December 2010?"

That's all part of the process when you ask a wide cross-section of 101 people to produce an arbitrary list. At least it was a fun exercise for me. Thanks to BLUFF Magazine for asking me to cast a ballot.

A footnote: no women appeared on the final list. I'm not sure a woman has ever made the list. I had two women on my ballot this year but I ranked them #15 and #19.

Dateline Sao Paulo

2011-02-16T11:17:00.000-08:00

Greetings from the Southern Hemisphere. My poker work has again taken me out of the US of A, this time to lovely Sao Paulo, Brazil for the 2011 PokerStars.net Latin American Poker Tour Brazil Main Event (look at me pimping out the full name instead of saying "LAPT Brazil"). It's my first return engagement with Brazil since I went to Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro in 2002.* I must not stick out too much because I've already been stopped on the street and asked for directions by a truck driver.**

Despite the potential for calamity with three legs to the trip -- one through Chicago -- Donnie and I ran good with our travel. His 1K status got us into the United lounges at LAX and O'Hare for free, and we touched down in Sao Paulo ten minutes early. All of our bags made it ten minutes early too.

The plan is to be here until Monday night. Otis and Change100 are also on the premises. For the moment we're all huddled in our respective hotel rooms, waiting out a "wrath of God" thunderstorm that (of course!) started while I was on the street sans umbrella. In five hours I've spent $7 on ATM fees, $80 on a cab, $175/night for an "adequate" hotel room and $15 on a rather pedestrian lunch. How the hell is Sao Paulo such an expensive town? Aren't I in South America?

Whatever. Vamo!

*Funny story about that trip. Strolling along the "minor league" samba parade one night my friend and I were jumped by a gang of five or six 18 year olds. I was yanked off my feet, from behind and by my neck, before we even knew what was happening.

Now that I think about it, there's nothing funny about that story at all.

**At least I think he asked for directions. I forgot to pack my dog-eared 2002 Portuguese phrase book, so I had no fucking clue what he was saying to me. He very well could have been asking me if I like men. The only Portuguese words I remember from 2002 are "thank you" and "pineapple", neither of which was going to help him with directions around town. Or my sexual orientation.

The Week That Was

2011-02-10T10:53:00.000-08:00

It's been a weird week for poker.

Things started with the announcement late last week that Zynga, the social media gaming company that has created popular Facebook games like Farmville, Mafia Wars and Zynga Poker, will hold a two-day "live event" at the Palms in Las Vegas on March 18-19. Nobody is quite sure what Zynga intends -- either with this live event or its future plans -- but signs are piling up that Zynga will try to move into the regulated online poker sphere (for real money) if and when that becomes a reality in the U.S. Zynga claims to have 7 million players daily and 37 million players overall. Even though all of those players are "play money" players, the poker industry should be watching Zynga very, very carefully.

Next came the announcement that Gabe Kaplan has been replaced as host for the new season of High Stakes Poker (which begins airing later this month) by Norm MacDonald. MacDonald is the kind of comedian you either love or hate. I happen to be a fan of his acerbic wit and am at least curious to see how that will translate to HSP. I didn't mind Kaplan as host but sometimes a product needs to be made fresh with a small change. We'll see.

A footnote to the HSP story was the continuing battle between PokerStars and Full Tilt over which TV shows their sponsored pros can appear on. No Full Tilt pros will be appearing on HSP this season, which most notably means no Phil Ivey and no Tom Dwan. I don't understand why this "battle" continues to rage. Both sites would seem to stand to have more to gain from cooperating with each other regarding TV shows that competing with each other but seem content to cut off their noses to spite their faces. Zynga's looming presence in the distance makes that strategy seem even more foolish.

Then came the Ashton Griffin ultra-marathon prop bet. If you missed this one, Griffin laid 3-1 on $300k that he could run 70 miles on a treadmill in a 24-hour period. Ordinarily I would pass over this type of story but for two blog posts that recently were written on CardRunners by one of the losers of the bet, Haseeb Qureshi.

Qureshi put himself through some searing soul-searching during and after the bet about what he was willing to subject people to all in the name of money. My good friend Otis, a veteran scribe and one of the first to enter the poker writing business some 6 years ago, said of these posts, "If on the level, probably the most important pieces of poker writing in years."

Finally, this morning Peter Eastgate announced his return to poker. He said his 8-month "hiatus" was a means to re-connect with who he is as a person and who he wants to be. The timing of the announcement was keyed to the release earlier this week of a partial list of competitors at the NBC National Heads-Up Championship (set for March 4-6). Eastgate is on that list. It was an amazing coincidence that Eastgate should be so candid about spending "quality time with my family" and having "an opportunity to figure out who I am" on the heels of Qureshi's tales about the Griffin prop bet.

All of these stories have a wait-and-see component to them: What will Zynga do next? Will Norm succeed? What's the next battleground for PS and FPT? Will there be any lasting take-away from the Qureshi and Eastgate tales? For a culture that celebrates instant gratification, that qualifies this week as weird.

It's All About the Money

2011-01-31T11:08:00.000-08:00

Meandering post today.

There's been some discussion during the last week about the all-time tournament money list in poker. Several commentators feel that closed events like the WSOP Tournament of Champions and events like the $250,000 Super High Rollers at the Aussie Millions -- tournaments that are only open to the richest of the rich -- distort the list.

I was surprised that people care about such trifles until I remembered that poker players care about anything where ego is involved. I guess it's easy for me to be dismissive of how the list is tabulated; I'll never be on it. But I'm also someone long on record as preferring to be rich and anonymous rather than rich and famous (if given a choice). In that sense my ego is minimal.

To me poker is an intellectual exercise, the goal of which is to win money. Period. I'm not too concerned if I've won $9 million and then someone who won $7.5 million wins a $250,000 two-table sit-and-go for $2.2 million and leap-frogs me on the list. I say, "Good for that person. Congratulations on your score." And then I go to sleep "on top of my large pile of money, surrounded by many beautiful women."

Maybe there's an innate need to rank players against one another, to say that this player is better than that one. I suppose I understand that desire but in a game where luck plays a substantial role, ranking players is a Herculean task. Poker isn't tennis, where an elite player at the top of his/her game can go out week after week and compete for the top finishes and the top prizes. Some days Phil Ivey is going to be eliminated in Level 3.

That's got to be the rub. The all-time money list is supposed to represent "the long run" for a player. We're all told that "over the long run" a player's skill edge should become apparent and that "over the long run" the best players should win the most money. The long run will correct for this eliminated-in-Level-3 days, and the total amount of money won is the best way to "keep score".

I guess. But if I've got $9 million in career earnings, I'm pretty sure I don't care where I fall on an arbitrary list.

Online Poker Not Out of Duke's League

2011-01-20T15:33:00.001-08:00

Time for some good old-fashioned armchair quarterbacking.

Earlier this week, Federated Sports and Gaming announced a new professional poker league that will begin play in 2011. Participation will be limited to the world's top 200 live tournament players. A limited number of exemptions will be available; everyone else will have to play their way in under a proprietary formula that has yet to be released to the public.

The league will have four events, all at the Palms Casino in Las Vegas, between now and January of next year. At each event the game played will be no-limit hold'em. The league aims not to charge players any juice on their tournament entry and possibly to provide added-money to the prize pool.

Since the announcement I've purposefully avoided reading any blogs, forum posts or other media pieces about the league. I didn't want to taint my own theorycraft about the league. But I do gather from Twitter, at least, that the league has sparked a fair amount of discussion.

You can debate the merits of a PGA-like poker league. The as-yet-unknown critera for player inclusion. Whether the viewing public wants to see the "old guard" pros exclusively or a mix of old pros and rising young guns and amateurs. The likelihood of the league's success. You can debate all of those things until you're blue in the face. To me that's not the interesting part. The interesting part is the people and entities surrounding the endeavor.

FS+G is run by a few people who know something about poker and gaming: former WSOP Commissioner Jeffrey Pollack; several former executives of Youbet.com; and professional player Annie Duke, who will serve as Commissioner of the new league and will not participate as a player. Duke, you may remember, ended a long-standing relationship with UB at the end of December.

Although nobody predicted this transition for Duke, it's not entirely shocking. At the 2010 WSOP in particular she seemed unenthused during several events. She also has some nostalgia for the pre-boom days; during one $10,000 WSOP event last summer, she remarked to her table, "Remember when making a dinner break used to mean something?" This new endeavor allows her to branch off in a new poker direction, presumably renewing her enthusiasm for poker, while also restoring something of the old feel of poker from before the boom.

Pollack went over to professional bull riding in May, but has five years of poker experience under his belt. He's also something of a social media proponent. As Zynga has shown the world, gaming and social media go together shockingly well. Backing up Pollack's and Duke's live poker experience are the online gaming experiences of FS+G's other founders, who all are former Youbet.com executives. And Duke, of course, is well known to the world from her stint on Celebrity Apprentice.

See where I'm going with this?

Unless I've missed the mark entirely (possible, since I'm just theorizing based on limited information), FS+G and the Palms may be looking to get into regulated online poker, using Duke as the face of the product and using this poker league the way many of us assume the WSOP brand will be used by Caesars.

Currently, the live poker offerings at the Palms are minimal. The room is quite small, even by Vegas standards. It doesn't usually have more than a couple of tables running at any one time except during the two weeks of the WSOP Main Event when PokerStars and its (rapidly diminishing) hordes of qualifiers invade. So at face it's curious that the Palms would choose to get involved in this league, and that the league would choose the Palms -- especially given the usual "down-market" choices of the Golden Nugget and South Point.

FS+G can't do online poker alone though. With every piece of poker legislation we've seen so far a unifying element has been the need for a brick-and-mortar casino to be involved. That's where the Palms fits in. FS+G develops the social media gaming side of things in anticipation of regulated online poker (allusions to it are littered through their press materials); the Palms develops the TV brand awareness side of things and provides the required B&M presence.

I believe that FS+G is betting that the TV audience will tune in to see the "top professionals", the "colorful personalities" of the "old school". Those players won't be able to pass up money-added, zero-juice tournaments. The Palms/FS+G brand will be heavily marketed to the public, similar to the way PokerStars is marketed now (think EPT Live, the PCA final table, etc.) When regulation finally comes along, a combined FS+G and Palms partnership moves in and set up shop with regulated poker on the internet.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, WSOP / Caesars.

Look, I never believed for a second that Duke would go to "The Big Two" or some other UB analog. I also didn't believe she would get out of poker. At the time I remarked, "But Caesars / WSOP.com isn't the only company that's rumored to be sitting on the sidelines of the U.S. online poker market, waiting for its regulatory golden ticket to be punched. ... That could send Duke to one of those other idling companies..." Specifically what I had in mind for Duke was social media gaming, perhaps something like Zynga, an SMG company widely believed to be positioning itself for regulated online poker.

But if I'm right this move is even savvier. Pollack and Duke are essentially looking to hit a home run the same way all the Full Tilt founders did back in 2003 by creating their own poker site. If that happens the league becomes self-sufficient. The overlay money and zero-juice is made up for out of the coffers of the online poker site and accounted for as a marketing expense.

Regulated online poker isn't here yet though. The league has to survive on its own merits long enough for regulated poker to get here. That will require corporate sponsorship, angel investors, or maybe a combination of both. Pollack will have his hands full in that regard, convincing "reputable" corporations to get in bed with FS+G's "gambling operation". What's the line that the Palms is putting up some of the necessary money as an upfront investment on what it hopes is a lucrative long-term online poker return?

Again, I could be wrong about all of this. I probably am. But it's been fun to think about and if nothing else it will be fun to watch it all play out.

Release the Donkeys! The 2011 LAPC Starts This Week

2011-01-17T18:50:00.000-08:00

The craziness in the Bahamas is finally over. The dust has settled on the 2011 PCA and you can't be bothered to fly all the way to Melbourne for the Aussie Millions. What's a tourney grinder to do?

Head to Los Angeles for the 2011 L.A. Poker Classic, of course.

This year's installment of the six-week bacchanalia of tournament poker starts on Wednesday at the Commerce Casino with what I like to call "Event #1: The Super Donkathon". $335. Four Day 1s, with re-entry allowed. Although Commerce TD Matt Savage didn't invent the re-entry format, he certainly brought it back into vogue when he started rolling it out at Commerce about 1.5 years ago. This year he's added "Event #20: The Crack-Addled Super Donkathon", a $125 Turbo NLH tournament with four Day 1s and two heats on each day. There's a $300,000 guarantee on that sucker.

Unlike the WSOP, the LAPC truly offers something for everyone. Rebuy events. Team events. Turbo events. Mixed games. Heads-up events. A healthy mix of hold'em events and "other" events. Buy-ins from $125 to $25,100. Check out the LAPC schedule for yourself. It really is one of the most player-oriented schedules you'll find outside the WSOP anywhere in North America.

Structures are fantastic. Hotel rates have been extended outside the Crowne Plaza located on the Commerce Property to three nearby hotels. Matt and his team are doing everything they can to make the player experience this year even better than it was last year. The only thing they can't do is make sure players show up.

I've been to the LAPC every year for the last... um... I've lost track at this point. Trust me though -- it's a great tournament series. Make sure you give it a whirl this year.

PokerStars and Women: Still in the Stone Age

2011-01-12T10:43:00.000-08:00

I intended to write about the New Jersey internet gaming bill today. The bill would create the first sanctioned intrastate online gaming system in the country. It was overwhelmingly approved this week by the New Jersey Senate and New Jersey Assembly and now goes to the desk of Gov. Chris Christie for his signature.

As I was getting ready to dig into the meat of the bill this morning, PokerStars sent out a baffling press release from the PCA entitled "Dawn of Woman". It was so tasteless that I decided to hold off on discussing the New Jersey gaming bill until Gov. Christie signs it and to focus instead on the presser.

In its continuing quest to bring more women -- an under-represented demographic -- into the game of poker, PokerStars handed out video cameras to all of its female Team Pros at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure in the Bahamas. The women were encouraged to create daily video diaries of their experiences at the PCA. Those diaries would then be uploaded to PokerStars TV.

On its face the idea makes sense. Stars wants to encourage more women to play live events, since the live events are mainly a marketing angle for the online poker client. By showing women what they're missing out on by not playing these events -- from a woman's perspective -- Stars may very well bring more women into the game.

Then came the press release, in which the female Team Pros are compared to "shrieking, howling" Neanderthals who have no idea what to do with their video cameras when they first receive them. The presser goes on to state that the project lead's instructions to the "girls" were "pointless" and "ignored", that "the more 'advanced' women were already dismantling the devices and trying to work out what was inside." It concludes with the bizarre, "The results of all these vblogs are fantastic.. some of the women should definitely stick to poker for a living; others could consider forging new careers as videographers."

I should say that I have plenty of friends who work in Stars PR and marketing, people who are fundamentally good people. Even good people mis-step sometimes, and I don't believe anything overtly malicious was intended by this press release. In fact it is trying to promote women in the game. However the whole thing was sigh- and cringe-inducing. At best it seems like basic marketing was completely ignored while writing this press release.

At a deeper, perhaps more subconscious level, we have yet another case of women being given the short end of the stick by the poker industry. The message this press release conveys is, essentially, three-fold: (1) women are little more than a shrieking pack of Neanderthals; (2) women have almost zero capacity to handle anything "techie" without painstaking instructions from a man which they will ignore anyway; and (3) women are "girls", a term that is demeaning in its own right.

As someone who loves strong, smart, capable, independent women (see, any woman I've dated in the last 6 years), it really pains me to see tired cliches being applied to a demographic that the industry is trying to court. I feel like the poker industry might have better success increasing female participation in poker if it stopped treating women as "girls" and started treating them as people.

You get an "F" for this press release, PokerStars.

How Do I Not Have a Washington State Tag Yet?

2011-01-07T10:37:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I received this email from a friend (who will probably be mock outraged in the comments to this post that I do not mention him by name):

"No comment on the Washington state cash grab?"

The short answer is, "No."

The slightly longer answer is there are two reasons why I was mum about it. First, I just plum missed the story on Wednesday. Sometimes the internet and I have a lover's spat and I turn the damn thing off for a day or two.

The second reason was that when I finally did spot the story yesterday afternoon, there wasn't much to say except, "See? This is why we need regulation."

Well, fine. There you go. See? This is why we need regulation. With every new seizure, the government gets bolder and the chilling effect on the rest of the payment-processing industry grows a little stronger. Those $8 million seizures may not seem like much for an industry valued in the billions, but they add up.

Sure, one of these processors could try to take a stand against the government. Unfortunately that takes a great deal of time and a great deal of money, two things that the typical fly-by-night payment processor doesn't have. In the meantime the government will continue to steam ahead with other seizures unless the legal landscape changes.

This is going to get worse before it gets better. I'd say one train left Chicago at 4:45pm heading east at 70mph while a second train is pulling out of Penn Station at 7pm going west at 80mph. I'm no mathemagician, but at some point those two trains collide unless Denzel Washington and Captain Kirk put aside their veteran-rookie differences and save the day.

Casting call for online poker's Denzel Washington and Captain Kirk starts... now.

Cake Walk and the Hellmuth-Duke Guessing Game

2010-12-31T09:50:00.001-08:00

The online poker industry ended 2010 with a bang in what is typically a slow news week.

One story that hasn't gotten a ton of play (yet) is the abrupt departures from Cake Poker of two ranking executives, Serge Ravitch and Card Room Manager Lee Jones. Neither Jones nor Ravitch gave any concrete reason for his departure; Jones only would comment (rather ominously) on 2+2 that "management has made some strategic decisions with which I’m not comfortable". Ravitch cited "the same reasons" for his departure.

Jones was the person who most loudly sounded the alarm about the current status of payment processing while the entire industry was debating the pros and cons of the Reid poker bill a few weeks back. It's a pure hunch on my part that Cake may be moving in a payment processing direction that Jones and Ravitch are unwilling to follow.

Regardless of whether my hunch is even remotely in the ballpark, it's clear that something's rotten in the state of Cake Poker. Jones has had an exemplary career over the last decade in the online poker industry. For him to abruptly resign from Cake, followed immediately by Ravitch, is not a good sign for players at that site.

An equally intriguing story developed yesterday when Phil Hellmuth (finally!) announced his departure from UB as a sponsored player. Starting around the time of the November Nine (Nov. 9th), Phil was regularly seen not wearing his standard UB garb, but was always mum about the subject. Now it's official -- he's left UB.

Annie Duke also announced yesterday that she left UB, saying "So why am I leaving UB? In a nutshell, professional and personal growth. I’m going to explore and pursue other business opportunities on a full-time basis." She highlighted that she will remain a part of the poker industry going forward.

Lots and lots of questions here. First and foremost, did Hellmuth and Duke leave UB on their own or did UB, which is clearly going younger (and rumored to be announcing new sponsored pro Prahlad Friedman next week), gently guide them out the door?

It's hard to imagine that Duke and Hellmuth were "too expensive" for UB at this point. Hellmuth and Duke are not hard-core tournament circuit grinders. They play a full slate at the WSOP, some WPTs, and make some TV appearances. In any event the publicity that Hellmuth generates and Duke's qualities as a spokesperson probably justify the expense of each. Hellmuth, after all, garners more attention at the WSOP every year than just about any other player.

Logically I'd lean towards Hellmuth and Duke initiating the split -- and UB, which seems resigned to being a second-tier poker site, not being terribly put off by it.

Second question: where will they land?

I believe that where they land will say a lot about who is placing what bets for the new poker landscape that's going to start emerging in 2011. And although it's easy to say they'll be snatched up by PokerStars or Full Tilt, you have to ask why either would go to those sites -- and why those sites would want either player.

Would the Poker Brat fit in with the PokerStars identity? Would he want to be "just another horse in the stable" at Tilt? What does Duke give either site that they don't already have? If she were going to have gone to Tilt to join brother Howard Lederer, wouldn't it have happened by now? Duke and Hellmuth made their bets on UB in 2004. It seems pretty late in the game for them to move over to Tilt in 2011.

Many have speculated that Hellmuth will go to WSOP.com. The WSOP has been ramping up U.S. awarness of its online arm, waiting for the day that regulation arrives so that it can start offering real-money online poker to U.S. residents. Hellmuth would give that site an instantly recognizable face, one that in many ways is synonymous with WSOP after all of the air time that Hellmuth received over the last six years.

Duke also has significant ties to WSOP through her work for WSOP Academy. Her standing as one of the top female tournament players in history, along with her "celebrity tv" cross-over appeal, are good fits for WSOP. She would bring to the table what Hellmuth lacks in terms of corporate spokespersonship.

But Caesars / WSOP.com isn't the only company that's rumored to be sitting on the sidelines of the U.S. online poker market, waiting for its regulatory golden ticket to be punched. For now at least, WSOP.com may not need more than Hellmuth to hawk a product that nobody can yet buy. That could send Duke to one of those other idling companies...

Third question: what does this mean for regulated online poker in the U.S.?

Directly, it means nothing. But again, where Duke and Hellmuth land will give some guidance as to who is placing what bets for online poker in 2011. For example, if Hellmuth goes to WSOP.com, it may show that Caesars -- a party heavily involved in the back-room dealings during the recent Reid Bill saga -- is confident that U.S. online poker regulation is on the short-term horizon. Otherwise there would be little reason to bring Hellmuth on now.

Generally speaking, in business, politics and life, if you follow the money trail you find your answers. For now we'll have to wait to see what Hellmuth and Duke do next but I'll lay a good price that they don't wind up at Stars or Tilt.

Of course this is all just rampant armchair speculation from me. Take it for what it's worth. If nothing else, 2011 is shaping up to be an interesting year for online poker.

Harry Reid's Internet Poker Bill: Talking Points and State Rights

2010-12-20T14:50:00.000-08:00

Even though the internet poker bill that Harry Reid was shopping around Congress, the "Internet Gambling Prohibition, Poker Consumer Protection, and Strengthening UIGEA Act", has (most likely) been shelved as a Congressional agenda item for the rest of 2010, it continues to get some play in the media. One of the things that is driving me absolutely bat-shit crazy is an argument being advanced in certain quarters that regulating online poker at a federal level will take away a state's right to decide if regulated online poker should be permitted in that state.

Listen, people trying to push that argument. I know that the 10th Amendment has become the flavor of the day, but on this one particular issue you couldn't possibly be more wrong. Let me state this as clearly as I can.

The Internet Gambling Prohibition, Poker Consumer Protection, and Strengthening UIGEA Act would NOT take away a state's right to decide if regulated online poker should be permitted in that state.

In fact, the complete opposite is true. Under the Reid bill, each state makes its own choice to opt in to or out of the online poker regulatory and licensing scheme created by the bill. Period. Full stop.

If you don't believe me, read the bill yourself:

SEC. 108. PROHIBITION ON USE OF LICENSES IN CERTAIN STATES AND INDIAN LANDS.
(a) IN GENERAL. — Except as provided in section 104(b)(3), Internet poker provided by Internet poker facilities licensed under this title shall be lawful in the United States only with respect to the acceptance of bets or wagers from individuals located in States and Indian lands that have not opted out or have opted in, as the case may be, under this section.

It drives me nuts to hear people arguing that this bill creates a "federal right to gamble" and to read that states are up in arms because they would be pre-empted by this bill. It's a massive communication failure by the people that are supposed to be managing the message of this bill, largely because those people never wanted to manage the message in the first place. Instead they were hoping to slip the bill through Congress unnoticed during the lame-duck.

Guess what? The genie's out of the bottle. It's way too late for slipping things through unnoticed. If the poker industry ever wants this bill or a future variant of the bill to come off the shelf and make it into law -- and it's that or watch the industry collapse on its own through a payment processor death spiral -- it's time to start pro-actively managing the message.

Your talking points are: Job creation. Tax generation. Consumer protection. State rights. Aren't all of those things what the electorate was so angry about this past November?

Go forth and multiply.

What's Next for U.S. Online Poker?

2010-12-16T12:09:00.000-08:00

With Harry Reid's internet poker bill (seemingly) dead, it's time to think about what the U.S. online poker universe could look like in 2011.

1. Fragmentation of the industry - this is something that I touched on briefly during This Week in Poker on Tuesday. Fragmentation of the industry is gaining speed. Already, Washington State has banned online poker. Now California, New Jersey and DC are pushing ahead with efforts to legalize intra-state online poker (intra-state because of the misguided notion that the Wire Act of 1961 prohibits online poker across state lines).

On one level it's good to see the states trying to take the lead on this issue. But if history is a guide, it means the federal government will only be that much slower in developing national standards while it waits to see how things play out at the state level. It also gives anti-gambling legislators like Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) another argument against creating a national system.

If intra-state poker becomes the prevailing model, the industry will be split into multiple miniature player pools on a state-by-state basis, to the detriment of American poker players as a whole. And once Humpty Dumpty has shattered into 50 different pieces, good luck trying to put him back together. There *will* be differences in how online poker is run and regulated from state to state. Balancing and unifying all of those competing differences, and competing state interests, in national poker legislation will be exceedingly difficult.

Reid-bill detractors might point out that there would have been fragmentation under that bill as individual states opted in or opted out. While that's true, at least all of the opt-in states would have been playing in the same player pool with the same set of rules. Under state efforts, there's a different pool -- and most likely different rules -- for each state.

2. Continuing deterioration of payment processing - For anyone who thinks the status quo is fine, here's a reality check:

* Online sites are now cutting paper checks out of Singapore.

* Electronic deposits and withdrawals have started taking weeks to show up in players' bank accounts.

* The card room manager of Cake Poker -- someone with a vested interest in peddling the fallacy that all is fine in the payment processing world -- has gone on record as saying, "The [Department of Justice] is bolder than ever and Washington State has set an ugly precedent. It will come down to payment processors who have no more scruples than your average Mexican drug or African arms dealer." That's not a healthy direction.

* In 2010, more than $30 million was seized by the U.S. government for UIGEA violations. That was money that belonged to U.S. bettors, some of it traceable to PokerStars and other online poker sites. The amount seized in 2011 stands to increase.

* At this very moment, the Southern District of New York is investigating payment processors and how they code online poker transactions.

The status quo is NOT fine and cannot continue indefinitely. The government is starting to catch up to what the UIGEA intended four years ago. The DOJ is getting itself up-to-speed so it can shatter the backbone of the U.S. online poker industry -- money movement. Without the Reid bill or similar legislation, players in states that aren't moving forward intra-state poker legislation will find it more and more difficult to move money onto and off of online poker sites. No money means no games. It's as simple as that.

3. U.S. abandoned? -- It's hard to imagine that this will happen in 2011, but at some point the risk/reward ratio of operating in the U.S. may become too unfavorable for the online poker sites. Businesses are going to operate like businesses. When it no longer makes economic sense to stay in the U.S., they'll get out while the getting-out is good.

**

The Reid bill didn't fail because it was bad policy. And the Reid bill didn't fail because it got too much publicity (no matter what the gambling lobby wants you to believe). The Reid bill failed because its proponents, and the businesses that stood to benefit the most from it, allowed social conservatives and opponents of both Reid and the bill to shape the debate.

How much did we hear about the job-creation and tax-generation aspects of regulating an industry in which 15 million Americans already participate? Not very much. On the other hand, we were treated ad nauseum to arguments about: (1) the "social evils" of problem and under-age gambling; (2) how the bill was a quid pro quo for Big Gaming's support of Reid during his campaign against Sharron Angle; (3) some sort of nonsense about the illegality of creating a "federal right to gamble"; and (4) who was going to get screwed by the bill: Indian tribes, state lotteries, my Aunt Martha's bingo hall.

There's nothing that says we won't get another bite at the apple in 2011. But split control of Congress -- the Republicans now have a majority in the House -- will make any legislation more difficult to pass. Historically, Republicans have not been very friendly to poker legislation.

As 2010 comes to a close, we're left with an online poker future that is murky at best.

Harry Reid's Internet Poker Bill: Busto... Most Likely

2010-12-15T19:01:00.001-08:00

Tough times for online poker in the United States.

The Reid bill appears to be all but dead. It's looked that way before, of course, but the prospects now are exceedingly grim. Reports indicate that the bill has not been attached to the tax-cut extension nor does it appear in the omnibus appropriations bill. Those two pieces of legislation were believed to be the only real vehicles for poker, since the Reid bill almost certainly will not get a reading on its own merits before the end of the Congressional session.

The most credible source declaring the bill officially dead is Andrew Feldman at ESPN Poker. Today Feldman cited an email message from John Pappas, Executive Director of the Poker Players Alliance, in which Pappas wrote, "We are disappointed that Congress failed to act and provide the necessary consumer protections and sensible oversight over this multi-billion dollar industry."

For the moment, no similar update appears on the PPA website. Unless I missed something -- entirely possible -- the most recent statement relating to the Reid bill is Pappas' December 9 statement endorsing the bill.

Last week Pappas was quoted as saying that the Reid bill wasn't dead until Congress adjourns. Congress hasn't adjourned yet, making this an odd about-face in a span of less than a week. Pappas also doesn't definitely say "Game over" in his comments to Feldman. But his remarks track the below-the-surface rumblings of others in the industry.

They also match a general feeling of unease that I've had as days have ticked by since Friday with few poker-bill updates from Washington, Reid or the PPA. Yesterday on This Week in Poker I declared my feelings that this bill had a 50/50 shot. To be fair, that declaration wasn't based on anything specific. Most likely was it just hope talking because I believe, for several reasons, that poker needs something like the Reid bill.

I wouldn't expect to hear anything from Harry Reid on this issue, so in a sense Pappas' comments last week were "right" -- we can't really be sure that the bill is dead until Congress adjourns. For the time being, however, I'll be operating under the belief that the bill will not be passed. Tomorrow I'll delve into what that could mean for poker going forward.

In the meantime I'll retain the tiniest sliver of hope that the situation changes.

Some Financial Impacts of Harry Reid's (Still Kicking!) Internet Poker Bill

2010-12-09T08:23:00.000-08:00

After a wild afternoon yesterday, it appears that Harry Reid's internet poker bill is still alive and making the rounds on Capitol Hill.

Some interesting commentary this morning comes courtesy of Forbes.com. That's where Michelle Minton penned a piece entitled, "Legalizing Online Gambling is a No-Brainer". Minton is someone without a dog in this fight -- she's the director of insurance studies with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a non-profit public policy organization dedicated to the principles of free enterprise, limited government and individual liberty.

Free enterprise and limited government? The Reid bill? I'd guess Minton hasn't read a copy of the bill. Still, she's probably correct that the Reid bill would create jobs, and she almost has to be correct about the revenue and tax generation benefits of the bill.

Last night at the Bellagio (where the WPT Five Diamond final table was taking place) the Reid bill was a lively topic of conversation. Opinions are mixed on (a) whether the bill is #goodforpoker and (b) whether it can (or will) pass. People who are among the most nervous about the bill are the media -- many of whom work for sites that derive large chunks of their revenue from affiliate marketing. If the Reid bill passes and existing operators are forced to leave the biggest online-poker market in the world for 15 months, affiliate revenues will drop drastically. In fact, there's no guarantee that affiliate marketing would come back in its current form at the end of that time.

Rakeback is another financial item that might wind up a casualty of the Reid bill, especially in a U.S. market where the barriers to entry would be impossibly tall for all but the largest casinos. Why offer rakeback when there's only 1 or 2 other sites you're competing against? Some might argue it's long time for rakeback to go away anyway, having out-lived its usefulness to existing online poker sites as the market has matured. If rakeback did die a quiet death after the black-out period, the bottom line of U.S. online pros would suffer.

So keep the status quo, some say. Don't change online poker just yet. Keep using the existing legally-gray system. The problem there -- I have read and heard from multiple sources that it's getting harder and harder to find reputable payment processors for the sites to work with. I don't have any direct knowledge on the issue but common sense would dictate that the payment processing mess isn't going to get any *better* under the existing UIGEA. It can *only* get worse.

Just some financial food for thought as we all continue to watch Washington closely.

Harry Reid's Internet Poker Bill: Deal or No Deal?

2010-12-08T11:27:00.000-08:00

Over the last few days I've had some discussions with gaming attorney Stu Hoegner about whether or not the new version of the Reid poker bill would allow an existing poker site (like, say, PokerStars or Full Tilt) to sell itself to a U.S. casino (like, say, MGM) to get around the 2-year exclusion period that is mandated by the Reid bill for poker sites that are not backed by a U.S. casino. Stu has largely convinced me that yes, the new version of the bill would allow that scenario.

It's probably an academic discussion though. Who would buy? Why would they buy and/or why would the sites sell?

Let's tackle the second question first. The most obvious reason for an existing U.S. online poker site to sell itself to a U.S. casino interest is that the site would be able to access the U.S. market at the earliest possible moment. Also, people who own big pieces of the U.S. site could finally "cash out" and go buy an island somewhere. The major downside would be a loss of operational control and becoming a small cog in a much larger gambling conglomerate.

From the casino's side, they'd have instant access to technology, IP and branding, and players so that they would be ready to "hit the ground running" as soon as the 15-month blackout period expires.

But who would buy those poker sites?

~~Harrah's~~ ~~Caesars~~ WSOP.com already has an online poker partner. Its UK-based poker site is run in conjunction with 888. WSOP also has been registering players through its U.S. play-money site for months. It doesn't need to buy another site, either for the technology, the branding and goodwill, or the players.

That leaves MGM as the main potential suitor for any of the large U.S. poker sites. Maybe Wynn. Maybe some group like the Stations or LVS. But all of those groups would have significant difficulties paying for the acquisition.

There are lots of ways to set a purchase price for a big corporate acquisition. Valuations come in every shape and flavor. One of the simplest ways is to use a multiple of the target's net operating income. Net operating income is a company's operating income after operating expenses are deducted, but before income taxes and interest are deducted. It's a fairly easy, non-manipulable way to get a snapshot of a company's health.

Let's say, for example, that PokerStars' NOI for 2010 is $500 million. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but as a ballpark number $500 million probably works. An acquiror would then pay a multiple of that $500 million to buy PokerStars. The multiple depends on negotiation and a host of factors that I'm not going to delve into here. But you can see that we're talking billions of dollars.

When you attempt a multi-billion dollar acquisition, you don't usually pay for it in cash. Most companies don't have billions of dollars in the vault. The consideration is often a combination of cash, equity (shares of the acquiror) and debt. Let me reiterate that I'm simplifying things a great deal here. The payment portion of a corporate deal is often HIGHLY complex.

But back to cash, equity and debt. Have you seen how much debt MGM is carrying on its books? As of September 30, almost $13 billion in long-term debt. They're drowning in debt. The same is true of LVS and isn't the Station group in bankruptcy? None are in a great position to issue more debt, and if I'm the person selling the U.S. poker site, I'm not sure what a great bet I think it is to take a big chunk of debt from such a highly leveraged acquiror.

There might be some cash available -- MGM raised $500 million back in September -- but I'd guess that a sizable portion of MGM's cash is tied up as a debt reserve and/or already earmarked for debt service. Investors don't let you take out $12.9 billion in debt for free. You have to pay for that privilege.

That leaves equity. Do a full equity deal? I guess it's possible. Depends how bullish the target site is on the acquiror. Even there, however, you have problems. Such a sizable equity issuance isn't done easily.

But even if this were to happen, there's only one MGM. There are multiple online sites out there. MGM wouldn't need to acquire all of them, or even the largest of them. They'd need just one site with a decent U.S. player base. Where does that leave the rest of the sites? Fighting to be acquired by LVS or Wynn or the bankrupt Stations?

How about "Without a chair when the music stops" for $500, Alex.

Harry Reid's Internet Poker Bill: While We Wait

2010-12-08T07:37:00.000-08:00

Harry Reid's proposed bill to license, regulate and tax internet poker, the "Prohibition of Internet Gambling, Internet Poker Regulation, and Strengthening UIGEA Act of 2010" doesn't lend itself to much of an acronym. PIGIPRSUA? Meh, let's just call it the Reid bill. Anyway, the Reid bill continues to be a moving target. Significant developments this morning:

1. As noted by PokerGrump, among others, the PPA is suddenly in favor of the bill, telling its members to call their Senator and ask him/her to support it. This is not 24 hours after the PPA made a non-statement about the bill.

Remember that the PPA is basically a mouthpiece for the major existing players in the online poker industry. Could it be that the 2-year exclusion for non-casino-backed operators -- the so-called penalty box provision -- has been removed in the latest draft?

2. Rumblings that this thing *will* be attached to the tax-cut extension bill, *before* it goes to the floor of both chambers of Congress (rather than after approval, as was done with the UIGEA). Pokerati Washington correspondent ~~Tricia Takanawa~~ Scarlet Robinson seems to think tomorrow or Friday for attachment. And how weird is it that Pokerati has a Washington correspondent? When did Michalski get to the big leagues?

If President Obama was worried about Senators and Representative voting against the tax cuts yesterday, wait until Harry Reid attaches the online poker bill!

3. Bill Rini made a great point I hadn't considered previously, namely: offshore sites that try to give the US government the middle finger, and continue to operate in the US in spite of this legislation (if it were to pass), will quickly wind up on the DOJ's UIGEA blacklist of sites with which financial transaction providers are forbidden from doing business. Those sites may not have to worry about the $1 million per day penalties and the 50% non-licensing fee -- being outside the jurisdiction of the US -- but how are their customers going to get money on and off the sites?

4. This thing is starting to get quite a bit of mainstream media attention after Politico picked up the story yesterday. Not sure if that's #goodforpoker or #badforpoker, and how it will affect Reid's chances of getting the thing attached to the tax cuts and passed. For that matter, there are a lot of people questioning whether the #reidbill itself is #goodforpoker or #badforpoker, largely because of the 15-month #pokerblackout that would result if the bill passed in its current form (never mind the penalty box provision).

I continue to believe that, long term, any scheme that makes online poker 100% legal and legit is good for the game. But there may be some bumps in the road -- short-term variance -- along the way. Obviously the bill in the forms that we've seen so far heavily favors the casinos, to the detriment of existing online poker sites and (perhaps) players. But with a few tweaks it could turn into something that everyone -- the casinos, the existing sites and the players -- could live with.

Right now all we can do is watch and wait.

Quick and Dirty Summary of (Version 2!) of Harry Reid's Internet Poker Bill

2010-12-07T08:23:00.001-08:00

Here we go again. A new version of Harry Reid's internet poker bill, the "Prohibition of Internet Gambling, Internet Poker Regulation, and Strengthening UIGEA Act of 2010" (what a mouthful!), started making the rounds on Capitol Hill yesterday. Thanks to Kevin Mathers, I was able to get a look at it this morning to see what (if anything) had changed.

Unfortunately, because of wildly divergent formatting, and the fact that this version of the bill is MUCH more "fleshed out" than the first version, getting a blackline of the two versions proved exceedingly difficult. So if I miss any major differences, that's the primary reason why.

My summary of the original version of the bill is available here.

On to the highlights of the new version:

* Let's get the bad news out of the way first. Contrary to previous reports, this version retains the two-year exclusion for operators who have not owned or controlled a casino or race track for a minimum of 5 years prior to their application. [Sec. 104(f)(2) and (3)] That means that sites like Full Tilt and PokerStars would be excluded from the market for 2 years after the first license is issued.

[EDITED TO ADD: Some seem to think that Sec. 104(f)(2)(B) might allow a site like Stars to sell itself to MGM and therefore become an applicant "owned or controlled by" a casino in operation for 5 years. On its face, that might be possible although I highly doubt it's what's intended.

The reason I doubt it -- Sec. 118(c)(2) is explicit that a license can't issue to any person that "purchased or acquired, directly or through an affiliate or intermediary, in whole or in significant part" any person who owned a U.S.-facing site prior to the Act. My only question about 118(c)(2) is if it's supposed to apply to ANY U.S.-facing site, or only those U.S.-facing sites that refuse to wind down as required under the "One bone..." paragraph described below.]

* The 15-month total blackout period on issuing *any* license still applies. [Sec. 118] No qualifying body can issue a license until 15 months after passage of the Act. That means that no operator could legally offer internet poker in the U.S. for those 15 months, and sites like Full Tilt and PokerStars would be shut out for 39 months.

* The U.S. player pool continues to have to be segregated from the rest of the world for at least 3 years after the first license is issued.

* One bone for Full Tilt and PokerStars: they would have 30 days to cease offering poker in the U.S. after passage of the Act, and 2 years to return all customer deposits. [Sec. 118(b)] The first version of the bill was much harsher, requiring immediate cessation of poker and 30 days to return deposits. Sites that are currently operating in the U.S. are required to comply with those provisions as a condition for eventual licensing.

["Paper sales" paragraph deleted and replaced by italics above!]

* There are now provisions at Sec. 104(k) to guide the determination of whether or not something is "internet poker" -- something that's rather key for legislation that seeks to limit online gambling to only internet poker. The determination is left to the qualified body that issued the license. So, for example, if Nevada issues a license to WSOP.com, Nevada would determine what constitutes "internet poker" in all states in which WSOP.com operates (presumably, all states that have opted in and those states which haven't opted out).

Could we see instances where certain games aren't offered in certain states? I'm thinking of the specific example of razz, which (as far as I know), is not an allowed game in New Jersey. If someone applied for a license from a state like that, would they not be allowed to offer certain games? Obviously operators would then favor making applications for a license from the state with the most comprehensive definition of "internet poker".

* It appears there is now the potential for a 5-year prison term, in addition to the $1,000,000 per-day penalty, for operating without a license. [Sec. 103(b), Sec. 104(m)(1)(D)] Those of you who thought that Full Tilt and PokerStars might remain in the States anyway (in the 15-month total blackout period) should think again. Not only that, but...

* A few changes to the licensing fee: first, it appears previous confusion in the definition of "internet poker receipts" has been cleared up. That term now means, essentially, the rake. The licensing fee is 20% of the rake.

More importantly, anyone who operates an internet poker facility WITHOUT a license is subject to a 50% "licensing fee". The bill is explicit that this fee in no way limits the liability of the operator under *any* other provision of the bill. So, if Stars or Tilt were to remain in the U.S., not only would they be subject to $1,000,000 per-day penalties and potentially 5 years in prison (for the executives), but they'd also have to pay 50% of the rake they received to the IRS.

My good buddy Shamus questions how this can be enforced if the sites, executives and servers are all located offshore. It's a good question. I'm not sure, but I suspect that, if a regulatory and licensing scheme were put into place, the US would exert some diplomatic pressure on places like England (Stars) and Ireland (Tilt) to bring those operators into line. In any event, Stars seems to pride itself on always operating within the law. Operating without a license would be expressly illegal under this bill.

* One aspect of the bill I didn't discuss during Round 1: to be automatically designated a "qualified body", for licensing purposes, a gaming regulatory board has to have been a gaming regulator for 5 years prior to enactment of the Act, and has to have been responsible for regulating at least 5% of total United States casino gaming revenue for at least 3 out of those 5 years. I don't know how gaming revenue breaks down nationwide but I would suspect this gives Nevada and New Jersey a leg up over the rest of the nation.

The reason why that's important is because other state gaming boards that want to be able to issue licenses have to apply to the Commerce Secretary, but only after all the final regulations under the Act have been issued.

Not only that, but sites that were U.S.-facing prior to the Act could only apply for a license through the automatic qualified bodies -- i.e., Nevada and New Jersey. Would existing casinos apply pressure to NGC / NJCCC to shut out those formerly U.S.-facing operators...?

* The opt-in / opt-out provisions for states and tribes remain. [Sec. 108] They appear to be largely unchanged. States wishing to opt-in or opt-out have until December 31, 2011 to make that determination. After that, their status can be changed on 60 days notice to the Secretary of Commerce.

* The concept of "cheating" is greatly expanded in this version. Cheating in the first version was largely limited to the use of "cheating devices". In the new draft, there's an outright prohibition on "knowingly violating, attempting to violate, or assisting another in violating the rules of play established by the licensee for the purpose of obtaining prohibited or unfair advantage in any game authorized under this title". [Sec. 113(a)] The use of bots is also expressly prohibited in the new version. [Sec. 113(b)(2)]

* Conviction under Sec. 113 for cheating entails two possible penalties: a permanent ban from playing internet poker, and a criminal penalty consisting of a fine and/or up to 2 years in prison.

That's all I've got for now but I'll continue to study this version of the bill and any new version that emerges. What does everyone else think?

Harry Reid's Internet Poker Bill: How a Tack-On Would Work

2010-12-06T10:28:00.001-08:00

With all of the buzz surrounding Harry Reid's proposed internet poker bill (new version said to be circulating today; if and when I see it, I'll highlight the changes in a new "summary" post), I thought it might be useful to remind people how this could potentially become law. Most likely it's not going to go to a floor vote in the House of Representatives and Senate. There's just not enough time left in the session, especially with so many other more pressing issues.

Instead, in a little bit of parallelism that would make J.J. Abrams proud, the bill would most likely be tacked on to a "must-pass" piece of legislation in the same the way that the UIGEA was tacked on to the SAFE Port Act. It would be appended to something like the Bush tax cut extension, something that is virtually guaranteed to be approved by both chambers of Congress.

To refresh your recollection, the SAFE Port Act was a piece of legislation designed to improve U.S. port security in an age of global terrorism. It passed the House of Representatives on May 4, 2006 by a vote of 421-2 and the Senate by a vote of 98-0 on September 14, 2006. The UIGEA was not tacked on to the bill at that time.

What happens in the U.S. legislative process once both houses have passed a bill is that if the bill passed by each chamber is not 100% identical in all respects, a bicameral conference is convened to iron out the differences. The Representatives and Senators in that conference create a uniform version of the bill. They then submit a Conference Report back to each chamber with the final approved, identical version of the bill that each chamber must again pass.

The UIGEA was tacked on to the bottom of the SAFE Port Act by the conference. The Conference Report with the final version of the SAFE Port Act (and the UIGEA!) then went back to each chamber and went up for a vote. As a matter of practice, once a bill has passed a full floor vote, the Conference Report is viewed as a formality. No surprise that the SAFE Port Act's Conference Report passed in both chambers. Two weeks later the SAFE Port Act was signed into law by President Bush with the UIGEA tacked on.

If Harry Reid's internet poker bill will be passed, it will most likely be tacked on to something like the Bush tax cut extension after both chambers of Congress have voted to approve that extension. That means we won't know if a tack-on is going to happen at the moment of the floor vote; we'll only find out once the final Conference Report is submitted and approved.

Quick and Dirty Summary of Harry Reid's Internet Poker Bill

2010-12-05T10:42:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the Las Vegas Review Journal placed online a copy of Harry Reid's proposed online poker bill, the "Prohibition of Internet Gaming, Internet Poker Regulation and UIGEA Enforcement Act”. I spent a few hours last night looking it over and distilling its 75 pages down to these 700 words:

• The bill would set up a licensing, regulatory and tax framework for fully legal online poker in the United States. Operators wishing to offer online poker to U.S. residents would be required to apply for a license from a state or tribal gaming authority that has been qualified by the Commerce Department to issue licenses. Applicants would bear all costs of their application. Once issued, licenses would have a 5-year term.

• The first license cannot be issued until at least 15 months after the bill is passed into law. "Rogue" operators (operators like PokerStars and Full Tilt that have offered internet poker in the U.S. prior to passage of the bill), as a condition of eventual licensing, would be required to immediately cease unlicensed activities upon enactment of the bill and, within 30 days, return all customer deposits.

Thus, if the bill passes in its current form, there would be a period of 15 months where there would be *no* legal internet poker offered in the U.S.

• States and Indian tribes have the ability to opt-in or opt-out of allowing licensees to operate in their jurisdiction. The 35 states that do not currently permit "live" commercial poker may opt-in. The 15 states that allow it can opt-out. This status can be changed at any time upon at least 60 days notice to the Secretary of Commerce. Thus, we could potentially have a situation where internet poker is offered in some states but not in others.

• For two years from issuance of the first license, licenses can only be issued to applicants who have (a) owned or operated a casino or race track; or (b) manufactured and supplied slot machines to casinos; for at least 5 years prior to passage of the bill. For these purposes, a casino is a facility that "hosts 500 or more gaming devices in one physical location pursuant to a duly authorized license issued by a state or Tribal gaming regulatory authority." This is, obviously, designed to favor existing U.S. casino interests at the expense of existing, powerful internet poker sites like PokerStars and Full Tilt.

• All other operators would be ineligible to receive a license for a period of "[xx]" years after issuance of the first license under the Act. Supposedly "[xx]" is currently pegged at 2 years. When the 15-month lead time is factored in, it means existing operators like PokerStars or Full Tilt would have to leave the U.S. for a minimum of 39 months. They CANNOT get around this black-out period by selling the ownership or the assets of their organization to a "clean" entity. This is expressly prohibited by the bill.

• The U.S. player pool of licensed Internet poker operators would be segregated from the rest of the world for at least three years from the date the first license is issued. After three years, the Commerce Department can determine to allow commingling of the U.S. player pool with players from other jurisdictions where online poker is not illegal.

• The licensing fee is 20% of the licensee's "internet poker deposit receipts" each month. I admit I'm confused about what "internet poker deposit receipts" means. In one place, it's defined as "the aggregate… of the rake, tournament fees and all other fees or charges required or received from customers directly as a result of Internet poker, from deposits into any account maintained by the licensee or on behalf of the licensee." To me, that sounds like 20% of the rake. But in another place, the bill provides that "funds received from a customer by an operator of an Internet poker facility and made available in any form… for the purpose of placing a bet or wager… shall be regarded as deposits in calculating Internet poker deposit receipts."

• The UIGEA gets a little work-over with the creation of a list of "unlicensed internet gaming enterprises". The list will be maintained by the Treasury Department and will give financial transaction providers a definitive "black list" of entities for whom it is unlawful to process financial transactions.

• With respect to each internet poker player account, licensees are required to report to the IRS on an annual basis the following information: name; address; tax ID number; gross winnings, wagers and losses; calendar-year net winnings; tax withheld; year-start account balance; year-end account balance; and all calendar-year deposits and withdrawals . A copy of the IRS report should also be sent to the account owner.

Obviously this is a very cursory summary of the bill's provisions. Hopefully it's enough to educate people on the bill's contents and stimulate discussion. The bill is drafted in surprising detail, showing that someone's been working on it for quite a while.

So... Las Vegas

2010-11-19T08:28:00.000-08:00

(With apologies to Otis for borrowing his title.)

Back from Cebu. A good time, as always.

Coming home from any trip always makes me question why I live in Vegas. There's nothing about Vegas that feels like home. In fact, just about anywhere feels homier. Even Cebu, with its abject poverty and the filth that often accompanies it, has a certain charm that Vegas lacks. Back in April, upon coming home from NYC, I remarked that New York is a city of dreamers and Vegas is a town of losers. It's a sentiment I haven't been able to shake since.

Vegas is driven by image, the kind of place that creates an Andre Agassi (remember his "image is everything" line of camera commercials?). It's where you go because your ego demands that you be a big fish in a small pond or because you care too much about what other people think. When you don't feel "cool" enough, there's always a person, a place or a business in Las Vegas that you can (over-)pay to make you feel like a rock star. It's a town of escapism and a city of emotional bankruptcy.

None of that appeals to me. Which begs the question of why I remain here, putting aside the question of why I came here in the first place.

The problem that Vegas people like me run into is that the town allows certain freedoms and a certain lifestyle that is difficult to duplicate in other places without either completely ripping up the social fabric of the place or large bags of cash. That's the trade-off that some of us, for the moment, have accepted about Las Vegas, the reason we hold our noses, steel our emotional centers and continue to putter about the valley.

Make no mistake: Vegas is not a real city. It may not even be a real place, for all I know. It could just be a desert mirage created by fake businessmen -- gangsters -- and taken over by juridical people -- corporations. At some point, I'm going to blink and Vegas is going to be gone.

Quick Hit

2010-11-08T11:49:00.000-08:00

Yep, I let it go a whole month without a post. After my last post, it seems almost fitting.

The truth is that I spent two weeks on the road in California (awesome, by the way) then came back to Vegas in time to tune a few things up for the November Nine. That little drama concludes tonight at the Penn & Teller Theater in the Rio, at which point I'll chug a few drinks with the assorted writers I call friends. Then it's an early bugle tomorrow morning with a 6am flight out of McCarran that will eventually put me in Cebu, The Philippines, for this year's APPT Cebu event.

My work wrapping the WSOP will appear on PokerNews tonight. For APPT Cebu I am writing over at the PokerStars Blog.

The Decline of Poker Writing

2010-10-08T10:47:00.000-07:00

Change100 and PokerNews "parted ways" this week. As Change100 noted in a blog post about the separation, "PokerNews let me go for reasons that had a lot more to do with dollars and cents than anything else... in the New World Order of cost-cutting and downsizing, it is now more valuable for outlets to hire younger, more inexperienced people to write for them rather than paying more money to a veteran who knows what his or her talent is worth."

There is so much sad truth in this. It's been the elephant in the room for about a year and a half now. There are only a very few gigs in poker that don't actively favor cost over quality in 2010, not nearly enough for the number of talented writers that have gravitated towards the industry in the last five years. Thus those writers who don't land a plum gig are forced to choose between undercutting themselves or looking for a new industry in which to write.

This problem, this new formula of "cost > quality", isn't unique to poker. As Katkin pointed out to me yesterday, it's part of a larger trend across almost all writing disciplines, especially media (I know that poker media isn't really "media". Just work with me here.) and probably across many creative disciplines. Ask musicians and photographers what's happened to their rates in the last few years.

You might think that poker should be immune to that trend but "shit rolls downhill" and individual content creators are definitely at the base of the hill. When the online poker sites grew sufficiently large playerbases, they didn't need to spend as much to acquire new players. They started to squeeze the affiliates. The affiliates, accustomed to the huge profit margins of the boom years, saw their net revenue declining and were alarmed. They started looking more closely at their costs and trying to determine which costs were the most revenue-maximizing so that they could continue to enjoy the same absolute level of profits that they did four years ago. At the same time, there was an influx of inexperienced writers who really wanted to be around poker.

The law of supply and demand collided in a predictable way. Because most forms of written content don't produce as many views as most poker video content, sites looked to cut their writing costs first and foremost. With a supply of cheap labor readily available and profit margins declining, the prices media sites were willing to pay for writers began to drop.

The video / writing dichotomoy is also part of the problem. In the 21st century, more people prefer to receive their information passively (watching it) than actively (reading it). Even the most magnificently written piece of poker writing is rarely going to get as many hits as run-of-the-mill video content. Unfortunately for writers, poker media organizations seem to value the two costs equally, under a rubric we can call, "cost of acquiring content".

All of these factors formed a gigantic hammer which started smashing down the rates talented poker writers could command. If you weren't working for an online poker site, which views the costs of talented writers as a drop in the "marketing expense" bucket, you were likely to be caught by those hammer blows.

This morning Otis remarked, "If you give your talent away today, don't complain when people expect you to give it away forever." I fully agree with this statement. It is the main reason why I haven't worked for PokerNews -- not written a single word for them on the front page or in live reporting -- since the morning that the WSOP Main Event went on hiatus almost three months ago.

But I also understand the business rationale behind the drop in rates. I may not like it but I understand it. Businesses don't exist to provide individuals with a livelihood. They exist to make money, usually as much money as those businesses can.

As the poker industry has evolved, businesses associated with it have had to evolve also. You'd hope that poker businesses would treat their people well but you'd also expect businesses to act like businesses. They're going to make decisions that make the most sense for their bottom line and if they have to "crack a few eggs" along the way you can bet your bottom dollar that they'll crack those eggs.

Speaking from personal experience, there are some legitimate questions you probably could ask about the way PokerNews handled the whole situation with Change100. But those questions aren't germane to the larger issue of cost being favored over quality in poker writing. Unfortunately for those of us who have made a living in this industry for years, that's a trend not likely to change in the foreseeable future.

Place Holder

2010-10-06T12:18:00.000-07:00

Wow, two weeks without a post? Really?

To be honest there's not much to report. It's been quiet. Things will pick up in the second half of October with a road trip, followed by a week home before the November Nine. As soon as the November Nine wraps up I'll get on a plane to Cebu. So there will be a stretch of a month which will be quite busy indeed.

Until I have something more interesting I want to write, I direct you to a hilarious ongoing write-up of a trip to Flyover Country.

It's All About Volume

2010-09-23T13:58:00.001-07:00

I'm not a high-volume online player. I never have been, and I find it unlikely that I ever will be. But I do go through phases were I play online a little bit more than normal like I'm doing the past few weeks. Since I've never kept much more than $1,000 online, my poison of choice has been low-limit 135-player Rush SNGs ($4.40 and $12).

Playing these tournaments has given me a new appreciation for the insane volume players have to put in if they hope to overcome short-term variance. As someone who's made his living around tournament poker for the past several years, I wasn't oblivious to short-term variance. But witnessing it in the aggregate is very different than living through it yourself.

Multi-tabling takes on much more importance as a tournament player. In the past, some of the highest-volume tournament players played 10,000 online tournaments per year. That's the only way to try to smooth out short-term variance, and it requires the ability to play 15 or more tables at once.

The rest of us -- the recreational players, the ones who aren't willing to commit that amount of time to online poker or to develop the ability to play that many tables at once -- really are just treating tournament poker as a lottery ticket. Is there a skill component? Of course. Is it greater than short-term variance? Ask anybody who's ever lost a flip on a final table.

The Mind of a Slow-Roller

2010-09-17T13:32:00.000-07:00

In the interests of bumping my 9/11 post down the page a bit, a brief anecdote from last night:

I was playing some live 1-2. The first pot I played I flopped a set of 7s. On the turn of an A-7-8-6 board a player raised all in behind me. He Hollywooded it pretty badly -- the whole hemming and hawing, sighing, then shipping his stack. I was reasonably confident he had a straight but the amount back to me was small enough that I was priced in to call for a full house.

I quickly called and asked, "Do you have a straight?"

He shook his head. "No, I have a pair of 7s."

The river bricked off and I turned over my hand. "I have a set of 7s." My opponent looked at my hand, peeked back at his own cards, and then slowly and deliberately turned over the nuts, 9-10. He turned the ten-high straight all along, just as I had guessed.

You can imagine how smug he looked after the hand. He was so proud of himself! Later I saw him pull an almost-as-douchey maneuver, all in pre-flop against A-K. The flop came 6-8-9. This guy, even knowing he was up against A-K (his opponent opened pre-flop), waited until the river to turn over two eights for a set. Obviously there's no requirement that he open before the river, but when you have your opponent drawing dead to a chop, all you're doing by not opening sooner is slow-rolling him.

I've been slow-rolled before, of course. Play the game long enough and it will happen at some point (although being flat-out lied to on top of that was a new one to me). My question: what possesses people to act like that? Are their lives so miserable that the only way they can get any joy is by trying to give others a false sense of hope, just so that they can watch those other people deflate? Are they so insecure that they can only find any self-worth by tearing down the people around them so that they feel better about themselves?

The Sky Was So Blue

2010-09-11T00:34:00.000-07:00

I've never written much about September 11. In 2004 I said a few brief words about being thankful for the important things in your life; in 2006 I posted a photo I took of the Towers of Light a few blocks from my Brooklyn apartment:

In 2005, 2007, 2008 and 2009 I didn't write or post about 9/11 at all.

A good writer tries to make a point or tell a story with the writing he produces. I've never known what point or what story I wanted to tell about that day. Just listing my tiny little piece of the experiences and my memories -- as vivid as they still are nine years later -- never seemed like enough. After all, the 9/11 attacks became one of the most well-documented news stories of the modern era. The September 12, 2001 edition of the New York Times devoted all 28 pages of the front section to the attacks. They were the first of thousands of pages the Gray Lady would produce on the attacks. Other news organizations did likewise.

Apart from the coverage saturation, I think my problem is two-fold. First, the experience of being in Manhattan on that day, with the connections that I had to the World Trade Center, was intensely personal. I have never been adept at writing about intensely personal experiences on this page, and that day changed me. It sounds so melodramatic and cliched to say that, but it is undeniably true.

More importantly, I don't know how to make sense of that day. I know what happened and I know why it happened. But I just can't wrap my brain around it. If I can't make sense of something I can't write about it. That's just the way I am. Nothing that's ever been connected with that day has made sense to me (see, most recently, the "ground zero" mosque and opposition thereto).

And so, on the 9th anniversary of the attacks, all I have to offer is this meta-post about why I don't write about that day. But if you ever corner me with a drink in my hand and are interested enough to ask, I can give you an hour-by-hour description of my experience, from boarding the subway at 8:15am until I got home at about 6 in the evening.

Even if you don't write them down, some things you don't ever forget.

A Little Self-Pimpage

2010-09-07T14:24:00.000-07:00

Vanity is not one of my dominant personality traits, but even I am not above linking to a couple of things I've written this week that appear on other sites:

* All of this month, I'll be writing final-table recap posts of World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) events over on the PokerStarsBlog. My first effort covered Event #1, $215 NLHE 6-max, and appeared yesterday morning. You'll also find recaps by Change100, Jen Newell, Drizz, Pauly, Shamus, and Kevin Mathers.

It is no hyperbole to say that the PokerStarsBlog's WCOOP team is one of the most talented groups of poker writers you'll find assembled on one web page. Brad Willis -- an excellent writer himself -- is at the helm of this outstanding crew.

* I've become an occasional contributor at Out of the Storm News, a web publication of the Heartland Institute’s Center on Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE). The Heartland Institute is a non-profit organization that strives to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to a wide range of social and economic problems. It should be no surprise that my first contribution is on internet poker and the UIGEA, although future pieces most likely will not have any gaming angle.

* I have a few post ideas that I'm hoping to pound out on this page later this week. I've even written them down this time around so I don't forget them.

"The Enemy Has Captured Captain Keyes"

2010-09-02T13:11:00.000-07:00

I'm sure I've written in the past about how music is a very powerful memory trigger for me. For example, play Andain's "Beautiful Things" and I'm transported to Seoul, 2008. All of Herbie Hancock's "Maiden Voyage" album takes me to Shutters in Santa Monica in 2009, watching a beautiful Japanese woman wrapped in a terrycloth robe as she stands on the balcony of our hotel room and tilts her head to the right side while toweling her hair. Sia's "Breathe Me" puts me on the F train in NYC on my way to work in 2007.

Train's "Drops of Jupiter" is a song I hate, but even hated songs trigger memories. That one brings me to 660 Rose Avenue in Venice, California one afternoon in 2003. The day started with Train's bass player in a throwing-and-breaking-things domestic dispute (his girlfriend found out he'd been fucking several other women) and ended with lots of booze, some drugs and me seeing three different women naked. Including the bass player's girlfriend. [FN1]

A few nights ago I saw a commercial on TV for Halo:Reach, the latest offering in the wildly popular and successful Halo franchise of video games for the XBox. Because I find video games especially addictive, I don't own an XBox or any other gaming console and won't be purchasing Halo:Reach. [FN2] But of course I've known people with XBox consoles. One of them was a good friend in NYC who hosted a home poker game on the Upper West Side from 2001-2003.

I'm certain that anyone who's ever played Halo remembers and recognizes the game's theme music. It is stirring and iconic. Whenever I think of Halo, I think of that music. Whenever I think of that music, I think of those home games -- Sunday nights which usually ended with some multi-player Halo action before we all went home to get some shut-eye in preparation for the work week.

The games were the silly variants you often find in quarter-denominated home games (I believe we played $0.25-$3 spread limit), replete with all sorts of wild cards and crazy rules. They're the types of games I don't like to play much anymore. They're not pure enough for me. But the camaraderie of a home game is usually what will make or break it, not the games themselves. That's one of the things that Halo gave us, and the memories that the game's theme music triggers. [FN3]

Now I live in Las Vegas, where home games basically don't exist. "Why play in a home game when you can drive 15 minutes to the nearest casino and take some stranger's money?" is the typical refrain. But for me at least, home games were never about taking other people's money. They were about friends, and bonding, and blowing up aliens. Those memories will always be more powerful than winning some random pot against some random player in a random casino poker game.

FN1: I only slept with one of the three. That day. My life was more entertaining back then, wasn't it?

FN2: If this post were about video games, it would include a passage damning Katkin to the blackest circles of hell for introducing me to Angry Birds last week. Fucking hell, who sells a video game for $0.99? That's like giving away crack for free.

FN3: It also gave me my former blogging name and still-used online poker screen names.

The Glacier Moves a Little Further Left

2010-08-26T13:43:00.000-07:00

Interesting article in the Reno Gazette Journal yesterday. The salient points:

1. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) told Reno casino heads he intends to support legalizing online poker in the U.S. (but not any other form of online gaming). Reid's support would be instrumental in pushing any bill legalizing online poker in the U.S. through the Senate.

2. The Reno casinos have expressed concern that online poker will lead to full-blown online gaming, both of which will hurt the bottom lines of small Nevada casinos.

So you have Harry Reid, a Democrat only the state of Nevada could produce, now softening what had previously been a hard-line stance against online poker. This is not a surprise. Reid is barely beating Republican Senate challenger Sharron Angle in the polls ten weeks out from the election -- and mind you, Angle is a Tea Party candidate from whom even Fox News has distanced itself. Reid should be winning this election easily. Angle was by far the worst of the three Republican candidates who could have come out of the Republican primary and yet still Reid is struggling against her. It was only a matter of time before the vast coffers of campaign contributions available from Harrah's, online poker sites and others with similar interests persuaded Reid of the error of his ways.

You have the Nevada casinos who, perhaps not surprisingly, do not present a united front on the internet poker issue. The large casino holdings -- the Stations, the Harrahs, the MGMs and the Wynns of the world -- are more or less in favor of regulated online poker in the United States. Harrah's in particular hopes to leverage its WSOP brand into an online poker site. Whether the other large casino chains would follow suit is less clear, but they at least seem to recognize that one way or another online gaming is coming and they need to find ways to synthesize it into their current business. Adapt or die.

On the other side of the ledger are the smaller upstate Casinos -- places like the Peppermill in Reno. It seems like they expect to get out-muscled on the online front by the deep pockets of their larger cousins. Rather than look for niches they can take advantage of with respect to legalized online poker, they're taking a "the sky is falling" approach to the whole thing. In a state with unemployment at 14%, the Reno casinos (and Angle) have decided to try the scare tactic of "supporting any bill that legalizes online poker will take jobs away from Nevadans".

A few weeks ago I said "Wake me when we get there," regarding the return of legalized online poker in the United States. Certainly Reid changing his stance is helpful, but there are still lots of moving pieces that have to fall into place. As long as operators whose interests *should* align with legalized U.S. online poker dig in their heels and set their backs against it (Commerce Casino, I'm looking at you), legalized online poker in the U.S. will remain a fair distance off.

Always Be Closing

2010-08-21T11:41:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I played the Detox Poker Main Event, after having satellited in the night before. The day was an object lesson in having a terrible, terrible seat. It's not that any player at my table was so amazingly good; rather, the table dynamics were such that I had the worst seat. To compound the problem, my table never broke the whole day.

I'm not a good tournament player. I know this. And a better player than me probably would have taken a few more chances, even despite some shitty table dynamics, and found a few more spots to shove. Certainly, moving in six times in the last hour, and only being called once, suggested I could.

In the end, it's all on me. I can bitch about a bad run of cards, I can bitch about 2-, 3- and 4-outers, I can bitch about a bad seat. But it's all just excuses. Re-watching The Scene from Glengarry Glen Ross (aka "the 7 minutes that justify Alec Baldwin's entire career"), I found it to be a damn good analogy for playing tournament poker. "Your name is you're wanting. You can't play in the man's game? You can't close them? Then go home and tell your wife your troubles."

1,001 F-Trainian Nights

2010-08-19T12:32:00.001-07:00

Hmm, my 1,000th post was the Detox pimp post.

Hmm, it took me six years to peck out 1,000 posts.

Yes, it's quiet 'round these parts. There are things I'd like to say but can't, and things I'm not sure I want to say but might some day anyway. Today, however, is not that day.

For the poker industry, summer ends in mid-July. But it's hard to believe that almost 5 weeks have passed since that time, and now the summer is drawing close to its more traditional ending point of Labor Day. Where do the days go?

WCOOP is coming up next month, the poker equivalent of the transition to fall. WCOOP will mean more opportunities for writing and more opportunities for shaking my head as ill-equipped people continue to bash their heads against the tournament poker wall. There are some travels on the horizon, as always.

It's probably going to be time to shake things up soon. They've gotten a bit to static -- not enough forward motion. That stasis may be comfortable for some people but it's not my way.

Until then, however, expect things to continue apace, which probably means less frequent posting.

Detox Poker Series Starts This Week at Hard Rock

2010-08-09T14:24:00.001-07:00

It's Monday Pimp Day at RTFT. Today we're pimping the Detox Poker Series that starts Friday August 13 at the Hard Rock in Las Vegas and runs until Sunday August 22.

I'm no fan of the Hard Rock, as I believe I mentioned last week. When I first checked out the "Poker Lounge" in 2008, I didn't have the best feeling about its potential for success. It turned out that during the following two years the room was mismanaged at just about every step of the way. Being well-hidden from the main gaming floor did not help the room's cause.

But!

Recently the poker room staff seemed to be pushing to increase the room's visibility. Matt Savage took a risk and attached his good name and considerable talents to the poker room by teaming up with them for the Detox Series. (Never mind that after announcing the Detox Series, the Hard Rock decided to relocate and downsize its poker room from 18 tables to 6-8 tables once Detox is over.)

Matt is not planning to let the Hard Rock's past failures stand in the way of a great series. Consider what he has put together for Detox:

* 14 separate events with buy-ins ranging from $230 to $550;
* A nice mix of NLHE (9 events in varying flavors) and "other games" (5 events);
* A $5,000-added player appreciation event at the end of the series;
* 3 guaranteed prize pools (Event 1, $350 NLHE - $100,000; Event 10, $230 NLHE with 1 $200 rebuy - $50,000; Event 14, $550 NLHE Main Event - $200,000); and
* Something Matt likes to call "deep structures not deep stacks". At this time last year I wrote a short post about how Matt is one of the few active TDs who understands this crucial difference.

Matt is keen to create a great tournament series AND a great playing experience for everyone. To that end, he's organized a 2+2 and Media Party on Thursday August 12, and has arranged for certain food options (In&Out, pizza, drink specials, and discounts on other food options at Hard Rock) for players during the series. He's even had the forethought to put together a cell-phone charging station. Trust me -- as someone who was asked by players almost every day at the WSOP if I had a blackberry/iPhone/whatever charger, this is a simple but brilliant idea.

I have absolutely no qualms about throwing my support behind the Detox Poker Series. I've known Matt almost since the day I got into the poker industry (we met at APT Macau in 2008) and know that his name and his previous endeavors speak for themselves. This will be a great tournament series with buy-ins at a level that most people can afford.

See you there!

What Do You Look Like?

2010-08-08T20:40:00.001-07:00

I played a short live cash game session on Friday night, my first (other than two Pokerati game sessions during the WSOP) since mid-May. A player sat down on my right soon after I arrived and bought in for $100. He took the big blind immediately and so had the button for his third hand at the table. That hand I wound up doubling him up on a flip. After the hand he looked at me and said, "Oh, I know who you are. You don't know me but I know you."

Uh oh.

I like to keep a low profile at the poker table. I don't usually tell people that I work in the poker industry. Although people find my work interesting, they tend to mark me as a player against whom they should take extra care if I mention I work in poker. It doesn't matter whether or not I'm actually as good as they think; the mere fact that their guard is up lowers my edge a bit. Thus my standard story, if asked, is that I'm a New York lawyer. It's kind of true.

Everyone once in a while, however, someone recognizes me. In this case, the person was phluxer of Wired Pairs, in town with Veneno. While I was happy to meet a fellow blogger and (briefly, because I wound up heading to Binion's after an hour for some BARGE activities) reconnect with some people I had lost touch with, I was unhappy that the young kid from Vancouver on my left seemed very interested in our exchange. Ten minutes later that kid asked if I played a lot.

"Actually, this is my first cash game session in three months," I said. Again, kind of true if you ignore the Pokerati sessions -- which have a home game feel -- and all the Rush Poker I've been playing since coming back from New Zealand.

"You look like someone who plays every day," my Vancouver friend responded. That's *definitely* not the image I want. I told him I wasn't sure if what he said was a compliment or an insult but assured him that I hadn't been in the Venetian since April. It was all about trying to put him, and the rest of the table, at ease.

I don't mind that phluxer recognized me, especially since I wouldn't have recognized him. It was a nice little piece of happenstance. And I wound up getting $70 back of the $100 I lost before heading to Binion's. But table image is one of those things that I think more and more about with every cash game session. The cards might not be in my control, but my table image is.

The Four Types of Poker Twitterers

2010-08-04T13:02:00.000-07:00

Poker's a solitary game. But with the advent of social networking tools like Twitter, poker players can now invite other people into their solitary world -- or at least feel like other people are listening and taking part in their solitary pursuit. There are four broad types of poker twitterers:

1) The Black Cat - this person uses Twitter almost exclusively for bad-beat stories and to lament about sessions where the person is running bad. The Black Cat wants everyone to know just how unlucky he/she is. If only luck weren't involved, the Black Cat would win every time. When the Black Cat is winning, there's nothing to gripe about and nothing gets posted.

2) The Epic Hero - The counterbalance to the Black Cat. The Epic Hero wants you to believe they're the best. player. EVER! by only posting to Twitter when they've made a brilliant play or are winning in their game. If they hit a big score, Twitter smells of their farts for a week. If they're playing badly or losing a ton? Not a peep. That would dispel the notion that they're an A-player.

3) The Court Reporter - The Court Reporter tweets every significant hand they play, good or bad. While the Court Reporter presents a more fair image of his/her play than either the Black Cat or the Epic Hero, he/she doesn't discriminate between a $5 MTT on PokerStars and a $10-20 NL game in LA. Every hand of poker gets twittered, no matter the stakes. The Court Reporter's twitter account is just a long string of boring-ass hand histories.

4) The Barry Greenstein - Probably the least offensive of the poker twitterers. This person updates their tournament chip count at every break, starting with Break 1 of Day 1. There's usually not much context for the number, making it even more meaningless than a mid-Day 1 chip count already is.

Here's the thing about all of the poker Twitterers outlined above: unless you're at a final table of a major buy-in poker tournament, none of your followers really care. Great, you're up two buy-ins. Wonderful, you got out-drawn on the river again. Perfect, I have a completely context-less chip update for you during the middle of Day 1 of a three-day tournament. Why do you, Twitterer of these banalities, think that anyone cares about any of them?

Maybe it's true that most of what goes on Twitter is drek that tries to make people feel more significant than they are, but poker players -- with their propensity towards insecurity and egotism -- are among the most flagrant offenders. They care too much about what other people think of them, and many of them have a huge need to prove to everyone else how good they are. That's the root of most of the poker-related tweets that get posted.

I made a resolution during the second half of the WSOP, after seeing too many poker-update tweets, to never tweet another hand of poker. If I'm playing properly, I should be focused on what's going on at my table instead of burying my head in my phone. Besides that, tweeting a hand is just gnashing my teeth or beating my chest about the results of the hand. Shouldn't I be focusing on making proper decisions and letting the results sort themselves out?

Do I think that people are going to stop posting poker hands to Twitter? Of course not. Do I wish they would? You bet.

Poker's Long Road Back

2010-08-03T14:01:00.000-07:00

You might be wondering why, as an interested member of the poker industry and a lawyer, I haven't yet had anything to say about HR 2267, the Barney Frank-sponsored bill that would license and regulate Internet gambling. Last week the bill escaped the House Financial Services Committee in a 41-22 vote that was largely along partisan lines.

To put it simply: wake me up when we get there.

Four years after the back-handed passage of the UIGEA, the fact that this bill made it out of committee is an encouraging first step. But it's just that -- a first step, and a baby step at that. It's a long road from the passage of a bill in committee to fully licensed, regulated and operating internet poker in the United States. Only after a bill becomes a law -- a lengthy process in and of itself -- will anyone bother to set up the regulatory framework and licensing scheme necessary to comply with the law. There won't be any online poker in the U.S. until that framework is in place.

Consider this: HR 2267 was introduced by Barney Frank to the full House on May 6, 2009. A marked-up version made it out of committee on July 29, 2010, more than a year later. Although the Senate typically acts faster than the House, there is no companion bill going forward in the Senate right now, which means that should HR 2267 be passed by the full House it's going to be seen with fresh eyes in the Senate. And how long might passage by the full House take, anyway? Nothing gets done in Washington in August. Mid-term elections are in early October. Then what? What happens in a new session of Congress?

Obviously the sooner we get started on the whole process, the sooner (fully regulated) online poker will return to the United States. I'm certainly glad someone's working on it. But don't kid yourself. The process will take years.

Detox Looms

2010-08-02T12:31:00.000-07:00

It used to be that the time directly after the WSOP was a "quiet period" for a span of 4-6 weeks. But with the proliferation of poker around the globe -- especially in the guise of PokerStars' global tours -- that's no longer the case. The alphabet soup of poker tours ensures that there's always an event in some part of the world just around the corner. Right after the WSOP Main Event it was the ANZPT Queenstown event; this week it's the LAPT Brazil event. Next week is the Detox Poker Series here in Las Vegas.

The Detox series is the brain-child of Matt Savage, in collaboration with the Hard Rock Poker Lounge. It's an odd pairing if only because the Hard Rock has plans to cut their poker room from its present size of 18 tables down to a more modest 6-8 tables after the tournament series is over. For what it's worth, that makes total sense. I've never seen more than five tables in action at the Hard Rock outside of special events like the Victory Poker charity tournament.

I remember going down to the Hard Rock Lounge shortly after it first opened. I didn't like it -- the front tables, for me, are incredibly problematic, with their low ceiling and proximity to the front bar and smoking area. The room as a whole was always poorly signed and located, such that half of the hotel guests probably never even knew it was there. And although the staff promised they were going to spread every game under the sun, they did nothing to actually try to build the player base for those games. Instead you got "just another" Vegas poker room, albeit with nice chairs.

Now it seems like the Hard Rock is taking some active steps in the right direction with a player-friendly tournament series... but shortly after setting up the series decided to downsize the room. Mismanagement?

I haven't decided if I'm going to play any of the Detox tournaments. Although there's a wide range of games on offer that I enjoy, just enjoying the games offered isn't enough. That's what my Golden Nugget PLO8 experience taught me this summer. The oddball games will draw all of the best Vegas grinders -- people who play tournament versions of those games online multiple times a week. I'm not arrogant enough to think that just because I enjoy a certain game that I have any edge over that type of field.

Queenstown Snapshot

2010-07-21T15:02:00.000-07:00

This will be necessarily brief.

I'm in Queenstown two full days now and loving every minute of it. This part of New Zealand is incredibly picturesque, with its mountains, lakes, fir trees and snow. I haven't had much chance to do any of the "adventure sport" Queenstown is known for, but the alpine air alone (about 27F as of this 10am writing) is doing loads to refresh me and wipe away all the sins of the WSOP season. Plus it's been great to see some old friends and make some new ones.

It's easy to focus on negativity but there's a lot to be thankful for. We'll have another two easy days of poker, which is really just what the doctor ordered for me after the seven weeks of the WSOP. And I made a mental note last night that, one way or another, I am going back to Cebu this year.

Time for brekky.

Spanning the World

2010-07-19T18:28:00.001-07:00

Ok, so yeah. I was going to try to update my blog every day of the WSOP and failed miserably. I guess I don't have the stamina or the chops of someone like Shamus.

The WSOP was challenging this year. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't glad it's over. Judging by snatches of conversation I had here and there with other media, I'm not the only one who feels that way. 51 days in the Amazon Room, even with a day off a week, is draining on every level.

My heartfelt thanks to everyone who has expressed, in one medium or another, their gratitude and appreciation for the work that I put into the 2010 WSOP coverage. Tournament reporting is often a thankless task, so it's nice to be reminded that there are people who enjoy it.

Unfortunately there's no rest for the wicked. Not eight hours after I left the Rio for the last time at the 2010 WSOP (until November, at least) I was on a plane. You can now find me at latitude 45°S, longitude 168°E -- Queenstown, New Zealand. I'm here for the ANZPT Queenstown event. Even though the timing is rotten, I'm glad I was offered and accepted this opportunity. Queenstown is beautiful!

My cab driver from the airport to the hotel personified every thing I've come to expect from Kiwis (and their Aussie counterparts) -- chatty, knowledgeable and incredibly friendly. I expect this is going to be a great week.

Dawn's Birthday Gift

2010-07-08T01:20:00.000-07:00

This post isn't related to the World Series of Poker. If that's the content you're looking for, feel free to skip this post.

***

To be honest, I do not remember when I first met Dawn Summers. It was some time between August 1997 and May 2000. Yeah, wide span. I drank a lot of beer back then.

Dawn performed in the Law School Show at Columbia with us in the Spring of 2000, but I'm sure I would have met her before that. Because she's racist, however, she probably refused to talk to me. (It's true! Ask her about having her online poker account chat-banned for racist remarks. Or spend five minutes with her. Especially during the summer, when she race-baits other people by eating watermelon.)

Since those halcyon days at Columbia Law School Dawn and I have had many, many mis-adventures together. I say mis-adventures because, whenever Dawn Summers is involved in an outing, excursion or adventure, you can be sure that things will wind up hilariously wrong. The last time I was in NYC, we went to DiFara's to get pizza to bring back to a friend's apartment. A simple 10-minute drive for pizza turned into a 2-hour, multi-borough affair.

That's part of the Dawn Summers charm.

What I look for in the people I choose to associate with is positive qualities. People who try to build other up rather than break them down. People who enrich the lives of those around them rather than detract from them. People who are willing to give of themselves to others in response to what others give them. After all, the best part of living can be other people -- but only if you spend time with the right sort of person. Life's too short to suffer fools, jerks, egotists or emotionally broken people.

Dawn Summers is none of those things. She has all of the best qualities you'd look for in a person, and she has them in spades (spades because she's black). She's one of the best of the best. She's smart, she's witty, she's quirky, she's quick to laugh. She's there when you need her and will give back at least as much as she gets. She'll never tear you down, but she'll point out to you when you've wandered into left field or when she thinks you're wrong. In short, she's a good friend.

Sure, Dawn has her faults. Her memory is long. Cross her once and you might not find yourself ever able to cross her again. But Dawn knows that she has her faults. She doesn't pretend they're not there. That's something that you can only respect in a person: a person who is secure enough in themselves to say "This is who I am. I am not perfect, but that's fine."

One of my faults is that I'm a terrible gift-giver. To be sure, Dawn Summers loves to open gifts. She'd much rather get a box set of Glee that she can hug, rub all over her body and pop in the DVD player than some lame feel-good thing like a contribution on her behalf to the Human Fund or some sort of happy-birthday-tribute post. But I'm fine with my faults too.

This year I told Dawn that I'd give her the gift of my attendance with her at the Liberace Museum in Vegas while she looked for hideous Liberace sneakers. The truth is that getting to spend time with a good friend like Dawn is really a gift to myself (told you I'm terrible at giving gifts). When I realized that, I thought I'd have to do something really personally repulsive and buy her a pair of those hideous sneakers she loves so much. Then I figured, what the heck, I could give her some links to her blogs and her Twitter account and that would make her pretty damn happy. Not as happy as a Glee box set or Liberace sneakers, but I'm willing to come in 2nd, or 3rd, or 15th place on this one.

And so, on this the day of her daughter's wedding, I hope that her first child is a manly one. Happy Birthday Dawn Summers! Enjoy the protection of the birthday force field.

2010 World Series of Poker: Main Event Mania (Day 40)

2010-07-06T15:41:00.000-07:00

I've re-surfaced!

We're in the home stretch now for the 2010 World Series of Poker. As far as my life goes, things have gotten much, much easier. This week is a series of 10-hour days, one day on, one day off. Compare that to last week, where I worked 14-hour days five days in a row. Easy peasy.

A few random thoughts:

* I still don't understand the culture of celebrity. Matt Damon played Ante Up for Africa and people were falling all over themselves trying to get his autograph. It's a two-way street of course, made clear by the fact that without the presence of ESPN's television camera, participation at AUFA dropped from 138 in 2009 to 84 in 2010.

* Remember that whole problem with the TOC I wrote about last time? It got even worse on Saturday. Essentially some of the players revolted against playing at 9am on Sunday and Jack Effel and Ty Stewart let them do it. Daniel Negreanu, not always a bastion of level-headedness, actually made a good point when he said to us, "This is a freeroll. We didn't pay a penny to enter it. If Harrah's wanted to play it at 6am on a Sunday morning, that's when we should play it." Hear, hear, Daniel.

* Day 1A of the Main Event was boring. That's probably a good thing and a bad thing. It's a good thing because it allowed the poker to be the focus. It's a bad thing because if poker is the focus it will be harder for ESPN to package and promote the product.

* There's still quite a bit of value in the Main Event, however, judging by some of the hands I witnessed or my crew reported to me.

* It was good to see Pauly back in the press box for the start of the Main Event. Follow his updates to get a sense of the "color" of the room (or lack thereof) during the Main Event.

2010 World Series of Poker:The Needs of the Few (Day 31)

2010-06-28T17:33:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was Day 1 of the Tournament of Champions. It started at noon and was scheduled to play four levels, ending at about 4:20pm (Bob). And so yesterday was the first day when most of the rest of the poker world learned that the needs of the many don't mean shit compared to the needs of the few or the needs of Harrahs.

All summer, Day 2 and Day 3 restarts have gone off at either 2:30pm or 3pm, depending on the event. Yesterday, restarts were pushed back to 4:30pm. Why? So that the 27 players that were playing in the TOC wouldn't have to worry about having their stacks blinded off if they were alive in other events.

I was scheduled to cover Day 3 of the $5,000 PLO8. 21 players were returning. Exactly one of them, Erik Seidel, remained in the field. And so the other 20 players, all of whom paid the same $5,000 as Seidel, were thrown into a state of confusion when their restart didn't go off at 3pm like they had been told it would. In fact, many of them couldn't even get a precise answer as to when it *would* restart. At one point, the best answer I got was, "Not before 4:10pm".

Don't get me wrong. I'm not faulting Seidel. This was a decision that was made by Harrahs. If I were in Seidel's shoes and Harrahs said to me, "We're going to delay your restart," I'd be fine with it too. But it's a stark reminder of where Harrahs true interests lie, and that's not with the players at large. It's also a stark reminder that some players are more equal than others.

Harrahs and ESPN need these "tv" players to play the made-for-television TOC and to pump up the overall WSOP television ratings. That directly translates into money in ESPN's and Harrahs' pockets. God forbid any of those players should have to make a choice between pursuing a deep run in a bracelet event -- a real poker tournament -- and playing for the $500,000 first prize in the TOC.

I guess the lesson here is, "Nothing gets in the way of the money."

2010 World Series of Poker: Unlucky in Cards (Day 28)

2010-06-25T11:33:00.001-07:00

One of the things I failed to mention in my odds and ends update yesterday was the protest that occurred at the WSOP Seniors Event.

Wait, what?

There was no protest at the Seniors Event, of course. You'd think that the people who claimed they were protesting the Ladies Event as discriminatory and sexist and not on-par with a bracelet in an open event would have been there to protest the Seniors event as discriminatory and ageist and not on-par with a bracelet in an open event. But they weren't, which just further goes to show what a bunch of bollocks the whole Ladies Event "protest" really was. And before you tell me "but the NGC allows the WSOP to age-restrict the Seniors Event", understand that the underlying principle is *exactly* the same. The fact that the Seniors Event is state-sanctioned is irrelevant.

**

We're 40+ events into the WSOP now and reaching the stage where player's bankrolls have been decimated. There are plenty of players who are "0 for the summer" so far and who start coming up with creative excuses about why they've decided not to play the later-in-the-schedule, big buy-in events. Some are better at hiding their losses than others, just as some are better than others at fooling themselves that it's a case of run-bad rather than a case of being overmatched and/or lacking the proper skills.

It's hard to differentiate bad luck from bad play, to be sure. That's one of the things that makes tournament poker so frustrating. During any of the large-field NLHE events, there might be 100 players who play optimally and wind up with nothing to show for it. The question becomes, "Am I playing optimally and getting unlucky? Or am I not playing optimally?"

Not surprisingly, given the egos involved, most players think they're getting unlucky. I asked a friend once to give me an example of a hand he played poorly. He couldn't do it. The best he could come up with was getting coolered with KK into AA. It is exceptionally rare that I hear a player admit that they didn't play well. Most are usually "playing great and getting unlucky".

It's the one thing, more than any other, that will prevent those people from ever being great players.

**

If you haven't been watching the World Cup, you missed arguably the most important -- and the most exhilarating -- moment in U.S. soccer history on Wednesday afternoon. Landon Donovan slotted in a goal one minute into stoppage time to send the U.S. through to the knockout stage. It was a moment that had been building for 16 years, ever since the U.S. hosted the World Cup back in 1994.

America may have finally caught up to the rest of the world as a footballing nation.

2010 World Series of Poker: Odds and Ends (Day 27)

2010-06-24T14:38:00.001-07:00

* A sure sign that we're four weeks into the 2010 WSOP: I haven't posted in a week. The sleep deficit is building after some incredibly long nights at the Rio. These days I'm sleeping almost until the point that I have to go back down there. World Cup isn't helping.

* Numbers continue to be up at the 5pm tournaments and in the non-NLHE games. With what I've witnessed in many of the fixed-limit games, I think the statement, "In poker in 2010, players with a skill edge are better able to exploit that edge in fixed-limit games" is at least worthy of debate. When I see Phil Ivey correctly value-betting third pair, and some other players not getting obvious value for top pair, it starts the gears turning in my head. After all, fixed-limit poker is all about extracting the extra bet when you're best and saving it when you're not.

* There was a power outage last night in parts of Las Vegas for about 5-10 minutes while I was covering Day 2 of the $1,500 PLO8. They kept playing in a semi-darkened Amazon Room using emergency lighting.

* Watching Phil Ivey dismantle Bill Chen heads-up in the $3,000 HORSE event was a thing of beauty. Chen started with a lead of 3.3 million to 1.0 million. Within 10 minutes of the start of heads-up play limits increased to 60,000 and 120,000. Ivey had all the chips in less than 2 hours, whereas almost every other heads-up match at this WSOP has taken 3.5 to 4 hours to play out.

* My streak of not covering a single hand of poker in the Pavilion Room was snapped on Day 25. I was scheduled to cover $1,500 PLO8 in the Pavilion Room at noon, but because the $3,000 HORSE ran so late I was bumped to the 3pm restart of Day 3 of a $1,000 NLHE (my first 9-handed, "simple" NLHE event) in the Amazon Room. At about 4pm it was decided to swap me back to the PLO8. If the original swap had held, I would have made it all the way to Event 51, $3,000 Triple-Chance NLHE, without setting foot in the Pavilion Room.

* Is the Main Event really 11 days away?

2010 World Series of Poker: Another Day Would Be Nice (Day 20)

2010-06-16T01:18:00.000-07:00

Yesterday (today?) I covered Day 3 of the $10,000 Limit Omaha Hi/Lo World Championship at the World Series of Poker. We started with 23 players. When I looked at the structure, I knew I was in for a brutally long day.

"Bet the over on 5am," I told Abe Mosseri when he asked me how long I thought it would take to play to a champion. "And it's a lock."

7am. That's what time it was when Sam Farha eliminated James Dempsey to end the tournament. It was a 16-hour day that started at 3pm. The players played 31 one-hour levels across three days -- eight levels on Day 1, ten levels on Day 2, and 13 levels on Day 3.

That has become a common pattern at the 2010 WSOP. Of the first 25 events, I believe only two reached the final table by the end of Day 2. Typically the final table of a tournament is a day in and of itself, but 23 of the 2010 WSOP events have started Day 3 with more than one table of players and have had to play multiple levels on Day 3 before the final table was reached. That has made for many long Day 3s.

The length of tournament days was a huge problem in 2008. Event 2 of the 2008 WSOP, the first event I ever covered, still had 18 players remaining at 6am on Day 2. Last year the WSOP tried to combat the problem by instituting a new rule (I'm too lazy to look it up, but I believe it's Rule 96) that states that no level on a Day 2 will start past 3am. The problem with the rule is that it simply makes Day 3 the super-long day -- the day when the biggest money is on the line and the decisions have the most direct impact on a player's results.

It's all a question of math. You can stop play for the day at a certain time of night, but the length of a tournament is a function of the total chips in play and the structure. Right now the size of the fields and the pace of the structures create a WSOP tournament that takes roughly 30 levels to play out.

I'd really love to see the WSOP move to 4-day tournaments instead of trying to cram everything into three days. Triple chip stacks and the size of the typical WSOP field justify such a move. An EPT model could be used, with eight levels played every day. Very, very few tournaments would have problems reaching the final table by the end of Day 3, and then the players wouldn't be bone-tired at the final table while trying to make decisions worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. An ancillary benefit is that dinner breaks could be scrapped, since players would never play more than eight levels in a day. Noon tournaments would wrap up by 9pm; 5pm tournaments would be done by 2am; 3pm re-starts would finish at midnight.

Four-day tournaments will never happen, of course, for two reasons. First, the WSOP schedule would have to be lengthened. It's already unwieldy and too long at 7 weeks (see Katkin's Pokerati Op-Ed for more thoughts on this) and lengthening the schedule would cost money. There is absolutely no chance Harrah's is going to create more costs for itself than are minimally necessary to run the WSOP. Theoretically the number of bracelet events could be reduced in order to provide room in the schedule for four-day tournaments... but that would also reduce the rake paid. No dice.

The second reason the WSOP won't move to four-day tournaments is because a small but vocal minority of poker pros -- the ones who play 20-30 events every summer -- wouldn't be as able to play multiple events. The WSOP has tried for hard to broaden its appeal to a wide, "casual" audience while also leaving plenty of things intact for the hardcore tourney grinders. Those grinders constitute a small percentage of the overall WSOP player population but also constitute a not insignificant percentage of the rake paid.

The WSOP has been an evolving beast the last couple of years as it has encountered, and attempted to resolve, problems caused by growing pains. This is one problem that I suspect will never be addressed, and that's really too bad for all involved.

2010 World Series of Poker: Checking in on the Numbers Again (Day 18)

2010-06-14T12:44:00.001-07:00

We're almost halfway through the preliminary events of the 2010 WSOP, so it's time to check in on attendance again:

Event 1 - $500 CE NLHE: 866 in 2009; 721 in 2010 (-17%)
Event 2 - $50,000 PPC: 148 in 2008*; 116 in 2010 (-22%)
Event 3 - $1,000 NLHE: 6,012 in 2009; 4,345 in 2010 (-28%)
Event 4 - $1,500 O8: 918 in 2009; 818 in 2010 (-11%)
Event 5 - $1,500 NLHE - 2,791 in 2009; 2,092 in 2010 (-25%)
Event 6 - $5,000 NLHE shootout - 280 in 2009; 358 in 2010 (+28%)
Event 7 - $2,500 2-7 TD - 257 in 2009; 291 in 2010 (+13%)
Event 8 - $1,500 NLHE - 2,506 in 2009; 2,341 in 2010 (-9%)
Event 9 - $1,500 PLHE - 633 in 2009; 650 in 2010 (+3%)
Event 10 - $10,000 7CS - 142 in 2009; 150 15 in 2010 (+6%)
Event 11 - $1,500 NLHE - 2,638 in 2009; 2,563 in 2010 (-3%)
Event 12 - $1,500 LHE - 643 in 2009; 625 in 2010 (-3%)
Event 13 - $1,000 NLHE - 3,042 in 2010
Event 14 - $1,500 2-7 Draw - 147 in 2009; 250 in 2010 (+70%)
Event 15 - $10,000 Stud Hi/Lo - 164 in 2009; 170 in 2010 (+4%)
Event 16 - $1,500 NLHE 6-max - 1,459 in 2009; 1,663 in 2010 (+14%)
Event 17 - $5,000 NLHE - 655 in 2009; 792 in 2010 (+21%)
Event 18 - $2,000 NLHE - 446 in 2009; 476 in 2010 (+7%)
Event 19 - $10,000 2-7 Draw - 96 in 2009; 101 in 2010 (+5%)
Event 20 - $1,500 Pot-Limit Omaha - 809 in 2009; 885 in 2010 (+9%)
Event 21 - $1,500 Seven-Card Stud - 359 in 2009; 408 in 2010 (+14%)
Event 22 - $1,000 Ladies NLHE - 1,060 in 2009; 1,054 in 2010 (-1%)
Event 23 - $2,500 LHE 6-max - 367 in 2009; 384 in 2010 (+5%)
Event 24 - $1,000 NLHE - 3,289 in 2010
Event 25 - $10,000 Omaha Hi/Lo - 179 in 2009; 212 in 2010 (+18%)

What a difference a week makes. It seems that the smaller-field events are drawing better than they did in 2009. Are players shifting their thinking to the idea that trying to slog their way a 4,000-player field in an event with a fast structure is not the best value for their money? Or is it just that the non-NLHE games are gaining more popularity than they previously enjoyed?

The $1,000 donkaments seem to have settled around 3,000 players each. Presumably that's a number that WSOP officials will be happy with. It's well above what the $1,500 events were typically drawing, but not so crazy out of control as to be a logistical nightmare to organize and operate.

Things are looking up for the WSOP

2010 World Series of Poker: Ladies Event Post-Script (Day 17)

2010-06-13T12:28:00.000-07:00

A few more thoughts on the Ladies Event: PokerGrump's comprehensive post, Change100's Op-Ed "Don't Rain on My Parade" at PokerNews; California Jen's post comparing the Ladies Event to racial segregation.

I agree with some of what these authors wrote; I disagree with some of it. But each piece is worth reading. I'm surprised that some other people who have been very vocal on this issue in the past have chosen to remain silent. But my bottom line is this: whether or not you agree with the existence of the event doesn't give you the right to crash someone else's party and shit on it. There are better, more respectful ways to try to induce change.

--

Yesterday I was on Day 1 of the $10,000 Omaha Hi/Lo. It was a fairly sedate day, with about a third of the field eliminated by the end of the night. I'll be back on it today and tomorrow.

2010 World Series of Poker: Ladies Event Controversy Again (Day 15)

2010-06-11T12:29:00.001-07:00

Today I intended to write about the flap over the live-reporting coverage of this year's WSOP. That was before a group of men entered WSOP Event 22, the $1,000 Ladies Event. Some probably are going to accuse me of being too emotionally close to this issue because of the people involved, but I have a lot to say about this stunt.

It seems every year the Ladies Event causes controversy. Some people are in favor of the event as a way to bring more women into the game. They believe a women-only event makes women who might otherwise be intimidated to "get their feet wet" playing poker feel more comfortable at the table. Others are against women-only events, largely because they find the existence of women-only events demeaning to women. They believe there's nothing stopping women from competing on an equal footing with the boys in open events and that women-only tournaments suggest that there's something inherently "male" about playing poker.

The issue has been debated interminably for years and years. Personally, I believe that ladies events are a solution in search of a problem. But I'm willing to concede that each side may have some valid points. In this post I'm not going to champion one side or the other.

What I am going to do is blast the guys who entered the Ladies Event and the people who supported them in doing so.

I understand that there is no way that Harrah's can prevent men from entering the Ladies Event. But just because it can't be prevented doesn't mean it should be encouraged. After all, what does a man competing in an event designated as a Ladies Event accomplish? Why, exactly, are these men doing it? I suspect there are a number of different dynamics at work, none of them mutually exclusive and all of them incredibly misguided.

1. Guys who think it's funny. Some of the guys dressed up in drag to play the Ladies Event. I'm guessing that they thought doing so would be hilarious. News flash, guys: it's been done.

Dressing up in drag for a ladies event might have been good for a few chuckles when the TiltBoys first did it six years ago at Bay101. Since then, however, it's been done so often that it's become unoriginal and derivative. There's nothing chuckle-worthy about it anymore. If these guys want to dress up in drag, the Fruit Loop isn't far from the Rio.

Dressing in drag to enter a women-only event also overlooks the fact that these guys are turning the Ladies Event into their own personal joke at the expense of the people who take the event seriously. I wonder how disgusted those same players would be if CareerBuilder.com entered a chimpanzee into the Main Event.

2. Guys who think they're making a statement. Some guys entered the event (not in drag) to protest the existence of ladies-only tournaments. Here's my question: what statement, exactly, does a man playing a women-only event make? Are these guys trying to force the women who believe in the value of a women-only event to play against men?

I just don't understand what the participation of these men in the event is supposed to prove. All it does is shit on the women who actually believe in the value of women-only events. It also makes those men look like incredibly selfish, juvenile assholes. I'm told that the whole room applauded upon the elimination of the first guy from the event. What does that say about the "statement" the men were trying to make?

If these men were really interested in change, if they were really interested in the removal of women-only events from poker festivals, if they were really interested in bringing more women into the game on an equal footing with men in open events, the guys who entered the ladies event would work to effect that change continually. They'd try to find avenues to the levels where the decisions to host women-only events are made. They'd do that continually, repeatedly, over time. They wouldn't do it by playing a women-only poker tournament one day out of the year and then ignoring the issue the rest of the year.

Where are those guys to protest the Seniors Event? Where are those guys to protest the Casino Employees event? The same principle is at work in those events but I don't see these guys entering those events to "protest" their inclusion on the WSOP schedule.

If the argument is that the existence of a women-only event is demeaning to women, the LAST way to make that point is to enter the tournament. Because here's the thing: a LOT of the women (not all, but a lot) who play women-only events believe in the concept. By entering the tournament as a man, all you are doing is demeaning those women and shitting on their beliefs and values because you think you're being clever or because you think your beliefs and values are more valid than theirs.

3. Guys who think the field is weaker than an average field. This category is not mutually exclusive with categories 1 and 2. Don't kid yourself. If the men who entered women-only events were ONLY interested in doing it for chuckles or were ONLY interested in doing it to make a statement, they wouldn't try to so hard to win the damn things. What these men are doing is attempting to take advantage of a field that is perceived as softer than average. These men can dress it up as a ha-ha, they can dress it up as a political statement, but like everything else in poker (and in life) it's as much as about the money as it is anything else.

Again, it's not the first time this has happened. In 2007 Jose Canseco and five others entered a ladies event at the Cal State Champs. In 2009, Abraham Korotki won the $300 Ladies Event at the Borgata, good for $20,000.

Some people are pissing in the wind when it comes to this issue. They can react with all the mock indignation and outrage that they want when Harrah's apologizes to the field for the inclusion of men, but Harrah's was right to apologize. The event was marketed as a Ladies Event, an event where women could play only against women. It was not marketed as an open event. Harrah's can't prevent men from entering the tournament but Harrah's can certainly encourage them not to, can certainly apologize to its target audience for the disruption of the event by a few misguided, juvenile individuals.

There are good ways to protest something and bad ways to protest something. The people who entered the Ladies Event, whether out of humor, misguided political statement, or to take advantage of the field, rightfully deserve the scorn of everyone in poker. That includes those who believe in the value of women-only events and those who believe that women-only events should be removed from the schedule -- but believe in effecting that change in ways that are respectful to all involved.

2010 World Series of Poker: A Day for People (Day 14)

2010-06-10T11:16:00.000-07:00

Last night, for the first time in two weeks, I wasn't the last person to leave the Amazon Room. The 6-max tournament played down from 16 to a champion in 6 hours of play, thanks in large part to the freakish run-good of eventual champ Carter Phillips. I actually had time to go have a few drinks at the hooker bar with AlCantHang. We were eventually joined by BadBlood before TheMark dragged him off for some late-night PLO cash action. Lacey Jones even joined us, all agog about a big announcement coming tomorrow.

For all my talk of playing satellites, last night would have been a great opportunity. In fact, I was in the Pavilion Room for more than 2 minutes for the first time all WSOP. But one of the things I've been lacking with my very late nights is quality socializing time with the friends I've made in this little wacky poker world. Yes, I've talked at length recently about all of the negative personality types that dominate the game but there are also some damn fine people. I provided comedic relief to the crew that was covering the $2k LHE event and also chatted with a few friends playing in that event before Al and I headed off to grab drinks. All of that was more important than playing. There will always be time to play.

Today is another day off, a day I'll use to catch up on some other work. Funny how life doesn't stop just because the WSOP is in town. Tomorrow, maybe, I'll play some satellites. The day before a donkament seems like a good satellite day, don't you think?

2010 World Series of Poker: Quiet in the Amazon Room (Day 13)

2010-06-09T12:07:00.000-07:00

When I arrived to the Amazon Room yesterday at 1:30pm, it was empty and dead silent. For several years I have thought of the Amazon Room as being the hub of the World Series, the room that is always going 24 hours a day for 7 weeks. This year, that room is the Pavilion Room, and oddly enough through two weeks of the WSOP I have yet to set foot inside the Pavilion Room.

For me, then, the WSOP is lacking a certain energy this year.

That's fine. I don't need it to be a non-stop carnival of poker action. When Wicked Chops, a few years ago, said, "It's just like high school," they weren't kidding. Even once you discount the youth factor of a lot of the "Internet generation" of poker players, there are too many poker players whose insecurity is so crippling that they cope with it by trying to prove how poker-smart they are to anyone who will listen or by winning some poker.

At least in the Amazon Room I don't have to deal with a lot of that, don't have to deal with the endless bad-beat stories. Poker players, as a group, are the unluckiest people in the world. You'll rarely find one that played a hand or a tournament badly. They either got unlucky, were bad-beated, ran bad, or whatever other variant you want to call it. It's just another form of the poker ego manifesting itself.

I do like to see the genuinely nice people who catch a heater, play well, or otherwise run good and hit a nice score. They're the ones who are genuinely happy with their accomplishment, rather than feeling entitled to it or deserving of it or vindicated by it. Those nice people exist at the WSOP, they just tend to be much quieter than their asshole, insecure counterparts.

Today I'm covering the last three tables of the $1,500 NLHE 6-max, Event 16. Hopefully the winner will fall into the former category of player rather than the latter.

2010 World Series of Poker: Side Trip to the Nugget (Day 12)

2010-06-08T09:28:00.001-07:00

In a weird quirk of scheduling, yesterday was my second day off in a row. I initially intended to use the day for satellites at the Rio but Sunday evening I was persuaded to hit the Grand Poker Series' $235 PLO8 tournament at the Golden Nugget. For what it's worth, I've played exactly one previous PLO8 tournament in my life, but variety is good and I expected the field to be soft.

Not so much. 150 players came out -- a very surprising number given that only 68 played the PLO at the WSOP-Circuit at Caesars in April -- and I recognized many of them. Last year the $235 HORSE tournament that I played at the Nugget was filled with people who seemed like they had nothing better to do at the time. Yesterday's PLO8 field had a few of those players but they were outnumbered by players who clearly had played some Omaha before.

For sure, PLO8 is not a game often offered in live tournaments (watching dealers try to split pots was frustrating). The Omaha junkies might therefore have come out for a tournament at a price point that they might otherwise have ignored. But it still surprised me that some of the people who were there would bother with such a trifle as a $235 tournament.

I got donk-lucky to stay in the tournament all the way to the money bubble, then got donk-unlucky on the bubble. Somehow I squeaked into a min-cash, a frustrating result for 11 hours of play but better than the alternative, given that I was down to just 2 big blinds on the money bubble.

Today it's back to the grind at the Rio. I can't say I'm looking forward to the slog but writing about poker is better than playing poker for a living.

2010 World Series of Poker: durrrr-Nguyen's Natural Selection (Day 11)

2010-06-07T09:20:00.000-07:00

I had the day off yesterday, so I missed the durrrr circus (durrrr-cus?) last night. I'm guessing the atmosphere in the Amazon Room was electric but to be honest I didn't much care. Tom Dwan is good, no question. But the thing that created the atmosphere was the fact that he's an absolute degenerate with millions of dollars on the line for winning a bracelet. That's something that makes me shrug.

The night before I witnessed the spectacle of Men Nguyen capturing bracelet No. 7. It was, in a word, disgraceful. He acted like a child for much of the final table, by outright laughing at his opponents to their face, by sulking and muttering under his breath when he was on a downswing, by flinging his cards at the dealers and sidling to the edge of verbally abusing them when he had bad luck, and even by cajoling Brandon "Bryan" Adams into playing the last hand blind. Nguyen treated his river card like he was playing baccarat.

Welcome to the World Series of Squeezing.

To be fair, two nights ago few people were rooting for Nguyen, a player who has the reputation of a cheater. A well-known member of the media sent me a text during the final table that read, "For all that is holy in the universe... I hope Brandon wins." On the other hand, last night most people were rooting for durrrr, even though his heart is no less degenerate than Nguyen's. Probably the only people who weren't rooting for him were the pros who made bracelet bets against him.

Welcome to the World Series of Sweating.

Is all this really something to admire and to aspire to? Do intelligent, interesting, ambitious people look at the poker scene (not the game itself, mind you, but the scene, the industry, the people who have forsaken all else for poker) and think, "Yes, that's the way to go"? Or do they look at it and find it all kind of sad?

I'm not sure. There are good people in poker, for sure. But there's a reason they say it's a tough way to make an easy living, and when you see what that does to people like Men Nguyen -- and maybe one day Tom Dwan -- it doesn't exactly inspire.

2010 World Series of Poker: The Numbers Game (Day 9)

2010-06-05T12:45:00.000-07:00

A little scoreboard watching through twelve events:

Event 1 - $500 CE NLHE: 866 in 2009; 721 in 2010 (-17%)
Event 2 - $50,000 PPC: 148 in 2008*; 116 in 2010 (-22%)
Event 3 - $1,000 NLHE: 6,012 in 2009; 4,345 in 2010 (-28%)
Event 4 - $1,500 O8: 918 in 2009; 818 in 2010 (-11%)
Event 5 - $1,500 NLHE - 2,791 in 2009; 2,092 in 2010 (-25%)
Event 6 - $5,000 NLHE shootout - 280 in 2009; 358 in 2010 (+28%)
Event 7 - $2,500 2-7 TD - 257 in 2009; 291 in 2010 (+13%)
Event 8 - $1,500 NLHE - 2,506 in 2009; 2,341 in 2010 (-9%)
Event 9 - $1,500 PLHE - 633 in 2009; 650 in 2010 (+3%)
Event 10 - $10,000 7CS - 142 in 2009; 150 15 in 2010 (+6%)
Event 11 - $1,500 NLHE - 2,638 in 2009; 2,563 in 2010 (-3%)
Event 12 - $1,500 LHE - 643 in 2009; 625 in 2010 (-3%)

That's six events that are down in numbers, 3 events that are flat, and 3 events that are up. One of the "up" events -- the $10k Stud -- could easily just be a statistical aberration. I wouldn't expect to see Stud make much of a comeback any time soon.

If we add up all the numbers, we find that attendance is off 17% so far to start the 2010 WSOP. Andrew Feldman at ESPN states on Twitter that we can't say that the WSOP isn't succeeding based on donkament numbers. And I'm not suggesting that the WSOP isn't succeeding. Sure, if you get 2,000 players for a tournament, that's a great turnout.

But declining numbers surely have some meaning -- the question is what that meaning is. Total donkament numbers so far are off 19%, a shade worse than what the total WSOP is off. Donkaments are what the WSOP has become. There are 13 on this year's schedule of 57 events, not counting shootouts, 6-max events and non-open events. If we're not going to judge the WSOP on donkaments, what *are* we going to judge it on?

(Prediction, by the way: the $1,500 NLHE shootout will see a huge increase in turnout this year.)

I'm going to mull over what I think it all means while I continue to watch the entrants on an event-by-event basis. In the meantime, today I'll be working the $10K stud final two tables. It's quite a line-up, so check out the live updates on PokerNews.

2010 World Series of Poker: Jim Joyce's Second Job (Day 8)

2010-06-04T11:30:00.000-07:00

Dealer errors happen. Floor errors happen. I wrote a few days ago about how making mistakes can actually be very instructional. And if that's true, than the 2010 World Series of Poker is quickly proving itself to be the most instructional WSOP ever. Jim Joyce would be proud.

This is my third WSOP. I'm well-acquainted with the fact that it's difficult to find a few thousand qualified, well-trained staff (dealers, floors, etc.) to drop everything for 7 weeks and move to the middle of the desert. But the errors I'm seeing this year extend to every level of the operation. There were the poor decisions made regarding Event 3, which almost reached the money on independent Day 1s; there was the Amnon Filippi registration miscue of a few days ago; there are basic floor decisions being botched horribly; and there are dealer mistakes as egregious as skipping a player during a hand of Stud on seventh street.

The floor errors are the most problematic. The floors are the arbiters of the game, the ones who are supposed to make sure the rules are applied properly and fairly. They're not doing a good job of it. Towards the end of the night in the Stud event yesterday, Matt Glantz completed to 1,200 before David Singer threw out three chips (two T500 and one T1,000) chips behind him. Even though Singer made a mistake and meant to just call, his action was *clearly* a raise. It was more than half of a raise and was not just a single over-sized chip. The table requested a floor ruling. Somehow the floor who came to the table initially ruled Singer's action a call! There was such a howl of protest that a second floor was summoned who reversed the call.

The human element is what people were deriding earlier this week when Jim Joyce botched a call in a baseball game between the Detroit Tigers and the Cleveland Indians that cost Armando Gallaraga a perfect game. In Joyce's case, it was a "judgment call". At the WSOP, bright-line rules are supposed to prevent those kinds of botched calls by taking judgment out of the equation. But that only works if the rules are properly applied.

For $420 of juice a head in a $10,000 event, asking that the rules be applied properly doesn't seem like it's asking for too much, no matter how "instructional" mistakes in the application of those rules might be.

2010 World Series of Poker: Back At It (Day 7)

2010-06-03T10:53:00.000-07:00

Looks like I didn't miss much while I was away from the Rio yesterday. I really do want to get into several of the single-table satellites at some point but yesterday wasn't the day. Neither is today. Despite not starting work until 4pm (for the 5pm $10K Stud event), I just won't have the time.

Allen Kessler spent some of his time two nights ago during a break in the 2-7 triple draw event complaining to Jack Effel and Ty Stewart about what he felt was the event's horrible structure. (Kessler would go on to make the money, finishing in the final three tables.) Stewart just bit his lip. Effel replied that he doesn't take complaints after 5pm, and that Kessler should send Effel an email -- an email which, I'm sure, will be promptly taken to /dev/null.

Kessler is a well-intentioned guy, but "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". At this point, Kessler is becoming a caricature of himself. He's even spawned a gimmick Twitter account.

As I've written before, there are times when I really despise the poker "scene". Maybe more often than not. I think that shows that I've still got some sanity left, because I'm not really sure otherwise how anyone with any intelligence and ambition would allow themselves to buy into it all and be sucked into it.

But, as Mike Matusow would say, that's negativity. For now I'll be happy with my place at the freak show.

2010 World Series of Poker: Blessed Rest (Day 6)

2010-06-02T11:44:00.000-07:00

For the first time in five days, everything ran smoothly yesterday. I predicted Event 4 would play down to a winner sometime between 3am and 5am. One of the floor supervisors scoffed and said surely it would be done by 2am. No such luck. The last hand was dealt at about 4:15am. I win?

One of the things I don't think I've ever written about is the back hallways at the Rio, the "guts" of the place. Like many of the journos, I park my car in the employee parking lot and come in to the Amazon Room through a back door. If I have to move between rooms at the Rio, I move via back hallways. Typically it's a more direct route; also, I don't have to deal with 1,000 donkeys in the hallway. This is a favored tactic of many of the name pros as well. All of those autograph requests can get tedious.

There's not much back there in those hallways. The floors are poured concrete floors, there are stacks of those god-awful Rio chairs (try finding one that's level), and there's a bar where cocktail orders are filled. The dealers also have a break room, but that's about it.

Still, the back hallways are a place that you can find a little peace and quiet if you need it. That's a scarce commodity at the World Series of Poker. Even in the press box, people are constantly coming and going. Some are welcome; some are not. Two days ago a random railbird approached me and Nolan Dalla, hard at work side-by-side in the press box.

"You all seem so focused!" he said. In fact, he had to say it three times to get our attention, thereby breaking our focus. He was just being friendly, I guess. Sometimes it's hard for people to understand that their spectacle is my office.

Today is a blessed off day. After five nights where we didn't ever finish before 3am, I can relax and lay low. I'm very tempted to play some of the ridiculously juicy single-table satellites, but dragging myself to the Rio on my day off seems like blasphemous. I'll probably chase a white ball for a few hours with some donkey instead. That seems like a better way to ruin a day off.

2010 World Series of Poker: Ghost in the Machine (Day 5)

2010-06-01T12:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's Day 2 of the $1,500 Omaha Hi/Lo event didn't go smoothly for Harrah's. About an hour into Day 2, my blogging partner asked me how come Amnon Filippi wasn't in the PokerNews chip counts. The night before, at the end of Day 1, Filippi bagged up what I described in the end-of-day post as "low 30s" in chips. It made him a Top 10 stack heading into Day 2. Yet Filippi was not listed in the the overnight counts we received directly from Harrah's. We both pored over the counts, double-checked a couple of different resources, and were flummoxed. No Amnon.

Normally we'd just add Filippi by hand and be done with it. But this year we're using a new blogging platform that runs on duct tape, paper clips and hamsters. It is, at best, functionality-challenged. Figuring out how to add a single count by hand on a Day 2 requires a map and the Rosetta Stone. We put in a call to EIC Matthew Parvis. Parvis was surprised by Filippi's omission and said he'd look into it for us.

About 15 minutes later WSOP TD Jack Effel showed up on the floor and headed to Filippi's table. While Effel was talking to Filippi, we looked up Filippi's starting Day 2 seat. It was assigned to someone named Steven Aarons of Colorado.

Hmm.

Straight up I should say that nobody suspected Filippi of anything nefarious. But it did look like he was playing a ghost stack, or playing someone else's stack. It was clear that a major fuck-up had occurred.

Through cage logs and cameras, Effel determined that the cashier who took Filippi's buy-in registered Filippi for the tournament under the TotalRewards number of the player ahead of Filippi in line (a player who registered for the $1k NLHE event). In the end it all got sorted. Filippi was credited for his buy-in, Stevens was deleted from the list of registrants, and Filippi was added.

Getting to the bottom of the problem turned out to be an academic exercise when Filippi busted just short of the money. But this was a breakdown at every level. It was a breakdown by the cage, for making the error in the first palce. It was breakdown by the dealer at Filippi's first table, who clearly did not match Filippi's ID to his registration card. It was a breakdown by the overnight chip counters, who managed to somehow match Filippi's tag and count to Stevens' name. And it was a breakdown by Filippi himself, who should have checked his registration card before leaving the cage.

Just another day at the 2010 World Series of Poker.

26 players will be back for Day 3 of the Omaha Hi/Lo. Updates, when the site isn't broken, at PokerNews.

2010 World Series of Poker: The Gray Hair of Seth Palansky (Day 4)

2010-05-31T12:35:00.001-07:00

If you're a WSOP official, you're probably not encouraged by the start of the 2010 World Series of Poker. Attendance is down sharply in every event so far. Consider:

Event 1 - $500 CE NLHE: 866 in 2009; 721 in 2010 (-17%)
Event 2 - $50,000 PPC: 148 in 2008*; 116 in 2010 (-22%)
Event 3 - $1,000 NLHE: 6,012 in 2009; 4,345 in 2010 (-28%)
Event 4 - $1,500 O8: 918 in 2009; 818 in 2010 (-11%)

There are a few forces at work here which might be distorting these numbers. For example, last year there was only one $1,000 NLHE event. Anyone who wanted to play it had to play that event. This year there are six. It stands to reason that the field in that event would be smaller. Also, the $1,500 NLHE event that starts today may have cannibalized the $1,000 field. (Or maybe the $1k will cannibalize the $1,500. I guess we'll see.)

With the PPC event, I compared the numbers this year to the 2008 event because last year ESPN did not broadcast the final table. As a result many exposure-seeking pros passed on the event. This year the format changed from HORSE to Eight-Game. That may also have affected turnout, especially since PLO can be a real "widowmaker" of a game.

The other two events, however -- the Casino Employees' Event and Omaha Hi/Lo -- were the exact same events as last year. While I acknowledge that something as small as changing the day of the week an event starts from a Thursday to a Friday can impact turnout, both events experienced a double-digit decline in players.

There have been other problems as well. The web site of the "official live-update provider" has been held together by duct tape, paper clips and hamsters. Tomorrow is the day that enforcement of the UIGEA regulations is supposed to begin. What are those things going to mean for attendance at the rest of the WSOP?

I'll be back in the Amazon Room today for Day 2 of the O8. Live updates (when the site is working) at PokerNews.

2010 World Series of Poker: On Making Mistakes (Day 3)

2010-05-30T11:54:00.000-07:00

It was another quiet day in the media box at the back of the Amazon Room covering Day 2 of the $50K yesterday. The Amazon Room had a bit more buzz because many of the tables were being used for Event #3, the first of six $1,000 NLHE events. But by dinner time all of those tables had broken and we were back to about ten mostly quite tables in the $50K.

The task of covering a poker tournament is not exactly a science. In the heat of things it's easy to jot down a card incorrectly. Sometimes, if you walk up to a table in the middle of a hand, the action can be mis-reported due to things like the dealer pulling chips into the pot. Maybe your attention gets distracted for a moment by a hand at a nearby table. Perhaps you miscount the size of a bet or raise.

Yesterday, a poker player in Event 3 was upset because it was reported that he made a squeeze play "with an airball" after the flop in a three-way pot. In fact he said he actually had top pair. He called the incorrect reporting of the hand a "bash" and threatened a "libel suit". (Clearly, he needs to look up the definition of libel.)

It was an error. They happen, as stated above, for any number of reasons. I'm sure the reporter for that hand was unhappy to later learn that he or she had gotten it wrong.

Everyone makes mistakes. Nobody is ever right 100% of the time. True strength is admitting your mistakes, apologizing for them, fixing them if possible and learning from them. It's another of those things that separates professionals from amateurs and adults from children. In fact, mistakes are some of the greatest learning tools. There's nothing "strong" or positive that comes from projecting an air of infallibility to the world, always claiming to be right and never apologizing for anything. It does the opposite of what you're trying to do -- it exposes you as a sad, insecure, emotionally weak individual.

Poker seems to attract those types of people.

Today I'll be moving off of the $50K and covering Day 1 of the $1,500 Omaha Hi/Lo. I'm offering all of my luck in this event to two of the "good people" of poker -- Shirley Rosario and Matt Savage. Here's hoping that two days from now they'll be heads-up for the title.

2010 World Series of Poker: Whoops, Sanity is Missing (Day 2)

2010-05-29T10:46:00.000-07:00

Imagine that you are tasked with providing live internet coverage of the most talked-about, most watched, most high-profile poker tournament series on the planet. Also imagine that the series starts with a marquee event that is sure to attract some of the best talent in the game and sports a $50,000 price tag just for a seat at the table. What's the one thing you'd like to make sure is rock solid? Your web site, right?

Yesterday was a trying day for PokerNews writers, PokerNews readers and PokerNews administrators. Technical glitches caused the web site to shudder and wheeze throughout the day. Some were hardware-related; some were software-related; some were user-related. At one point during the $50K we were unable to post anything for roughly an hour. It was enough to try the sanity of even seasoned veterans.

Mistakes and crises happen though. Reacting to them in a cool, level-headed manner, rather than standing there in the middle of a crowded room and shouting your head off, is what separates professionals from amateurs and adults from children. All that drama and negativity isn't going to fix anything. It's just drama and negativity heaped onto things for no good reason. Eventually some semblance of functionality was restored to the PokerNews web site and we all went on with our nights.

Other impressions from Day 1:

* It's hard to convey the size of the Pavilion Room in words or pictures. It's like the Grand Canyon. When you see pictures of the Grand Canyon, you think, "Sure, that's big I guess. But so what?" Only when you see the Grand Canyon in person do you understand the enormity of what you're looking at.

* It was weird being inside the Amazon Room without the typical "buzz". The only tables in action were the 15 $50K tables. It was oddly sedate all day.

* Final entrants in the $50K: 116. Ship the under-125.

* As happens every year, there were allegations of marked cards in the $50K. Particularly revealing was this interlude at John D'Agostino's table:

...one of D'Agostino's hole cards had a small "chip" taken out of it near the corner. D'Agostino stopped the deal before it was complete to call attention to the card. He asked if he should just flip it up, as he had not yet been dealt his door card. The dealer called the floor over to the table but continued the deal before the floor arrived, giving D'Agostino a third card, face up.

"I guess not," D'Agostino said to nobody. "How can I play this hand now?" When action came to D'Agostino he closed his hand. Then he turned up the marked card.

"Shockingly it was an ace," he remarked as he showed the ace of spades. "Who could have guessed?"

* Neither Howard Lederer nor Chris Ferguson were perp-walked out of the $50K by the federales. Both survived to Day 2. In fact there were only 11 eliminations all day (ship the over-10.5, 2 for 2!). Dan Shak was first out when he over-played middle set in PLO; durrrr followed soon after.

I'll be back at it for Day 2 of the $50K at 3pm. Head to PokerNews for coverage.

2010 World Series of Poker: Dream-Crushing Starts Now (Day 1)

2010-05-28T08:31:00.000-07:00

Last year I interviewed Andy Bloch just before the 2009 World Series of Poker started. He described the non-WSOP part of the year as time spent "waiting for the next WSOP".

After producing just three cashes and no final tables during an aggressive slate of bracelet events in 2009, the wait to the 2010 World Series of Poker must have been a long one for Andy. Today that wait is over. In about 3 hours, Event #1 - $500 Casino Employees NLHE will officially start the bracelet events for 2010. It will be followed five hours later by one of the most anticipated events of the entire series: the $50,000 Poker Player's Championship. I'll be covering the first few days of the $50K for PokerNews.

There's going to be a lot of shit over the next seven weeks. Some of it will be good; most will be bad. That's to be expected when $180 million is redistributed from 60,000 people to 6,000 people (minus a 5% vig to Harrah's, natch). There will be people who play multiple events they have no business playing; people who waste their time and money out of some misguided notion of proving something to themselves and others; people who get in over their heads; and people who blow their bankrolls. Hell, today in Event #2 there will almost certainly be players in the field who fit all of those categories.

Last night at a pre-WSOP party, four WSOP media veterans debated how many players will show up for the $50K today. In 2008 the $50K HORSE drew a field of 148 players. Last year, when ESPN chose not to broadcast the $50K HORSE, that number dipped to 95.

This year the format has changed to an eight-game format -- with an all-NLHE final table, so that ESPN would be persuaded to broadcast it. Also, the $50K has been moved to the very front of the schedule, where players still have bankrolls and haven't yet had their dreams repeatedly and savagely crushed.

The line was finally set at 125. Two of us took the over; two of us took the under. Either it was a good line or two of us are complete idiots. We'll find out later today.

The wait is over. The 2010 World Series of Poker starts today.

Busy, Busy

2010-05-27T08:33:00.001-07:00

I've been a bit absent from the blog for the last week due to a trip to Palm Springs, various runnings-around-town here in Vegas, and the Brunson Beer Pong Invitational Tournament, which somehow I got invited to. "May you live in interesting times," I guess.

I often make friends slowly. People don't instantly take to me and I often don't instantly take to them. Although I know some other people would vehemently disagree, I don't think it's a personality flaw. It's just the way I am. I might appear stand-offish at times but my friendships are built over time, shared experiences and commonalities. That's how it's come about with Joe Speaker, with whom I spent all of Sunday.

Speaker and I opened the festivities with a round of golf in the morning in which we both swung the clubs like we'd never played the game before. Afterwards we went back to the swanky new Chez Speaker to play internet poker and spend some time with Speaker's family: his lady friend Emet and his 8-year-old son AJ. The line of the night belonged to AJ. After I busted out of the BBT5 in 4th place, I told AJ I came up a little short but I won $170.

"Can I have it?" he asked. Dead serious, too. I like the way he thinks!

When I got into my car Monday morning to head back to Vegas, there was a slip of paper on the floor of the passenger side that I guess had blown out from under the seat the day before. It was a voided rail ticket for Amtrak, round-trip, from Los Angeles to Solana Beach, a trip I made with Speaker and Emet last year to Del Mar racetrack. It was as if the universe was saying, "Remember this? Don't ever let these people slip out of your life."

Yesterday the beer pong tournament took place at Hogs and Heifers in downtown Vegas. Most of the people that were there would never set foot in Hogs were it not for the beer pong tournament, so the vibe inside was a bit weird. My good buddy Eric Ramsey was my teammate on Team PokerNews. We avoided embarrassment in the first round, surviving to win by a single cup against a team of two girls who had never played beer pong before.

In the second round we drew Hoyt Corkins and Steve Gross, about as close to ringers as you get in beer pong. (Beer pong ringers? Seriously? What world am I living in?) Despite a decent fight, we lost by three cups. Eric and I agreed that you should never play drinking games against a man in a cowboy hat.

Today there are various meetings. Tomorrow, the $50K Players Championship begins and we're off and running for seven weeks. I'll be covering the first two days of the $50K before moving over the the $1,500 Omaha Hi/Lo event. All of the coverage is on PokerNews, of course.

WTP = WTF

2010-05-20T16:02:00.000-07:00

Even though it's 2010, people are still trying to find a game-changer to make a "new" buck off of poker. Given the industry's maturation since the Moneymaker Moment of 2003 (seven years ago this coming Monday), those dollars are harder and harder to find. The affiliate marketers who were rolling in cash in 2005 are being squeezed at the edges now because the dominant online poker sites no longer need to pay lucratively to acquire new players. Training sites were the rage a few years ago but have recently undergone some consolidation. And the market for televised poker has gotten very, very crowded, with shows like Poker After Dark, High Stakes Poker, the PokerStars Big Game, World Poker Tour, Heartland Poker Tour, NAPT, and WSOP all competing for viewer attention and advertiser dollars.

Many people in poker tend to forget how truly niche the industry is. Although some of the revenue streams in play are measured in hundreds of millions of dollars, in terms of popular appeal poker probably has a single-digit market share. With the industry so strongly established and the major operators so firmly entrenched, it takes a sound idea and an excellent business model to make a new poker venture a success. If your poker business / poker tv show / other poker product doesn't have the ability to capture 100% of the poker market -- and hopefully some spillover into a non-poker market -- its days are numbered. This is a major mistake that "The Real Deal" made.

All of this brings us to World Team Poker, a "new" "team poker" concept that had its inaugural event yesterday at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas. I can't help but think that this poker venture is going to fail, like so many before it.

World Team Poker pits poker "national teams" of reasonably well-known poker players (i.e., "good for TV" players) against each other in a double-shootout format. There were eight teams in action yesterday on five tables -- one player per team per table. The rules allow players to be substituted or rotated almost at will, and the team captain can be called in for a consult at any time if a tough decision is required.

Individual players cannot be eliminated, per se. Each player in action at any time is simply playing his or her team's stack at that table. If the player busts from the table, the player's team is busted from that table -- but the player who busted can be substituted into a different table, assuming the team still has other stacks in play.

The top two players from each table advance to the final table. However no country can be represented more than once at the final table. So, for example, if China had three survivors in the first round of the double-shootout, all of their stacks would be consolidated into one Chinese stack for the final table.

As if all of this wasn't gimmicky enough, the tournament also used a mixed-game format, with rotations of limit hold'em (30 minutes), pot-limit omaha (45 minutes) and no-limit hold'em (30 minutes).

First things first -- nobody has ever found a successful team poker model. Many have tried. That's not to say that there isn't a workable team-poker concept out there. Many people think Dream Team Poker came closest. The problem I've always seen with Dream Team Poker is that, without television behind it, there is no way for Dream Team Poker to make enough money to make the concept sustainable. And Dream Team Poker was the best of the team poker concepts.

Now we have World Team Poker. The concept was initially announced and launched just after the end of the WSOP last year. (The press release is dated August 5 2009.) From that press release to the inaugural event took nine months. And while I realize the complexity involved of putting together a television production, I have to think that WTP started off behind the 8-ball by taking so long to actually bring the product to market.

Yes, this event was a television production. Somehow, somewhere, someone at WTP convinced FSN to sign on to broadcast 13 episodes of this product. Maybe it was a time buy; maybe FSN was asleep at the wheel and bought 13 episodes of something they'd never seen and nobody had ever tried before. I'm going with Occam's Razor on this one, but I have no independent facts to support my assumption.

I'm really not sure how this is all going to play out on TV. My gut instinct is that Average TV Viewer is going to be very confused to see someone bust out, but re-enter the tournament later. I also believe that playing limit hold'em and no-limit hold'em in the same mixed-games format is a recipe for television disaster. I'm long on record as saying that I don't believe PLO works very well on television.

Even if I'm wrong about all of that, I still think WTP is destined for failure simply because the production yesterday was so slipshod. Breaks were taken at frequent intervals for seemingly no reason. In the first 5.5 hours of "play", only 3.5 hours of poker were actually played. That was 2 hours of pure waste. And I know that television union contracts require breaks at certain intervals, and that tapes have to be changed at times, but this was beyond any poker production I've ever been a part of. If a break was scheduled for 10 minutes, it went 30. If it was supposed to be 30, it went 60. And the "short 10-minute break" between the two legs of the shootout (required to remove a few tables and chairs from the set, re-position the cameras, and organize chip stacks at the final table) took a solid hour.

All of that lost time is lost money for World Team Poker. Generally, once these television productions reach a certain length of time, the crew goes on overtime. That's very, very expensive. In fact, it was so bad that a new crew arrived at 8am to strike the set -- only to find the tournament still being played! Play concluded at approximately 8:30am, and with "outro" takes for television factored in things didn't wrap up until about 9am.

The television production values in use were B-grade at best. Teams made their entrance through a smoke machine next to a giant digital representation of their country's flag that looked, in the words of one of my colleagues, like it had been culled from Windows95 clip-art. The set design, in general, was uninspired. The set had numerous sight-line problems, with giant flat panels set up on the floor of the set, instead of hung overhead as is done in just about every other television production I've been a part of. Tape changes took 10-15 minutes each, significantly contributing to the length of the tournament. Side-line reporters were probably overpaid and conducted some cringe-inducing interviews.

I'm told that the commentators who were doing audio on the internet livestream of the event -- which was being broadcast on a 10-minute delay, and with use of hole-card cams until the Australian team complained -- set poker commentary back almost a decade. I can only hope that the television commentary, provided by Kenna James and Matt Corboy, will actually rise to the level of what viewers expect from televised poker in 2010.

All of the television production problems, in addition to the tournament structure problems and overall gimmick-y feel of the event, are going to translate badly for the actual viewing experience, I think. And if they translate badly, ratings will suck, advertisers will flee and that will be that. Look at what happened to Face the Ace.

But there are also actual poker problems with World Team Poker. Why should the players care about this product? Each team was in for $50,000, with the winning team receiving $300,000 and the runner-up earning $100,000. As the tournament ran into the wee hours, Chau Giang of Team China (the team that ultimately won) complained to teammate Maria Ho that the whole thing was a waste of his time when he could be home playing online and making ten times as much as his share of Team China's winnings. Given how much opportunity there is for television exposure already as it is, why will the "big-name" players WTP wants to showcase have any desire to play in some gimmick tournament where, at best, their return will be a small slice of $250,000? Who knows how sponsorship and television exposure will factor into all of it, but given how terribly the tournament was run and structured I'd be surprised if the players flock to this concept -- especially if they're only in it to get a logo on TV. The investment of time was far too great.

To me the whole thing felt like the people behind WTP believe that all you have to do is shake the poker money tree for hundred-dollar bills to start falling out of it. That business model went by the wayside four years ago. I suspect it will be far, far less time before the WTP goes by the wayside.

The Krusty Komeback Klassic

2010-05-18T16:01:00.000-07:00

Banana? That's your answer to everything!
--Krusty the Clown, to his chimp Mr. Tiny

Late last week I spent some time reading back through my archives. It was like looking in a funhouse mirror. That's me writing those things? Really?

I don't mean that in the usual, "Woe is me I'm getting old" sense. Although it's hard to think of myself as young any more (even though my genetics still cause me to be carded with irritating regularity), I don't feel any older than I ever have. In fact I've never really felt "grown-up" to begin with, perhaps a huge part of my problem.

No, what I mean is that when I read the things I wrote prior to the last year or two, I felt like I was reading the writing of someone who wasn't buried to the neck in a shit-storm of negativity and emotional exhaustion. It's a rather unpleasant sensation, being buried to the neck by a pile of shit. There's the smell, the flies, the slimy feel of shit sliding against your bare skin, and the fact that you can't really move. Not fun.

Sure, I post about poker and the poker biz now more than I used to. Some of the personal style and personal stories that used to be the substance of this site have gotten lost as a result of that. It happens, I guess. Maybe I should separate those stories out onto a different site. But that's a slippery slope. You start one other blog, and before you know it you have fifteen. (Hi Dawn! *waves*)

As I spent hours sifting through my archives I thought back to something Otis said to me at NAPT Venetian in February. It was late and boozy one night, as days on the poker trail usually are. We were at the sports book bar with Joe G. and, I think, Jen. Otis and I got to chatting about whatever things you chat about at 3am with booze in front of you -- the fading relevance of the United States as a superpower in the 21st century, the relative merits of homemade hummus, T-Pain, and what-have-you. That's when Otis said it.

"F-Train," he said, "One of these days when I see you you're not going to have a sigh for me."

I don't see Otis that often.

As a lapsed Catholic, one of my all-time favorite movie lines is about guilt. It's from the forgettable 1997 Keanu Reeves vehicle "The Devil's Advocate", mainly notable for its full frontal nudity of Charlize Theron and Connie Nielsen. In the movie, Al Pacino plays the Devil, attepting to recruit Reeves (his son?) into an unholy union with Nielsen (his daughter?) to produce some sort of Anti-Christ child. All very far-fetched and forgettable, as I said.

As Pacino is trying to tempt Reeves, he says, "Guilt is like a bag of fucking bricks. All you've got to do is set it down." So much truth to that, not only in guilt but in so much of what people do on a day-to-day basis. Negativity, unhappiness, emotional exhaustion. All choices. In improv training we were taught that emotion, like everything else in life, is a choice. Choose to hang onto all of the negativity with a death grip. Or just set it down.

So after this stroll down memory lane and little bit of navel gazing, I'd like to think that I've finally set down everything that needed to be set down and that things are back on the right track for me. Hell, I even mocked Dawn Summers in this post for the first time in a while. If that's wrong, I don't ever want to be right.

REPOST: Life Crackpot Theory #310

2010-05-13T00:55:00.000-07:00

I really need to read through my archives more often. Presented in its entirety is a post I wrote on March 6, 2008, called "Life Crackpot Theory #310".

--

Event horizon, in general relativity, is a general term for a boundary in space-time, an area surrounding a black hole, beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer. Light emitted from inside the horizon can never reach the observer and anything that passes through the horizon from the observer's side is never seen again.

--Event Horizon entry, Wikipedia

I've always been kind of fascinated with black holes. They appeal to the nerd in me the same way the New York City subway system does. With black holes it's because there exists this infinitely tiny singularity that is responsible for the most crushing gravitational force in the universe; a force so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape it. (That, and maybe it's also because I was once called a "black hole of negativity" by someone I used to count as a friend.)

Therein lies the conundrum of the black hole. Because light can't escape the gravitational field of the singularity, black holes can't be observed. Once an object has passed across the black hole's event horizon, the light that such an object would normally reflect to an observer never makes it past the event horizon. Instead it is sucked into the singularity at the heart of the black hole along with the object itself. As an object approaches the event horizon, the light the object reflects moves away from the event horizon ever more slowly; the light has to overcome the stronger and stronger gravitational forces of the singularity. The result is that it appears that the object is slowing down as it approaches the event horizon. An outside observer will never see the object cross the event horizon; at the event horizon, the light emitted by the object will hover right there and never reach the observer.

Really cool stuff. But you may be asking yourself why I am yammering on about general relativity. Why indeed...

Once in a while I have occasion to re-read posts that I've written years ago. It might be because I was looking for a particular post or a particular link. Sometimes I just randomly type a word into the search box on top of my site to see what it pulls up. Last week I was looking for a link I wanted to send to someone and I came across a post I wrote in February 2006. As I was re-reading it, I had a glimmer of understanding about the paradox of my Life Crackpot Theory #229 as stated near the top of that post. (If you're too lazy to click, the idea is "One of the great cosmic ironies is that human beings are incredibly adaptable and resilient, yet highly resistant to change.")

I'm still not sure why people should be BOTH of those things. I think the reason people are so resistant to change is not just because everyone wants to feel like they're exerting some sort of control over the universe around them, their own mini gravitational field. It's also because everyone's life has an event horizon. Anything that passes beyond that event horizon is beyond that person's influence and lost forever, never to be observed again. The motion is opposite -- something passing *out* of the life event horizon as opposed to *into* a black hole's event horizon -- but the result is the same. There are the rare instances when this is objectively a Good Thing. But for the most part the things that are in orbit around our lives are there by our own choice, and when we lose them we lose a part of ourselves in the process. It's the feeling of loss that is so bothersome. It's that feeling that we're not in control, that our life gravitational field isn't exerting any more influence than a gun control lobbyist at an NRA meeting.

The frustration comes from the fact that if we try to exert more of our "gravitational influence" to keep something in orbit around us, that force often ends up acting like two similarly charged magnets and pushes that thing further away. Even though we create our own gravitational field around our life, we have no control over what orbits us and little control over what escapes that orbit.

I guess I'm saying "Go with the flow" and accept whatever life throws at you. It's about the best you can do.

Long Night Ahead

2010-05-11T15:23:00.000-07:00

Tonight I have to cover an SCOOP, Event 26, that starts at 5pm local time and will most likely take at least 16 hours to reach the final table. I guess what I mean to say is that tomorrow morning I have to cover an SCOOP final table that starts at 5pm local time tonight.

This is a really, really strange scheduling turn by PokerStars. Consider the following "High" events:

Event 2 - $2,100 NLHE [2-day event]
Entrants: 1,077
Starting stack: 10,000
Starting blinds: 25-50
Level length: 30 minutes
Total tournament time: 23h09m

Event 20 - $2,100 NLHE [2-day event]
Entrants: 1,088
Starting stack: 10,000
Starting blinds: 25-50
Level length: 30 minutes
Total tournament time: 24h05m

Each of these tournaments was scheduled as a two-day event with the expectation (presumably) that they would be long tournaments. And they were. Now consider these other two tournaments:

Event 8 - $1,050 NLHE
Entrants: 1,145
Starting stack: 10,000
Starting blinds: 25-50
Level length: 30 minutes
Total tournament time: 19h17m

Event 26 - $1,050 NLHE
Entrants: ?
Starting stack: 10,000
Starting blinds: 25-50
Level length: 30 minutes
Total tournament time: ?

Admittedly, despite an identical structure and a few extra players, the lower priced $1,050 NLHE took four to five fewer hours to play than the $2,100 NLHE tournaments. But that overlooks the fact that the $1,050 took more than 19 hours to complete.

Tournament players on PokerStars are given a 5-minute break at the end of each hour. At the end of the 12th hour they're given a 15-minute break. All of the big prize money is at the final table. Thus the players facing the decisions with the biggest import are also the ones who are bone-tired from having played internet poker for 16, 17 or 18 hours in a row.

Maybe PokerStars didn't anticipate such a high volume of players for the $1,050 event. But next year I'd hope that the $1,050 events are two-day affairs like their $2,100 counterparts. Anything less seems barbaric.

UltimateBet Deja Vu

2010-05-07T03:10:00.000-07:00

I recently took part in a media round-table set up by my good friend Shamus. The first half of the round-table went live on the Betfair blog today. Definitely check it out.

In other news, yesterday PokerTableRatings announced a flaw in UltimateBet's security that "allow[s] an attacker to hijack victim’s poker accounts and display their hole cards in real time." This is the same UB, by the way, that was embroiled in a cheating scandal you might have heard about. You know, that one where certain users could see their opponents' hole cards in real time.

Paul Leggett, UB COO, quickly responded on the UB blog. I snorted water through my nose when I read this paragraph:

I would also like to say that I am very embarrassed and upset that this issue was not caught by our internal staff or through the countless audits we’ve been through this year and last year. We’ve invested a great deal of money into all types of security and I am very shocked that this was not identified by us or the many third party auditors we’ve employed.

What's that line from Casablanca? "I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" Seriously, is anyone other than UB COO Paul Leggett shocked by this? Is Leggett even shocked by this?

I wanted to believe that UB was going to try to clean up its act last year, but this is just embarrassing at this point. When you suffer the worst cheating scandal in the history of online poker, if you're really committed to cleaning up your image the very first thing you should do is stress-test the hell out of your security. Pay hackers very, very good money if you have to, but get someone to tell you exactly how they would trivialize your "security". Then pay someone else even more money to fix it.

It's not like these people are in short supply. Hell, UB could hire anyone who's designed a web site for an online merchant in the last five years. They could probably tell UB how to run security better than the "security experts" at UB can right now.

I've never had an account at UB. This latest debacle certainly won't encourage me to open one.

An Offer Too Good to Pass Up

2010-05-05T18:36:00.000-07:00

After a late night and early morning of SCOOP coverage (bad, but nowhere near as bad as what Shamus went through) I'm feeling surprisingly refreshed today. I managed to roll out of bed by about 4:30pm and am even of sound enough mind to play tonight's Mookie.

Last night a little hiccup during some deal-making in SCOOP Event 8-Low. The last five players asked a host to look at chip-chop numbers, then haggled amongst themselves as to the best apportionment of the prize pool after they got those numbers. The negotiations were painful to watch (largely because many of the players were talking past each other) but eventually a deal was hammered out. That left the $2,000 set-aside to play for.

After two more eliminations, the PokerStars host announced that the deal the players agreed to did not include any set-aside, an error that was squarely on him. Oops. Problem was that two players had already been eliminated so there was no way to un-do the deal. The remaining players were playing only for TLB points. Predictably, the tournament ended a few minutes later, with one player's 9-4 taking out another's Q-7 long after the sun had risen here in the Southwest.

Errors happen, especially after a long night of poker. But for my part I was grateful. The error allowed me to crawl into bed that much sooner.

The Spirit of the Rules

2010-05-04T11:14:00.000-07:00

Last week Shamus wrote a great piece on "the unwritten rules" of poker. I was thinking about it last night while covering the final table of 2010 SCOOP Event #4-Medium, $162 Badugi. (By the way, when was the last time you saw a Badugi tournament spread in a live casino?)

At the final table, one player refused to use his "fold" button. If he wanted to play a hand, he was in there betting, raising or calling in a "normal" amount of time. But if he intended to fold, he would not click the fold button. Instead he would let himself time out, taking 20 seconds to do so in each instance.

A few of the other players asked the offender not to engage in such behavior. When they received no response, they complained to the two Team PokerStars players at the final table (George Danzer and Adam Goetsch) and the host, Richard Toth. "In a live casino, he would be given warnings and penalties," one player lamented. "Isn't there anything we can do?"

Toth correctly pointed out that no, there was nothing to be done. Even though it was bad etiquette for the player to do what he was doing, it was well within the rules. Goetsch went a step further and told the player complaining, "The thing to do is not what you are doing it. Just forget about it."

Goetsch made an excellent point. Although violations of unwritten rules are often as egregious as violations of written rules, there's little that can be done to prevent them. By complaining about the behavior, the complainer gives the offender another weapon to use at the poker table. And indeed, at the Badugi final table, the offending player "woke up" and started to use his fold button every time as soon as the complaining player was eliminated.

People who violate the spirit (but not the letter) of the rules are often doing so in order to provoke a reaction. The best weapon to combat their tactics is not to give them the reaction they seek.

The Unofficial Final Table

2010-05-03T11:34:00.001-07:00

Hard to believe that we're now inside of four weeks until the start of the 2010 World Series of Poker. It's a busy lead-up, too, with SCOOP, the Cal State Champs, APPT Macau, and World Team Poker all taking place between now and the start of Event #1 on Friday, May 28.

Over the weekend I was involved in a minor Twitter discussion with WPT reporter B.J. Nemeth, pro player Steve Brecher, and two of the pre-eminent tournament directors in the world, Jack Effel and Matt Savage. It started with Brecher asking the Twitter ether, "Why do so many (all?) tournaments which have been 9-handed convene a final table of 10?" It's an excellent question. Playing two 5-handed tables instead of one 10-handed table: (a) is not unfair to either table, as each table is balanced, and (b) puts more pressure on the short stacks. Also, the 10-handed final table is not considered the "official" final table. One player has to be eliminated before that happens, which all around seems very odd.

Nemeth was the first to respond to Brecher, saying "I've asked around several times, & the best answer I've received is "tradition." Not a very satisfying answer." Eventually Brecher punted the question directly to Savage. Savage replied that for the sake of consistency and uniformity, the TDA adopted 10-handed final tables in 9-handed events as a TDA rule.

That answer, however true, didn't get to the "why" behind the rule, the policy that the rule was designed to facilitate. I asked that follow-up question myself. Both Savage and Effel responded by stating that many tournaments pay only 9 places. Collapsing to a final table of 10 eliminates hand-for-hand play -- something that players and tournament staff uniformly dislike -- and significantly speeds the tournament. Effel noted that "at WSOP, we also combine to 1 table at 7 for 6 handed events, 8-7 handed events, and 9-8 handed events."

Although Effel and Savage looked directly at how many places are being paid as the policy behind the rule (a policy undoubtedly true of most "nightly" tournaments that poker rooms run to attract customers), we can extrapolate the same reasoning to the final table bubble of large buy-in tournaments like those at the WSOP. In live big buy-in tournaments, a huge premium is placed on the final table, both in terms of prize money and in terms of prestige. Without hand-for-hand play, short stacks undoubtedly would start stalling if the tables played 5 and 5 on the final table bubble. Even though the blinds would theoretically come around faster and short-handed play would put more pressure on everyone, the tournament would have to be played hand-for-hand to avoid stalling tactics. [Updated to add: Daniel Negreanu made this exact point in a Twitter response yesterday that I didn't see, stating it as the original reasoning behind the rule.]

It would seem that there's no player disadvantage to hand-for-hand play; it's just a pain for the tournament staff. The short stacks, however, get a significant advantage from collapsing to a final table of 10. You can debate whether that boon to the short stacks is worth avoiding the pain of enduring hand-for-hand play on the final table bubble. But at least now you can't say that there's no good reason for collapsing to a single final table of 10.

WSOP to Caesars in 2011?

2010-04-28T17:59:00.001-07:00

Normally we here at RTFT don't traffic in rumors. We leave that to ~~Rumorati~~ Pokerati. But yesterday while covering the WSOP Circuit event at Caesars, we overheard a floor person telling a player that, for sure, the WSOP will be at Caesars next year. Who knows if he was blustering or if he had inside information.

With the Rio officially put on the auction block by Harrahs recently, it's clear where the 2011 WSOP will not be held. There has been lots of speculation that Planet Hollywood, recently acquired by Harrahs, would be a natural replacement. But the Caesars poker room (as much as it has fallen off in the last few years) is the premier Harrahs poker room on the Strip, and the Caesars convention center could theoretically be big enough for the Series. Parking...?

Two other random tidbits while I'm thinking about it: the WSOP Circuit event started with stacks of 500 BBs. This, along with excessively long late registrations periods, is a trend that needs to die.

The WSOP Circuit Deep Stack Extravaganza

2010-04-26T09:21:00.000-07:00

Another BBT5 final table, another 5th place finish. It was more than a little frustrating since I felt I was the second-best player at the final table. If I had won the key pot (my QQ v. Linda G's AK) I probably would have taken at least 2nd place.

--

Tomorrow the $5,000 "Main Event" starts for the WSOP Circuit series at Caesars here in Las Vegas. I'll be covering it for PokerNews as a tune-up before the real WSOP starts in four weeks. Given that only 231 players came out for Saturday's $2500 "Main Event" at the Venetian for the 2010 Deep Stack Extravaganza II (compared to 280 last year), and given that last year 187 played the Caesars Main Event, I'm expecting about 160 players tomorrow. I doubt the tournament will remain a 4-day event as currently scheduled.

In general, the field sizes throughout the WSOP-C and the DSE have been unimpressive. The WSOP-C's $230 NLHE events attracted an average field of 292 players; the $340s drew 224; and an average of 165 turned up for the $550s. The two non-NLHE events, $340 LHE and $340 PLO, did even worse, failing to crack 60 players in the field. Venetian drew an average of 251 for their $340 NLHE tourneys (slightly better than the WSOP-C) and 151 for their $550s (slightly worse).

The two series certainly have sapped each other's player bases. But even if only one series was running, and the fields were perfectly consolidated, tournament poker still seems to be on the decline somewhat here in Vegas (at least the small market, non-televised type of tournament poker). JDN played the last $550 NLHE of the WSOP-C yesterday at Caesars and had this to say about it: "I won this tourney 2 years ago when there were 650 runners. Today: 135."

Counter-programming is, in general, harmful when the product being offered is virtually indistinguishable. All it does is splinter the market. That helps nobody: not the poker rooms running the tournaments and certainly not the players. Sometimes it can be hard to determine exactly who is competing with whom for players, but the TDs in overlapping geographic markets really need to sit down and figure this out. The boom days are over.

PLO No

2010-04-23T08:33:00.000-07:00

Ever since coming home from NYC, I'd had yesterday circled in red on my calendar. At least, I suppose if I had a calendar I might have circled it in red. That's what people used to do when they had calendars, yes? Anyway, there was a $340 PLO tournament at Caesars for the WSOP-C that I wanted to play.

Now long-time readers probably know my feelings about the Caesars poker room, which are: I fucking hate it. I've never had a good experience there other than winning the blogger tourney in 2006. But they W-2G'ed me for that $2200 win (wtf) so even that was tarnished.

Live PLO tourneys aren't that easy to come by and I figured the field would be somewhere around 100 players. It was enough to overcome my aversion to the room. I rocked up to the window at 3:50pm yesterday for the 4pm start and asked how many players were registered.

"Nine."

"Nine? Like, the single digit nine?"

"Yes, nine. No wait. Sorry, I'm looking at the wrong number. It's 24."

24 players is better than 9 players but it is not a tournament. It's a 3-table SNG. I hated to waste the trip to the Strip so I grabbed a copy of Bluff from the magazine rack by the entrance to the poker room while waiting things out. It was unlikely the field would grow that much by the start, but there was no sense in leaving yet. By the time SUAD was called, 35 players had registered.

They started playing 6-handed, intending to fill in the empty seats with late registrations. The time period for which, by the way, was the first three 40-minute levels. If anyone can explain to me why a $340 tournament needs two hours of late registration, they should be doing more important things with their lives than reading this blog. Maybe start by ending world hunger.

Another twenty-five minutes went by, with the field reaching 50 players. Now or never. Even though the field was about half the size I was expecting, I decided "what the hell" and went to the cage to register. Andreas Hoivold got in line behind me. The cashier took my cash but then was having trouble finding me a seat. A few minutes went by. Nothing. A floor finally came to the cage and told me, "You'll be the first alternate."

Say what now?

The field had grown to six 9-handed tables and apparently six 9-handed tables it would stay. If I wanted to play I was going to have to wait for someone to bust, a pretty dumb thing since (let me remind you) there were only 54 players in the field.

I asked for, and received, my buy-in back. Sure, given that it's PLO I probably wouldn't have had to wait all that long. But in light of my past experiences at Caesars the whole thing rankled me. It was another example of the epic-fail that permeates the Caesars poker room on a regular basis.

Tilt Transfer OK?

2010-04-22T10:21:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking quite a bit about this (alleged) grand jury investigation into Full Tilt Poker's activities that's emanating from federal court in the Southern District of New York. I'm not sure I see it ending well for Full Tilt any time soon.

When I was at Mohegan Sun two weeks ago, I overheard David Singer and Phil Ivey negotiating a bet on whether Tiger Woods would win the Masters. Singer gave Ivey 5.5:1 odds to take Tiger, ultimately settling the amount of the bet at $20,000. As they were concluding their negotiations, Singer asked, "Tilt transfer ok?"

In the U.S., anyone who receives a cash transfer greater than $10,000 while conducting their trade or business is supposed to report that transfer to the Internal Revenue Service within 15 days. If the transfer is received by wire to a bank account, then the financial institution that receives the wire must file a similar report with the Treasury Department. Either way, transactions of more than $10,000 are reported to the government. These reports facilitate law enforcement against, among other things, tax evasion, money launderers and other criminal enterprises that deal in high volumes of cash.

Right now, U.S. online poker players can transfer any amount of money to each other without triggering the filing of any reports with the U.S. government. Every day U.S. players are transferring tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of dollars to each other online. It is essentially unregulated off-shore banking. In the case of the Singer-Ivey golf bet, Ivey presumably shipped $20,000 to Singer, but if it had gone the other way Singer may have shipped Ivey $110,000 (assuming they settled the bet right away).

Think about that in light of the SDNY grand jury investigation. From what I understand, the SDNY prefers to consider itself a semi-autonomous branch of the DOJ. It doesn't like to kowtow to the government overlords in Washington, preferring instead to trail-blaze its own path through gray areas of the law. The SDNY takes an especially strong interest in financial crimes, located as it is in one of the major financial centers of the world. Put all of those factors together and suddenly the SDNY's interest in online poker starts to make more sense.

Why Full Tilt though? Why not PokerStars? I can't say for sure. I'd guess it's a case of access to information. Full Tilt's various legal troubles during the last year have brought to public light a fair amount of information about Tilt's corporate structure and ownership, including the fact that some of the owners live right here in Las Vegas. That information for Stars, on the other hand, is more difficult to come by.

There's no indictment yet, and even if the government obtains an indictment, that's no guarantee there will be a full-blown prosecution of FTP. But the facts are not in Tilt's favor. For federal prosecutors looking to make names for themselves, this case is too tempting to pass up. Don't expect it to disappear any time soon.

SCOOP Oop-A-Doop

2010-04-21T08:28:00.001-07:00

The PokerStars Spring Championship of Online Poker is just a few weeks away, with Event #1 kicking off on May 2. Like many people, I won an $11 SCOOP ticket in the WBCOOP a few months ago. I was hoping there'd be a good mix of "low" SCOOP events in which to use the ticket. Turns out... not so much.

Only 8 of the 38 "low" events are $11 events, and three of those are rebuy events. Thus the $11 ticket, which seemed like a modest but useful prize back in January during the WBCOOP, now has considerably less utility. I won't use my SCOOP ticket for any of the rebuy events. Rebuy events aren't to my taste and anyway I'd like to treat my SCOOP foray as a freeroll, as I suspect many $11 ticket winners would. That narrows the list to these five options:

Event #6 - $11 Pot-Limit 5-Card Draw
Event #8 - $11 No-Limit Hold'em
Event #24 - $11 2-7 Triple Draw
Event #26 - $11 No-Limit Hold'em
Event #30 - $11 Pot-Limit Omaha Hi-Lo

Two of these games (5CD and 2-7) are about as squirrel-y as they come and are not wise investments of my $11 ticket. That leaves me with either NLH or PLO8. Given that choice, I guess it will most likely be PLO8.

I realize that Stars is trying to cater to a wide range of interests and bankrolls. That's one of the things that makes SCOOP great. It's just disappointing that the WBCOOP prizes (almost 100 $11 tickets were awarded in each preliminary event, I believe) turned out to be of such limited value and utility, given the vast amount of value and utility that Stars got out of all of the links people put on their sites as a requisite to playing in the WBCOOP tournaments.

Strong Initial Showing for NAPT on ESPN2

2010-04-20T11:20:00.000-07:00

While the legal aspects of online poker get murkier and murkier, poker on television seems to get better and better. The initial two hours of coverage of the North American Poker Tour aired on ESPN2 yesterday. No surprise that the quality and feel of the inaugural episodes was similar to that of ESPN's WSOP coverage, with some PokerStars-specific flourishes (like the PokerStars red spade) added in a mostly unobtrusive way. Yes, some of the B-roll seemed of incredibly poor quality, but that was probably due to the very dark conditions on the Venetian floor where it was shot. 441 could more properly be faulted for some weirdly unflattering lighting during the interview segments, especially if you were watching in HD.

From a production standpoint, 441 has learned a few new tricks this year. They now indicate the button, small blind, and big blind with red B, SB, and BB notations; the card graphics have better, crisper visibility; and a small arrow has been incorporated into the on-screen graphics to indicate which player the action is on. Each change is subtle but improves the overall production considerably.

From an audience-enjoyment standpoint, the NAPT hit the jackpot with the bounty shootout. What makes televised poker most compelling is "the final table". In a bounty shootout, each table is a mini-final table. By setting the price point at $25,000, the NAPT assured itself of a world-class field full of recognizable names, each arrayed at a "final table". There were three such tables in the first hour, and four in the second hour.

We'll see how the coverage of the Venetian Main Event compares to the BSO, but so far I give NAPT and ESPN an A- for this effort. Given: (1) that grade; (2) the price point of NAPT tournaments; and (3) the online qualifying aspect that PokerStars brings to the table, NAPT's biggest problem in the coming months may be finding venues that can fit all of the players that will turn up for NAPT events.

Hodge Podge, Monday Edition

2010-04-19T09:15:00.000-07:00

A few quick hits:

1. Thanks to AlCantHang for setting up the BBT5. The first tournament was last night. I had an excellent opportunity to lock up a TOC seat early, having the chip lead with 7 players to go. Instead I flamed out in 5th. Well done.

2. Things are getting worse and worse for online poker. It's getting that I can't even keep track of all of the open issues anymore. Let's see what we have:

* The State of Kentucky is suing various online sites, trying to recover the losses of Kentucky residents from playing poker online since 2005;

* A grand jury in the Southern District of New York is investigating Full Tilt on money laundering and assorted other charges;

* There's legislation making its way through the Massachusetts legislature that would make online poker illegal and punishable by up to two years in jail and a $25,000 fine;

* Let's not forget the looming enforcement date (June 1, 2010) of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act;

* The arrest in Las Vegas last week of Daniel Tzvetkoff, owner-operator of payment processor Intabill, on charges that originated out of New York of money laundering and wire fraud (and violations of the UIGEA to boot);

* There are also various civil suits: Everest Poker versus Harrah's; Full Tilt versus several of its former employees; etc.

The arrest of Tzvetkoff should serve as a wake-up call for everyone in the online poker industry and especially the owners of Full Tilt. Given that most grand juries will indict a ham sandwich (if the old saying is believed), what kind of odds will people offer that a high-profile arrest of Howard Lederer or another Team Full Tilter with heavy involvement in FTP management will occur during the $50K Player's Championship or during the WSOP Main Event?

3. It's a crowded tournament calendar at the moment. You've got EPT San Remo and Monte Carlo in Europe; the WPT Champs at Bellagio; WSOP Circuit at Caesars Las Vegas; Venetian Deep Stack in Vegas; the Cal State Champs at Commerce starting in roughly two weeks; and APPT Macau just after that. It's getting so that there's always a tournament somewhere if you don't mind a piece of traveling.

Humble Pie

2010-04-16T08:47:00.000-07:00

It can be tough admitting you got something wrong. Even when the facts are plain as day and incontrovertible, it can still be tough to believe them, to swallow them (along with your pride) and to say, "I am wrong." Hans Christian Andersen wrote a cautionary tale about this.

It's even tougher when the whole world can see straightaway what you cannot, or choose not to, see. It's the opposite of the Emperor's New Clothes problem. The vast majority of advisors and on-lookers are shouting down the Emperor's nudity but the Emperor gets his back up and soldiers on. He's determined to makes the clothes appear because he knows that they're really there, if only everyone else will look a little harder.

One of the great things about having true friends is that they're willing to tell you when you're naked. They won't just sing "Kumbaya" and pretend that you're fully clothed and that everything is puppies and rainbows. But they can't pull your head out of the sand so you can see the nudity for yourself. You have to do that on your own.

There are too many poker media colleagues, poker media friends, blogger friends and other long-standing friends from NYC to LA who have been trying to tell me for a long time how naked I am. When a whole universe of very intelligent people who care about you and have your best interests at heart feels the same way about something, it's foolish not to take notice. At that point the externalities that you think they haven't considered don't matter.

Notice the chorus of voices and accept their merit. Two lessons learned. Next round of beer is on me.

A Play You Wouldn't Make

2010-04-12T14:49:00.000-07:00

NAPT Mohegan Sun is over for me. The $25,000 bounty shootout started today but I skipped that for a little R&R in New York City. The $5,000 Main Event finished last night with a lesbian (Vanessa Selbst) battling a strip club owner (Mike Beasley) heads-up for the title. Selbst won. Never underestimate the power of the V.

There were some curious hands played during the course of the tournament. One that particularly stands out is Phil Ivey's elimination hand. It occurred late on Day 3, when 29 players remained out of the 716 starters.

Ivey's stack had been all over the place during the day but after a series of damaging hands he was one of the shortest stacks in the room. He had 115k with blinds at 6k/12k/1k, giving him fewer than 10 BBs and an M of 4.42. Most players in that spot would only make one move if they decided to play a hand. They would raise all in.

Ivey is not "most players". He limped into the pot from under the gun for 12k with, we would later discover, Kh-10h. The remaining specifics of the hand aren't important. What puzzled me was this limp, from one of the worst positions at the table, with a marginal hand and a very short stack. What could Ivey have been hoping to accomplish?

I ran through some theories. I considered the fact that with a short stack and the blinds coming, Ivey may have been unwilling to throw away even a medium strength hand like Kh-10h. But Kh-10h is not the type of hand to shove from early position with seven people yet to act.

The under-the-gun limp looks very strong. When you add the Ivey Intimidation Factor and the fact that Ivey appeared committed to the hand if anyone else re-raised, is it possible that nobody else at the table would raise without a very solid holding? That would allow Ivey to limp with a hand that he otherwise might not be able to limp with. If the raise comes, he can fold and preserve his stack at 8.5 BBs. If it doesn't, he at least has a shot at hitting a flop and doubling.

So far that's the most plausible theory I've come up with. There are plenty of others. He might simply have gotten frisky; he might have made a mistake; he might have been operating at a level beyond which my poker comprehension can reach, planning some play or some line that would never even occur to me.

One of the perqs of tournament coverage is that there's almost always something that makes me stop and think about "the game". I'll be noodling on this one for quite a while.

Eastward Bound

2010-04-02T09:47:00.000-07:00

I've got a bit of traveling coming up in the next few days. I'll be at Mohegan Sun for the next NAPT stop from April 6 to April 11. Following that, I'm heading down to New York City for five days. It seemed silly to be so close to the city without stopping in for a visit.

If you'll be at Mohegan, seek me out while you're there. Unless I hate you, in which case leave me the hell alone. If you live in New York City, batten down the hatches and prepare to be boarded.

Robl's Footnote

2010-03-29T10:35:00.000-07:00

Normally Gabe Kaplan does an excellent job as commentator for High Stakes Poker. In last night's episode, however, he either missed or intentionally chose not to comment on a reference made by Andrew Robl in a hand against Patrik Antonius.

The hand itself was straight-forward. Phil Ivey opened to $7,000 from the cutoff with KdTd. Robl called on the button with AsQh. Antonius was in the small blind with AhAc and three-bet to $30,400. Action folded back to Robl. After what appeared to be a lengthy decision-making process, Robl moved all in for $144,000. Antonius (obviously) double-fist-pump snap-called.

Antonius offered to let Robl pick how many times they'd run the board. Robl decided, "Run it twice." While they waited for the first board, Robl then added, "Maybe four times would be better. I don't know how I can win it four times. I don't know if there's enough cards."

Robl was slyly referencing a hand of high-stakes PLO he played against Antonius (and I reported) at the 2009 Aussie Millions Cash Game. He got it in really bad against Antonius and offered to run it four times, then won all four boards. Here's the clip:

Particularly amusing are Antonius' snarky comments after the hands are revealed ("Wow. Good luck buddy. Good call, by the way. Or good raise. Good re-raise.").

PLO is a drawing game. You need big hands -- and big draws -- to win. Stacking off with one pair and no appreciable draw is a pretty massive PLO-fail if ever there was one, especially given the action. Antonius raised his button pre-flop to $3,500, then called Robl's three-bet to $12,000 from the small blind. On the flop, Robl bet $16,000 of his remaining $119,000. Antonius then raised pot to $72,000, representing either a big hand or a big draw. Either way, Robl's play of shipping it all in is mind-bogglingly bad. He has no fold equity. He is never ahead there and often he is way, way, way behind.

This time around, on HSP, Antonius and Robl ran it twice. There was no repeat lightning strike for Robl. He lost both boards.

The Phil Ivey of Golf

2010-03-25T10:14:00.000-07:00

Interesting feature in this week's New York Times Magazine by Jonathan Mahler, an author best known for the 2006 book "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning". The feature is entitled "The Tiger Bubble" but it's not about the carefully constructed public image of Tiger Woods. The focus of the piece is on how golf is marketed and what Tiger Woods has done for the game since he turned pro in 1996. "For years," Mahler writes, "Woods fueled a frenzy of investment in the game — from corporate sponsors, advertisers, broadcasters, clothing and equipment manufacturers, even golf-course developers. It was, you could say, a classic economic bubble, the Tiger Bubble. The question now is whether Woods’s crash will end up being just a temporary correction for golf or if the bubble has truly burst."

Even if you have no interest in golf, the article is a compelling read. Additionally, the parallels to poker are almost impossible to ignore. The inflation of purses; better talent being attracted to the game as a result; the sponsorship angle; the need for "stars" and how the game is televised. On this point Mahler's comments seem to be speaking almost directly to poker:

Sports are driven by stars, and it was impossible to predict who was going to be the big story at any given golf tournament. A leader one day could drop out of contention the next, replaced by someone you never heard of before — and might never hear about again. Woods changed all of this. He won roughly a third of the time he played, a rate that defied the sport’s conventional wisdom. Even when he lost, it didn’t much matter. Whether Woods was pumping his fist after an important putt, flinging his driver aside after a disappointing tee shot or just applying lip balm, he was the guy viewers wanted to see. The weekly Nielsen ratings underscored the point: the tournaments Woods played routinely drew twice the audience, including many younger fans, of the tournaments he skipped.

Later the point gets hammered home with even more intensity by golfer Harrison Frazar.

“The TV people come to talk to us every once in a while, and they say that’s what we need. We need more emotion. We need the guy out there pumping his fist in the air, jumping up and down when he makes a putt,” the tour veteran Harrison Frazar told me. “But as golfers we’re taught to be gentlemen and to be respectful to the people we’re playing with. And also all of the psychologists and coaches teach us to try to stay level. Yeah, they want emotion, but it’s a tough thing to ask of people who are taught to be emotionless.”

We've long seen a crossover appeal between poker and golf. Many of the poker players I know are also golfers. That may be because of the competitive angle, or the gambling angle, the mastering-your-emotions angle or just because of the idea that an average guy can pick up the sticks, hit the links and put together a respectable round the same way he can do that at a poker table with a deck of cards. I never realized that the parallels on the professional side of things, the industry side of things, the marketing side of things, run much deeper than that.

I highly encourage reading the article. And for that matter I also recommend The Bronx is Burning. It's a book that holds special meaning to me for a number of reasons.