Jennifer Tilly wins poker tournament

Jennifer Tilly wins poker tournament Actress takes home $157,625 in Texas Hold 'Em winnings Actress Jennifer Tilly won the Ladies no-limit Texas Hold ’Em event at the World Series of Poker — the first time a celebrity has won an event at the famous tournament. Tilly’s skillful play and admitted good luck earned her $158,625. She beat 600 players to capture first place in a two-day event featuring some of the top female professionals in the world. “I think she showed an incredible amount of talent,” tournament media director Nolan Dalla said. “She had an enormous chip lead and never looked back. It was almost as though her victory was never in question.” Tilly, 46, said she’s learned plenty of pointers from her boyfriend, poker player Phil “Unabomber” Laak. “When you’re living with Phil, you kinda learn by osmosis,” Tilly told CardPlayer.com. “Even in the middle of the night, he wakes up screaming out poker terms. Most guys scream out other girls’ names.” Tilly, an Oscar nominee for her role in the 1994 film, “Bullets Over Broadway,” is the first woman in this year’s World Series of Poker to win a bracelet — which happens when you win an event. The tournament is being held at the Rio hotel-casino.

Play Poker For Free and Win Real Cash

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ANNIE Duke is going Hollywood

ANNIE Duke is going Hollywood By Anna Dubrovsky For Bloomberg News Service ANNIE Duke is going Hollywood. The world's most successful female poker player is moving to Los Angeles to take advantage of her newfound celebrity. "I was lucky enough that someone decided to turn a camera on what I did," Duke, who won $2.5 million in poker tournaments last year, said in a telephone interview. "Because I've had success in a game that happens to be on TV, I've had a lot of doors open to me." Since many of those doors are in Hollywood, Duke is house-hunting in Los Angeles this month, ready to say farewell to Portland, Ore., where the 39-year-old divorced mother of four has been living since 2003. Duke is profiting from an unprecedented poker boom in the United States. Once considered a seedy pastime reserved for cigar-chomping, visor-wearing men, it's become a high-profile "sport" that's televised by several networks and played by millions in casinos and on the Internet. Duke recently formed her own production company and sold a poker-related game show to the GSN cable network, which is owned by Liberty Media Corp. and Sony Pictures Entertainment. Ten Dimes Productions — the name is poker slang for $10,000 — also is developing a horror film that Duke created. In addition, she's promoting a line of poker products by Walt Disney Co.'s ESPN and a new no-calorie soda, Coca-Cola Zero. Her autobiography is scheduled to be published in September, and she'll be a character in poker-themed video and cell-phone games that will be released this fall. That's the kind of attention you get when you beat nine men to win $2 million in last year's World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions. One of those men was her brother, Howard Lederer, who taught Duke how to play the game. Another was Phil Hellmuth, the temperamental "bad boy" of poker. "People don't expect moms of four to be poker players," Duke said. "People expect Calamity Jane types to be poker players." Duke grew up in a competitive family obsessed with card games, majored in English and psychology at Columbia University and planned to become a professor. She abandoned her doctoral studies in cognitive psychology after five years and moved to Montana, where she started playing poker to help pay the $125-per-month mortgage on a cabin made of chicken wire and stucco. In 1994, Duke's brother convinced her to play in the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. She made more than $70,000 and stood out as one of the few top-flight female players. Since then, she's become a regular on the TV poker circuit. Her colorful life story was the basis for "All In," a sitcom developed for General Electric Co.'s NBC. Although the comedy, starring Janeane Garofalo as a poker-playing single mom with four kids, didn't make the network's fall lineup, Duke still feels fortunate. "I'm very lucky because people seem to be interested in my story," she said. Duke is currently competing in the 2005 World Series of Poker, a series of championship events operated by Harrah's Entertainment Inc. The climax is the No-Limit Texas Hold 'Em event that begins July 7. If the field includes the maximum 6,600 players, the top prize would be $7.5 million, up $2.5 million from last year. Duke's children, ages 3 to 10, are out of school for the summer and staying with her in a rented house in Las Vegas while she plays high-stakes poker. Last year's event took place in April and May, so Duke had to leave her children in Portland. "It's hard for me to focus on poker when I miss my kids that much," she said.

Poker Stars makes a move

Poker News: Poker Stars makes a move By Michael Friedman For PokerNews.com The laws regarding poker and online gambling are murky at best, especially when you try to understand the U.S. policy toward foreign casinos. Lawyers say that federal law prohibits online gambling, but many of the online sites sit outside the U.S. jurisdiction and the laws simply can not be enforced. U.S. law also prohibits American companies from being involved with online gambling sites. The U.S. government has made several attempts to stop interactive online sites by taking legal actions against several prominent U.S. companies and media outlets, such as Google and Esquire magazine. The government's attempt to clamp down on online gambling seems to be failing. Americans place more annual online bets than people in any other country in the world. According to a January New York Time's article, some $7.6 billion is lost in wagering over the internet, with U.S. residents accounting for half of that. In January 2005, a small island located in the Irish Sea made a major decision that has created its share of waves in the world of online gaming. The Isle of Man decided to reverse a four-year-old law prohibiting internet companies on the island from accepting bets from U.S. residents. Now companies can accept bets from the U.S. From the beginning, the Isle of Man prohibited U.S. online bets, but without U.S. bet, business came to a grinding halt. Before the law passed, major gambling organizations like the MGM Grand were pursuing residency on the island. But because of the country's strict law, which originally was what attracted gambling organizations to the island, most gaming companies quickly left. Fast-forward to June 2005, when as early as this week, PokerStars will be officially announcing its move to the Isle of Man. Accounting for more than 10 percent of market share in the poker sector, PokerStars will bring millions in revenue with it. The Isle of Man is going to cash in on this agreement through a licensing fee and by collecting tax revenue. At this point, this is where online gambling law gets tricky. Thanks to the island's change in law, PokerStars believes it has the right to accept US bets. PokerStars is banking on the fact that because the Isle of Man's defense and foreign policy is protected by England, it falls under the authority and laws of the World Trade Organization. To finish reading the article at pokernews.com, click here

Poker's New World Order

Poker's New World Order by IVAN SOLOTAROFF for RollingStone.com It's 10 p.m. on a Tuesday evening in October 2004, and six kids with killer good looks and IQs north of 150 are scattered across America, living out the pipe dream of their generation. Known as "the Crew," they're taking money from people. Lots of it. On his laptop in Fresno, California, Russell "Dutch" Boyd, the former child prodigy who stitched together this loosely knit crew of savants, is playing a few more hours of online No Limit Texas Hold 'em -- where you can bet your entire stack of chips on any card -- before getting behind the wheel for Las Vegas. At twenty-three, he's already been in "the life," the poker professionals' shorthand for the vagabond highs and lows of their existence, for five years, ever since he left Columbia, Missouri, behind, having already graduated from law school. Three thousand miles away, Dutch's twenty-two-year-old brother, Bobby, fresh from a day's sleep at an Atlantic City Super 8, has hit the sweet spot of the night. It's 1 a.m. in the Borgata Casino poker room's high-stakes pit, and the tourists trying their luck at a $2-$5 No Limit Texas Hold 'em game are starting to bleed red and green $5 and $25 chips. Back from the Philly bars an hour away, David "Dorf" Smyth, 27, is loading four games of $5-$10 Hold 'em on his father's home computer. He's a little tipsy -- Dorf can down three pints of beer in under six seconds on a bet -- but it doesn't matter. Dorf is a poker machine, and the odds and methods of playing every possible hand are second nature to him, though he's been competing seriously for less than two years. At a $5-$10 No Limit table in the Bellagio Poker Room, Joe Bartholdi, 24, is at the tail end of a two-day binge that's netted a good week's pay -- for a mid-cap CEO. Next to the wad of $100s in his pocket is a voucher he won this afternoon for a free seat at the World Poker Tour's $10,000-entry Doyle Brunson North American Poker Championship. Its $1 million first prize is blood in the water to the top pros, and they're all in Vegas tonight. Ten miles south of the Strip, in a cookie-cutter development on Rancho Drive, blood is in the air. That '70s Show is loud on a floor-to-ceiling entertainment center that fills half of the expensively furnished living room in Scott Fischman's corner condo, and someone has cranked AC/DC up to 11. The power chords and canned TV laughter mix oddly with the study-center/ guerrilla-training-camp aura inside. The Crew is scattered these days, but in Vegas, this is their unofficial HQ. Upstairs, the beds are unmade and have been since the maid was here last week. The walls are bare but for a print of a pair of aces descending over an azure sea at twilight. Printed matter is limited to a few unopened magazines and a swimsuit calendar of Shana Hiatt, hostess of the Travel Channel's World Poker Tour. The fridge completes the frat-house feel: nothing but twelve-packs, a jar of pickles, a bag of withered minicarrots. Pizza boxes, chips, beer and soda bottles line the kitchen counters and living-room table, where fellow Crew member Tony Lazar, 29, is playing four games of Hold 'em on his laptop. At the foot of the stairs, a half-packed suitcase awaits a final load of laundry for a month on "the circuit" that Fischman begins this weekend. It's a patchwork professional itinerary typical of Poker's New World Order: twenty-nine nights of casinos and card rooms; a TV studio, where he'll film an instructional Hold 'em video; a $600,000 tournament in Monte Carlo; an old factory office outside Orlando, where he and Lazar will fleece a bunch of cigar-smoking seniors in a midnight game -- "like, the five richest men in Florida," Fischman tells me later. Fischman, Card Player magazine's number-seven-ranked player, sits at his L-shaped living-room desk like a man in a duck blind. Beneath a gray i got the nuts baseball cap and brown wraparound shades, his mouth half-open in a rapture of concentration, he fires off $5, $10 and $20 bets and raises at eight online Hold 'em games he's playing simultaneously. Raised in Vegas (his father was a casino executive), half-townie and half-prodigy, with the peach-fuzz goatee, center part and imperious smile of a math nerd finally having his day, the twenty-four-year-old Fischman has been at it for four hours, shuffling together two stacks of ten orange chips obsessively as he toggles silently between his pricey twenty-seven-inch dual flat-screens. "Keyser Soze has a fuckin' four!" he suddenly yells. "I'm gonna puke myself." Keyser Soze is one of thirty-six red "chairs," with players' screen names on the back, arranged around four green-felt "tables" on Fischman's right screen. Any lingering images one might have of Steve McQueen at a smoky film-set card table come to a screeching halt at Fischman's desk. Dollar totals in the tens of thousands are moving, constantly, mechanically, across Fischman's and Lazar's screens every five minutes. IMs from fellow players and lurkers hit Fischman's screens like paparazzi flashbulbs: "Scott F is God!!!" So do the flamers: "The Crew, all sevin of you can lick my hairy balls." Dutch Boyd founded the Crew just after the 2003 World Series of Poker -- staking $25,000 of his winnings there to establish a communal bankroll and to cover the rent on the headquarters he set up in Culver City, California -- but Scott Fischman is the current superstar. He plays tournaments as a limited-liability corporation, his entry fees paid by a New York hedge-fund manager. He has a personal manager (his sister Beth) negotiating endorsement deals for poker clothes, watches and whiskey; book and video contracts; a column in Card Player; a network-TV show about the Crew; and his own online card room, thefishtank.com. But right now, all he has is Keyser Soze, "who has no business whatsoever being in this hand with a fuckin' four." Keyser is in, though, and he does have a four, and it costs Fischman a $187 pot. And a mouse, which Fischman slams down so hard it breaks. "Fuck," he says, looking guilty. "That's, like, my tenth little mousey this year." On this night, across America and beyond, Keyser Soze and 149,344 others are logged into virtual card rooms, most of them playing Texas Hold 'em, a deceptively simple form of poker that was all but dead five years ago. Buoyed by massive television coverage (thirty-eight hours on five networks this particular week), it's driven a viral-marketed tap deep into the national psyche and created a dollar pool that seems almost bottomless: Tonight alone, according to pokerpulse.com, some $151,824,391 has been won and lost on Hold 'em "ring games." All along the Strip, in Atlantic City, the California card rooms, the Indian casinos in Connecticut and the riverboat ones in Mississippi -- in every state where poker is legal, semilegal or still relegated to the backrooms -- waiting lists for tournaments and ring games can be hours long. The big hotels, which offered poker to get gamblers in the door, now can't train dealers fast enough. World Series of Poker entries doubled in 2003. The online card rooms, while offshore and hard to monitor, are widely said to pocket up to $50 million a year apiece. "But it's not just a numbers game," says Steve Lipscomb, CEO of the World Poker Tour. "It's also a complete cultural change." At Bellagio, the hottest casino on the Strip, the craps, twenty-one and roulette tables have been cleared out from the heart of a gaming pit to make way for the Doyle Brunson North American Poker Championship. Behind velvet ropes, hunched over five tables like they're awaiting biopsy results, sit forty-five highly skilled men and women, looking exhausted but vicious in their sunglasses, the rump end of the 312 people who each put up $10,000 for a shot at the $3 million pool. Lipscomb points to the tourists gaping behind the ropes at America's new celebrities: the former prodigies Daniel Negreanu and Phil Hellmuth; Howard "The Professor" Lederer; his sister Annie Duke; Gus Hansen, the thirty-one-year-old Dane named one of People's "50 Sexiest Men Alive"; Phil "Unabomber" Laak, the droll World Poker Tour champion famed for the hooded gray sweat shirts he vanishes inside to block opponents' stares. It's like Waiting for Godot meets Mafia sit-down, a tedious theater of concentration where the plot is rarely revealed and the actors seldom speak (and are usually lying when they do), but the fans will be six-deep until midnight. "And it's all happened so fast," adds Lipscomb. "Two years ago, I was getting laughed out of network meetings. And when a poker pro went home for Christmas, it'd be hidden, like some family secret. Now, he's not just a household name, he's a hero to the nieces and nephews." It's those nieces and nephews who are driving the cultural change. Hold 'em is the blood sport of choice now for any kid with a credit card. If they're good, very good, they may one day join the hundred or so who can make it in "the life." And then comes the hard part: learning to tolerate what the pros call "the variances" -- the runs of bad luck, or deviations above the norm, which can last for months. "The variances," says the Crew's Dorf, "can eat your whole family." The day before, I watched the variances get the best of Scott Fischman as he flamed out at a tournament. Four hours in, he'd been sitting in his swivel chair like a kid at a soda fountain, cheeks flushed and yelling, "I'm in the zone!" or "I've got all the donkeys at my table!" As his stack dwindled from more than $23,000 to nothing -- in less than an hour -- his face turned ashen, his body sagged and his head vanished, inch by inch, into the neck of his please don't call me sweat shirt. Then he vanished. "I simply cannot bear my life when I bust out of a tournament," he says. "I go home and sleep as long as I can. I cannot tell you how stressful life is at this level of poker." An inscrutable generation of right-brain warriors, today's poker kids are a community joined at the hippocampus by freak single-mindedness and equally freak abilities. To instantly compute odds. To remember distant hands. To find ways into opponents' psyches when a good mind-fucking is needed. To read an opponent -- if not his cards, then his emotional temperature. And to act, on a very selective basis, with inhuman patience and supreme aggression. What's different with the Crew and their caste is that they learned it all largely online. "What took me decades to learn, these kids can get on the Internet," says Doyle Brunson, 71, who literally wrote the book on Texas Hold 'em (Super/System). "What I learned by brute force, dealing out hands, they learn on computers. It tends to make for fairly technical players, but they make up for it with aggression, the kind that comes when you learn things fast." Very fast. At online sites generating instant random shuffles, they can play 10,000 hands a week. By contrast, a pro playing in a casino gets in about 30,000 hands a year. "Is it weird for people our age to be poker millionaires?" says Antonio "The Magician" Esfandiari, who became poker's first under-twenty-five millionaire in February 2004. "This story's just beginning, believe me." The long, strange career of Dutch Boyd is the founding myth of that story. He's a genius to some in the poker world, a con man, lunatic or savior to others, and his tale of sound and fury has made him a celebrity in anyone's book. When he arrives at Bellagio on the second day of the Doyle Brunson tournament, he walks inside the velvet ropes to clicking cameras and stares, glares and greetings -- from players who don't look up from the table for anything. A year older than Bobby, Dutch was the first of the brothers to catch poker fever after seeing the seminal Hold 'em movie, 1998's Rounders. Moved by Matt Damon's character, who ditches law school to return to a life of professional card-playing, Dutch took the plunge himself. All of eighteen, he already had his law degree but no desire to practice law. The lawyers he was interning for "were all kinda miserable," he says. After seeing the movie, he borrowed the one poker book at his suburban Missouri library and joined the forum at rec.gambling.poker. There, he learned his first lesson: Poker may seem glamorous, but it's really nothing but problem-solving and pattern recognition. The Boyd brothers were born to do exactly that. Bobby had mastered flashcards literally in diapers, crawling across the living-room floor with his bottle in his teeth to pick out the duck and ship on his mother's command. At five, Dutch was promoted from kindergarten to the second grade after he began doing the other kids' work. Both skipped enough grades to start college at twelve. By June 1999, Dutch followed his brother out to Silicon Valley. Bobby was working for a company that routed the Internet across vast swaths of the Midwest. While Bobby went to the office to supervise Ph.D.s twice his age, Dutch would spend his days playing poker at the Wagon Wheel, an old-timer's bar in Mountain View. He'd leave there at 6 p.m. and head over to Macy's, where he worked the evening shift selling belts and men's underwear. Afterward, he'd head to a nearby card room, flash a fake ID and play deep into the morning. Or he'd go back home, open his laptop and play online. He was playing on Bobby's bed late one night when the software crashed on planetpoker.com, then the big site. "Man," he said to his brother. "Someone should figure out how to do this better." "Why not us?" said Bobby. They were in the condo hot tub with notebooks by 3 a.m. and had it figured out by sunrise. Dutch registered domain names (he still owns about 1,000 of them), and Bobby put an ad in the local paper for programmers to help with the software. Borrowing $50,000 from their stepfather, Dutch flew to the Caribbean to incorporate in Antigua and then headed to Costa Rica to put up servers. He went to gaming conferences in Canada to arrange logistics like cyber-payment-solutions. (Online poker was, and still is, technically illegal in the U.S.) Within nine months, Bobby had finished the software other sites would struggle almost another year to develop. By year's end, their site, pokerspot.com, was up and running, and the boys were raking in $100,000 in profits a month, two and three dollars at a time, from the pots and tournament fees of their 6,000 subscribers. By January 2001, they were up to $160,000. In the online poker forums, Dutch was predicting $50 million yearly profits for the top Internet card rooms, though no one in that small world at the time took the excitable nineteen-year-old entrepreneur all that seriously. The gray market of online gambling would become huge, quick. But it would first have to weather the dot-com crash, and in the Internet poker world, Dutch would become its most celebrated victim. Online gamblers play, by definition, on credit, and as newfound millions vanished overnight, so too did credit cards and card payments. Netpro, the offshore payment-solutions company Dutch had taken on to handle pokerspot.com's accounts, had its assets suddenly frozen in early 2001 by London-based Barclays Bank: Too many Netpro customers were issuing "charge backs," disputing or refusing to pay charges on their cards. Dutch, who had just turned twenty, panicked. For a period of time (he says it was a month, others insist it was longer), he continued to solicit new accounts, hoping to pay creditors off with borrowed money. At best, Dutch was staving off disaster. At worst, he'd turned pokerspot.com into a Ponzi scheme. Then he went nuts. "The first episode came January 1st of 2002," he says. "Sitting in my room, New Year's Eve, watching Dick Clark and the ball drop. A car commercial came on, with some Louis Armstrong music. It was God telling me to go to New Orleans." In the next two and a half years, Dutch's life became a nightmare of mental institutions, card rooms and casinos. At various times, he was living in fifteen-dollar-a-night Vegas flophouses or on Caribbean yachts. And along the way, he was venting his psychosis at rec.gambling.poker. His contributions to the site's threads, some hyperlogical, others rants, tell a weird picaresque of angel capitalists and shady characters, of lost weekends in Montreal, Boston, New Orleans and Antigua as Dutch tried to save his company and himself. His grandest dream was to launch a new kind of online casino, rakefree.com. Most online casinos take a small percentage of each pot -- the rake. On Dutch's new site, there would be no rake. He would charge only a flat fee of $30 a month. First, of course, he had to raise seed money. But Dutch's psychotic episodes, mostly of the "let's take off our clothes and go naked" variety, had begun to get nastier, and backers were in short supply. Enemies weren't. "Dutch insulted some extremely fine and kind people," says Burton Ritchie, a Pensacola, Florida, cardplayer who says he spent months trying to arrange a deal between Dutch and a consortium of venture capitalists, Kansas City mobsters and NFL players. "Dutch signed a letter of intent and then went schizo. I'm sorry to hear he's bipolar, but he's also an asshole." Dutch speaks of his psychosis with a strange, detached irony. He likens the episodes and their accompanying visions to airport murals. "The kind," he says, "where it's just colored dots as you walk by, until you hit the right place and they all come together to form the big image." He hit bottom in March 2003 in Antigua, where he and Bobby had gone for some online-casino consultancy work; despite their notoriety, the brothers' vision and technical knowledge were still sought by other gaming sites. Dutch went manic aboard a boat they were staying on, and Bobby had no choice but to commit him to an island medical hospital. His home for the next week was a six-by-nine-foot cell "with a metal door, a bed, a toilet and you sitting there with your direct line to God," he says. "My advice: Don't go crazy in a Third World country." Dutch was a month out of that cell when he hit the national stage in the 2003 World Series of Poker's $10,000-entry No Limit Hold 'em Championship: a striking twenty-two-year-old wearing a bright-red bandanna on his head and working the tail end of a $3,500 bankroll he'd brought to Vegas a week earlier. Scott Fischman, also twenty-two and four years into "the life," was awe-struck the first time he met Dutch. "He was different," Fischman says. "He was a man of vision." Dutch had put up $200 to enter a "satellite" tournament and outlasted others to earn his $10,000 World Series voucher. For three days, he beat legend after legend, emerging as the chip leader. By the Day Four dinner break, with only sixteen of the original 839 players left, Dutch had more than $1 million in front of him and a clear path ahead to the final table with its $2.5 million payday and certain immortality. Then, inexplicably, Dutch waved his right hand, "all in," and bet $850,000 in chips on a middling king-high hand. The unknown Chris Moneymaker, a Tennessee accountant who was playing in his first tournament, had just made a $100,000 bet, and Dutch had smelled weakness. But Moneymaker, holding a lowly pair of threes, called Dutch's bluff and went on to take the $1.5 million hand and, twenty-one hours later, to win the $2.5 million and become the face of overnight poker riches. In what should have been his most humiliating moment, Dutch had his next vision. Finishing twelfth in the tournament earned him an $80,000 prize and a disproportionately large share of the post-tournament limelight -- which he grabbed. He recruited four other "hip young players" at the tournament and told ESPN that he and his hastily assembled posse, soon to be known as the Crew, would "take over the poker world." It seemed an odd claim. Two of them, his brother Bobby and "Dorf" Smyth, weren't even poker players. The other two, Joe Bartholdi and Brett "Gank" Jungblut, had a decade of spotty play between them: Bartholdi, a high school kick-out and sometime pool hustler, had run through a succession of five-figure bankrolls with little to show for it except a certain intermittent genius for playing hands full-throttle. Jungblut, 25, a former model, seemed an even odder choice. Dutch had met Gank in Las Vegas a year earlier -- "the most beautiful male I'd ever seen," Dutch says -- and the two talked from time to time about putting a bankroll together, perhaps getting a few others involved. The son of a professional cardplayer (he was named for Brett Maverick, TV's poker-playing gunslinger), Gank was known less for his poker than for his massive intake of marijuana. By his own admission, he's stoned every minute of the day. "I'm major, major ADHD," he says. "If I'm not high, I can't even sit in a restaurant without wanting to throw a chair through a window." The Crew left for Los Angeles the next day, found a five-bedroom house in Culver City and devoted six months of twelve- to eighteen-hour days online, honing their skills, teaching, playing, arguing with one another. At the end of 2003, they descended on casinos from L.A. to Tunica, Mississippi, where in January 2004 Dutch recruited Scott Fischman. Fischman's old running buddy Tony Lazar was added after he met Dutch at a tournament in Reno two months later. Lazar was older than the other Crew members, but he earned his way in after taking $120 from Dutch playing Rock, Paper, Scissors, which a number of poker pros use to warm up the intuitive muscles. As the 2004 World Series of Poker got into gear in Vegas in April, the Crew became the story: ESPN cameras were magnetized by their bravado and good looks as they won three of the tournament's thirty-four events between them, and close to $1 million. They'd already begun to crack as a unit, however, largely because of Dutch's erratic behavior, which led to a huge falling-out with Gank. "In the beginning," Gank says, "if one of us found ten dollars on the street, it would've gone into the bankroll. It was like a commune or something. But I don't know why I didn't see that Dutch is basically a con artist. Maybe I was smoking too much weed." The rest of the crew doesn't see it that way. "If Gank's hair was on fire," says Dorf, "I'd piss on his leg." It's a lifelong drip, the life of the so-called poker pro," Dutch tells me over clam chowder in Snacks, a fast-food bar off the Bellagio Poker Room. "I shudder to think how many kids have dropped out of college because of us. TV makes it look glamorous and like something anyone can do, but it's neither." Dutch's voice is all Missouri, but his inflections are a strange mix of gentle warmth and "why aren't you getting this?" logic. Behind us, the World Poker Tour competition is in its last throes, down to eighteen players desperate to make the final table. He is talking about the Crew and how it may have been, in some ways, an outgrowth of his mental illness. "When you slip into the manic state, one of the first things to go is your sense of a separate self," Dutch says. "Part of the euphoria -- which makes it so addictive and so hard to admit that you need help -- is that you're part of one big organism. Just one of those dots, but you're the one who will be able to put them all together." But heading into this year's World Series, the Crew has hardly been functioning as such. "are we still a crew?" Fischman asks rhetorically as he flops onto his Harrah's Atlantic City hotel-room bed in January. "No?" he muses, scanning the room-service menu before deciding on chicken fingers. Fischman has a strange habit of reading menus in their entirety, then ordering the same thing each time. At the foot of the bed sits the suitcase I saw him packing in Vegas four months ago. His career has taken off -- Fischman recently won his first WPT title, a shootout called Young Guns of Poker, in which he beat five other under-twenty-fives -- and he's traveling across America these days with Doyle Brunson, playing tournaments and promoting the 2005 World Series. He not only personifies "the life" now, he's become something of a poster boy for Poker's New World Order, and he finds it a bit exhausting. Fischman is a born poker player, and unlike Dutch he never speaks of the downside. Still, I wonder if he finds the pressure hard to take. Then he empties his pockets on the night table, and I stop wondering. Among the car keys and cigarette lighter are two wads of $100s, in industrial-strength red rubber bands. One wad is a good two inches thick. The other is three inches. "Gank's gone off on some brain fart and left the Crew," Fischman says, yawning, "but, like, what does that even mean?" "The end of the Crew?" I ask. "Well, there's no more shared bankroll, and we don't live together. But how could you leave something that wasn't there to begin with? It's like poker. Have you played for no money? It's completely meaningless unless you're committed. The Crew definitely has that commitment to each other. "So, yes?" he tries again. "I mean, we're still talking all the time, learning from each other. I don't know what I'd have won if not for Dutch and Gank. We're brothers, even if some of us happen to be, uh, vastly more successful than others at the present time." Room service arrives. "I think the real answer is forever," he says. "I'd also add that it's more than the seven of us now, or the six of us. Whatever. You can call this a fad if you want and try to calculate its shelf life. But to me, to all the people I know, this is life."

Atlanta's Josh Arieh wins poker title

Atlanta's Josh Arieh wins poker title by Associated Press After a six-year dry spell, poker pro Josh Arieh of Atlanta has won a second title at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, tournament officials said. The 30-year-old won $381,600 by beating out a crowd of 212 players — including 2000 poker world champion Chris "Jesus" Ferguson — to claim first place in the pot-limit Omaha tournament. In addition to the prize money, Arieh received a gold bracelet, which is a World Series of Poker trophy coveted by poker pros and enthusiasts. It is his second such bracelet — he won his first in 1999 in limit Texas hold'em. "It's so nice, just being able to prove myself and prove all the doubters," Arieh said Monday by phone from Las Vegas. "Now that I'm financially settled, the money is not important. It's now about ... proving to yourself that you can win. I haven't won in six years." The World Series of Poker started June 2 and consists of 39 different poker tournaments at the Rio All Suite and Hotel in Las Vegas. The series ends with its main event — the $10,000 buy-in no-limit Texas hold'em World Championship on July 7. In the poker world, World Series tournament wins identify the best poker players in the world. Arieh came close to another poker title — a world championship in poker — last year during the series' main event. He won $2.5 million after he placed third out of a field of nearly 2,600 competitors in the $10,000 no-limit tournament. But he was so disappointed he did not win that he left in "absolute tears," he previously said. Last year, Arieh gained notoriety for appearing unsportsmanlike during the televised event for criticizing other players during the tournament, something that Arieh said was more the result of TV editing than his typical conduct. This year, "I made a point to stay calm and not show too much emotion," he said. "Everybody expected me to do something crazy." Arieh dominated the field in this year's Omaha tournament, officials said. By the time he and Ferguson were the last two players remaining, Arieh had a 2-1 lead in chips. But Ferguson won a big hand and soon gained the lead. Omaha is a variant of the popular Texas hold'em poker game. It uses four hole cards instead of the two cards players receive in hold'em. In Omaha, players must use two of their four hole cards and combine that with three of five community cards to make the best five-card hand. With the lead in chips, Ferguson went on attack, raising every hand and Arieh said he had to stop the former champion's momentum. So he asked for a restroom break. "I didn't have to go to the bathroom. I needed to take a time out. All his fans were going nuts," Arieh said. Arieh came back with renewed vigor, sensing that Ferguson had let his guard down. "Did I catch the deck? Nope, I bluffed my way to victory ... It should definitely make for good TV," Arieh wrote on his Web site. Despite the win, Arieh said he hasn't had time to celebrate with his family. There are 17 more World Series of Poker tournaments remaining, including the July 7 main event. "I have a long way to go before celebrating," he said.

Poker website could be flushed out of Canada

Poker website could be flushed out of Canada by John Waples and Matthew Goodman for www.timesonline.co.uk PARTY GAMING, the online poker company planning a controversial £4.8 billion London listing, faces the threat of legal action under the Canadian Criminal Code. Canada is an important market for the poker group but there are doubts about if the firm’s gaming licence is legitimate. The group’s prospectus reveals “directors have been advised that the extent of the group’s operations and presence in Canada may be sufficient for criminal or civil action to be taken”. The group’s gaming licence was issued by the Kahnawake Gaming Commission in Canada. But the company conceded that there were serious doubts at a federal level as to whether this commission had the authority to issue such a licence. There are also no guarantees that a second licence will be issued. To reduce this risk, Party Gaming is moving its server centre to Gibraltar from Canada’s Mohawk Territory. The casino and bingo server is being moved this August and the poker server by November. But it will retain a back-up operation in Canada. The firm has refused to disclose terms of director’s contracts and its level of insurance to cover litigation. It said there was little risk of directors being arrested when they travelled to America, though the Department of Justice considers online poker to be in violation of federal law — a view not shared universally. Paul Telford at Allen & Overy, a law firm, said: “I imagine in the short term the directors are probably staying well clear of the US on the ground that they would consider themselves at risk were they to enter the country.” Party Gaming said executives regularly travelled to the US. Other authorities are taking a more relaxed view. Party Gaming’s prospectus warns that its Gibraltar gaming licence permits it to offer gambling services only in countries in which “it is not illegal”. The Gibraltar government said it saw no reason to revoke the licence. Shares in the grey market are trading at the lower end of the float range.

Empire cashes in on poker

Empire cashes in on poker AN Internet gambling firm is the latest to cash in on the popularity of online poker when its shares began trading on the London stock market. Empire Online floated on the Alternative Investment Market with a value of £512.4m, but immediately saw its shares rise from their opening price of 175p to 181.5p. The group makes its money by directing players to poker and casino websites such as Party Poker. These companies receive all the gambling revenues and pay Empire a marketing fee for attracting business. Empire has a deal to market websites for a subsidiary of online poker giant Party Gaming, which today announced details of its forthcoming flotation. Poker accounts for around two-thirds of Empire's business while casino makes up for the remaining third. The placing raised £123.5m.

US to crash $11bn online poker party

US to crash $11bn online poker party By Ian Cobain in London For www.smh.com.au London's biggest stockmarket float for years has been overshadowed by advice from Washington that the four dotcom millionaires behind the venture risk arrest and prosecution in the United States. PartyGaming, operator of a hugely profitable poker website, is expected to be valued at £4.76 billion ($11.3 billion) when it floats on the British stockmarket later this month. The offering will transform one of its owners, Ruth Parasol, the daughter of a former San Francisco massage parlour tycoon, into one of the most successful female entrepreneurs in history. While the company's activities are legal in the UK, the US Justice Department is warning that operators of online gambling enterprises could be prosecuted and, if convicted, jailed for years in America. Internet gambling companies occupy a legal grey area in the US, with many in the industry insisting that case law shows them to be legitimate, while the Justice Department insists they are outlawed. According to the department, online gambling operators such as Ms Parasol, 38, her husband, James Russell DeLeon, 39, and their partners, Indian computing experts Anurag Dikshit and Vikrant Bhargava could face prosecution under three federal statutes: the Interstate Wire Act, the Illegal Gambling Business Act and the Travel Act. These carry penalties of between two and five years' imprisonment for each offence. The company prospectus concedes that its activities "are considered to be illegal by the relevant authorities" in the US, but says case law has established that online poker sites are excluded from the legislation controlling gambling. It also says its four founders have travelled to and from the US with impunity. Ms Parasol and Mr DeLeon have declined to give interviews, refused to be photographed and are rarely sighted in Gibraltar, where their company is registered and they are said to be living. Mr Dikshit, 33, is also maintaining a low profile, leaving Mr Bhargava, 32, as the public face of PartyGaming. The company denies this is due to concerns over its legal position in the US, and insists that the company's founders want only to lead normal lives. The Justice Department's warning is likely to increase anxiety among US investment institutions, some of which are reported to be reconsidering whether to back PartyGaming. When the company announced a float price of between £4.4 billion and £5.1 billion on Wednesday, instead of the widely predicted £5.5 billion, it rejected claims that the cut was in response to those jitters, insisting that the price tag was a "realistic assessment" of the company's worth. A senior Justice Department official said: "Any business offering online gambling services that are in the United States, or can be accessed in the US, are illegal. "The focus today is on how we can do more about it [online gambling] and how we can charge people. If they are American citizens, it would be a little easier for us. They can face prosecution if they enter the United States." A successful float in London, with the vast injection of capital that would bring, would make little difference in Washington, the official added. "If they're taking bets in the UK, and it's legal there, that's fine; but if they're taking bets in the United States, that's illegal, and they will be prosecuted." PartyGaming disputes the Justice Department's interpretation of the law in the US, saying that no company offering similar services has ever been prosecuted there. "The US does not have legislation specifically regulating online gaming and therefore there is uncertainty as to its legality," a spokesman said. The Guardian

Legal worries cloud PartyGaming poker float

Legal worries cloud PartyGaming poker float By Steve Slater For Reuters.co.uk PartyGaming shares were under pressure in unofficial trading on Thursday amid investor concern about the regulatory risk facing the online poker giant, which is set for a multibillion-dollar share float later this month. Spread-betting company IG Index said its price range for PartyGaming's shares had slipped to 110-118 pence, while Cantor Index's price was 112-115p, both towards the lower end of PartyGaming's indicated price range of 111-127p per share. The weakness came a day after the company issued its prospectus which said the company's directors risk jail if U.S. moves to clamp down on online gaming are successful. "There is a significant risk that criminal or civil judgements may be sought against the group of directors," PartyGaming said in its prospectus for the initial public offering in London. "If successful, such actions may result in remedies such as injunctions ... fines and imprisonment." PartyGaming said 87 percent of its players are based in the United States, where the legality of online gaming is a grey area. The Gibraltar-based company does not have a physical presence in the United States, but it does advertise and receive funds from payment processors there. U.S. LEGAL ISSUE It said any disruption to its relationships with partners such as banks, credit-card companies or payment processors could affect its business, and said as payment processing has become more tightly controlled it had experienced "some difficulties" in processing payments to and from its customers. "Accordingly, payment processing costs and bad debts may increase as a proportion of the group's revenues in the future, and the group may experience increasing difficulties in advertising," it said in the section of the prospectus dealing with risk factors. One legal expert said the high-profile flotation was likely to bring the legal issue in the United States to a head. Continued ...

PartyGaming sets IPO as poker booms

PartyGaming sets IPO as poker booms By Reuters PartyGaming, the world's biggest online poker company, said its backers will raise up to $2.1 billion in a London share listing--less than expected as concerns over the legal status of online gaming persist. Uncertainty about the legality of online gambling in the United States--where more than 80 percent of its clients are based--continues to overhang the offer and analysts said the pricing of the shares reflects a risk discount. "It's a fantastic business and should have a lot of potential, but it has a lot of regulatory and legal hurdles to overcome to justify some of the high valuations people have talked about," said Henk Potts, investment manager at Barclays Stockbrokers. "There's a real question over the legality of providing a service to customers who could potentially be breaking the law in their own country," he added. PartyGaming is set to rank as the biggest flotation in London since technology company Dimension Data in July 2000 and will break into Britain's leading FTSE 100 share index. The offer size will match the amount raised by publisher Yell as the biggest IPO since Friends Provident in July 2001. The move underscores a dramatic global boom in online poker playing. PartyGaming, formed in 1997, now reaps a profit of almost $1,000 every minute as it pulls in revenue of $100,000 every hour of the day. The company and its hundreds of rivals act as hosts for players--they do not take risks in the game and charge players a commission, or "rake," typically about 3 percent of the pot. Up to 70,000 people play simultaneously on PartyGaming's sites. One source familiar with the deal said the size of the sale had been trimmed, with some investors clearly wary of the regulatory risk. "Generalist fund managers have shied away from PartyGaming because of potential regulatory risk, but fund managers familiar with the gambling sector were sanguine on the issue and understand that any regulation is difficult to enforce," he said. Official trading is expected to begin on the London Stock Exchange on June 27. Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein is sole global coordinator for the offer. The bulk of that payout will go to the company's four founders, who will also reap a cash windfall from the offer and become paper billionaires. Online poker has surged in popularity in recent years, pulling in a wider audience than traditional casino gambling, often attracting women and younger players who may not have visited casinos. Companies hosting such sites, whose costs are relatively limited, have reaped the reward, and PartyGaming said it has an estimated 55 percent share of the online poker market. It said its revenue was $222 million in the first quarter of this year, up 93 percent from a year earlier. Operating profit jumped 81 percent from a year earlier to $128 million. Story Copyright © 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony Unveils Nautica Charity Poker Festival Center

Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony Unveils Nautica Charity Poker Festival Center City and county government officials joined leading charities and Jacobs Investments' personnel for a ribbon- cutting ceremony today that unveiled an impressive 20,800 sq. ft. Festival Center that will house a series of poker festivals to run throughout the summer at the Nautica Entertainment Complex. The Nautica Charity Poker Festivals will consist of 12 four-day festivals featuring Texas Hold 'Em played inside the air-conditioned Festival Center beginning this Thursday, June 16th and running through Labor Day weekend. While players keep their cash winnings, each Festival is hosted by a qualified charity that receives proceeds in the form of hourly seat fees and concession income. Charities hosting Festivals include the Cleveland Police Athletic League, Art on Wheels, Easter Seals of Northeast Ohio, Cleveland Baseball Federation, Greater Cleveland Special Olympics and Up Side of Downs. Northeast Ohio Breast Cancer Coalition, Cleveland Municipal Football and Walsh Jesuit Booster Club were announced today as additional charities hosting upcoming Festivals. "I would like to thank the County Commissioners for recognizing the economic benefits these Poker Festivals offer to charities and downtown Cleveland," said Jeffrey Jacobs, Chairman and CEO of Jacobs Investments, Inc. "Their support helped to make the Nautica Charity Poker Festivals a reality," he added. "I would also like to thank Mayor Campbell for her efforts to bring gaming to northeast Ohio. These Charity Poker Festivals will reveal to statewide voters that this job-creating, revenue-generating industry is a plus for Cleveland, as well as Ohio. Last but not least, I would like to thank the distinguished charities that are hosting these Festivals. The thousands of volunteers required for the Festivals represents a significant commitment, however, your efforts will substantially increase the awareness and funding of your causes," noted Jacobs. Created to generate revenue for local charities, as well as generate public awareness of the economic benefits of gaming, Nautica Charity Poker Festivals will serve to draw thousands of visitors to downtown Cleveland. "The Poker Festivals will demonstrate the phenomenal demand for gaming in Ohio and show people that gaming is a viable source of revenue," said Dave Grunenwald, Vice President of Development/ Leasing for Jacobs Investments, which owns the Nautica Entertainment Complex. "Today we welcome additional charities that will host upcoming Festivals," added Grunenwald. "Northeast Ohio Breast Cancer Coalition, Cleveland Municipal Football and Walsh Jesuit Booster Club will join charities previously announced to host and benefit from Charity Poker Festivals. We ask that you support these fine organizations by coming down and participating in the Festivals," said Grunenwald. While players keep their cash winnings, each charity will receive proceeds from the Festivals which may exceed $50,000 during each four-day event. Adults 21 years and older will be allowed to play poker at up to 30 tables seating up to 10 players each. Proceeds will come from an hourly seat fee paid by each player, donations made by patrons, food and beverage concessions and sponsorship. The Cleveland Police Athletic League (PAL) will host Nautica Charity Poker Festivals this week beginning Thursday, June 16th through Sunday, June 19th and the following week, June 23rd - 26th. Festival schedules, hours and detailed information on Texas Hold 'Em tournaments and open play is available online at http://www.NauticaCharityPoker.org.

The poker king shows his hand

The poker king shows his hand By Police Reporter SAM RICHES for The Advertiser BY his own admission, Joe Meissner has a "colourful" past that could also explain a police raid on a poker tournament this week. Patrons and organisers were perplexed at the manner in which about 40 police officers stormed in and raided what allegedly was an organised and sophisticated illegal gambling event. STAR Group, Drug and Organised Crime and Avatar, the anti-bikie taskforce, were all involved in effectively taking over the Carrington St venue, in what many players felt was "ridiculous" overkill. Mr Meissner said yesterday he had received a "half-pie apology" from Avatar yesterday. "They said they were misled, that they had misinformation because of some of the names of players on the list," Mr Meissner said last night. "Now they're talking about sending us infringement notices." According to Mr Meissner, it's irrelevant that he has been involved in "sports, politics and gangsterism". That could further explain the involvement of STAR Group and the organised crime branch. "It's no secret, but I don't see what relevance it has," he said. He is open about his past – which includes jail time for attempting to steal submachine guns from an army base in the 1960s, heroin charges and the infamous "love boat" saga. There's allegations of political bribery and a fascinating collage of all things underworld. "There's hundreds of pages on Google on Joe Meissner, you could write a book," he said. "They want to call me a standover man, let them do that in court." These days, Mr Meissner says he is happy to just play "high-stakes poker all over the world". The poker tournament raid was described as "heavy-handed" by Opposition gambling spokesman Robert Brokenshire yesterday. About 40 police raided the Italian Club on Wednesday night. "Surely a simpler and smarter solution would have been to contact the organisers, tell them the event appeared to be illegal and that it had to be cancelled," he said.

Poker-Faced

Poker-Faced By Joseph Menn, Times Staff Writer Of the millions of gamblers who have rushed to play Texas Hold 'Em and other fast-growing poker games online, Roger Gabriel isn't the most intimidating. The 30-year-old Newport Beach engineer started playing for money only a month ago. He lurks online at the tables for the chicken-hearted; even there, where the biggest ante is 4 cents, he can't win consistently. But Gabriel has a potentially powerful alter ego. In his spare time, he's perfecting a computer program to go online and play the game for him. His BlackShark software is still a work in progress, but Gabriel has no doubt that such programs eventually will be championship quality. "In the future," he said, "robots are going to take over." Gabriel is one of an increasing number of computer professionals who design poker robots, or "bots," that pose as human gamblers but can play endlessly without tiring or losing concentration — for real money. Though not yet good enough to beat skilled humans consistently, these programs are seen as a threat by online casinos — all based outside the U.S. and out of the reach of American laws — and the gamblers who spend billions of dollars chasing big pots. "There are already lots of robots playing online, and that's definitely unethical. They should identify themselves," said Paul Magriel, a veteran professional poker player. The march of the machines will be celebrated in Las Vegas next month with the world's first money tournament for robots — and the $100,000 prize is drawing a handful of coders out of anonymity. The emerging technology does more than raise the stakes for real people and online casinos. It also raises fundamental questions about how far computers have come in mimicking and improving on human behavior, and about how far they can go in the future. Computer programs have conquered checkers, chess and, most recently, backgammon. By rapidly evaluating plays more moves ahead than a person can, computers routinely beat the strongest human players in those games. This was demonstrated most dramatically in the classic 1997 match between world chess champion Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue, a 1.4-ton supercomputer built by IBM. The machine's victory marked Kasparov's first professional loss, and many took it as a depressing event for mankind. Even Gabriel, then studying artificial intelligence at UC Irvine, had been rooting for Kasparov. Backgammon programs, which had to adapt to the random element of dice, grew so good by the late 1990s that they changed strategic wisdom built up over 2,000 years, influencing how the best humans play the game. But poker — popularized recently by televised tournaments for pros and celebrity amateurs — is a far more human game, one in which psychology matters as much as probability. That's why in poker there's no such thing as an absolutely correct play, except in retrospect. If someone, or something, bets heavily with a lousy hand and everyone else folds, that was the right bet. This makes poker bot design fascinating to academics like Jonathan Schaeffer, a computing science professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton who for 14 years has headed a project to build poker programs. Schaeffer said cards were more likely than chess to produce computing approaches useful in the real world because poker players must deal with incomplete information. But before such research can contribute dramatically to solving real-world problems, Schaeffer said, it has to solve the challenge of poker — and that's several years away. For now, only the poker players with the poorest skills — people like Gabriel, for instance — have much to fear. Typically, a user signs on to an online game site manually, launches the poker bot and lets it run. Gabriel's BlackShark, for example, displays a window on his computer that collects information from the poker site and then calculates odds before making a bet. Like most of his peers, Gabriel, who is working five nights a week to get BlackShark ready for the Las Vegas tournament, is an engineer first and a poker player second. He said his poor game skills are his biggest handicap. "The hard part is: What if I've got two 10s? What am I going to do?" As he scans poker books for strategy tips, Gabriel is laboring to add an enormous set of rules telling the machine what to do with different cards and how to react to the frequency with which other players fold, call and raise. to finish reading this article, visit the latimes.com website

Activision Catches Poker Fever

Activision Catches Poker Fever by David Adams for IGN.com America's just crazy for poker! Yes, it's poker fever, and it's sweeping the nation, splashing mothers, children, and the infirm in its mighty wake! Catch the sensation! Right on top of the wave is Activision, which announced Thursday an agreement with Harrah's to create and publish games based on the World Series of Poker Tournament. "The World Series of Poker is the world's premiere poker event, drawing thousands of entrants and millions of viewers worldwide," said Mark Meadows, Vice President of Marketing, Activision Value Publishing. "The World Series of Poker will deliver to consumers the same excitement and authenticity of pulling up a chair at the WSOP table and taking home the championship." Activision's license covers consoles, handhelds, and the PC. The company expects to ship the World Series of Poker games this fall. Stay tuned for more. Poker!

With Poker Mania, It's All Hands On Deck

With Poker Mania, It's All Hands On Deck by Annalisa Burgos for Forbes.com You could call it the new American pastime. From Las Vegas to Atlantic City, N.J., and from card parlors to cyberspace, poker is the game. You might go so far as to say poker is the game of the globe--if you don't count football (soccer). In the past few years, the game has attracted millions of new players. Tournaments such as the World Series of Poker--a six-week marathon that kicked off June 2--and around-the-clock play on the Internet have helped fuel the frenzy. So has a group of young Hollywood stars, including Ben Affleck and Leonardo DiCaprio. To be sure, promoters have also managed to exploit the game's Everyman image, and casinos have used the game to attract new customers. Poker mania has produced TV shows, best-selling books, magazines and a host of celebrities. Even the venerable New York Times has hired a poker columnist for the first time in its history. Nearly 2 million play online poker each month. In New Jersey and Nevada alone--the only two states that track data--revenue hit $152 million in 2004, up 45% from 2003. Fun aside, the headlines and the big money comes down to the tournaments. Two major brands dominate. The older, more established (36 years in the running) is the World Series of Poker, which is owned and operated by Harrah's Entertainment (nyse: HET - news - people ), now in the process of merging with Caesars Entertainment (nyse: CZR - news - people). Cable-TV channel ESPN, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Co. (nyse: DIS - news - people ), broadcasts the tournament. The series consists of several tournaments offering smaller prize money, in addition to the main tournament, which decides the world champion. This year, some 6,600 will compete in the main tournament July 7-15. Many of the competitors paid $10,000 to enter, with the hope of winning a jackpot of some $8 million. The other major brand is the World Poker Tour, now four years old and run by WPT Enterprises (nasdaq: WPTE - news - people ), a majority-owned subsidiary of Lakes Entertainment (nasdaq: LACO - news - people ). A TV show based on a series of high-stakes poker tournaments airs on the Travel Channel in the U.S. and 50 other global markets. The tournaments are held in various casinos and on cruise ships throughout the world. The WPT is credited with making the game more accessible and exciting with its innovative camera shots that allow viewers to see players' hands, or hole cards. Click on the links below to view several poker mania videos. Meet Mr. Poker Bluffing The Big Boys Mastering The Poker-Room Face Training Tomorrow's Poker Champs Poker Joins The Big Leagues

U of M student wins $41,000 at College Poker Championship

U of M student wins $41,000 at College Poker Championship by Associated Press MINNEAPOLIS - A University of Minnesota student who was named the best college poker player in the world will receive a trophy and a $41,000 scholarship on Thursday. Chad Flood, 20, a junior from Fond du Lac, Wis., finished ahead of 25,000 players May 22 in the second annual College Poker Championship. "I thought it would be a long shot to win the whole thing since there are so many people in it," Flood said Wednesday. "I was pretty shocked for a while." Flood, an economics major, finished in the top 100 in last year's competition. He learned regular poker when he was in junior high but didn't start playing Texas Hold 'Em until three or four years ago. In college, Flood became more interested in Texas Hold 'Em, which has gained popularity after being featured on TV and played by celebrities. Flood also started playing the game online for money and read a few strategy books about it. "Playing a lot and reading the books - I just became better and better," he said. Although he's already reached the top for his age, Flood said he plans to play in the competition again next year and looks forward to turning 21, which will make him eligible to play in more competitions. "I'd like to compete in the World Poker Tour or World Series of Poker," he said. "Maybe I'll make some trips to Las Vegas and see how I do."

Poker Expert Phil Gordon to Kick in with Daily Podcast from 2005 World Series of Poker Beginning June 6

Poker Expert Phil Gordon to Kick in with Daily Podcast from 2005 World Series of Poker Beginning June 6 Beginning this week (6/6/05), poker fans will be able to connect to the high-stakes excitement of the 2005 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas by subscribing, free of charge, to top pro and commentator Phil Gordon's daily podcast from this legendary event. Both iPod owners and other interested digital downloaders can subscribe to Phil's reports by logging onto www.expertinsight.com. A professional poker player who has won well in excess of $1.3 million in tournament play, expert analyst, and co-host of TV's "Celebrity Poker Showdown," Gordon will provide fans with a table-eye view of the hottest action on the floor. He will break down the thought process, strategy, and twists and turns as they unfold, in the quest to lay down a winning hand in poker's premiere event -- and stay alive in the quest to walk away with an estimated $10 million in cash and the title of World Series of Poker Champion. Gordon's journal-style Web posting will be transmitted daily throughout the tournament as he takes listeners on a journey all the way to the Final Table on July 15th. Mixed into Phil's early commentary are his interviews with world-class poker pros and celebrities such as Daniel Negreanu, Layne Flack, Erick Lindgren, Annie Duke, and James Woods. Gordon believes that podcasting, which combines the freedom of expression of blogging with XML-based audio downloading technology, is the perfect venue for providing poker fans with a sense of context, excitement and insight on breaking news from the tournament. Gordon has also taken a progressive approach to instructional videos with the release of his DVD, "Final Table Poker With Phil Gordon" (more information available at www.expertinsight.com). Rather than a traditional tutorial, Gordon places viewers at the final table of a high-stakes tournament and inside the mind of a professional as he breaks down how winning decisions are made in tournament play. Gordon's definitive strategy guide to No Limit Hold'em, The Little Green Book of No-Limit Hold'em (Simon Spotlight Entertainment), is also scheduled for release October 4, 2005.

Legends of Poker - Doyle Brunson

Legends of Poker - Doyle Brunson Al Moe for PokerNews.com Seven of the first eight World Series of Poker Champions hailed from the state of Texas. What could account for that? Was it something in the water? Were those players really that good? Or was it simply that they were playing the toughest, most exciting poker game ever invented: Texas Hold'em? Nobody knows for sure why, but the fellows from Texas just dominated the competition when it came to big money, high pressure Texas Hold'em, and Doyle "Texas Dolly" Brunson was arguably the finest player by the end of the 1970's. Born in Longworth, Texas in 1933, Doyle grew up with his brother and sister in a small home his father was able to provide them by working at the Planters Gin Co. He recalled his father as "The calmest, most even-tempered individual I've ever been exposed to," and from Doyle's later accomplishments in poker, he must have inherited his calm demeanor from his father. to read the rest of this article, visit pokernews.com

Computer malfunction hits video poker machines

Computer malfunction hits video poker machines The Associated Press A computer malfunction caused some of the Oregon Lottery's video poker machines to "tilt" in the middle of games over the weekend, cashing the player out automatically. Outages were reported on machines across the state, although it was not immediately clear just how many players were affected. Lottery staff and the system's vendor, GTECH, worked on the problem most of Sunday, said Chuck Baumann, Oregon Lottery spokesman. No money was reported lost by players, and lottery officials don't know how much state revenue has been lost. Problems with video-poker machines have been uncommon since the games were introduced in 1992, Baumann said. Terminals recently were upgraded to include video slot machine games, in addition to poker, but it is not yet clear whether the upgrade is related to the problem.

2005 WSOP + Ghosts of Poker Past

2005 WSOP + Ghosts of Poker Past from Las Vegas and Poker Blog The time grows short before the crowds take their place at the Rio's Pavilion. The work crews continue to set up tables and lights, big screens closed circuit TV, sound systems, registration booths, all the things needed to guarantee a smooth and successful run for the historic 2005 World Series of Poker. The spacious, modern facilities at the Rio Resort are in stark contrast to the aging Binion's Horseshoe in downtown Las Vegas. Having spent a number of years covering the WSOP at the Horseshoe and remembering trying to crowd more people into Benny's Bullpin than would fit; I, for one, am looking forward to this year's uptown tournament. Of course, I'll miss many of the things that were downtown traditional to the World Series of Poker; but I won't miss the lousy lighting that made good photos an impossibility. I won't miss the crowded corridors that were impossible to navigate, nor will I miss that peculiar odor that had permeated the Horseshoe the last few years. I will miss knowing about the best parking spaces, the shortcut into the coffee shop, secret passageways, lower levels and even the ghosts that are always just out of sight in the old place. Would the late Benny Binion approve of his WSOP moving to bigger and better digs on the upper end of the Vegas Strip? Probably not, but the WSOP isn't his anymore. Benny would have moved it to a better place, and that place would have been the Horseshoe. He always maintained his downtown property with a spit and polish attitude and continued to make the Horseshoe better without doing damage to it's soul. Whatever it took to get the gamblers into his joint and make them comfortable was his special knack. Benny had a genuine affection for poker players and the World Series of Poker was his gift to everyone that plays the game. Did Benny foresee the WSOP becoming the monster of today? Probably not, in fact, no one predicted the tremendous growth of the industry until it was already well under way. So, how would he have handled the multitudes coming to be a part of poker history when the 2005 WSOP begins Thursday? The same way he always did. He would make sure you were treated with respect, got a fair shake and was as comfortable as possible. I think they should modify the stature of Benny, the one of him on his horse. They should show him holding a WSOP gold bracelet in one hand and a stack of food comps in the other. That's how I remember the founder of the WSOP, bigger than life, and I do miss that memory. Speaking of food comps, I hear rumors there will be no food comps, player buffets or any dining accommodations for the 2005 WSOP participants. I am assuming the 'suits' made a bottom line decision that continuing the Binion tradition of feeding gamblers wasn't cost effective. Apparently the bean counters (pun intended) couldn't work out an acceptable ROI on the food. Least I forget, the final twenty-seven players in the $10K main event will return to the downtown Horseshoe for one last time. I'm sure the ghost of poker past will be out in force to see how this one plays out. Benny, Moss, Ungar, Strass, Roberts and a few others will be there playing in their own exclusive poker game and making side bets on the outcome of the live game.

World Series spotlight will be on defending champ

World Series spotlight will be on defending champ from www.mysanantonio.com Greg Raymer has no idea how to beat the estimated tournament field of 6,000-plus players in next month's World Series of Poker Main Event, but he does know how to whip 2,576. That's how many opponents he had to storm though en route to last year's Main Event championship, and that qualifies him as the pre-eminent expert in mega-tournament play in my book. "There's no way around it, you gotta make a lot of good decisions," Raymer said. "You have to get your money in when it's good to do so, and you have to avoid being unlucky." The good decisions come easy for Raymer. He's been crushing the poker games at his local Foxwoods casino in Connecticut for years and knows how to play the game. Raymer thrives on aggression and likes to keep the pressure on his opponents. He's prone to attack the table if he believes he has the best hand or knows his opponents don't. "I'm more active and play more hands than the average player," Raymer said. "I believe in seeing more flops and taking a few more risks. If I do bluff, it's not because I've folded three-straight hands and I'm telling myself it's time to bluff. It's because I don't think you have enough of a hand to call." The ESPN cameras proved that Raymer only put his money on the line in the most opportunistic circumstances. He was an underdog only twice — both times at the final table — when he turned his cards over, and even then it didn't matter since he was dominating in chips. Early in the tournament, the four times he went all-in and would have been knocked out if he hadn't won the hand, he was over an 80 percent favorite in three of them. One of Raymer's key hands came in the first two hours, when he put in all his chips with pocket eights after a flop of J-8-3 against pocket kings. Any king on the turn or river would have sent him packing. There is no formula for avoiding the bad luck. That's the great equalizer. "Sometimes you can get your money in good and lose anyway," Raymer said. "Even the greatest players are going down if they hit a full house and lose to a bigger one. I don't think there are too many players that can get away from something like that. You are just going to lose." Raymer did it all in dominating fashion and has enjoyed life since his victory. After Uncle Sam and financial backers got their cuts of his $5 million prize, he was allowed to keep about $1.7 million, which was enough to quit his job as a patent attorney. He's been spending his days traveling the globe as a spokesperson for pokerstars.com and playing in many of the big buy-in tournaments the past year. He also does speaking engagements and has a book in the works. As for this year's Main Event? Don't count Raymer out for a repeat championship, but the sheer numbers in the field will make it difficult for him, or any other well-known pro, to win. "I'm looking forward to trying to win it again, but statistically it's very unlikely," Raymer said. "I've been there before, so I know I'm not going to choke or make any stupid mistakes. I didn't have that problem last year, and I have no reason to believe I would this year." And, yes, Raymer will be playing with his signature reflective lizard man glasses that he made famous at the final table last year. "That would be like Elvis not swiveling his hips," Raymer said. "That's my signature. I feel obligated to wear them."

KELOLAND.COM: News for Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa

KELOLAND.COM: News for Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa by Andy Harvey for KELOLAND TV Deadwood isn't bluffing about wanting to attract visitors and figures poker can be a big part of it. In fact, the gaming town now wants to ante-up to win a spot on the world poker tournament's map. Move over slot machines, there's a new game in town. Deadwood Gaming Association President Mike Rodman said, "There's a lot of people who come here just for the thrill of playing poker in Deadwood." It's a game of precision that's increasing in popularity. Poker Dealer Joe Russell said, "A lot of them now have seen poker on tv. A lot of them play online." Now, Deadwood gaming officials are interested in a piece of the pot. Rodman said, "We've had interest from some of the larger poker tournaments that go on around the country coming here to Deadwood." But in order to get those tournaments, gaming officials want to charge participants more than $100.00 to enter. While there are no laws regarding entry fees, one does set a $100.00 bet limit in town. So the Deadwood Gaming Association went to the state for permission. Rodman said, "And so what we want to clarify is that we can charge a higher entry fee than a $100.00 for a tournament and have bigger jackpots and bigger prizes by doing that." Poker may be the fastest growing game in Deadwood, but slot machines reign supreme by bringing in the most cash. But if the state deals a good hand by allowing higher entry fees, poker could become the game of choice and revenue. The state gaming commission plans to hold a hearing in June on possibly increasing poker tournament entry fees.

World Series of Poker set to kick off at new venue

World Series of Poker set to kick off at new venue News 4 Local News Harrah's is getting ready for the World Series of Poker to start this week at a new venue, the Rio hotel-casino in Las Vegas. For 35 years, the event was held at the downtown Binion's Horseshoe. But Harrah's bought the rights to the tournament when it bought the casino and sold it to MTR Gaming. Play begins Thursday and runs through July 15th.

Guys dominate local poker circuit in numbers

Guys dominate local poker circuit in numbers by ANDREA PANTELIC for Up & Coming Weekly Smoke rises, beer bottles perspire and anticipation builds this evening at CrossRoads Sports Bar & Billiards. People file in and mingle and playfully size each other up. It's 30 minutes till game time. The bar on Ramsey Street has hosted poker nights on Thursdays and Sundays since May 5. At 7 p.m. the bustle peaks as three dozen poker players and on-lookers seat themselves at three felt-covered tables on the right half of the bar. The left half is busy with APA league pool players. High energy '80s rock music rains from ceiling speakers and overlaps nervous chatter. This is not an Old West saloon or dark "hole-in-the-wall." There are no shady dealings in some back room. They are young and old, male and female. They are all shapes, hairstyles and ethnicities. Heavy equipment operator Mark Shannon goes to different bars several times a week, wherever he can find a game. The 38-year-old has only played poker for a month and goes by the alias RedskinsFan tonight. "I stumbled across it on ESPN one night when I was bored. I guess I got bitten by the bug," he said. They clink their chips together, continue to trash talk, smoke, chew sunflower seeds, and examine each other for facial twitches that reveal the strength of their poker hand. One tries to twirl a chip gracefully between his fingers like he sees the pros do on television. "I like Daniel Negreneu," says Michael Timal, a 23-year-old student. "Kid Poker," snaps Jonathan Wisenbaker, a 22-year-old soldier from Kansas, who is proud to be a poker player "before the craze." They are waiting for Shannon to make a move. He peers at his cards: Queen and four of clubs. He flicks them forward in disgust. CrossRoads is one of at least 16 local bars and restaurants that participate in a local online-based poker tour and owner Flea Weatherly said it has been great way to attract new customers. World Bar-Tavern-Restaurant Poker (www.WorldBTRPoker.com) and World Tavern Poker (www.WorldTavernPoker.com) are locally owned businesses that sell their services to Cape Fear area bars and restaurants that want to add poker nights to their lineup. Players sign up online an hour prior to a game and accumulate points towards rankings and a seat to a World Series of Poker event. The poker of choice is Texas Hold 'Em, which involves each player being dealt two cards, face down, and five community cards face up, with the player with the best combination of five cards winning the hand. The game is "no limit" which means you can go "all in" and bet all of your chips at any time. Each player has their own strategies that will carry them "all the way" to a seat at a nationally televised event. Captain Rob Abbey, 37th Signal Battalion, said many players don't count the number of "outs" they have and make foolish decisions. His strategy is to win a big hand immediately and then sit back and play "tight" until few players remain. Paratrooper Joe Plewniak said cash games are a lot more interesting but playing for fun at local bars is good practice. "You get to pick up tells," he said, referring to unconscious movements players make that indicate a bluff or a genuinely good hand. He said people play more cautiously when real money is at stake. "Here, nobody respects a raise, nobody respects an all-in. You get people coming here thinking they are king s---, and it is fun when they bust out." Of the three dozen players and on-lookers, males heavily outnumber females. Student Timal has a theory: "It's because enough women haven't been introduced to it yet. When they do, they become sharks." A sliver of sunlight slices across green table felt as the sun set outside. As the game progresses, the remaining males vocalize their suspicions of the females, suggesting the females are better players and are more experienced than they claim to be. Firefighter Jackie Voisard has an opposite perspective: "Guys are d---s until you get them off the table." So who's the best player in the group? "That's our resident Phil Ivey," the players agree. They point to 39-year-old Bryan Nelson, a "self-employed" local star who plays online regularly. His nickname is that of professional poker player Phil Ivey, known as the Tiger Woods of poker. Adding a poker night can be a hit or miss endeavor for an establishment, and an over saturation of these nights may already exist. Most host a combination of two - Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays are the most popular nights. Many of the players at CrossRoads were at Drifters in Spring Lake the night before. Drifters manager Monnie Spicer has mixed feelings towards the game's ability to draw a crowd. He said business has increased a little bit but similar interactive offerings exist that are less expensive to host. "Some take it seriously and are really intense," said Spicer. "Some just want to socialize and they don't care because there is no money involved. We cater to them and have our bouncer serving them drinks like he's a waiter, but sometimes they are not really appreciative and become overbearing because they don't want to be bothered while they are playing." Matthew Lane, 23, plays online and in person at Jester's Pub, Big Harry's Tavern, Drifters and CrossRoads. How does he have time for work? "I do nothing. I got out of the Army a few weeks ago," he said. At 11 p.m., nearby Ruby Tuesday isn't taking To Go orders anymore. Players refuse food and bathroom breaks. For a while no one speaks and faces are solemn. By midnight, the jukebox is silent. The bar is empty and most of the pool players have gone home. At least a dozen local bars are considering the addition of a poker night, realizing it could mean more business or just something new. Right now a belief exists that if you host it, they will come.