We’re no TV experts here — when is Gilligan’s Island gonna get the trophy it deserves? — but we knew we were looking at something special on the small screen watching Joe Cada upend the hopes and dreams of Darvin Moon and logger poker players everywhere. (Phil Ivey probably had something to do with that, too.)
Specifically it was for the November Nine coverage in the category “Outstanding Live Event Turnaround”.
I think they’re referring to the fine TV production work of Dave Swartz, Matt Maranz, and the 441 Productions crew, moreso than the chipstack turnaround of Cada.
PokerNews is reporting that the UIGEA will go into effect on June 1, as the Treasury Department will not request another delay of the regulations to happen.
Bild.de (translated from German) and Bluff Magazine (in English) are reporting that one of the suspects in the EPT Berlin robbery from two weeks ago turned himself in on Monday to German authorities. The police in Berlin released names and photographs of the three other suspected bandits: Mustafa Ucarakus, Jihad Chetwie and Ahmad El Awayti. The article in the German newspaper notes that the suspect mentioned they did receive help from someone on the inside as to where the money was stored and that the security staff was unarmed. More details to come as more news is available.
UPDATE: Bild.de reports that that German police have arrested Ahmad El Awayti.
Here’s the latest episode — a good one with Phil Hellmuth in studio talking a little EPT-Berlin robbery, significance of the NBC Heads-up, and his recent non-collapse collapse at Bay 101.
They also talk with his “mindset coach” Sam Chauhan … and the process of keeping players focussed.
It doesn’t get weird until Andrew Feldman and Bernard Lee start to talk about Hellmuth shirtless.
The Prevent Cancer Foundation presented its 2nd Annual “Cancer Champion” award this weekend in Washington DC to two Full Tilt poker pros — Rafe Furst and Phil Gordon.
You be the judge … good poker face on Spencer Bachus (R-AL) as he and his wife congratulate Rafe and Phil for their good great work fighting cancer?
Perhaps one of poker’s staunchest political opponents is softening … Either that or it’s hard to oppose money for cancer, especially at an event sponsored by Pfizer.
The big announcement that the WSOP announced on Twitter over the weekend has now turned up online. The 2010 WSOP Tournament of Champions will have 27 players will meet in June to play for a $1 million prize pool with the winner earning $500,000. The twist for this year is that the public will vote for the remaining field of 20 WSOP bracelet winners. A list of the 521 living bracelet winners is available here , along with the current top 50 in online voting. Voting starts at noon ET March 15 and runs through June 15th at midnight. The other spots have been filled by these players:
Joe Cada – 2009 WSOP ME winner
Barry Shulman – 2009 WSOPE ME winner
Mike Sexton – 2006 WSOP TOC winner
Mike Matusow – 2005 WSOP TOC Winner
Annie Duke – 2004 WSOP TOC Winner
Two sponsor exemptions (the WSOP will announce details on how these seats will be awarded shortly)
The TOC will begin on June 27th at noon, and play down to the final table. Play will then resume July 4th (the day before the WSOP Main Event begins) and play down to a winner. ESPN will film the action to air as a two-hour show on August 3rd. The entire press release is on page 2:
My first lesson … watching Cole South talk through a $5/$10 no-limit heads-up game. Here he tells what you’re looking from your opponents to develop reliable reads, and how to size your bets accordingly:
The final table of the Bay 101 Shooting Stars Classic concluded early Saturday morning as McLean Karr, down to just 10 big blinds with 27 players left when day 3 started, winning $878,500, which includes a $25,000 WPT Championship seat, defeating Andy “BKiCe” Seth in heads-up play. Phil Hellmuth was the first elimination at the final table, when his QQ lost to Seth’s AJ when another ace hit the river, causing Hellmuth to curl up in the fetal position, leading Tony G to blog an open letter to Hellmuth, expressing concern for his mental health after his stunning elimination. Here’s the full results from the final table:
1 McLean Karr $878,500 including $25k WPT seat
2 Andy Seth $521,200
3 Daniel O’Brien $292,800
4 Hasan Habib $234,300
5 Matt Keikoan $175,700
6 Phil Hellmuth $117,000
Here’s an interview tournament director Matt Savage had with McLean and friend Maria Ho after his win:
A spokeswoman for Berlin police — who did not give her name in keeping with department policy — said the suspect had been set free due to a lack of evidence. The suspect, who was detained late Friday, denied throughout several hours in questioning having taken part in the heist at the Grand Hyatt hotel in the capital.
Hmm. While it briefly seemed like the case might be unravelling for the robbers, maybe not so much … apparently just because a guy robbed one casino in Germany doesn’t mean he committed all casino robberies in Germany.
UPDATE UPDATE:The suspect has been released. Apparently German coppers got the wrong guy … or are running a high-level police play where they detain a person and let him go hoping he will lead them to someone else. No word on whether or not they are still looking for a black Mercedes somewhere in Germany.
Police have arrested a man in connection with last weekend’s armed robbery at the Grand Hyatt during EPT Berlin:
Few details on the suspect himself, other than that his arrest has something to do with info police received about a black Mercedes getaway car … and that he may have been a guy convicted and sent to prison for a casino robbery in 2004.
The thugs made off with $331,000 in the daytime heist, pulled off as cameras rolled at the biggest poker tournament in German history.
Supposedly, we’re also hearing, the robbers left behind a lot of clues, and more arrests are likely to follow. Police don’t think it was an inside job, but are looking into whether or not there was an accomplice who entered one of the events.
UPDATE: A little more news from Germany … the heist took place while guards were on break and the money was being prepared for transfer to the casino’s main cage. Also, from TheLocal.de:
The arrested man was thought to have taken part in another high-profile robbery in 2004. That January four armed masked men stormed the casino at the top of the Park Inn on Alexanderplatz in central Berlin. They were later arrested and convicted, receiving jail terms of between two and four years.
An article by Howard Stutz at the Las Vegas Review-Journal states that the Nevada Gambling Control Board is considering establishing a set of guidelines between casinos and the .net section of online poker sites, which could lead to widespread changes into how poker tournaments are run in Nevada. In 2007, Harrah’s established a series of rules that prevented online poker sites that took US customers from registering their satellite winners directly into the World Series of Poker. Those sites were also prohibited from having their players promote .com sites, while they were allowed to promote their “poker school”, with a .net suffix.
When these guidelines will be finalized is unknown, they could have a huge effect on the World Series of Poker, North American Poker Tour, and televised poker programming such as Face the Ace and Poker After Dark if .net sites were also not allowed.
After having what he admitted was his worst year in poker last year, Phil Hellmuth decided some changes were in order. In his blog from February, Hellmuth hired mindset coach Sam Chauhan and had a battery of tests among other changes to get his poker game back to the when he was considered by more than himself as the best player in the world. It appears to be paying off this week, as Hellmuth has made the final table of the WPT Bay 101 Shooting Stars Main Event Friday afternoon. Here’s how the rest of the final table will be seated when play resumes around 4pm PT (results come from the Hendon Mob Database):
Other big names who missed the final table: Scotty Nguyen (8th), “Miami John” Cernuto (11th), Nick Schulman (13th), Chau Giang (14th), and current WPT Player of the Year leader Faraz Jaka (18th). Live updates will be available from BJ Nemeth and the other good people over at the WorldPokerTour.com site.
In other news related to Hellmuth, Ultimate Bet has decided to cancel the 2010 Aruba Classic as they decided to expand their offerings online, including having a second Ultimate Bet Online Championship series each year.
None other than KevMath stepped into a new dimension across the pond last week, appearing on The Poker Show with Jesse May. Our favorite 2+2 moderator — and arguably the second or third most mysterious man in poker — shares his refreshingly sober analytics from what May calls “the best AND worst journalism about poker”. Check it out … there’s a lot to be learned from the guy charged with shepherding ducks on NVG (and cleaning up their mess).
They also get into the personalities at the NBC Heads-Up Championship for a bit, and talk about the peculiar appeal of Luke Schwartz — what’s behind FullFlush’s rising star in the UK, and why is he more than just a 2+2 blowhard?
Really good stuff from a new (to audio) voice serving a necessary role in the poker world. He clearly does it all for the glamour:
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The eventful EPT Berlin Main Event final table came to a conclusion Sunday afternoon, and it would be American Kevin MacPhee taking down the first prize of 1 million Euros, defeating Ilari Tahkakollio heads-up. MacPhee also had the chance to do this brief interview Monday about his weekend:
An interesting footnote to the excitement from Saturday was a decision Tahkakollio made when play eventually resumed. With 21 players remaining, he was involved in a hand with Luca Canielli, who was all-in for his last 600,000 with As-Qd, against Tahkakollio’s Ad-10h, with the board showing 3c-Kc-8s-4c. At that moment, the armed robbery took place, scattering players and chips leaving this for the players to return to about four hours later (picture from pokerolymp.de):
As the players and tournament staff came back to their seats, and exact chip counts impossible to determine, tournament director met with the remaining players in the main event. It was decided that the players would go by the honor system to determine each player’s chip stack.
Next was to decide how to handle the Tahkakollio-Canielli hand. Since it was impossible to know if the deck had been tampered with amongst the confusion, Kremser ruled that the hand be ruled dead. However, Cainelli was unhappy with this decision as he was in need of doubling up. Kremser then ruled that the deck could be reshuffled so the river could be dealt, but would also need the approval of Tahkakollio, who could have decided to have the hand ruled dead and the two get their chips back. After thinking for several minutes, Tahkakollio decided to allow the river to be dealt, and when the 5h came on the river, Cainelli received his double up, while Tahkakollio had lost about a third of his chips. Tahkakollio recovered from that setback to make the final table third in chips, and after a tense back and forth battle with MacPhee when play got to heads-up, eventually collecting 600,000 Euros for finishing 2nd.
The original reporting of the hand was done by the PokerStarsblog.com team.
Was going to post this over the weekend, but stuff happened in Berlin to delay things a bit. One of these days, GSN will get its act together and put the current season of High Stakes Poker on Youtube AND decide to put it up earlier in the week than Friday.
Numbers 4 and 2 are the only ones that seem possibly questionable to me. The Bounty Shootouts, indeed, are likely to become great. But it’s not even clear yet where the real championship will take place. (The upcoming version at Mohegan Sun will be the first open one of these.) Likewise for the WSOP’s new $25k six-handed event. High-roller and fast no-limit hold’em action, sure … but again, can you really put something at #2 when it hasn’t even happened yet? I’d rather see an Ironman tourney on that list … even though they aren’t big, yet, I think all who have battled in them can attest they are tough.
UPDATE: Anyone else finds Daniel’s omission of the NBC Heads-Up curious? I wouldn’t think much about it had he not included WSOP Heads-up as #8. Now I gotta wonder if his list woulda been different had he been in the final four this weekend / Annie Duke not won.
The Poker Beat has needed a new commercial, and Annie Duke’s win in this year’s NBC National Heads-Up Championship at Caesars’ Palace may just do the trick. First a brief run down of today’s matches:
Clubs/Spades Bracket:
Erik Seidel beat Peter Eastgate
Scotty Nguyen beat Jason Mercier
Hearts/Diamonds Bracket:
Dennis Phillips beat Doyle Brunson
Annie Duke beat Jerry Yang
Semifinals:
Erik Seidel beat Scotty Nguyen
Annike Duke beat Dennis Phillips
The finals commenced with Duke (1-5 lifetime before this year’s event) taking on Seidel (0-5 lifetime at the NBCHU) in the best of three final. Duke won the first match, Seidel would tie it up in the second and held the lead in the deciding match, and had Duke all-in while holding the best hand, but his AdKd was no good for Duke’s Qd9d when she made two pair to take the lead. Duke eventually sealed the deal when her pocket nines turned a straight against Seidel’s A-2. Seidel was left with two outs to a chop, but the river was a blank, with the second place winnings of $250,000. Duke picks up $500,000 for the win, her first major win since her 2004 victory in the WSOP Tournament of Champions.
Kevin interrupting this post to include some breaking news
PokerStars has just released a statement with an update on Saturday’s robbery at EPT Berlin along with clearing up various rumors:
“Yesterday at approximately 2.15pm, an armed robbery took place at the European Poker Tour (EPT) event in Berlin. Nobody was seriously injured. Four armed men were involved in the robbery which targeted the tournament registration desk outside the tournament area.
No shots were fired and the suspects quickly fled after a security guard intervened. The police investigation so far has shown that the suspects had a handgun and a machete. Contrary to tabloid reports, no Kalashnikov assault rifles or hand grenades were used. The suspects did not enter the tournament area and the money taken was substantially less than what has been reported.
The tournament resumed after a few hours and a police investigation is now under way. The tournament is taking place on the first floor of the Grand Hyatt Hotel at Marlene-Dietrich-Platz and is being held by SPIELBANK Berlin Casino.
The police are working closely with the EPT and SPIELBANK Berlin. Police are asking anyone who has information, video footage or photographs that might aid the investigation to contact them.”
14 clock in Berlin’s luxury hotel “Grand Hyatt”: The European Poker elite has the honor. It is the biggest tournament in Germany. Prize money: one million euros! Even Boris Becker was as an advertising face of Pokerstars.de at the table there – until he is rausflogen on Thursday. In addition, author Charlotte Roche ( “Wetlands”). Today I want to photograph the friend of Poker Europe champion Sandra “Black Mamba” Naujoks (28). He had lost a bet, now disguised as a woman sitting at the table. So far, so ordinary.
While so much can get lost in Google translation, sometimes it spits out pure poetry. The robbers haven’t even gotten there yet, and it would be Theater of the Absurd if it weren’t about to become so real.
And that’s exactly what it is: a story that I tell surely in abundance in my back, emphasizing the amusing details. But on the stroke during the two minutes that lasted the confusion, I fear the belly.
How they got to that final table on Saturday took an approximate 5-hour detour when a group of masked robbers stormed the Grand Hyatt Hotel around 2:30pm local time. You can check out my previous two posts from Saturday for some clips here and here.
Various mainstream media reports have said that up to 1 million Euros have been stolen, or as some called it, a “jackpot“. While the EPT Berlin event did boast a 1 million Euro first prize, it’s expected that the amount the robbers were able to pocket is expected to be far less than that.
While there have been numerous eyewitness accounts, most of them are German, which can make some interesting translations for those looking for something in English. Here’s a few foreign reports (translated through Google Translate):
They’re in the money at the National Heads-Up Championship. Everyone’s brackets have turned to shit — I’ll update that situation as soon as I put this post up here — and Jerry Yang’s crew is apparently rolling old-school Hevad Khan, getting all up in Jennifer Harman’s grill. (Jennifer of all people!)
Everyone left guaranteed at least $25k in pursuit of the $500k first prize.
The payout breakdown:
Champion $500,000
Runner-Up $250,000
3rd & 4th Place $125,000
5th – 8th Place $75,000
9th – 16th Place $25,000
Here’s some video from this afternoon’s attempted robbery at EPT Berlin:
Here’s a clip of an interview from German TV news:
A translation from 2+2 poster “B4RT3K” from the interview between the reporter and “Roman” the security guard in the video above:
Reporter: “We got one witness with us, Roman, you are from the security Team (Security-Kuhr), you were involved in this conflict, how can u describe what happened there ?”
Roman: “It was really scary, with how much brutality the gangsters were acting, I was just standing there minding my own business and securing the money, happy about the fact that the day was calm and nothing happened, suddenly there is shouting and screaming coming from the hallway and the people (gangsters) rush the cashier floor with huge brutality and even armed… it was really scary.”
Reporter: “You are injured, but you got to get hold of one of the gangsters, you were trying to get the money back from him… were you successful ?”
Roman: “Yeah, thank god, we were successful… we got a huge amount of the money back from the gangsters, one of the employees of the hotel helped me there, but we couldn’t secure the gangster because he got rescued by his friends.”
Reporter: “Which weapons were used ? We saw a machete, there were rumours about grenades, kalashnikovs, guns, pump-guns etc.?”
Roman: “I can only verify the machete and a hand-held gun.”
Reporter: “So you really tried to get hold of the gangsters even though u were unarmed and they were armed with guns?”
Roman: “Yeah, in the first moment I didn’t think of the fact that they will use the guns against me, and I just wanted to stop them from what they were doing in that particular moment.”
Reporter: “Brave.”
UPDATE: Here’s another PokerNews update with audio from a police spokesman:
Details are a little sketchy, but apparently at around 2pm CET (8am ET) a group of masked robbers stormed the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Berlin during day 4 of the EPT Berlin Main Event.
Here’s video someone recorded off the live stream as people frantically leave the area:
“An armed robbery by six men took place today at EPT Berlin. Nobody was seriously injured. We hope to re-start all events at 4pm local time. A police investigation is under way. If you have video footage or photographs that could help the police, please contact the EPT organizers as soon as possible.”
UPDATE #2, make that 5pm local time for a possible restart.
UPDATE #3, the 1,000 Euro event that started today was canceled, while the main event finally resumed around 6:00pm local time, but the EPT Live webcast has been canceled. Also, here’s a breaking news article from Pokernews along with a video update:
Let the heads-up fun begin. Ali Nejad and Leann Tweeden called out the pairings at Pure in Caesars Palace last night. Here’s a print-outable PDF of the official bracket for the 2010 National Heads-Up Championship, which gets underway today at 1 pm pacific.
Make your own picks via Pokerati’s bracket-tracker to see how our various predictions compare. We’ve got about nine five hours to come up with some sort of contest … a T-shirt is always standard, but I have to admit we’re running low on Pokerati shirts for really-really large men.
Big ups to @JessWelman who kept us posted live on Twitter, and @BarryGreenstein who accidentally sent a private tweet to Phil Ivey for all the public to see. (Gavin Smith plays small-ball; should walk into Ivey’s wheelhouse.)
Our good pals at the Hard Rock wanna remind you that they have their $20,000 guarantee tourney tomorrow. They probably don’t want me to tell you that they had to add money to the prize pool the last time they ran this tourney to make the guarantee … but that’s good for you. There were about 60 players, and something like 9 got paid. (I got 12th-ish.)
Decent structure, too. 12k chips for $250 ($225+25) … with a $100 rebuy or add-on for 5k chips. (I didn’t take it. My starting table was soft.) Seriously, it’s not a huge tourney, but it’s a good one, with good payout possibilities. Starts at 6 pm. Details here.
And, of course, they’re always happy to spread 1/2 NLH/PLO … and they usually have enough people interested in dipping their toes into 4-card hold’em waters to make it happen. Just ask them to put your name on the list for the Pokerati game and they’ll be sure to accommodate. You can always text “pokerati” to 25287 and you’ll get a text whenever this game is running. I won’t be able to make it this week, but next week I’m back in action, so you probably need some practice.
UPDATE: Tournament didn’t make. Not sure where the fine print may or may not come in for “guarantees”.
This seemed obvious once the pictures started coming in that showed us while no Haiti, the destruction caused by the 8th largest earthquake in recorded history made organizing a poker tournament an afterthought:
The PokerStars.net Latin American Poker Tour (LAPT) regrets to announce that the 2010 LAPT Viña del Mar, Chile poker festival has been cancelled. The festival was scheduled to be held at the Enjoy Viña del Mar Casino and Resort from March 19-23, 2010.
All players who have qualified or bought-in to the event will be fully refunded their buy-ins and any out-of-pocket expenses*.
This cancellation follows a devastating 8.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Chile approximately 175 miles south of Viña del Mar on February 27, 2010. The cancellation of the festival has been forced by the effects of the earthquake and in light of the rescue and recovery efforts now taking place throughout Chile.
Everyone at PokerStars.net and the LAPT offers their thoughts and condolences to all of those affected by this tragic natural disaster.
The LAPT sincerely apologizes for this cancellation to the players that had planned to attend the festival.
*Players should contact lapt@pokerstars.com with any queries
You gotta chalk natural disaster up to a bad beat, but man, the LAPT seems to really be having troubles getting off the ground (even with all the soccer stars they’ve got pimping). I could see LAPT dropping down from a projected #2 spot to a #4 in terms of prestige amongst the PokerStars tours … behind EPT (obv), NAPT, and APPT.
Poker 2 Nite has returned for their 2nd season, this time they’re on Versus, as Fox Sports Net had various restrictions on what Scott Huff and Joe Sebok could actually cover on the show, especially with online poker. Joe Stapleton is no longer the head writer, replaced by the people behind Wicked Chops Poker taking over the writing.
Segment one appears below, but stayed tuned for the special Pokerati mention in segment three on page 2:
@BigRussPoker was unavailable for comment on whether or not he would be considering a move should the measure make it to law. But it’s an interesting concept, if this intrastate thing starts to take hold and spread … might you see some old-fashioned rounders traversing the country looking for the best action?
We’ll be seeing the brackets for the National Heads-Up Poker Championship soon (drawing party is tomorrow) … and with some help from KevMath, I put together a list of who’s going to be represented at the mini-tables in this made-for-TV event. The list isn’t complete — feel free to let me know if we missed any representatives that are already settled and we’ll update accordingly — but it does give an interesting snapshot of where things stand in the competitive online poker landscape-dot-net circa early 2010.
Should be interesting to see how at least a few of these unknowns end up. (Darvin Moon, for example, and Jamie Gold.) Click below for a breakdown by player …
Longtime friend of Pokerati and poker pro Gregg Merkow took a rough beat early yesterday morning when fire engulfed two of his restaurants in Dallas. A four-alarm blaze destroyed The Hurricane Grill and the Greenville Bar & Grill, owned by Merkow, along with Mick’s bar and Terilli’s, the Italian restaurant where the fire reportedly started. It’s one of the most historic blocks of Dallas nightlife on Greenville Avenue — and thus citizens are concerned about saving what they can of the buildings even after they burnt virtually to the ground.
Because we care about poker players, and due diligence, we’d throw our friends under the bus in a second for a scandalous hedline + Google juice, we couldn’t help but ask whether or not perhaps he’d been running bad lately and this fire, started at a time when the structure was safely empty, might not have been a nefarious play for insurance dollars. Turns out that Merkow didn’t even have insurance on these legendary properties that may or may not have helped launch a poker career.
While non-poker people in Dallas debate how that could be (and who should ultimately be responsible), one of the players in his regular 10/25/50 NLH/PLO game explained, “It’s Merkow. He’s a gambler.”
Our sympathy for his loss … sucks, dude. Merkow speaks with the Associated Press shortly after the fire that had nothing to do with poker here:
Our friends at CardRunners couldn’t have been more thrilled when I took down the team portion of the WSOP-Dream Team event this past summer — wearing their patch while doing so — but since then have been less than enthusiastic about my performance at the tables.
So … they strongly suggested I work on my game. “If you ever want to be taken seriously as a player you have to actually improve, Dan. You can’t go burning through your entire bankroll trying to learn PLO,” said a CardRunners representative about three steps removed from Brian Townsend. “And stop talking all this garbage about Isildur!”
So I agreed — at least to the part about my advancement in poker. I had to start by writing “I will not raise with weak starting hands against strong players in middle position” 100 times in permanent marker on a whiteboard, and then had to promise to study the video lessons available via TrulyFreePokerTraining.com.
Preface
You might wonder why there is this page. Well, I also have the services of Michael Schuett, alias adopted USAG24 Inc. and has been cheated a lot of money. Meanwhile, there are quite a lot of people who feel the same way.
The people who have resisted and have published their case as the Internet, were then put massive pressure from Michael Schuett and most have agreed to the cancellation of their websites. This of course happened after agreeing a settlement, for example, was paid some money from Michael Schuett so that the matter is created from the world. Most of these people have only received a fraction of the lost money again and had to return the sites to take from the net.
Thus Michael Schuett is still continuing its Betrügerein. I will not comment on such a comparison and the money had already been written off as dearly as I will have to deal with this person any more. However, I would keep everyone else from dealing with that person and any company business.
Your USAG24-dupe
Now for all we know this is just one disgruntled ex-colleague. But he’s had a twitter feed set up for the past three months just to track the whereabouts of this one person. @usag24betrug has three followers.
And here’s a half-hour lifestyle documentary on Michael Schuett, apparently chronicling his move to Florida:
Very strange. Might online poker sites be a victim of a fraud here? Or just tangled up with the wrong guy? I’m still not sure what to make of it all, but I do get the sense now that this situation may turn out to be about more than online poker …
Still making sense of it all, and how this is different from other poker-related money seizures and charges against Canadian Douglas Rennick … but it looks to be something big, and a new level of poker prosecutions.
It may or may not be coincidental that the the Feds have arrested Michael Olaf Schuett’s for money transfers directly related (allegedly) to online poker just as the state is taking a closer-than-ever look at the game with eyes on its revenue potential. It’s also not clear if Schuett’s been charged with anything yet, or is just being held because he is a foreign national flight risk with felony charges pending.
Here are some plausibly relevant names, and highlights that jump out at yours truly:
Michael Olaf Schuett, or Schütt, is the guy they’re after. He’s a 29-year-old German whose visa expire in April. A federal judge has ordered him held in Lee County jail without bond.
He’s been married only a month to a 28-year-old woman he’s known for only nine months. Her name is Jennifer Sherman.
Feds allege that since opening accounts in 2007, Schuett has transferred about $70 million to 23,000 people, mostly Americans and supposedly online poker winnings.
The giveaway was dozens of checks being received daily via Fed Ex.
People cashing checks sent to them from Schuett claim they are online poker winnings.
Secret Service is the law enforcement agency involved.
Agents are seeking to execute search warrants and seize allegedly ill-gotten property, such as fancy cars and watches.
The complaint lays out a web of money transfers between businesses and banks and players.
Lots of American and Canadian banks in play. Key company serving as go-between: Bluetool Ltd. out of Germany.
Supposedly no direct allegations in the complaint against any online poker sites, but the Naples News reporter was able to connect them to transactions from Full Tilt, PokerStars, and Absolute.
Three specific players — Corey Drury, Darren Elias, and Derek Dubois — get named as receiving money through Schuett’s legally questionable operation. All three have public profiles on BluffMagazine, PocketFives, CardPlayer, and PokerPages.
As banks became hip to the set-up, Schuett tried to create a new accounts to hold the money, claiming to be a real estate investor — a story the banks didn’t buy.
Once upon a time, February 27, was perhaps more important to the poker blogosphere than 4/20. You’d see the pokergeeky intertubes go nuts over the date representing a dream flop for those of us who like to raise from early position with 2-7 offsuit. But after so many years — and perhaps just an economic necessity of grinding in the Obama era — has the Hammer lost its luster?
It’s still been fascinating to watch the mainstreaming of a hand over the years. I hope I don’t get crucified for disparaging the sacred 7-deuce (as no longer seen on High Stakes Poker) … but perhaps the jumping-the-shark moment for the Hammer came when UB took it on?
We all know there’s lots of chit-chat on blind structures, always, and there should be. They are important. In the early days of the poker boom, a lot of tourney directors didn’t really know what they were doing and surely didn’t understand the nuances of stack sizes deep into tournaments with bigger-than-expected fields. Then the Venetian came along with their Deep Stack concept, kinda-sorta revolutionizing the way smaller-stakes tournaments were played … at which point everyone started copying it and multiplying … and eventually trying to apply a bajillion starting chips concept to higher buy-in, big-time poker.
That’s when TDA honcho Matt Savage stepped up to say, wait a minute, let’s take a look beyond the first few levels, maybe these perceived Deep Stacks in a lot of instances aren’t all everyone says they’re supposed to be. Just about any educated “outsider” I’ve talked to who has taken a close look at the prevalent blind structures of the day contend that, indeed, while the non-bastardized Venetian Deep Stacks set-up is good, Savage’s not-so-deep-stacks structure as seen at the LAPC are indeed some of the best in the business — a model for other tourney directors to emulate.
Also last week, kinda funny, I had just shown up in the tournament room at the Commerce when I was supposedly simultaneously in front of a computer, chatting in the LAPC livecam chat room:
(Thanks to all looking out for this site’s good name.)
6:54 pokerati: maybe we can get uyou involved somehow with some streams like this..
6:54 WhoJedi: Pokerati is Dan, is this Dan?
6:54 WhoJedi: That would be cool.
6:54 pokerati: nosir
6:55 pokerati: i did NOT no there was a pokerat that wud be cinfused
6:55 pokerati: i am NOT impostering
6:55 WhoJedi: lol More…
The LAPC main event is fixin’ to get underway … Friday at noon, and Yevgeniy Timoshenko, Jason Mercier, and a few others got together to hold a $5,000 fantasy draft for the main event of California’s version of the WSOP.
More to come as the field takes shape tomorrow/today Friday. Last stretch of satellites going on now.
I’ve been following this event multimedially via the 147 emails a day they send me and via the official LAPC blog.
With over 3.5 million people playing bingo on the web regularly (and with this number set to rise over the coming years) it is worth being aware of the risks involved. However, with a vested interest in keeping their customers happy, bingo providers take their online security very seriously indeed.
Like joining any site, registering with your chosen bingo provider is simple. The requirement to enter private details is inevitable, as you will sooner or later need to add funds to your account in order to qualify for any joining-bonuses or promotions that the site may offer. Initially, of course, players can play for free while they learn and gain experience before they join the high rollers and play for real, but once they are “in the zone” they will want to taste the real winnings for themselves, and to take this next step they will have to take the security plunge and enter names and bank account details.
But have no fear. As mentioned above, the online bingo providers – like any online gaming institution – have to take care of their information databases, so employ the best possible security systems to keep this information scrambled. The bad publicity generated from any successfully hacked site would be immense, and like the old saying goes, mud sticks.
Just reading this might not be enough to set your mind at ease, however. If you are concerned, you can do your own research into the kind of security employed by the majority of bingo providers: SSL technology. This stands for Secure Socket Layer, and is the best possible for maintaining security at 128-bit encryption. This ensures transaction details and personal information stay hidden from prying eyes. Coupled with this, gaming sites use a separate, secure, remote server. Isolated in this way, it is much more difficult for hackers to get in amidst that personal information.
In any case, and as though these measures were not enough to reassure you, should a hacker reach through the layers of security they would find incomplete card information. Gaming providers only keep the first and last four digits in their databases, meaning that half the information needed is missing. Added to this is the benefit of the casinos playing Big Brother, tracking the individual IP address of any player to ensure that an account is not being tampered with, a kind of in-game police to protect players.
An extra step you can take is to use a credit rather than a debit card to withdraw funds, giving you an added level of security when claiming money back from your credit card providers in the case of any fraud, no matter how unlikely.
All in all, there is much to be secure about when thinking about gaming security. With safety assured, bingo players can be left to get on with what they join sites for in the first place: to have fun (playing bingo).
I’m still alive, but Pauly’s out. Before bringing our Hollywood poker weekend to a close, we decide we should get a firsthand taste of the real Commerce degen experience, so Pauly escorts me to the ATM to make good on an a charitable WPT rebuy acquired-at-the-table debt before he jets off to Uruguay.
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This would be our last episode of the book on the 2010 WPT Celebrity Invitational. In the end, cards didn’t fall my way as I finished sans audio and had to twitter in my results:
@Pokerati Out to vince van fuckhead. All in preflop my AQ < 57s. I respect his play
12:55 AM Feb 21st via txt
Your intrepid player-correspondents catch up on the first break at the star-studded WPT Celebrity Invitational to talk about how the tourney is going … I’ve battled back from chip-and-a-chair conditions at a table full of pros (and rebought with Pauly money) to stay alive, while Pauly has been taunted by errant nipples and offered blow in the bathroom. We’re not even deep, but we’re already taking note of would-be final tableist Trishelle Cannatella, too, before getting distracted by the pathos of Commerce steerage.
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The PPA was in Massachusetts this week, testifying before a joint committee on behalf of H4069, which would classify poker as a game of skill — apparently important as that state considers a variety of casino-related legislation.
Go Massachusetts Skillaments, but elsewhere, far more is at stake for states that could care less about the nuances of what is and is not technically gambling amongst avowed gamblers. Thus, PPA Executive Director John Pappas has been crisscrossing the country addressing states considering intrastate online poker, trying to persuade them not to muddy the online semi-gambling waters with legislation that comes to the table inherently flawed, legally and from a competitive market standpoint.
Pappas was in Florida last week, addressing a Senate committee on regulated industries. Florida, as we know, has been working on more and more legal poker for the past five or six years with much success, so why not extend that to the internet? Well, Pappas explains, because problems needing fixin’ at the federal level first. Without it, anything any one state creates, he says, automatically will exist in a a legal gray area that could be challenged in a variety of federal ways. And because of this gray area, and the way poker works, regulated “state monopoly” sites will struggle to compete against the unregulated likes of Full Tilt and PokerStars. (He doesn’t mention those sites by name, but players know that’s who he’s talking about.)
It’s an important argument to begin honing, because right now we have California and Florida moving aggressively in the intrastate direction — supposedly with Iowa and Wyoming about to jump on the bandwagon. Legislation can be a rather cut-and-paste enterprise these days, so if those four states go, then it’s only a matter of time before some 40+ others follow suit, which could undermine, or at least complicate, years of work on by poker’s favorite grassroots advocacy group.
Have a listen. In addition to bringing the California arguments to Florida, for the first time we hear the PPA start to lay out some of the details on how internet poker taxation would work under either the Frank or Menendez bills — with provisions included for individual states to receive their revenue share from the federal regulatory system. We also learn of a new organization — the Poker Voters of America — that has effectively brought the idea of intrastate online poker to the Florida legislature. On its surface, the PVA doesn’t look too different from the PPA. But strategically, they’re fighting the UIGEA in a much different way. Well-meaning but misguided is the gist; can we have your donor list?
Poker2Nite inked a deal for a second season of the poker-news-talk-variety show presented by UB.net, featuring Scott Huff, Joe Stapleton, and Joe Sebok. After a start-up run on FoxSports — and seen regularly on Pokerati — season 2 will run for 12 episodes on the Versus network … Versus was formerly the Outdoor Life Network before rebranding itself as a sports and lifestyle channel in late 2008. This seems to be in line with their development of slightly non-traditional sports programming.
We’ll see how any new embedding options work, and what else may or may not change with the new channel. But glad to see the industry still able to support two semi-independent poker television news shows … the other, of course, being ESPNs The Inside Deal presented by PokerStars.
The new season begins on Wednesday, March 3, supposedly at 11 pm … though I am thinking that must be Eastern Time since the Cox Las Vegas listings say it airs at 8 pm and re-airs on Fridays at 2:30 pm. Channel 38.
And a little bubbling-under semi-related to the show … Cohost Sebok says he tried to buy out of his face-tattoo prop bet with Gavin Smith and Jeff Madsen, but they wouldn’t accept … which you know how that works … makes him the odds-on favorite to win the permanent lasts-longer bet for the LAPC main event.
The North American Poker Tour at the Venetian is coming to its inevitable conclusion with the $5,000 main event final table, scheduled to start at 2pm PT today, with live streaming available at www.napt.com/tv. Here’s how the final table of 8 will look when play resumes:
On Thursday, the final table of the $25,000 High Roller Bounty Invitational Shootout will play out, also scheduled to start at 2pm PT. Here’s the final table, with the number of $5,000 bounties each collected:
Each player earned $75,000 for winning their table, with the last man standing on Thursday pocketing $455,000 in the winner-take-all format. All seven players are also eligible to win an additional $100,000 from PokerStars.net for having the most bounties.
For those looking to follow the action, check out www.pokerstarsblog.com w/ ShortStack Shamus, Jennifer Newell and Otis, or the live reporting over at PokerNews.
They already offer online lottery tickets, online bingo, sports betting, competitive crossword puzzles (for money), and online mini-golf. While we may want to balk at newcomers trying to get in on the international action with their own localized version of it, ALC could be an interesting group to watch. They’ve already got mobile platforms in play, partnerships with brick and mortar casinos, and have some quite different sorts of marketing ideas to the table. For example, currently spreading the viral word of ALC’s games is a money contest catering to those with social media prowess to get your dog featured on a lottery ticket.
Why do I think that no matter what does or doesn’t pass legislatively around the world in the next few years that online poker will look very different in the not-too-distant future? Kinda shocked that we haven’t yet seen the Spuds McKenzie of Poker.
RELATED: This comes in the wake of Quebec planning on its own provincial online poker set-up — an attempt to “cannibalize illegal gambling sites” — before (temporarily?) pulling the plug just last week at the frantic request of health officials fearing major addiction problems for certain Canadian hosers.
We were still waiting for cards to get in the air at the WPT Celebrity Invitational when we found the red-carpeted smoker’s terrace at the Commerce. The first ever PartyPoker Party in LA, too — LA: It’s Very Different than America — as Tao of Pokerati runs into its first ever security issue.
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The field in the $5,000 buy-in NAPT Main Event at the Venetian is down to their final 24 players, with a few recognizable names remaining as they play down to the final table of 8 today. Today is also the first day of the $25,000 buy-in Invitational Bounty Shootout. 7 tables, each seating 7 players, will play down to a winner. If you knock out a player at your table, you pick up a $5,000 bounty, with PokerStars.net giving the player collecting the most bounties an additional $100,000. The winner of each table is guaranteed $50,000 $75,000, with the 7 winners returning on Thursday. The winner takes home the remaining prize pool – $630,000 $455,000.
The list of who’ll be playing in the 6th running of NBC’s $25k heads-up extravaganza is out. The event runs at Caesar’s March 4-7.
(Looks like a hodgepadge of patches, including one non-poker website … presenting sponsor GoDaddy.com.)
The entire field (alphabetical order):
Patrik Antonius
Eric Baldwin
Andy Bloch
Doyle Brunson
Joe Cada
Johnny Chan
Don Cheadle
Allen Cunningham
Pieter de Korver
Annie Duke
Tom Dwan
Peter Eastgate
Eli Elezra
Antonio Esfandiari
Sam Farha
Chris Ferguson
Ted Forrest
Jamie Gold
Phil Gordon
Barry Greenstein
Bertrand Grospellier
Joe Hachem
Gus Hansen
Jennifer Harman
Phil Hellmuth
Orel Hershiser
Jesper Hougaard
Phil Ivey
John Juanda
Gabe Kaplan
John Paul Kelly
Phil Laak
Howard Lederer
Erick Lindgren
Mike Matusow
Jason Mercier
Dario Minieri
Chris Moneymaker
Darvin Moon
Greg Mueller
Daniel Negreanu
Scotty Nguyen
Annette Obrestad
Brock Parker
Dennis Phillips
Greg Raymer
Shawn Rice (Caesars qualifier)
Vanessa Rousso
Kara Scott
Huck Seed
Erik Seidel
Mike Sexton
Gavin Smith
Jennifer Tilly
Paul Wasicka
David Williams
Leo Wolpert
Jerry Yang
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I’m still alive, but Pauly’s out. Before bringing our Hollywood poker weekend to a close, we decide we should get a firsthand taste of the real Commerce degen experience, so Pauly escorts me to the ATM to make good on an 
