After spending quite a bit of time as the small stack, Dallas’ own Allen Carter bested the most recent WPT Final table at the Southern Poker Championship in Biloxi, MS, taking home $1,000,000, an entry into the WPT Championship, and his first major bracelet. This win also marked his first 6-figure drag.

Allen is a member of a very elite group of poker players. Not because of his new bracelet or his arguable transition to pro ranks. It actually has little to do with how he plays, but more to do with why he plays. In my opinion, there are about 5 different kinds of players. Let me also note that I recognize that the majority of players belong to more than one of each.

1) Those who play for fun (Think Guy Laliberte)

Even his txt msgs have the right attitude.

2) Those who play for profit (Tom Schneider)
3) Those who play for action (Dan Michalski)
4) Those who play because of addiction (Endless list)
5) Those who play for lack of better options (Think tomorrow’s Madsen and other young guns turn college drop-outs of today)
…and finally…
6) Those who play purely for competition (Allen Carter)

I first met Allen in ’06 in the DFW airport, waiting to board a flight to the WSOP. He had won an entry into the Main Event through and online tournament. Actually, I should be clear,… He won FOUR entries. Pretty awesome in its own right, but totally redonkulous if you consider that he did all of it in only 6 attempts! And I believe that I remember he also came in 2nd in another one of those events.

You can’t enjoy success like that if you can’t commit yourself completely and exclusively to a single player category. And in case it isn’t obvious, the only two categories capable of supporting such are 1) Profit and 2) Competition. Allen has expressed to me multiple times that competition is his only reason for playing. Without that, he simply won’t play.

I understand that this philosophy almost completely contradicts the principles of the only other successful player category, profit, where you try to find the juiciest and softest game available. But maybe what Allen has figured out is that as long as you have enough water in the sports bottle (bankroll), you should always opt to play against the young, tall, black team, and never against the short, white, computer nerd, poker enthusiasts. Because with poker, unlike any other sport, you can put yourself or find yourself in the ‘big game’ at any time. This time it was a white, 40-something, former CPA from Dallas who prepared for and conquered the biggest game of his life. While he was preparing, you were checking your fish lists and looking for the softest SnG’s you could find.

The Continental Poker Championship has scheduled their first PPV event (with Pokerati’s own Tom Schneider on commentary) at the Turning Stone Casino in Verona, New York on Monday. Their first tournament, also at Turning Stone, drew 117 for a $2,000 buyin event back in July. Organizers were surely expecting similar numbers for their $1,500 3-day tournament, which started Saturday. Unfortunately, it looks like those final table participants may be waiting around for a while. According to a poster on 2+2 (post #666), they drew about 64. At 4:30 ET today, a player was eliminated in 30th. No word of if the final table is still to take place on Monday, but watch this space for any further updates if they become available.

Update: Play ended for the day around 8pm ET with 17 players left.

The final table starts at about noon ET today, Pokerpages will be providing live updates here.

We have online gambling news from the UK as Google loosens advertising restrictions for our industry. Also, what can US poker players do right now to help their cause?! Plus, we start to put the pieces of the Cardspike puzzle together!

And earlier in the week … Are we finally starting to learn the truth about Cardspike? Yes! But is it the whole truth? That’s still to be seen. See the latest “confessions” from those involved in the Cardspike scandal. Plus a visit to the Affiliate Summit and take a brief look inside!

As we can tell from a flurry of new comments on an old post, apparently the creator of the Poker Bowl, John Nightingale, is up to his old plausibly criminal heretofore legally uncontested shenanigans … as some fantasy sports players are feeling a little ripped off, kinda like cash-finishers in the Poker Bowl did until the Nevada Gaming Commission held the Palms’ feet to the fire and made the host venue pay up.

Supposedly all was going to be rectified and the event resurrected under new management … and then we didn’t hear from them for a while — televised poker is hard. But as Mathers points out, there’s a new video from October showing what a fun, different, crazy-but-still-true-pokery tournament the Poker Bowl really was, or could have been. You get to see Lacey Jones doing her thing, Mark Seif (and a happily drinky Scotty Nguyen) wearing an Absolute Poker uniform, and lots of moaning and dancing. Fun video. No audio though … gee, televised poker is hard … (or at least good televised poker apparently is).

Supposedly we’ll be seeing the PB (again) in 2009. But that was posted in October, right around the time financial realities were becoming uber-clear to potential backers, so … we’ll have to see if the Poker Bowl can live up to its promise. Meanwhile, the original creator of the event seems to have nothing to do with it — he’s busy taking in a few months worth of upper-middle-class living expenses while fantasy sports players screams “rip-off!”

Good times.

UPDATE: Never mind. Typo. Oops. But apparently these results ARE lies. Not accurate, I swear!

Maybe this is old news to most active online players … but I’ve been playing on Full Tilt a healthy unhealthy amount of late, and have been running pretty good. So I decided to SharkScope myself to see if there was any change in my public stats. Change indeed … Did a search for “dantana72″ on Full Tilt, and got the following results:

Their question makes me laugh. Because in a way, that’s what’s apparently at issue … in the future, regardless of the legal frontier, people will be choosing their game, er, network based on whether or not they want their data publicly available, er, mine-able. My stats are available for RiverDan72 on PokerStars, btw. Clearly it is nothing but a bunch of lies … down a thousand my ass!

Choose your game:

PokerStars (viewable by SharkScope)
Full Tilt Poker (not viewable by SharkScope)

Thanks to Gary Trask of Casino City Times, we have an update and some clarity on the all-too-important matter of Vanessa Rousso appearing in the upcoming swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated.

According to the article published today, Rousso will appear in the issue but, well…:

On Friday, Sports Illustrated Director of Communications Kelli Raftery explained the situation more clearly by saying that Rousso would be appear in the magazine, but not as a “featured model in the editorial portion of the magazine.” Instead, Rousso will appear as part of a PokerStars-sponsored “custom content” piece, which the online poker room paid for.

So, it’s a paid ad, but SI did the photo shoot. SI decided against featuring her with other models in the primary feature spread because “poker was not the direction it wanted to go in.” Interesting. Kinda a bummer, but still good to see that Rousso will make an appearance in the most popular Sports Illustrated issue of the year.

Call it a rally cry or a jump on the bandwagon, but with the UIGEA hitting poker so hard over the past year, it is high time we see some hope on the horizon. That hope comes in the form of a new president taking office on Tuesday and the old one (and his sneaky midnight regulations) getting the boot.

President-elect Obama and his transition team established a website to give the people of America a voice. Change.gov has a section called Citizen’s Briefing Book, wherein with a simple log-in, anyone can sound off about issues that they’d like to see the Obama administration put on its radar. Poker players have stepped up and taken action, not only by posting entries about online poker and the UIGEA, but taking one post in particular and ranking it so high (second at one point) that the Obama administration will have to take a look at it.

The entry called “Boost America’s Economy with Legal Online Poker” didn’t use spell-check isn’t the most detailed, but sometimes short-and-sweet is all that’s necessary. By thousands of people logging in and hitting “vote up” next to the entry, it has become one of the most viewed on the site. It takes a few minutes, and each subsequent vote will push the issue that much closer to Obama’s desk.

Meanwhile, in Congress, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) has introduced the Midnight Rule Act in an attempt to negate – or at least call into review – the last three months of regulations put into effect by the lame duck Bush administration. That would include the UIGEA that, despite objections by financial institutions, will go into effect on Monday, January 19th with compliance required by December 1st. If Nadler’s bill passes and gets to Obama’s desk, all of those midnight antics would go through a review, and possible rejection, by the appropriate members of Obama’s cabinet. This is a chance to reverse the enforcement dates of the UIGEA and give us more time to lobby Obama to help us change it.

Get on over to the PPA website, where you can get in touch with your Congressional representative and urge their support of the Midnight Rule Act introduced by Nadler.

Boys, the images in your minds of Vanessa Rousso in a swimsuit will have to be good enough. Gary Trask of Casino City Times reported yesterday that Sports Illustrated did the photo shoot but decided to leave her out of the swimsuit edition.

That’s cold, SI. Colder than it is today in North Dakota…cold.

Since Vanessa said that it was a good experience for her, those memories will have to suffice. And her renewed energy for poker this year might get her that big win on the felt in ’09.

Apparently the animal rights activists have a problem with our use of the term “fish”. While my first reaction was that the PPA needs to do something about this! Where’s Barney Frank?!? … but upon a little pause and reflection, I’m thinking maybe we should let this one go. As competing political forces, maybe poker and PETA should compromise — if we can have fully legal online poker, OK, fine, we’ll start calling inexperienced players “sea kittens”. Cool? Cool.

First we hear word that Full Tilt has plans to open a sports book, and now, apparently, according to an email from Doyle himself — or at least on from his room, with his face and signature embedded — they’ve got “big changes” in store, and it seems to include references to bona-fide online gambling:

Big Changes Are Just Around the Corner!
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As DoylesRoom readies to launch our all new poker room and casino, we ask that you keep a very close eye on your email box.



Get ready for over $5,000,000 in monthly guarantees, multiple daily and nightly guaranteed tournaments, an all new rewards program and the most active network that we’ve ever called home. It’s more of everything you love about DoylesRoom.

More players, more tables, and more guarantees at the times of the day you want to play poker.

This week, there will be no Bounty tournament as we transition to our incredible new platform. The Bounty will return on January 21st at 9:30pm ET. We will be sending each of our players detailed emails describing the new exciting changes and what needs to be done to smoothly transition to our new network.

May the Flop Be With You, I’ll see you in The Bounty on the 21st.

I’m not really sure what’s behind this sudden switch to pre-UIGEA standards. But these apparent moves by the likes of Doyle’s Room and Full Tilt almost certainly aren’t being made cavalierly without thought to the current, 2009 political sitch. And January 21, of course, is a significant date in non-poker America.

Click here to check out what’s up at Doyle’s Room.

For some reason, I think this drink stands a better chance of success than The Real Deal:

Tequila:How To Make A Poker Face Cocktail

(via What’s On)

I hadn’t played at the Wynn in nearly a year … but did so last night, and much to my delight they got rid of their confusing $3 chips in the $1/$3 NL game. They now use the more standard $1 and $5 denominations.

Not sure when the change happened — presumably in 2008 — but I’ll be staying there for the next couple days, and not having to brush up on my base-3 mathematics makes the game that much more enjoyable.

(Played last night there for 2.5 hours … buy-in: $200, cash out: $268. Not bad, but I left a couple orbits too late, as my stacks were over $500 when I got that leaving feeling.)

In this special episode, I begin interviewing possible Benjo scabs should the Tao of Pokerati’s non-American correspondent go on strike and find none other than Garthmeister J sitting with a big stack during the first break in a $110, 100-player Binion’s tourney. Our favorite work-vacationing Aussie gets his jabs in, calling Benjo his favorite Tao of Pokerati personality “that crazy French guy on crank”, while learnin’ us on why American beer is like sex in a canoe and why Binion’s will always hold a special place in his poker heart.

Book 9: Coup d’ePoker (feat. Garthmeister J)
Episode 9.1: Poker on, Garth 4:24

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Also, an extra-special guest appearance reminding us that Tao of Pokerati is the favorite poker podcast of former members of Public Enemy, and that black could theoretically be a foreign accent, too.

We continue our look into Cardspike’s alleged connection to Casino Affiliate Programs. Plus, indusry news that could tie online gaming to terrorism as we wait on an important decision in Kentucky!

Yeesh, you go AWOL for just a blip, and suddenly everyone thinks you’ve pulled a Mike Matusow. En route to the Bahamas, the Tao of Pokerati’s favorite Frenchman, Benjo, stopped off in Pauly’s New York hood for some All-American New Years Eve shenanigans (Benjo’s version here and, even funnier, here), and in the process they turned to stimulating discussion of playing poker in prison (tight is right!), the best French players in 2008 (David Benyamine and Bertrand “Elky” Grospellier), what Frenchie players are and are not broke, Benjo’s love for keno and Marrakech hookers, the “Budapest Incident” turned Lesbian Vomit Show … all capped off with a how-to on ordering from the international buffet of Gotham prostitutes. Tao of Pokerati at its finest — always the case when Benjo’s in town!

Book 7: Big Apple Benjo
New York City

Episode 7.1: Jailhouse Rocks (and Maniacs)
3:15

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Episode 7.2: The (French) Year in Review
4:49

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Episode 7.3: Hookers around the World! *
5:06

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*This episode brought to you by Asian Delight Massage.

UPDATE: Benjo nails another French claim to greatness, as ElkY took down PokerStars $25k “High Roller” event in the Bahamas yesterday. Clearly the only “best” French poker analyst in the biz.