Not to get all Lady Gaga over Phil Ivey … but seriously, the dude who’s only the third-biggest tournament winner in history seldom speaks to anyone not engaged in some sort of gamble with him for more than 30 seconds at a time. But he sat down for nearly 9 minutes with Poker.se and tells what it took to develop his game (15-16 hrs/day, 4-5 yrs), how rough it is to make it as a pro, bankroll management, the importance of Bobby’s Room during the WSOP, his bracelet prop-bet odds, November Nine preparation, etc.

via PokerNews

We’re not the only ones intrigued by the Kennedy vs. Full Tilt bot case.

Courthouse News Service took note. It’s like a Thrillist for lawyers … a subscription newsletter keeping attorneys abreast of “the most prolific and weighty litigation” in virtually all the courts in the USA (and Canada, Puerto Rico, and Guam).

And the Financial Times (the Wall Street Journal of the UK, you know, where all those European online sites that don’t accept American players reside) sees it as a bit more of a federal case:

Full Tilt accused of flouting US internet gambling rules

Congratulations to the Hendon Mob, who were picked by Pokerati readers as the clear favorite when it comes to looking up a player’s stats.

The Mob got nearly half the votes. CardPlayer got roughly half the remaining half. And an interesting 3rd-place finisher: PokerPages … which as we recently learned is going out of business.

Word on the electronic street is that at least two entities that didn’t make a strong showing in Pokerati’s unscientific poll are beginning the process of trying to buy PP’s player database at a fire-sale price.

Meanwhile, be sure to check out our new poll — sidebar, toppish-right — wondering: How many November Niner names do you know?

Face the Ace: Whether he’s abusively litigious or not is up for debate, but the Hollywood lawyer challenging Full Tilt (right) is apparently no legal schlep.

Just looking into the lawyer pressing the RICO Bot-suit against Full Tilt … Cyrus Sanai … from the best I can tell, he’s quite the loose-aggressive legal player … perhaps a self-appointed Gus Hansen of the courtroom?

Back in the day he wrote for Slate.com, about issues such as assisted suicide and school violence … and seemed to dig the journalism thing during his days at Harvard. (That’s where he went for undergrad. Law School at UCLA.)

His most recent case of note came last year, when he engaged in an ongoing battle against an LA judge … where Sanai found the judge’s personal blog, complete with humorous/bizarre porn images, and outed his NSFW fetish proclivities while was adjudicating a big obscenity case against a pornographer:

The question is how someone who has frequently engaged in frivolous litigation still remains a member of the California bar without any disciplinary record. It will be appalling if Kozinski faces judicial discipline in this dispute before Sanai faces attorney discipline.

More on what the LA legal community has to say about him below:

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PokerNews probably woulda prefered their name were never attached to this event.

The Venetian sued the parent company of the Sports Legends Challenge last week in Clark County Court, claiming the operation skipped out on a contract to the tune of $174k.

And now, according to at least one disgruntled former employee and phones no longer being answered, the operation full-on shut down today.

We can only imagine, that this is just the beginning of the fallout, actually.

Think about it … you’ve got two lawsuits regarding the set-up of the event … and we haven’t even gotten to the Bahamas yet!

Whether or not there was any fraud-like criminal activity in this multimillion-dollar-semi-bluff-gone-awry remains to be seen. Two lawsuits aside, potential additions to the got-screwed list include:

– Player who bought in
– Investors
– Charities hosting casino events promising SLC seats as prizes
– Players who won those seats
– Players who chopped and paid cash for the extra portion of those seats
– Poker pros who fronted their own travel costs

Anyone else?

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A big poker-related legislative battle is going on right now in Pennsylvania. In fact, state representatives debated the matter well into the night on Sunday — an unusual move for the Pennsylvania House.

At issue is the inclusion of table games — blackjack and poker specifically — in Pennsylvania “slot machine parlors”. Doing so would bring in $242 million … and yesterday’s overtime debate revolved around 170 amendments to the bill.

It’s definitely not all about poker though, or gambling for that matter … Pennsylvania apparently has been at a legislative impasse and operating without a state budget for 97 days!

It does seem, however, that the expanded gambling measure could make or break the budget as a whole.

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More on BetonSports honcho David Carruthers’ surprising change of plea (in the UK press). Carruthers, of course, was the executive arrested in Dallas in 2006 — where the American government stepped up the level of their online gambling crackdown, showing the intent of not just confiscating hundreds of millions of dollars at a time, but also putting a new breed of white-collar criminal in prison.

For a guy who’s not interested in getting press nor a sponsorship from an online poker site or anyone else … November Nine chipleader Darvin Moon sure did get some good ink this weekend, with a major feature in the Sunday Washington Post. Not bad for a guy who was living in a trailer at the foot of Backbone Mountain (before receiving his 9th place money and replacing it with a new modular home).

My favorite excerpt:

Moon started playing poker after giving up softball because, he says, “I got fat.” … Of course, in the slovenly melting pot of the poker room, having a half-watermelon for a gut doesn’t stand out, particularly not at the World Series, where players have been known to show up wearing animal costumes or dressed as Roman emperors.

LOL, “slovenly melting pot” … It’s funny because it’s true! fair description?

BTW, check out the comments on this piece … you’ll see at least a few WaPo readers question why they should even give a flip about this story.

Meanwhile, I can’t help but wonder if Moon isn’t a matter of weak-means-strong … both on the table and off. (I guess that’s one of the things we’ll be looking to find out at the final table, and the lead-up to it.)

Says Card Player magazine President Jeff Shulman, who will be sitting at the final table with Moon in November, albeit with 40 million fewer chips: “Darvin tries to say he’s not that good, he’s just an amateur who got lucky and ran really well for eight days. But at some point, you can’t say you’re just lucky. He was making good decisions.”

We have two major news stories in online gambling. The first is that former BetOnSports CEO David Carruthers has withdrawn his guilty plea in Missouri. And the second is the closing of Pitbull Poker, with rumors of criminal activity and arrests in Costa Rica. Those stories and other industry news.

I apparently missed this a few weeks ago. In case you did, too:

via TheHitWoman.com

Here’s the actual Kennedy vs. FTP lawsuit, 19 pages, filed by Cyrus Sanai, a lawyer out of Beverly Hills.

And here’s the 2+2 thread from 2007 when the key plaintiff — Lary Kennedy (aka “pokergirl_z” on Full Tilt) — first spelled out her beefs that led to this lawsuit … mostly stemming from a series of heads-up matches against a Full Tilt player known as “TheComplainer”.

Kennedy is the real plaintiff. Greg Omoroy is just a guy who owned another account she used (which is a whole-nother issue altogether). And though they aren’t formally seeking class-action status, they do seem to be laying the groundwork for such a possibility — an aggressive legal play for sure.

Essentially, the allegations are that Full Tilt — with unfettered ability to label a player a bot, confiscate her money, and smear her name by calling her a bot — constitutes organized crime … being perpetuated by Californians against Californians, in violation of all sorts of California business and gaming laws.

They also say that “Playing Against the Pros” is tantamount to gambling against the “house” … there’s an added boogeyman with allegations that Full Tilt is running its own bots on the site … and a new-to-me company gets discussed, too: Verta Enterprises, out of St. Kitts.

On the surface, that seems less shakedown/extortion-y than other California lawsuits against Full Tilt. But the class-action possibilities suggest this suit is really looking for penalties in the hundreds of millions or more — you know, the kind of money the Feds have been collecting from longtime online gambling purveyors looking to get on the USA clean list.

If it turns out pokergirl_z was not a bot — and she claims to have video proof — it could be quite the expensive security goof.

Click below for further breakdown of the suit:

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It’s always generally amusing when poker pros semi-catch the attention of those charged with letting us know about celebrities showing up at various locales around town. Yesterday, at the Palms:

Former MLB athlete and manager, Pete Rose dined at N9NE Steakhouse inside Palms Casino Resort Saturday night (10.3.09). Wearing a white dress shirt, blue jeans and white alligator boots, he joined his friends Mike Bertolini (sports memorabilia agent), Todd Brunson (professional poker legend) and Brunson’s son Doyle. They gathered for a short while to enjoy some cappuccino, leaving a little after 10 p.m.

Todd really is a legend when you think about it … but didn’t realize he had a coffee-drinking squirt named Doyle, LOL. A little curious what they musta been talking about with Pete Rose and a sports memorabilia agent. Perhaps Rose is thinking about making a go at the Poker Hall of Fame?

Andreas Oscarsson
Photo: PokerListings.com

The father of Andreas Oscarsson, the PokerListings cofounder murdered in Sweden two months ago, says his son was the victim of a professional hit. He spoke on Swedish TV (their equivalent of America’s Most Wanted, I believe) in hopes that the public can help police solve this crime.

Apparently there was almost no evidence left behind.

Oscarsson, of course, was one of the biggest success stories of the international online poker boom — not as a player, but in helping bring players to online sites — and he accumulated vast wealth in a relatively short period of time. The semi-retired poker affiliate kingpin was on a brief holiday to his family home in Sweden this past August when an unknown assailant quietly broke into the house. He was shot six times with what investigators believe was a silencer-capped pistol as his wife, parents, and two-year-old son slept.

Hear Oscarsson’s father in his own (chilling) words:

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You don’t need to speak Swedish to kinda-sorta understand what this is really all about …

Click below for two recent stories (Google translations) about the highest-stakes murder the Swedes have seen in a long while … one police do not seem close to solving.

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It was a seemingly epic battle for a queen’s ransom that went well into the wee hours GMT … old-school poker in Poker’s N€w World, if you will.

And making his second consecutive go at the WSOP-E main-event title, runner-up Daniel Negreanu would come up two outs short of being “happy” that he just became the biggest winner in the history of tournament poker.

photo: The Tower / A World of Poker

Negreanu knocked out six of the other final table-ists to get heads-up. And yet in the end Barry Shulman — CardPlayer’s overlord emeritus — held strong in a war of presumably tight aggression to win £801,603 (= $1,283,687 USD). That, of course, is almost exactly the amount his son Jeff has been guaranteed for making the November Nine. No added pressure/father’s shadow issues for sure.

Negreanu’s second-place finish and £496k payday propelled him to the top of the all-time tourney-money leaderboard, passing Jamie Gold and Phil Ivey — who now needs to finish 6th-or-better this November to re-pass Negreanu as the winningest tournament player ever.

(Thanks, Lance, for the deets!)

Here’s video of the final two hands from The Casino at the Empire, Leicester Square:

(If for some reason the above vid disappears, you can find the original page here.)

For those of us debating how ESPN and PokerPROductions (a different film crew than the gang producing WSOP-LV episodes) should do their broadcasting jobs … it seems this 6-day event will be shown in 2 hours, not 20 … and that includes squeezing in the Caesar’s Cup! While that may not seem to do poker-junkie justice to a tournament that kept a bunch of us jaded, immune-to-tourney-hype types checking in on the action for more than 16 hours of final table play, I suppose movie-length could work, too.

UPDATE: Clarification of ESPN’s programming intent in the comments below (from ESPN sources who would know). They plan to give it way too much more coverage than implied above.

Click below for Nolan’s official write-up/script:

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