I swear we’re not going gay(er than usual) here at Pokerati … but that song we told you about a long time ago, Poker Face by Lady Gaga, has now been turned into a male figure skating routine:
In preparation for the upcoming Vancouver Olympics, US figure skating champ Johnny Weir skated to the song about bluffin’ with muffins for an exhibition performance at US Nationals last week. Glad to see that the word about poker/lesbianism is still spreading.
The Poker Beat Crew celebrates our first-year victory in Bluff Magazine’s Reader’s Choice Awards. Then we take on the Kathy Liebert / Daniel Negreanu confab in Mississippi where they talked about what it really takes to get a sponsorship deal in this day and age … and we speculate on where Annette Obrestad fits in to all this. Then, what it means if anything that Phil Ivey dethroned Daniel Negreanu as the all-time tournament money leader.
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Here are the other winners:
Favorite Poker Personality: Mike Sexton
Top TV Poker Show for 2009: High Stakes Poker
Favorite Poker Podcast: The Poker Beat on PokerRoad.com
Top Poker Blog for 2009: WickedChopsPoker.com
Favorite Poker Forum: TwoPlusTwo.com
Best Poker Twitterer: Doyle Brunson
Favorite Las Vegas Poker Room: The Bellagio
Favorite Poker Room Outside of Las Vegas: The Commerce
Favorite Online Poker Site: Full Tilt Poker
Favorite Online Poker Resource: CardRunners.com
Top Story of 2009: Phil Ivey Makes WSOP Main Event Final Table
Best Online Poker Player: Tom “durrr†Dwan
Favorite Poker Villain: Phil Hellmuth
Favorite Player of 2009: Phil Ivey
That’s the word we’re hearing … but no confirmation other than that the World Poker Association’s website — wpapoker.com — has disappeared. A good idea with lots of support that never quite found its way before getting entangled in all sorts of internal political struggles that left a true grassroots coalition of players a dream that never quite came to fruition.
Some pokery political types are in London right now for the International Gaming Expo. Figure out for yourself why there might be foreign interest in the likes of the Poker Players Alliance, right as this bill gets ready to go into “mark-up”. Our pal J. Todd is there and he tracks down PPA Exec. Dir. John Pappas to talk about the 2010 Barney Frank bill, what’s the strategy behind it, and what makes it different from previous online poker legislation.
We love high culture here at Pokerati, but I gotta say, I never thought I’d spend 12 minutes of 2010 listening to/watching ballet. Though my tastes lean more towards watching heavy metal videos with semi-pokery themes on Youtube, I couldn’t help but click this one when I saw a ballet about the difficulties of playing pocket Jacks.
I’m no dance critic, but I think they capture the inherent conundrums with the hand pretty well:
ALT HED: Jacks Are Gay
OK, my apologies for making you watch that. Here’s a better dance about potentially troublesome pocket Kings:
The Venetian Deep Stacks, with the first ever NAPT tag attached to their main event, is underway. Click here to see the schedule.
One other new not necessarily that new thing this go-round is the Best Overall Player Award. Details from The V:
BEST OVERALL PLAYER AWARD
The four players that accumulate the most player points throughout the entire event will be awarded Best Overall Player cash awards. One-half of one percent will be withheld from the prize pool of each daily tournament and added to the Best Overall Player total prize pool. The standings will be updated daily and posted in The Venetian Poker Room. Super Satellites, 7 pm second chance tournament and the $5,000 NAPT are not part of the overall point’s race.
Damn, that was quick. a few weeks ago Delaware considered the idea of legalizing table games at its casinos (which includes poker), the Senate voted on it yesterday, and the governor signed it into law. They expect to be playing by summer time.
Harrah’s is moving forward on a plan to acquire Planet Hollywood. Harrah’s took over management of Planet Hollywood’s hotel operations and some of its restaurants and bars in January. Planet Hollywood continues to run its own casino, though Harrah’s has made it clear it wants eventually to own the entire operation. If successful, it would give the company control of all 126 acres on the east side of the Strip between Flamingo Road and Harmon Avenue. Adding PH’s 2,496 hotel rooms to Harrah’s inventory would give it nearly 23,000 rooms on or near the Strip.
I couldn’t help but find this convo between Kathy Liebert and Daniel Negreanu incredibly interesting. Not just because they kinda-sorta call Annie Duke a “Hooo-ore”, but also because Pokeratizens have long dealt with @donkeybomber‘s bitchings about why he doesn’t get the accolades and patch deals offered less accomplished players. With him, my usual answer is, “What have you done for me lately?” But that doesn’t necessarily apply for Kathy Liebert — who is pretty much always winning something. Instead, there’s another game out there, Negreanu suggests, that Liebert chooses not to play.
NOTE: Kathy Liebert still has a standing offer to play for Team Pokerati. We don’t pay your buy-ins, but we will put a patch on your chest and clap extra loud for you.
We sometimes forget that a lot of poker players out there — particularly mid-tier pros — rely on big tournaments to help them make their living. So when they see something potentially asinine, they get a little upset. Unlike we analysts, who simply laugh, scoff, and position ourselves to “cover” what could well be a gloriously entertaining collapse.
So it goes for the upcoming Bellagio 5-Diamond event in April — which features a ridiculous 17 rebuy tournaments as its preliminary events. Seriously, someone has lost it here, right? We’ll see if we can’t get a comment from Tourney Director Jack McClelland on what’s the thought process behind this. Because right now, the best we can deduce arbitrarily surmise is that maybe it would be contractually better for him to get fired as opposed to resigning?
Some players were so incensed by this rebuy-crazy sked, supposedly, that they began circulating a petition to change the schedule back to its original set-up — a scheduling revolt supposedly led by Scott Clements. And in it, they proposed an alternative that seemed to make more sense. However, according to 2+2, the Bellagio has said thanks-but-no-thanks to the suggestion — leaving some players already talking about skipping this series, and a few media types excited about the pending collapse.
Check it out … I suspect someone was playing at a casino and watching how the table-embedded auto-shufflers work when they thought: How awesome would it be if you could press a button, and instead of getting a new deck, you got snacks and cocktails? The new GameBar, from the not-quite-sueably named Playerati, features a hidden, refrigerated snack bar that serves up refreshments at the table. A much better way to get everyone a round of chilled Tuaca shots than waiting for cocktail service. Press the button again for the electronic poker dumbwaiter to retract until the next round.
Theoretically can also be used to serve up weapons and drugs. Load the thing with semi-automatic handguns, and never fear home-game robbery again, knowing that you can arm your table from your game’s hidden (refrigerated) weapons cache at a moment’s notice. Good place to hide the bank, too … not to mention little sandwiches.
That’s about all we know, but who knew, and glad to know … the US Men’s National Team striker has been recovering from injuries suffered in a major car accident. To help his healing, he’s been playing some $5/$10 no-limit hold’em at Bellagio.
It’s starting to occur to us that a lot of poker players out there might have a keen interest to bet some international football gamesin the coming months. Bear with us, and we’ll see if we don’t know anyone who can help that cause.
ALT HED: Phil Ivey, the Ronaldinho of Poker?
Meanwhile, Nick Geber, formerly the multimedia guru at Bluff and a Sirius Radio soccer analyst, is back in public action … just in time for the World Cup — over at The Ref’s a Wanker.
Who says tournament poker is dying/hurting? It’s hard to go anywhere on the planet these days without finding a major soccer poker tournament. Lots of kids with disposable bankrolls, it seems … and lots of older folks trying to grab it.
At the EPT Deauville, which just wrapped up, all eyes were on Elky and Peter Eastgate to take down the biggest tournament ever in France. But out of 768 runners, they went out in 9th and 8th, respectively, with 21-year-old Brit Jake Cody winning the €847,000 top prize and presumably earning himself a spot on the PokerStars Kids Team.
Elky, meanwhile went pimptastic/not-gay in his homeland, sponsoring Team ElkyLady:
Across the continent, in Atlantic City. the World Poker Open at the Borgata is rolling along, with their $3,500 main event starting Sunday. They’re still drawing fields in the multi-hundreds, making Borgata the East Coast place to be.
But let’s not forget Mississippi — which used to be the preferred place for poker players to kick off the new year. They only got 208 entries into the $10k WPT main event at Beau Rivage. The final table for the Southern Poker Championship is set:
Name Chips
Hoyt Corkins 2,069,000
Tyler Smith 1,169,000
Jerry Vanstrydonck 1,044,000
Jonathan Kantor 894,000
Jared Jaffee 762,000
James Reed 377,000
Halfway around the world, the Aussie Millions is into Day 2 of their main event. After a festive Australia Day celebration, things got underway for the big-daddy of this Southern Hemisphere main event:
Some other cool tourneys at the Crown Casino still going … It’s very 2 Months $2 Milliony In the Australian heads-up championship, they’re duking it out to see which four will advance to the money matches against Andrew Lichtenberger, Barry Woods, Vanessa Selbst, and Martin Gudvangen.
And action is just getting underway for the Team Event. Here’s how they play team poker down under:
How Does Team Poker Work
The game is No Limit Hold’em. Teams of two, only one member from each team is on the felt at a time.
The partner’s rotate whose turn it is to play the team’s stack each level. The first players in the game get half of the team’s start bank, if they bust in the first level the team mate comes in immediately and plays with the other half of the team’s starting bank.
That person will play the remainder of the first level, and the second, before the original partner resumes play in the third level.
From the second level onwards team will have their full stacks in play, and once it’s gone the team is eliminated.
And our new-good friends at the Heartland Poker Tour are in Quapah, Oklahoma — at the Downstream Casino in the far northeast end of the state, running qualifiers for their next televised main event, which gets underway this weekend. This one is good clean All-American fun for the kids, too, as you only need to be 18 to play.
