Day 1 of the Detox Poker Series got off to an encouraging start Friday when day 1a of the first event, $350 NL Holdem $100,000 Guarantee drew a field of 206 entrants. Any players who busted out are able to enter again today if they wish, so the guarantee should be cleared easily. Play concluded when nine players remained, with Kevin Kramer of New York, NY holding the lead with 354,500 in chips. The most recognizable name to make it to Sunday is Victory Poker pro Keith Gipson, 7th in chips with 39,000 chips. Notable names who cashed: Chris Tryba ($750), Jason Newitt ($750) and Donkdown’s Bryan Micon($550). The full list of results can be found here.

The 5pm Detox Poker Series event, $350 Omaha 8 or Better, drew a field of 57 as they played down to the final six players making the money. Here’s how the final table will be seated with blinds of 1,500/2,500, limits of 2,500/5000:

Seat 1: Steve Kaufman 40,500
Seat 2: Frankie O’Dell 41,000
Seat 3: Mitch Schock 86,500
Seat 4: Peter Mauro 12,000
Seat 5: Joe Worrell 54,500
Seat 6: Jason Reading 50,000

Saturday at 1pm is day 1b of the $335 NL Holdem event, with 127 players needed to reach the $100,000 guarantee. At 5pm, it’s event #3, $350 HORSE with a few dozen player expected for some mixed-game action.
Check out www.detoxpoker.com for updates/video/chat/etc.

Just a reminder that the Matt Savage-run Detox Poker Series starts this afternoon at the Hard Rock Hotel Poker Lounge in Las Vegas. Two tournaments kick off today: Event #1 is day 1a of the $350 NL Holdem $100,000 Guarantee tournament. They need 333 players total to hit the guarantee.

Event #2 starts at 5pm, it’s day 1 of the $350 Omaha 8 or Better tournament. More information on these events can be found over at www.detoxpoker.com where you can find structures, live video and chat when available.

Be sure to check out Pokerati every day for daily reports during the series, and follow @detoxpoker on Twitter.

We just learned the NFL is backing off its long-held opposition to online gambling — removing a major obstacle from HR 2267′s path to becoming law.

It was the King-Meeks amendment that assured the league the bill would exclude sports betting. One key supporters of this measure was John Campbell, a decidedly right-wing Republican from California who, incidentally, wrote the amendment that calls for a “blacklist” of “unlawful internet gambling enterprises”.

Photo special for Pokerati © James Berglie / BePhotography

Rep. John Campbell supports the rights of Americans to gamble online, so long as they can’t bet on football.

The effort to remove sports betting gives insight into the process of converting undecideds into supporters, as seen in the video below. Just a week earlier, Campbell had told the House Financial Services Committee, “You know I don’t gamble, and I don’t particularly like it; but freedom is not about legislating what I like to do and making illegal what I don’t.”

But as it became clear during markup that the NFL would be getting what they wanted and sports bettors would not, Barney Frank, who believes all forms of online gambling deserve the consumer protections HR 2267 advocates, couldn’t resist posing a somewhat humorous, if not uncomfortable question to his colleague from across the aisle:

With both the Campbell and King-Meeks amendments passing by voice vote, later that day Campbell signed on as the 70th cosponsor (and fourth Republican) willing to align themselves with online gambling.

Matthew Wheat, mindcirkus, PLO

Everybody’s getting ready for the Pokerati NLH/PLO tournament … Championship! at the Detox Series. Excited, of course, to be playing my first ever tournament session of half-pot-limit Omaha. So naturally, I went to my coaches at CardRunners for some quick pointers … and they sent me to Mindcirkus … aka Matthew Wheat.

He’s made his name amongst the online kids for dominance in 6-max PLO cash games. Now I get what they’re doing with all this wax-on-wax-off paint-the-fence shit they keep serving me … but not really what I’m looking for when I’ve got a tournament in just a week to prepare for. I already know how to play PLO cash games, obv!

“Now you don’t, Dan,” my chief keeper at CardRunners said.

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He pointed out that these are important skills to understand, and they helped mindcirkus make his way to the final table in the $10k WSOP PLO Championship this summer. Fair enough, but my game is really more half-and-half. Still, they say there’s stuff I’ll be able to use from this lesson about online tells in 6-max PLO — as seen primarily in bet sizes and bet speed.

You can get free membership to CardRunners simply by letting them track your Full Tilt play with Truly Free Poker Training.

Poker players are such good people … where else but outside a big poker tournament would you expect to see such an attitude in a crowded parking lot:

(Think he’s bluffing?)

You can’t be sure from the 7-max tags that these guys play poker … but factor in when and where they were spotted — Rio, WSOP — and yeah … someone we know probably knows at least one of these guys … and depending how big they play, may have helped pay for the car.

The NFL has officially retracted their opposition to HR 2267, removing a strong opponent to online gambling from the current political game.

According to PokerNews, an NFL representative cites the King-Meeks amendment to HR 2267 as reason for the reversal: “We don’t oppose it since it now includes the language we had hoped for. The amended language adequately addressed our specific concern. We are pleased with the outcome.”

The amendment of note, introduced by HR 2267 co-sponsor Peter King (R-NY) excludes sports-betting from potentially regulated internet gambling. Rep. John Campbell (R-CA), the bill’s newest co-sponsor, also gave support to this amendment.

One of the important hedlines never written during the WSOP:

Florida Is the New France

(Apologies for not sharing this important insight with you readers. Just busy, ya know?)

It was the place a lot of WSOP dealers were saying they were headed after the Series … and some of them were already there, forgoing a summer in Vegas to set up shop near the beach early. These Pokerati card-carrying dealers began reporting near-immediately that indeed, the games were “sick”, and as a dealer it was nice to finally find a place where dealing actually paid well again.

All this because Florida passed a law legalizing poker some five years ago, and now, after a few revisions to the relevant statute, with betting limits and tourney buy-ins uncapped officially as of July 1 (and poker rooms now allowed to be open 24/7) the state has finally put itself in a position to realize the game’s potential — for them and for poker.

Also says something about the WPT’s continued effort to reclaim significance in the poker world. Can only imagine the WSOP will have a big circuit event there soon, too. In fact, might be willing to bet we’ll see one of those before we ever see an NAPT-Florida.

Below is the World Poker Tour press release about their partnership to put branded poker rooms throughout multiple Seminole casinos, and host a big televised $10k event at the Seminole Hard Rock in Hollywood, Florida in late April/early May of next year. Early read is that this could become one of the big US tournaments of the year.

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Also from Gambling Compliance … This may be kinda old news now, but something else GC made available for all us poker plebes is their July interview with Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA), sponsor of HR 2268, the legislation that lays out the structure for a new federal online gambling taxing machine, and the “companion bill” for Barney Frank’s HR 2267, which, of course, sets up the bureaucracy that poker players collectively have been clamoring for.

McDermott makes a cautious prediction starting at about 4:57, saying, “It is very very likely that this bill will pass” before the end of the year. He then explains how and why he believes online gambling supporters on the Hill can win over the necessary Congressfolk, “one Member at a time”:

This interview came before the HR 2267 mark-up hearing, where the bill moved forward with a bigger margin of bipartisan victory than expected … presumably made easier by the various amendments added by representatives from across the country and across the political spectrum.

Because you can’t have McDermott’s bill, 2268, without 2267 — and 2267 means little in terms of practical application without 2268 — they totally go together. But until the two are merged, this dual-bill process also creates additional spots for cutthroat backstabbing shenanigans parliamentary maneuvers across the aisle should some influential sort not like the way the bill is taking shape for their client/big-donor’s competitive interest. I’m pretty sure that’s how it works … but to borrow a phrase from McDermott, not gonna say 100 percent.

So … watch and see?

For those not familiar, Gambling Compliance is one of a small handful of uberwonk journals for executive-types in the online gambling world. With offices in London and Washington DC, GC puts out high-level industry analysis that at least a handful of insiders find worth a £3,000-£5,000 in Europe subscription fee.

But they do make some content occasionally available for public consumption by non-subscribers. One I’ve been meaning to share for a while is the perfect companion piece to KevMath’s markup of HR 2267. (Supposedly Congressional staffers charged with the official cut-and-paste need a few more days to do what KevMath got done more than a week ago.)

Check it out … I like the cool, color-coded map; but the most important stuff is probably the breakdown by industry sector, explaining who has likely been affected how by the different amendments attached to the bill being sent to the floor. The report comes with an easy to browse table of amendments, too:

HR 2267 Frank Bill Amendments

Most interesting and plausibly relevant to our little world, imho, are provisions laid out in Rep. John Campbell’s (R-CA) amendment, which creates a “black list” of non-compliant operators. More…

The poker lifestyle isn’t all rock stars and glamor. For some, particularly the low-stakes Vegas grinder, it’s a matter of co-existing with douchebags fiscal practicality and living within your means:

Got an email the other day from an entity @WickedChops … a pic of a distinctly pokery license plate, taken “w/ iPhone before leaving WSOP from players parking lot where RVs were”, to which I thought cool, thanks, awesome! gahdammit you always gotta be showing off with your fancy photography and special rail-girl cameras …

Then I saw the plate and thought, pfft, dude we so already got that one … but it is a nicer pic, I guess. Just an iPhone, really?

Then I went back to the original post about this specific license plate, also spotted at the Rio during the WSOP, shortly before the main event … and WTF?

More…

The Detox Poker Series is right around the corner, starting Friday Aug. 13 with a $100k Guarantee for a $350 buy-in with two day ones, re-entry allowed. The spankin’-new small-stakes/big-action festival comes at a whispery time around the home room to the Pokerati NLH/PLO game … with a new crew of top-level casino brass combing through the Hard Rock’s books while walking through various gaming areas with tape measures … raising uncomfortable questions about the fate of the $12 million, two-year-old poker lounge that has seen its ups and downs without yet fully realizing its potential.

Of course that’s kinda the point of bringing in an internationally renowned tourney director. Or at least it was initially. Kinda still works, but for different reasons …

First things first … Savage has guaranteed the guarantees — $350k worth. This is despite a misleading tweet just two weeks ago from @hardrockpoker saying there’d be $1 million in guaranteed prize pools. [/shaking head] It coulda just been a hyperbolic typo, but an amusingly ironic one then considering the Hard Rock’s image problems after a few overpromises that these tourneys were to help put to rest. But according to Matt himself on 2+2, he’s got the $350k locked up by contract no matter how few players show.

Beyond that … expect an extra-partytime atmosphere around typical Savage series stuff (deep structures, quality dealers, friendly intelligent floor, good internet coverage, etc.) to liven up the joint: He’s in charge of providing ultra-improved tournament action while the Hard Rock promises to provide good music and a guaranteed flow of nipple-friendly eye-candy stumbling past the poker room.

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Seen on one of the Day 1s at the 2010 main event in the WSOP valet lot …

Corvette-ness makes the hedline seem plausible. Would have to cross-reference Clark County impound records with arrest reports from Las Vegas Metro to be sure … and though the presence of stripper-glitter in the passenger seat could be a telltale sign, windows were too tinted to be certain.

UPDATE: Or you could just check Wikipedia … to be reminded that Layne Flack does indeed hail from the state that some people consider the Oklahoma of Nebraska.

Nothing too special about this one … nice car, nifty plate … again not certain of the locale, but thinking it mighta been at Red Rock? Very Summerliny in many ways.

UPDATE: Or Panorama Towers. Word is the ride belongs to Jeff Madsen.