After spending the majority of the past 3 weeks in Detroit, Columbus, and Carlsbad attending weddings, I’m back in my one-bedroom apartment at the intersection of Flamingo and Maryland in Las Vegas. Maybe it’s just the annoyingly vast amounts of construction and “improvements” they’re doing on my building, but there seems to be higher than standard levels of particles and dust in the Vegas air. People are excited, poker players are selling pieces, and Phil Hellmuth moved into the Aria penthouse for 2 months. That electric feeling can mean only one thing… the World Series of Poker is almost here.

I’ve never sold on the open marketplace, so bear with me as I figure this process out. I’m not a high volume tournament player, but I agree with Phil Galfond when he says that strong cash game players can find success in tournaments if they take them seriously.

Poker rooms across town (well, those in Caesars-owned properties anyway) are ramping up their promotion efforts for the series, offering a plethora of ways to win a seat into various events. On top of that, you can step into one of many rooms to pick up a flier for their own mini-series which will run concurrently; events with smaller buy ins but still impressively sized fields and prizes can be found up and down the strip as well as downtown. WSOP time in Las Vegas is awesome. If you like poker, you simply need to see the sheer size of the production that takes place inside the Rio Convention Center. Rows and rows, hundreds of tables (in use, no less…). Strip poker rooms overflowing with players. So many hopefuls, so many fans of the game, all the superstars and several soon-to-be poker-famous players descending on one spot. And let’s not forget… so many fish!

More…

Mondays and Tuesdays are arguably the worst days of the week for poker, which is why I often take those days off.

The tourists have donated their Vegas dollars to the grinders over the weekend, and even the L.A. crowd has headed back to their movie studios and plastic surgeons.

This meant that for the final two days of my week-long experiment in playing Las Vegas daily tournaments, I would have to hit some of the bigger casinos — Caesars Palace and Bellagio.

The 10,000 starting stack at Caesars Palace's nightly tournament.

With a WSOP-circuit event being held at Caesars, I didn’t have trouble finding a comfortable-size field for their nightly 7pm tournament on a Monday. With a $110 entry fee, this event has a $5,000 guaranteed prize pool (Mon-Fri only). The staff and one local at my starting table who had already worked out the math said they would need at least 63 entrants to reach that figure. Caesars’s nightly tournaments sometimes start with even fewer players, offering a healthy overlay.

Of the buy-in, Caesars took $20 as a “maintenance fee” and $10 was for the staff toke.)

Grinders and well-known pros filled the room — the 2008 WSOP Main Event third-place finisher Dennis Phillips sat a few tables away playing a cash game and Jeff Madsen, the rapper who also won 2006 WSOP player of the year, was at the final table of the main event in the elevated area nearby. I didn’t recognize anyone at my table who should have given me trouble.

A Week of Whiffs?
I was due for a nice run, having missed the money in my first 5 tournaments. The 10,000 chip starting stack and 20-minute levels felt comfortable out of the gate. I’d have to beat out 59 others to earn the $1,914 first-place prize.

More…

Quick LOL … something I stumbled across while reading what I presumed was just a ho-hum news article about another state gearing up for online gambling (via the PPA’s latest newsletter). I wanted to see what state was next and whether or not they separated out poker. Turns out it was just California, talking about how much money they stand to make if they can just catch up with Nevada. For sure. Righteous, dudes.

But what stands out most to me is a line from one of the opponents of any measures for California to finally get serious about regulating online games within their own borders:

“We don’t want to see any of it,” said pastor James Butler from the California Coalition Against Gambling Expansion. “Pretty soon they’ll have an app that will allow you to connect instantly to a casino or a gambling site. Want to lose your home? We have an app for that,” Butler said.

Emphasis added. Not sure if we should tell the fine pastor that they already do have such an app — all over the UK to be sure, and in Nevada you can bet sports for real money anywhere you want using your Droid or iPhone with Leroy’s App. (It just turns off when you get to the California border — amazing that crazy technology these days!)

More…

Hey, at least the Lions are winning.

We had high hopes coming into the 2011 football season but to see them run out to a beautiful 4-0 start is outstanding. And the Tigers are up too! As I write this they currently hold a 2-1 series advantage over the Yankees after stealing home field advantage in NYC. One more win and they advance to the next playoff round. Life is good these days for my hometown teams.

Little did I know that the hole would only grow bigger and deeper as the day went on, culminating with me somehow losing with KQ vs 55 after c-betting a K-6-4 flop. I booked a 4-figure loss and called it a day.

More…

I just got back from my first live poker session in I don’t know how long… almost two months I think. I took an extended hiatus from the game for a couple of reasons; a) my dad was in town for a while and we went sightseeing here in Vegas and in Los Angeles; and, more important, b) my finances just weren’t where they needed to be.

(The shorter version of that story is “I went broke.”)

I was making too many mistakes away from the felt and living a lifestyle that just wasn’t sustainable on my “salary”. I definitely wasn’t going super crazy or ballin’ out of control by any means. But similar to the way a small preflop error can compound on itself and become a large, costly session-killer, smaller mistakes away from the tables can quickly add up and drain a poker player’s bankroll. This shouldn’t be news to any poker player, but when you live in a city like Las Vegas and you like being social and experiencing what the city and life itself has to offer, you have to constantly check yourself.

I look down at 6s7s for my first live hand in two months. Forget that I’m in early position, I can’t help it… the suited connectedness was overpoweringly sexy.

More…

JimmyLegs and Rosenkrantz deliver again with the new episode of The Micros. The three main characters (don’t remember their names yet — the one dude, the other guy, and lego chick …) are enjoying the fruits of one dude’s binking a Sunday Mill. But with a bigger online bankroll come new levels of trouble …

Good video from WPT-London … with Neil Channing discussing the travails of backing James Akenhead and a more detailed explanation of what goes into staking players, from the guy Brits worldwide look to for bankroll assistance:

Once upon a time, circa 2003, I had a Google Alert set up to send me an email every time a new mention of the word “poker” appeared somewhere on the internet. By the time I started getting like five a day (!) I began thinking this poker thing might really gonna catch on — and I bought the domain pokerrati.com (misspelling notwithstanding).

My how things have changed … not just with poker, but with the whole world-wide-web, and what people are searching for on it. Check out this amusingly related new bit from CardRunners video pro Lee Przytula, giving the contemporary poker player’s world view … as seen through Google interaction:

Jon Katkin

---

The Poker Economy

---

OP-ED

Brand names serve an important purpose in our society. For consumers, they offer a simple shorthand that let’s you know about a product’s quality – or lack thereof – while at the same time providing a quick way to flaunt your status or hipness to the unwashed masses in our burgeoning consumer culture.

For businesses, brand names are just as important. Let your quality slip or make your product too ubiquitous and your value – both real and perceived – begins to slip. Make your product trendy or limit its availability and you’ll have customers clamoring at your door to get their hands on it.

With 57 events on the calendar, the WSOP is hardly as elitist as it was in the past, but that’s OK with the folks at Harrah’s because when it comes to poker, there is no substitute for a gold bracelet. Win an event and you join a still exclusive club that includes some of the greatest players in the world. Play your cards right, and the WSOP is a golden ticket to the top of the poker food chain. Bust out before the final table and you’ll still leave town with a great story for your friends.

For $1,500 you can play one WSOP tournament and take your chances against a single field of 3,000, or for the same money you can play five Venetian Deep Stack events against a combined field of about 2,400.

And that’s what makes the WSOP the brand when it comes to tournament poker. Win or lose, playing a WSOP event carries with it an inherent coolness that other poker players innately understand and respect. But if you’re a serious low-stakes player looking for a big summertime score in Vegas, there are actually much better options to consider outside the Rio.

More…

Jon Katkin

---

The Poker Economy

---

For most of us, $50,000 is a whole lot of money. It’s a year’s salary. A new car. A down payment on a new house. Our savings.

For others, however, $50K is pocket money — a single pot in a $200/$400 game or a roll of the dice on the craps table. It’s also the cost of entry into the first marquee event of the 2010 WSOP, the $50,000 Poker Player’s Championship.

Over its short life, this tournament has undergone a variety of changes as it tries to cement its identity in the poker world. Starting out as the $50,000 HORSE event in 2006, the tournament quickly gained a reputation as the true players championship because of its hefty buy-in and mixed-game format. In that first year, 143 players ponied up $50K each for a shot at the title and the chance to play mixed games on ESPN.

The poker economy isn’t what it used to be. Players who wouldn’t have thought twice about dropping $50K two years ago are now looking at the cost of entry the same way many of us look at $1,500, $2,500 or $5,000 events.

Poor ratings forced a format change in 2007 and 2008, however, when ESPN agreed to broadcast the event only if the final tables were all No-Limit Hold ‘em — a game that’s much easier for the general viewing audience to follow. The change didn’t do much to affect the number of entrants, as 148 players registered for the tournament in both 2007 and 2008.

ESPN dropped the $50K HORSE event completely in 2009 and, it can be argued that the lack of potential TV time, combined with the beginning of the economic crisis, had a significant impact on the field as just 95 players competed in the event last year. Now, however, the $50K HORSE event is back on the air – renamed as the the $50,000 Player’s Championship and featuring an eight-game mix along with a TV-friendly NLH-only final table. Michael “the Grinder” Mizrachi took down the $1.5 million bracelet last night in what had to be good-for-TV fashion – with his brother and other well-known pros falling by the wayside before he ended up mano-y-mano against an interesting Russian high-roller.

More…

Swear I’m not mocking. Less than 12 hours ago, after all, I re-potted with two-pair in some 1/2 PLO at the Hard Rock, and then when the original pre-flop raiser check-shoved all-in, I felt I had to call …

But just a couple months ago I was watching Jean-Robert Bellande seemingly tear it up in the high-stakes room at the Commerce, sitting with easily 40 or 50k in front of him. But now, by his own admission on twitter, @BrokeLivingJRB is busto. Super-busto it seems. Terrible timing as we approach the WSOP.

Be sure to check out his twitter feed.

Name Jean-Robert Bellande
Location Las Vegas
Web http://WorldSerie…
Bio Poker Pro. Track my crazy swings as I take my bankroll from zero to a million.

Hmm, didn’t quite work out that way — or at least hasn’t yet. It’s so hard not to root for this guy. He knows himself, and just can’t control himself (?) … but still insists on being a “survivor” … and is willing to share his glorious collapse with all. Reading his tweets in reverse chronological order provides quite the revealing story about a poker unraveling … something all of us who aren’t consistent winners and don’t have real regular jobs may or may not wanna think about.

Kiplinger’s, the DC-based publisher of business forecasts and personal finance advice, appears to have “gotten” poker. A senior editor there attended a WPT boot camp (for a compilation story on adult camps), and before long he started seeing the world of investing and finance as a poker player … and that spawned a three-part series relating poker to all things economic.

Check it out … they’re all good reads:

INVESTOR PSYCHOLOGY
How Poker Can Make You a Better Investor
Learn to avoid emotional traps by playing a little Texas hold ’em.

STOCKS & BONDS
How Texas Hold ‘Em Simulates Investing
Both are based on incomplete and unfolding information.

STOCKS & BONDS
How Deepak Chopra Helped Me Play Poker Better
A device featuring the wellness guru taught me to keep my emotions under control.

And then, to top it all off, in yet another article in the January issue, they quote Barry Greenstein about investment risk:

Barry Greenstein, for instance, is a poker player by profession, so you might think he’d be prone to gambling with his portfolio. Instead, Greenstein buys utility stocks and municipal bonds, and says he follows his father’s advice: “You can play poker, but don’t trade commodities.”

So in conclusion, if I am surmising this right, the key to personal financial success in 2010 is play more poker. OK, got it.

(This, btw, is probably a good-for-poker message to go out to Kiplinger’s subscribers.)

More kids and poker, man … it was gonna be an issue anyhow, and Joe Cada’s WSOP win maybe made it even more so. I got an email from a student at Rollins University who’s doing a paper for his English Composition class on something that has indeed become if not a hot topic, a warmer than usual one on college campuses across the U.S.

Below are the questions Tyler in Winter Park, FL, sent me. While #1 is probably the hardest to answer — and ahh, the memories brought back by #2 — I think it’s interesting to see where his thinking is coming from … how the internet is obviously part of the issue, but not nearly all of it … and in general, the starting perception that gambling is a “problem”.

Questions

1.What is your profession?
2. Did you gamble in college?
3.How do you feel college administrations should address this problem? Do we need more awareness or intervention programs on campus?
4.Do you think this is a serious/risky problem for college students today? Why? Does the internet play a major role?
5. Can you comment on these areas of my argument
-Gambling can lead to addiction (colleges already educate on alcohol and drug addiction)
-Gambling can lead to risky behavior (financial problems, crime etc)
-Gambling can negatively affect academic progress

Here’s the ESPN E:60 segment in case you missed it. His first job: flipping burgers at McDonald’s. Parents briefly felt like failures when his life turned all-casino. He’s been technically homeless, sleeping under a bridge in Atlantic City. Built his bankroll by taking his last $50k and turning it into 2 Months $2 million. And eventually, he was the MVP helping “The Corporation” felt Andy Beal for 8-figures +.

Great stuff from a non-pokery ESPN reporter who gets to find out firsthand what it’s like being the craps cooler Ivey believes cost him more than $240k.