Reviewing what happened last night…

In a final table that ESPN SHOULD be covering (instead of ESPN360), the final table of the $5,000 Pot Limit Omaha w/rebuys final table has been set for around 3pm.

Seat 1: John Juanda 694,800
Seat 2: Phil Hellmuth 119,000
Seat 3: David Benyamine 1,041,000
Seat 4: Kirill Gerasimov 558,000
Seat 5: Phil Galfond 1,393,000
Seat 6: Daniel Negreanu 460,000
Seat 7: Brian Rast 1,176,000
Seat 8: Adam Hourani 300,000
Seat 9: Johnny Chan 624,000

The three names that may not appear familiar to the poker fan, but those who follow the online scene know OMGClayAiken, tsarast and the_houdini very well.

Other action from last night after the jump:

More…

I’m about to head over to the Rio — I think I might actually play a bit today — but before I shut my computer lid (about as difficult for me as stepping away from a table when I’m still up) I wanted to share with you some blogs other than Pauly, LVV, and Wicked Chops that make for good reading during the WSOP. Most of these folks have real jobs here in the poker media, but that doesn’t mean they still don’t have interesting things to say:

Poker Shrink — he runs the show now at my old PokerBlog stomping grounds, and though I haven’t yet seen his shiny orb around these parts, he always has something informative to say, and a cutting way to say it.

Change100 — A friend with weed is a friend indeed … and this PokerNews reporter always has the good Hollywood insight to share.

Benjo — aka the Angry Frenchman; I have no idea what his blog says, but it’s often fun to read the Google translation of it.

Gary Wise — Gary knows everything about poker (just ask him) … but really, the Bluff/ESPN correspondo does know a lot, and has better player connections than anyone else in media row.

Snoopy — This limey mate has a great take on the game, and new hair to boot — capable of fourth-level thinking and comes up with hedlines like “Throw Juanda down the Well.”

Michele Lewis — Wicked Chops probably got the best of it in our trade of Fresh Princess and a blogger to be named later for, um, nothing … but that doesn’t mean we don’t still love her sassy-mom takes on the game.

Pokerfolio — Steve Hall doesn’t need a big camera to scope out the WSOP hotties, but he may need a new webhost.

Spaceman – Jason Kirk can’t seem to leave the poker world no matter how hard he tries, and while he’s not blogging for PokerListings this year, he occasionally keeps us posted on real life.

Hardboiled Poker – Short-stacked Shamus is an absolute must-read; he’s a rookie on the PokerNews WSOP reporting scene, but as he’s proved with his own blog since getting on the blogging train late in the game, sometimes new=fresh, and he gives more to really think about per word than just about anyone else out there.

Haley – The managing editrix of PokerNews is 0-and-1 on prop bets with Dan this year, but that doesn’t mean she’s still not a smartaholic; heck, she even knows who The Batfaces are.

Mean Gene — The most celebrated poker blogger in all of Pittsburgh makes the annual pilgrimage to the WSOP again, and nobody knows how to have more All-American fun while doing a top-quality job than this PokerNews tourney reporter.

I’m sure I’m missing a few — apologize for that — so send me an email and I will update accordingly. But these are the ones I have been checking out with the most semi-regularity, and often giving thought to.

And for a list of players who are also blogging their experiences, check out Up for Poker’s WSOP blog-guide.

That’s all for now. I’ll be back eventually. But this should keep you informed/entertained/busy for at least a little while.

As you may be noticing, Pokerati has lost a little weight … and gotten a new haircut. The haircut part might take a couple weeks to grow into. The rest of it should be all good, though we may need to buy new pants.

Anyhow, stay tuned as we continue to roll out Pokerati 4.0, and feel free to use this post here to leave comments about anything that isn’t working/looking right for you. Overall, you should find the site faster, easier to read, and generally more engaging. And if you do the right combination of clicks, Ronaldinho will get super-powers and be able to score from anywhere on the page.

More…

Joel the MySpace Friend / Account Exec in Dallas writes in inquiring about a possible career change:

—————– Original Message —————–
From: “Joel”
Date: May 5, 2008 2:02 PM

How are things? How is Vegas? I might be moving out there at the end of the Summer to play poker professionally. Cash games and tourneys. Any advice, suggestions or best games you are finding out there? Any tips would help. Thanks!

More…

Four years ago today — on the glorious holiday that is 4-20 — Pokerati went live. Our first post was about a new online poker site that also just went live called Full Tilt. Prediction at the time: “I suspect this site will fare well.”

Boo-yah! Right on target … that’s how prescient Pokerati can be! Granted, we also said the online poker room market was also probably saturated in April 2004 … hey, you can’t hit a home run every time, right?

We’ve gone through lots of changes over the years, and more TK for sure. Personally, I can’t believe I’ve stuck to anything for four years … but it’s amazing what the burning desire to not work ever will do for you. Anyhow, thanks for reading us once or twice during that time. Kiss off, I don’t need you! We couldn’t have done it without you. So thanks again, happy blog-birthday to me. Maybe next year Full Tilt and Pokerati should have their party together.

Remember these guys? They are blogging again, only different:

It seems that everyone has a blog these days, and Doyle Brunson has begun his own journal of sorts.

Not long after the return of Doyle’s Room to the U.S. market in October, he began writing the occasional blog post on his site.

This week, he wrote a touching post about his dear friend Chip Reese. It begins:

A week ago my phone rang at 5:30 a.m. I answered it extremely irritated at being awakened so early in the morning. My nephew, Ken Hale said, “I think Chip just died.”

It took a moment to sink in and then disbelief overtook me. How could my best friend, who was 56 years old and apparently in good health, be gone? It felt like a big hole in my body which could never be filled. I jumped out of bed and drove to Chip’s house as fast as I could.

I went into his house and cried with his children Brittany, Taylor, and Casey. Chip had gone to the doctor that afternoon and had a chest x-ray which showed a shadow on his lung. The doctor gave him a shot, told him he was coming down with pneumonia, and sent him home. The doctor, who was a poker player Chip had been teaching, called him at 10:00 to see how he was feeling. Chip told him he felt fine and when the doctor told him he was at the Red Rock Casino playing poker, Chip asked him if he wanted him to come watch him play. The doctor said, “No, if they saw you sitting behind me, they wouldn’t play with me any more.” They laughed and hung up.

Chip went to his room, talked to his girlfriend for 30 minutes, told his kids good night, and went to bed. Casey went to his room at 4:00 and Chip was dead.

We know you’re looking at us … and perhaps creepily, we’re looking at you. Shout out and big welcome to this reader who accessed the site from Penn State University (Go Big 10!) with a widescreen monitor looking for “gay fat guys”:

Here’s the picture he may or may not have been looking for.

The “news” of Lycos and “poker” got me thinkin’ … and pecking around. You readers found Pokerati in 2007 via more than 15,000 different search phrases — congratulations, you win little!

Below are the Top 30 that brought you here this year:

1. Pokerati
2. poker
3. sorry
4. chip reese
5. brian townsend
6. clonie gowen nude
7. texas hold’em
8. andy beal
9. mp3 scorpions winds of change
10. Yoo tube

More…

Pokerati may or may not be down for somebody else’s maintenance from 7-7:30 pm central tonight. Hey, we all need a break every once in a while, right?

UPDATE: Oops, I am clearly a man ahead of my time not good with calendars. This temporary shutdown will happen tomorrow, as in Thursday, Oct. 18.

Anthony in McKinney-ish writes in with more:

Ok, I swear I’m not an email attention whore, but the hits just keeepp ooonnnnnn coming with this Absolute thing.

http://www.pocketfives.com/06D9EA78-E38F-49D3-AFA1-2B4B128CE7E7.aspx

Not to make it all about blogging, but poker players should be proud of the “citizen journalism” at work in this case. When “former” chief operators of a company are allegedly the ones pegged as playing with “superaccounts” … that clearly can’t be a good thing. Absolute looks to have done themselves in here. Short-term greed catches up with the offenders. This page now seems like a sadly ironic case of Strong Means Weak.

So as the evidence against Absolute becomes more and more solid, it raises a lot of other questions, including:

1. Will anyone go to jail? In an unregulated environment can anyone go to jail?
2. What other sites might be engaging in similar activities?
3. How can we trust that any particular site is not?
4. Will politicians in the United States see this as an example of why online poker needs to be regulated, or will it be their case for why it needs to be more comprehensively banned?
5. Since Absolute is in bed with Ultimate Bet, what will become of that relationship? And how connected are they really?
6. Will UB pros — Phil Hellmuth and Annie Duke specifically — speak out on the matter? And/or will they leave Ultimate Bet?
7. Will major online affiliates — such as CardPlayer, PokerNews, and PokerListings, for example — stop sending players to Absolute?

Big questions for online poker. How different folks with a vested interest in the answers react to this situation will tell us a lot about what kinda players we really are dealing with in this biz.

UPDATE: PokerListings is currently refusing to send players to Absolute and Ultimate Bet:

PokerListings.com has temporarily suspended the listing of the Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet poker rooms as a result of serious problems with both historical and current payments due PokerListings for services rendered. We are aware that our decision not to list these two brands may be an inconvenience, but as a trusted guide and resource, we do not believe it is appropriate to continue listing them.

Sincerely,

The PokerListings.com Team

There are four players left in the WPT Legends tourney — anyone’s game — and Tom Schneider is guaranteed anywhere from $228k to $1.6 million. Not a bad paycheck, but Tom … we have to talk! Is that really enough for you to be blogging for the World Poker Tour and CardPlayer?

Check out Tom’s new gig here, and here. Or, to quote from the official WPT site:

Tom Schneider - Pro Blog
Thursday, August 30, 2007 06:43 PM PDT

That was a fast and furious level. David Pham and Mike McClain both doubled up quickly through Shi, and Shi was pretty short when he made a move. He went out in sixth and McClain followed in fifth.

I didn’t really play many hands and only lost about 300,000 on the hand I did play. Things showed open up a bit more now that we are four handed. Out of the four remaining only David is really short stacked.

- Tom

Permalink | Comments(0)

Tom Schneider - Pro Blog
Thursday, August 30, 2007 05:25 PM PDT

So far my experience at the World Poker Tour final table has been a bit chaotic. This is nothing like my World Series of Poker final tables. Those weren’t televised and things are a bit different under the hot lights.
There’s also a lot more money at stake than when I won my two bracelets this year. The media has been crazy with interviews all day long and now they are putting make-up on me so that I can look good for the camera.
They are getting ready to start, so we’ll see how it all turns out.

- Tom

Permalink | Comments(0)

Interestingly enough, since Tom has started working for the WPT-CardPlayer Trust, he has dropped from second in chips to the short stack.

UPDATE: Robert sends word from the rail:

Tom just doubled u[p]

Bluff Magazine is holding its annual Reader’s Choice awards … and Pokerati has been nominated as a candidate for Best Poker Blog. Bitchin’, no? It’s nice to know all our hard work has paid off. I’d like to thank the Academy, and Pokerati’s other contributors … because really, to receive this high-level industry acclaim, I could only suck on so many pee-pees myself, ya know?

Be sure to vote. I’d say vote often, but doing so more than once will allegedly disqualify you. So all I can say that is if you don’t vote for Pokerati, don’t waste your time we’ll block your IP address.

The other contenders who may or may not clearly don’t deserve your consideration include:

ThePokerBiz (which is how I found out about these awards)
Ship It Holla Ballas
Iggy
PokerWorks
Daniel Negreanu
Bodog Beat
Wicked Chops Poker
Rizen Poker
Brian Townsend (aka sbrugby)

ALT HED: Where’s Pauly?

LAS VEGAS–Players are fixin’ to go on dinner break, and I will not be able to fill you in on much … because Tom has asked me to secure him a seat at Buzio’s here in the Rio. Naturally, I obliged, and then started to feel like his bitch. He shrugged it off knowing I would draw the line at doing his laundry. (Because really, I’m just not good at clothes.)

Anyhow, we’ll be back in a couple hours. Shouldn’t you be in bed already anyhow? I have so much to tell/show you people.

Hate these celebrity poker types.

In my last post on this subject, HERE, I was bitching about what I felt was inexcusable *coverage* by PokerNews’ “low-ranking, fresh-out-of-college interns”, as Dan Michalski described them in a very poor, and a bit unflattering, attempt to counter. He went on to explain that the cheap, inexperienced labor should not be expected to know all of the players in any given event. Dan, I agree 110%. But being able to identify the current top-ranked WSOP player and the only 2007 double bracelet winner should be a bit of a prerequisite for obtaining a media pass. BJ Nemeth also commented, a little more productively, stating “If the junior reporters are missing someone like this, we *would* like it brought to our attention”. He also invited me in on the efforts, saying “tell me, or Pauly, or whoever, and we’ll get it done.” Hmm. Ok. The critic in me gives PokerNews a failing grade on day-1 coverage, which BJ would later talk into a B+ based on customer service. I might have upgraded them to an “A”, but as this is being written, Tom is still without a chip count update for Day 1 of Deuce to Seven. But hey, least he’s listed.

[Ed. Note: They found him while Karridy was writing.-DM]

I start my day today by looking forward to the last WSOP Player of The Year point awarding event, hoping that my good friend Tom Schneider is able to keep Lessandro, Hellmuth, and the other POTY hopeful hounds at bay. Tom’s wife, Julie, is home in Arizona doing the same. I typically only get calls from Julie when Tom is doing great and can’t talk, or busted out and doesn’t want to. So, I was not crazy about seeing her name come up on my phone that early in the day.

“Karridy, I’m so freaking pissed right now. I’m just soo… I’m just sick of it!”

Below are the results of my request that Julie put her feelings in print. It should be known that Tom had caught wind of Julie’s intent to provide me this to post and he tried to talk her out of it. Sorry, dood. I’m thinking he hates the nametag too.

More…

LAS VEGAS–The $50k HORSE event finished up this morning … and FREDDIE DEEB is officially crowned the best all-around poker player in the world for the time being.

You can only presume HARRAH’S OFFICIALS are breathing a sigh of relief — after having pimped the tourney as the biggest deal, it makes a much better story to give the title to an immigrant who came to America to save his family from war and turned to poker as a way to make good while AMERICAN IMMIGRATION BUREAUCRACY futzed around with his ability to earn a living.

Had JOHN HANSEN won, the story would’ve been about a relatively unknown bad-ass from the NEW YORK hardcore poker underground. Less savory.

Speaking of LEGALLY QUESTIONABLE poker players, did you know drug kingpin JIMMY CHAGRA — released from prison earlier this year — played in the SENIORS EVENT?

He was on “Talkin’ Trash” with BRIAN WILSON just a couple days ago. [via Gary Wise on 2+2.]

JEFFREY POLLACK did a little semi-live blogging from the HORSE final table. Maddest props to the Commish — not only for letting us know what he heard from the poker-players town hall, but also for providing his first-ever outbound link. Puts him on a short-list of people who just-might qualify for Pokerati posting privileges some day. We’ll be watching as he continues to cut his Wicked blogging chops.

In the meantime, The Jeffster tells us:

1. There is insufficient play in the middle levels of limit games and too much in the beginning.

2. There are some instances where the color-up process isn’t being handled correctly.

3. The tent is not a comfortable place to play.

4. There needs to be more room between the spectators on the ropes and the players.

5. The next day’s breaking order should be posted when an event ends for the night.

6. We need to improve media access to final tables.

7. The sequestered tables are tough to cover for the media and follow for the fans.

8. Tournament clocks should be more visible.

9. The Amazon Room is too cold.

10. We should continue and better publicize escort service to the parking lot late at night.

Yesterday’s “other” bracelet went to a guy named SAIF AHMAD, who won the $2,000 Limit Hold’em event with relative ease.

View from the rooftop of Pokerati’s VEGAS EDGE bureau:

ERIC ROSENBERG poses an interesting question on his new-ish blog — about why official poker “stats” don’t subtract known tournament buy-ins from “winnings.” The WSOP, of course, has records of every bracelet-bound buy-in … so it could be done. Likewise, they bar-code initial seat cards, so it’s theoretically possible to provide PokerNews or whoever with the basic info on every single player whose chips they try to track.

Maybe next year?

Rosie has also spurred further conversation about BACKING-DEAL DISCLOSURE — specifically as it pertained to BILL CHEN’S WSOP-approved chip-dumping agreement. It’s not about gratuitous rabble-rousing so much as it is about decisions that will affect the future of poker, regardless of what they are.

So the $1,000 7-Stud Hi Lo continues today. Pokerati’s own TOM SCHNEIDER sits down with 4,300 chips. We’ll find out if North Texas pokerer DAMON RAMIREZ is still alive. And DOYLE BRUNSON takes his second stab at bracelet #11 with 10,700 chips. Pokerati fantasy man STEVE WONG also ain’t too far behind.

Follow the 7-Stud Hi Lo action today here.

Today’s other tournament action:

Day 1 of $2,000 No Limit Hold’em
Day 2 of the $5,000 World Championship of Short-handed No-Limit Holde’m.

And the final table for $2,000 Omaha Hi Lo gets underway, with at least one familiar professional face, who will see if he can hold on to the chip lead.

Seat 1- Martin Corpuz, Jr. 292,000
Seat 2- Ming Lee 373,000
Seat 3- Mitch Maples 70,000
Seat 4- Thang Luu 238,000
Seat 5- Jess Robinson 255,000
Seat 6- Frankie O’Dell 318,000
Seat 7- Marcel Luske 427,000
Seat 8- Marvin Ryan 104,000
Seat 9- Stuart Paterson 58,000

LAS VEGAS–Good morning. It’s good to see you all again. We’re half way through the 2007 WSOP, and Pokerati is working correctly. Fingers crossed — there still could be a glitch or five that we haven’t found yet since tearing the whole thing down and rebuilding it. But for the most part, it seems we’re once again an interactive medium for gratuitously snarky pseudojournalism. We’re also on a newer, more powerful server, so though the site is still a tad clunky — my fault, not the programmer’s — it should run much more smoothly than loyal Pokeratizens are used to. I hope you all can handle it.

Of course the downside is that this means that I have to get back to work blogging. (Tom, it would help if you could win another bracelet — just don’t win too many until we’ve driven a few miles on the new engine. Michele, you should win a bracelet, too. But still hold off on the bikini pics, cool?) It was quite pleasurable being able to blame several days of personal downtime on “technical issues.” But now the Series is full-on, and we look forward to bringing at least a sliver of it to you.

Friends, readers, non-American players …

Pokerati is going to take a little nap. We’re going “off the air” for a short while to fix a few things — we’ve run out of bubble gum and duct tape and are gonna turn to mid-tech nuts and bolts to accommodate your increasingly sophisticated WSOP demands. Thanks for your patience. Check back Monday morning, at which point we should be functional once again.

If you can’t wait until then to satisfy your poker-info jones, we recommend:

PokerNews — for the play-by-play coverage of every event.
CardPlayer — shocking, I know, but they seem to be learning what bloggers did in 2005-06 about the kinda coverage you can do when being media non grata forces you to improvise.

I also encourage you to download the latest episode of Beyond the Table. In fact, since you’ll have a little extra time this weekend, you should just subscribe via iTunes (or RSS/MyYahoo/etc.) and listen to a whole bunch of episodes. It will be like your own personal Beyond the Table marathon. Dreamy.

Photos will continue to show up irregularly in Pokerati’s Flickr gallery.

And perhaps I’ll have some fresh, frontline cash-games coverage for you over at PokerWorks.

You also should be reading:

Wicked Chops, The Poker Biz, Owen at PokerListings (he’s not the only one — a lot of their other coverage is good, too), Shuttergypsy, Pauly, the PokerStars blog, Mean Gene, CC, the Hendon Mob, PokerPages, PokerBlog, and Jeffrey Pollack’s blog (aka The Commish’s Corner).

If none of that really floats your fancy, you could be playing free poker online to win seats to the 2008 WSOP with our good poker friends at Milwaukee’s Best Light.

The video below may or may not be SFW — depends where you work — but it does a good job summing up a lot of what goes on off-the-tables at the World Series of Poker:

So there you have it. Pokerati looks to get un-broke over the weekend. Should be fun.

Click, and enjoy.â„¢

As The Fat Guy mentioned below, we’ve been having some problems with Pokerati’s web server. And to think … we thought we LOVED traffic here in our little corner of the internet. But right now apparently not-so-much — at least not until we migrate to a big-boy server, which is proving more difficult than paying the web thugs who demanded money and now are making us pull our own teeth so they can melt down our fillings.

(Couldn’t be worse timing, either.)

If you can see this post, it means we’re up and running. But we’re not out of the weeds yet. Like the bracelet Gonz used to get into the Playboy Mansion, the internal machinery that is Pokerati is currently being held together with bubble gum. You’ll notice comments aren’t working, and there’s some other techie stuff that goes on behind the scenes that isn’t operational, thereby lowering your poker-blog-reading experience. And there’s a good chance we could go down again on Monday.

Sincere apologies for the downtime it’s your fault for reading us.

ALT HED: Can We Borrow Some Duct Tape?

NOTE TO BLOGGERS: Just discovered the single pages aren’t working right now, so don’t use the “more” option for extended entries. Guess we’ll have to keep the writing extra tight for a while.

For one…sleep. My children were jumping on me at 7:30 this morning after I went to bed at 3am. Literally, they were jumping. I was having a wonderful dream…I was playing strip poker running through a field of flowers wearing a pretty dress when suddenly I felt a sharp blow to my thigh. Not good (insert Debbie Downer sound effect), possibly quite detrimental when heading into the second day of a tournament; However, it’s nothing a little Red Bull or Amazon Room Menergy can’t fix.

Another thing lacking this year are crappy dealers. Yes, you can always find a few bad apples in the bunch but overall they are running the games quite nicely.

Reportedly, alive and kicking but still lacking is…Vinnie Vinh. While it’s hearsay he’s alive…what good is hearsay? After all, technically he’s still MIA and I don’t mean the Miami Airport. Not to mention it was probably heard from a poker player and poker players shouldn’t be trusted.

Not lacking are some funny blogs bodogbeatpoker, drunken stories and as usual the mispelling of my name.

(Wonder if youwannapoker.com will even read this before they gank it.)

I had pretty much forgotten about the abundance of poker content thieves out there — was just gonna keep doing my thing and not let them bring me down. But then I read Gary Carson’s blog … and he reminded me that really, while maybe we can’t stop this practice outright, that doesn’t mean we should stand idly by as our “good friends” at Full Tilt continue to profit off the “work” of known internet thieves.

I’m being kinda serious: I think it might be time for a good-ole-fashioned lawsuit! Howard Lederer, Chris Ferguson, Clonie Gowen, Ray Bitar, Michael Craig … so many others — just dropping a few names who might take note and have a concerned interest in this matter — are you listening?

(Ultimate Bet, we’re looking at you, too.)

More…

I think I’m flummoxed. I mean sure, SEO is so 2006 … but Pokerati’s traffic has been growing, our content has been improving, other blogs continue to find reason to link us up, and we’re ready to bust nuts at the super-big frickin’ WSOP! Yet in the eyes of almighty Google, we are less than we once were — as Pokerati’s “page rank” has dropped from 5 to 4.

This may not mean much to most of you, but it’s kind of a bummer to poker web geeks, especially those of us who just finished reading Search Engine Optimization For Dummies. You see, we have long been a 5 here at Pokerati, and frankly, kinda felt like we should be a 6 … or at least wanted to become one because all my friends were 6s. But Big Brother Google must have recently recalibrated its algorithm or something, because their page ranks have dropped, too. Check it out:

Pauly dropped from 6 to 5
PokerProf — from 6 to 4 (LasVegasVegas dropped from 7 to 5)
Bill Rini — from 6 to 5
The Fat Guy — from 6 to 5
Iggy — from 7 to 5
PokerBlog (run by the SEO team at PartyPoker) — from 6 to 4
Wicked Chops — from 5 to 4
PokerWorks — from 6 to 5
CardPlayer — from 7 to 6
Bluff — from 6 to 5
worldseriesofpoker.com — from 7 to 6
PokerStars Blog — hanging tight at 6
Up for Poker — hanging tight at 5
The Poker Biz — from 4 to 3

More…

Great post by the great Daddy. And I’m not just saying that because he espouses the TBR 2007 mantra, “Tight is right.” Read for yourself and decide. (And how does one apply for these sorts of credentials?) (Via Drizz.)

So much of the internet these days is a fight with the people who take good creations and do bad things with them. Sad, really, when an individual human being lacks the ability/confidence/whatever to create something original and instead conceives of a way to profit semi-sneakily off the efforts of others. It perverts the whole shared and open-source concepts that make so much of the internet great. Anyhow, I will get off my soapbox preaching against malicious use of RSS feeds and irresponsible spamming … and instead say it is now a great pleasure to provide a link to one of the more egregious offenders:

http://pokerarticles.us.

First off, since we’re makin’ fun … let’s give some due props to our friends at CardPlayer — their new CardPlayerTV section (new to me at least) I gotta say is pretty damn good … from a functional interactive internet layout user-friendly usability perspective, very well done. As to the content itself, well that’s another story:

Just have a gander at “The Mouthpiece,” starring/featuring/all-about Mike Matusow. Wow, and you thought some of CP’s favorite poker pros-cum-writers were bad …

I did find two interesting timestamps, however … 1) at 2:20 he starts a bit that ends with a vociferous “Fuck off!” … and 2) at 15:00 Matusow panders to endorse non-overtly pokery products such as Vitamin Water (pink bottle) and Ritalin.

Now if only CardPlayer were willing to let us embed these videos in our own sites, people might actually watch them regularly enough to elicit good-ole-fashioned commercials from companies without affiliate codes or deposit bonuses.

Happy 4/20 to all of you. On this day, three years ago, Pokerati was born. (Ouch, my back hurts.) The World Poker Tour is celebrating by hosting a big $25,000 buy-in tournament in Las Vegas this weekend. The WPT Championsomething.

Full Tilt also went live this week in 2004, which was the subject of my very first post. My how things have changed … or not.

Here is my blogroll on Opening Day:

Click below to see some other kinda sorta interesting stories that were catching our attention in the early days, right as poker was starting to catch on. And, so long as we’re rummaging through the deep and broken archives, might as well have a listen, too, to Pokerati’s first ever podcast … (before we knew what a podcast was.)

Am thinking of taking the day off, by the way. Perhaps celebrating with a few stiff drinks, like any three-year-old should.

More…

Exhibit A: by Pauly
Exhibit B: by Otis

Is there any doubt that these guys are clearly the two best writers in poker? Sorry McManus — you’re still great and all, but that was like so 2004. The above stories (about life in the poker underground) are totally must-clicks, and I’m not just saying that because they also happen to be quality linkers. You wait and see … These are the guys etching out the tales of an era that will be read decades from now.

UPDATE: Wow. Apparently ESPN is no Rolling Stone. Pauly’s said thanks but no thanks to the top gig in town. And, of course, in true Tao fashion, he’s taken what is essentially an age-old storyline and given it the juice:

That all changed after a conference call on Tuesday afternoon. A suit in the upper brass (and non-poker person) had an issue with my philosophy of covering poker. The WSOP is not figure skating. It’s cut-throat poker in Las Vegas, held in one of the most dangerous cities in the world where crystal meth abuse runs rampant, gangbangers frequently blow each other away, female players offer anal sex for tournament buy-ins, and poker players get robbed in the parking lot of the Rio by gunpoint. Heck, just this past weekend, a pro named William Gustafik was brutally stabbed to death by his wife… in Las Vegas.

That’s just the beginning. If you dig deeper, it gets worse.

Seriously, it’s gonna be an amazing World Series this year, isn’t it?

I doubt Tipper Gore has anything to do with this (despite her husband’s inventing the internet) but it looks like Dan may not have to slap a warning label on Pokerati.

Blog on this…Technorati announced it’s first big acquisition today. Hey Dan…I’ve been meaning to ask…is Technorati the father of Pokerati’s baby?