Pokerati’s pirate feed is back … and to celebrate, the amazing Joey Stapleton from PokerStars’ The Big Game joins Huff, Sirius XM’s “fantasy guy”, in studio as Gary is off getting married and BJ leaves Jess to work the floor of WPT-Bellagio/Festa (unprotected from knife-wielding bandits!) so he and an angry Wolfman can tell you 2/6ths of everything there is to know about:

The Poker Beat: October 17, 2010

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• Rush Poker in your pocket – and the perks of Full Tilt’s Black Card
• Russian spy Anna Chapman – and the wisdom of a poker dalliance with black ops
• Nick Schulman on MTV’s World of Jenks
• Weeds poker TV
• Regional COOPing in the USA
• WPT-Festa al Lago and WSOP-Indiana
• WSOPC on Versus TV

“In the works”, they are saying … but sounds real … real awful, lol, if the new half-hour poker comedy — supposedly about a couple brainiac Vegas grinders chasing the WSOP main event dream — were being done by anyone but the exec prods of the hit Showtime show Weeds. [via Wicked Chops]

Of course poker fiction hasn’t done all that well since Rounders really … we had Lucky You and what was that show on ESPN? Tilt? … not exactly memorable beyond making Norman Chad oddly more palatable. But at the same time, you can kinda see what the production team of Jenji Kohan and Matt Salsberg could be going for, taking on the two biggest issues in the original Barack Obama national suggestion box — poker and pot — but with Ws.

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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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Amazing. Didn’t think it could be done. Yet the entities at Wicked Chops keep getting better and better at this whole video talk format, and if you look/listen closely you might start to believe that they’re actually not unintelligent, uninformed, uncouth sexist, racist wankers. Clearly WCP’s marketing department must be going ape-shit over this travesty and calling for someone’s firing if “the entities” are gonna go on-air every week and disgrace the Wicked Chops brand.

For those of you who didn’t see it — or get to watch in full — here’s an hour and 40minutes of the masters of poker low-brow taking on the headier issues of the poker day … with their special guests this week Annie Duke, John Pappas, and me … joining the crew for my first ever video Skype at 53:00 if you’re short on time and have to get right to the good stuff.

Also fans of @JessWelman will wanna be sure to check out the early part of the show, where she makes her debut appearance delivering news briefs and tackling matters of poker pop culture such as Beth Shak’s forthcoming season on Miliionaire Matchmaker.

* Seriously, not sure what I kept looking at way up in the sky. Video-chat clearly adds 10 pounds.

Is somebody winning the TOC? Do we care? Not saying I won’t be watching it once it gets edited down for TV, but I thought we were supposed to be at a final table by now, not down to 17 10. With more than a week of retrospective and a third of the field eliminated remaining, the preferable alternatives for the 2011 WSOP seem obvious:

a) Hold the TOC at the very beginning of the WSOP, under some premise like who’s gonna kick off the Series with a little extra freeroll juice?

b) Hold the TOC during the November Nine. Add a little Harrah’s-branded excitement to that week, ya know, and give top pros a reason to make sure they’re part of it all? Also would give some eligible winners a chance to qualify while their stock is hot …

With this and three other final tables going on today … WTF happened to that “day off” we were promised?

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Dan showed up to the Rio super early for a Sunday just in case the the DOJ decided to bust Full Tilt honchos Howard Lederer and Jesus Ferguson. Pauly compared his morbid fascination of the potential perp walk to watching a NASCAR race in order to see a big wreck.

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Dan and Pauly recap the brief events of Day 1 of the TOC, and the slight confusion surrounding the change in schedule.

Be sure to catch up with all the episodes you’ve missed in the TOP podcast archives.

Phil Ivey was at the Golden Nugget enjoying barbecue last night — at Howard Lederer’s World Series of BBQ — when he learned that Tom Dwan was making another serious run for a bracelet, in $10k PLO.

pic: Melissa Hayden

Durrrr in the headlights: Please, Melissa, I’m trying to eat …Who Tom Dwan what? How many chips? I need more sauce.

Play ended last night with 33 left and Durrrr the chip leader … by like a lot. (36 got paid.) Phil Hellmuth is 13th in chips, with 330k to Dwan’s 910k.

Here’s the event coverage Ivey and just about everyone will be sweating on Saturday: $10k Pot-Limit Omaha. Sigh. If only ESPN knew what Euros (and players in my 1/2 NL/PLO game at the Hard Rock) already do … that Omaha is hold’em, and thus can make for some great TV.

Others still alive include:

Jason Mercier
Devilfish
Ludovic Lacay (Benjo’s friend/French bad-ass)
Fabrice Soulier
Michael Binger
Daniel Alaeai
Tony Cousineau
Jason Lester (for viewers still insisting on familiar ’03-’04 faces)

Interestingly enough, the last man out for the night (winning $19.8k) was EPT Tournament Director Thomas Kremser … essentially the Matt Savage of Europe. Alexander Kravchenko, another pretty good-TV name, busted him.

But hey, this is PLO, so all sorts of card craziness can happen. Let’s reconvene when they get to the final table and see if indeed, poker geeks and uber-high-stakes prop-bettors everywhere will be clamoring about Dwan (and maybe Hellmuth) closing out the WSOP with a multimillion-dollar bang.

Former and/or current WSOP table sponsor Everest Poker has filed another lawsuit against Harrah’s … claiming the American gaming giant is infringing on trademark rights by playing the 2010 WSOP (and filming some of it) with Everest logos on and around all the tables.

This suit, filed in Las Vegas federal court, is the latest strike in a legal tit-for-tat between that adds to a list of matters on the table and off making 2010 arguably the most challenging WSOP year since Harrah’s took over.

Everest first sued Harrah’s on April 1, claiming breach of contract after the French ESPN affiliate electronically replaced Everest logos during 2008-09 WSOP broadcasts with “virtual signage” from Full Tilt, an Everest competitor. On those grounds, Everest refused to pay the final $8.4 million on a three-year contract, money the WSOP was expecting before this spring. That suit came, of course, shortly after the WSOP announced its $1 million “TOC” freeroll.

Buffering: So far the only live-streaming WSOP action has been from the WSOP-Academy sponsor’s exemption TOC sit-n-go, which took place on a single table with their own felt, not one bearing the marks of Everest Poker.

Harrah’s denied those claims, and followed with a suit of its own against Everest, alleging breach of contract and other infractions while seeking the promised Everest funds. And now, as mentioned, Everest has added further litigation to the Everest vs. Harrah’s docket, all of which is pending.

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If they just added a little Omaha, this show might be awesome … but apparently American players can’t handle that many cards? Alas … the rest of the world thinks we are dumb. Atill seems like it will be a pretty good, well-received show … a little new-school High Stakes Poker meets old-school World Poker Tour maybe?

Here’s the first look at the latest new poker infomercial set to repeatedly hit the cable-wire broadcast television — the PokerStars.net Big Game. This clip features a pretty fun hand that you gotta think might have Phil Hellmuth on tilt at least until WSOP Event #30something. It’s a $200k pot, with Hellmuth an 85 percent favourite over the must-win amateur “loose cannon” … but running it four times isn’t even enough for Hellmuth to get half the pot. (He woulda been better off running it once.)

Yeow, with that much on the line and a bad beat x3, it’s almost as if some people might see this and not think of poker as a game of skill at all!

PSBG debuts Monday, June 14, “late night” daily on Fox (Sports, I presume?) regular Fox-not-Sports’ local network affiliates.

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Jon Katkin

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The Poker Economy

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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.

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Gotta love Benjo and Pauly for keeping me (and therefore you) updated not just on results … but more so with what’s really happening on the Amazon floor as the first of three televised events — the $50k Players Championship — gets down to the final table.

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Pauly and TOP’s ready stand-in Benjo describe events on the rail in the closing moments of the final table bubble for the 50K Players Championship. They also spy on a potential endorsement deal being negotiated in the far corner of the Amazon Ballroom

Here, btw, are the final table players in the $50k (8-Game) Mix, from PokerNews:

Seat 1: David “Bakes” Baker – 3,095,000
Seat 2: Mikael Thuritz – 2,300,000
Seat 3: Vladimir Schmelev – 1,925,000
Seat 4: John Juanda – 2,620,000
Seat 5: Daniel Alaei – 1,705,000
Seat 6: Michael Mizrachi – 2,620,000
Seat 7: David Oppenheim – 460,000
Seat 8: Robert Mizrachi – 3,125,000

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You’ve all seen it before … but it had been several years since I watched it in full (with no other distractions). If you haven’t seen it for a while either, enjoy a clip from back when poker was just poker …

Seven years ago today, the 2003 Main Event got underway …

After wading through a massive field of 839, Chris Moneymaker would end up facing off against Sam Farha, the quintessential Vegas gambler, and making the bluff that created an industry:

(Check out his hat. Think PokerStars got good ROI on their swag?)

Old news, but first time I’m seeing it … (thanks KevMath for the embed code) … a very positive-for-poker segment on Good Morning America, with George Stephanopolous playing a private Poker After Dark sunrise sit-n-go against Annie Duke, Phil Hellmuth, Jason Lee, and Steve Begleiter. George played admirably and finished 3rd, after getting it in with the best hand.

Nice. What I couldn’t help but notice:

• Sweet mini-gig for Ali Nejad, getting to host an event on Good Morning America.
• Duke, who understands a thing or two about Washington and proper patching up, wore no UB.
• Hellmuth did however — and not just UB.net, but dot-COM. Did Phil miss a memo or something?

Seriously, not to take away from the respectability of this sorta TV play … nice job by all, and hearing Stephanopolous declare his excitement about playing Ante Up for Africa-DC probably couldn’t have been a better result. But really … UB.COM? Notably either bold, ignorant, or inconsequential.

The latest Poker Beat was a bit of a clusterfucky episode for us on the backend — computer breakdowns and internet snafus during a week where the only meaty topic we had for a full segment was David Williams’ stepping up to a new level of poker bad-assness by winning the WPT World Championship … and even that devolved into a Gary/Dan vs BJ spat about whether or not the mind coaching of Sam Chauhan has any tournament value or is just an Extenze-like sales success story for his brand of hypnotic snake oil.

But before we even get to that, we break down all sorts of poker buggerings … Daniel Tzvetkoff denied bail, poker recognized as a mind sport, Adam Junglen’s prosthetic leg, Cole South bowing out of CardRunners, PokerStars buying up abandoned poker blogs, Harrah’s selling the Rio, a new right-wing poker+politics show, and a study saying online gambling leads to jobs.

It was one of those episodes where so much was going wrong before we even got started that the crew just had to rely on shooting the shit about what we may or may not know … all while Huff attempted to keep the ship from running aground. I think it worked!

The Poker Beat
4/29/10

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As you may or may not know, our good friends at Wicked Chops and the Heartland Poker Tour have partnered up to find a new TV-hostess for the HPT. Cool American Idol meets Celebrity Apprentice on Facebook-like competition for poker-savvy women who want to look pretty and smart-ish while talking about bustouts.

We were gonna nominate the uber-young Katie for the position — seems like an adorble pre-teen who knows about bad beats and pot odds might be perfect for what the wholesome-Americana-poker Heartland is all about. However, upon learning from WCP that the notorious Ass Girl is a top contender for the job, we’re not so sure any more that this is the place for a child who hasn’t yet learned how to use breasts to her professional advantage.

(Zip it, you sick Wicked Chops readers pervs.)

Anyhow, they’ve got just a few days to go before nominations in this open casting call are closed. From there three finalists will fly to the HPT event at Turning Stone in New York for a May 14 pageant-off.

Of course … France opens itself up, and then gets way in on the televised poker thing … and sure enough the WPT is there to follow with a new stop. No time to vet any of this (we’re minutes from broadcast-time for The Poker Beat) so read the press release below and think for yourself what it might mean to have a WPT tournament that sounds like an Eminem song.

Oh, also, a wildly speculative, unsubstantiated prediction … the next France-like poker mini-hotspot you’ll see … it’s gonna be Florida.

WORLD POKER TOUR® EUROPEAN EXPANSION CONTINUES WITH NEW STOP AT FRANCE’S CASINO D’AMNEVILLE

3200 + 300€ Tournament Marks Second French Event for 2010

(LOS ANGELES) April 12, 2010 – Further expanding its tour offering in Europe, World Poker Tour® and Casino Municipal D’Amneville announced today a partnership to create the next WPT stop in France. The WPT Amneville 2010 tournament series kicks off October 30 – November 1 with land-based qualifiers and side events, followed by the 3200 + 300€ WPT Main Event November 2 – 6.

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