Just because my poker telecasting career the PokerBowl seems to have fizzled under a cloud of overt mishandlement (like the video’s gone and everything), don’t think the concept of organized semi-collusion has been simply tried and dismissed. A different operation — Dream Team Poker — pulled off a successful invitational at the Hard Rock in November, and sure enough, as is always the case with these team poker events … everyone had a great funky-slightly-different-poker time. And the winners (Bluff publisher Eric Morris, editor Matt Parvis, and tournament ringer ZeeJustin) actually got paid — $39k divvied up accordingly.

Dream Team Poker 2 is ready to go — Mar 27-29 at Caesar’s — and this one will be an open event … so any threesome with $1,650 ($500+50 per person) can get in on the action. Because the buy-in is both big enough and low enough, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this be something of a good-ole-fashioned pro-am event … especially if some of the pros who have been buying into similarly priced Venetian Deep Stacks lately feel they have an edge because they’ve played in a couple of these team tournaments already.

Click here for tourney details and to preregister online.

As we can tell from a flurry of new comments on an old post, apparently the creator of the Poker Bowl, John Nightingale, is up to his old plausibly criminal heretofore legally uncontested shenanigans … as some fantasy sports players are feeling a little ripped off, kinda like cash-finishers in the Poker Bowl did until the Nevada Gaming Commission held the Palms’ feet to the fire and made the host venue pay up.

Supposedly all was going to be rectified and the event resurrected under new management … and then we didn’t hear from them for a while — televised poker is hard. But as Mathers points out, there’s a new video from October showing what a fun, different, crazy-but-still-true-pokery tournament the Poker Bowl really was, or could have been. You get to see Lacey Jones doing her thing, Mark Seif (and a happily drinky Scotty Nguyen) wearing an Absolute Poker uniform, and lots of moaning and dancing. Fun video. No audio though … gee, televised poker is hard … (or at least good televised poker apparently is).

Supposedly we’ll be seeing the PB (again) in 2009. But that was posted in October, right around the time financial realities were becoming uber-clear to potential backers, so … we’ll have to see if the Poker Bowl can live up to its promise. Meanwhile, the original creator of the event seems to have nothing to do with it — he’s busy taking in a few months worth of upper-middle-class living expenses while fantasy sports players screams “rip-off!”

Good times.

The Team Poker concept isn’t going away just because its big introduction to Las Vegas a year ago turned out to be a near-criminal scam. (FWIW, everyone did eventually get paid from the PokerBowl, I’m pretty sure, except Karridy.) The LV room embracing it — team poker, not the rip-off attempts — is the Hard Rock … which is now running weekly team poker tournaments:

Hello Everyone!
Welcome to Team Poker at The Hard Rock Poker Lounge!

Every Thursday night at 6pm we have our Team League Tournament. It is teams of 4 people. $100 buy in per player, you start at different tables and you get 4 chances to win $2000, 3rd place wins your money back!! It is a lot of fun. We have lots of teams signed up already, Don’t miss out!

Call me asap 702-245-3758 If you want to register your team for tonight.

Hope to hear back from you,
Lara
Poker Host

In addition, the Hard Rock has just announced a big “Dream Team Poker” tournament, a $1k per player team event to be held there November 7-9. Check out the details at DreamTeamPoker.com. This one is the brainchild of a dude named Daniel Delshad, who from the best I can tell made his name in networking among storage professionals.

Slowly but surely, the fate of the US PokerBowl becomes clear-ish …

Another semi-private email went out this weekend to the winners who are still awaiting to be paid out. It says cash is ready to be handed over to its rightful owners — so long as they promise not to sue after they collect. Fair enough … (Presumably reliable super-secret inside sources say the unpaid PokerBowl prize money totals more than $400,000) … Step 2 will be to make-good with team managers and vendors (who might-should-wanna get in touch with this help@pokerbusinessenterprises.com guy so they can square up some invoices).

Sounds plausibly legit, and I happen to fall in this category, so we’ll see …

ALT HED: Netellery?

Click below to read the soothing email:

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A lot of people have been clamoring about my TV poker hosting debut wondering what has happened with the U.S. PokerBowl. Indeed, this inaugural team poker concept tourney was supposed to be airing this month on FoxSports. But I don’t think it will be — despite the arguable success of the event. Sure enough, everyone there seemed to be having a really good time … the televised images looked different than what has previously been seen on Poker TV … and amid an interesting re-interpretation of important poker rules, there was all sorts of heartwarming emotional drama with potential controversy (would Marc Seif’s Absolute team insist on wearing their be-logo-ed hats so visibly?) to give us announcers — and presumably the blogging television audience — much to talk about.

But perhaps everyone knew something was amiss when the only two people not smiling in the Key West ballroom at the Palms were the guy organizing the whole thing and John-Robert Bellande (who wasn’t even playing).

“Hey, congratulations on pulling off something really cool,” I said to John Nightingale at the start of the final-final table.

“Well, it was until about 30 minutes ago when the shit really started to hit the fan,” he responded before walking away all exasperated. I guess maybe we shouldn’t be surprised when a tournament that relies on too many freerolls and forgets to take any juice runs into a financial clusterflubbing. Bummer if it can’t be resurrected. Just ask anyone who participated … it really was pretty cool.

Click here to see my photos from the PokerBowl (kicking myself for not taking more of the real behind-the-scenes stuff) … and/or click below to read an email that went out last week updating those with a vested interest in the success (or failure) of the PokerBowl on where things currently stand and what the money situation is:

Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2008 23:29:35 +0000
From: help[-at-]pokerbusinessenterprises.com
To: help[-at-]pokerbusinessenterprises.com
Subject: POKERBOWL MONEY OWED URGENT UPDATE

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T.J. Cloutier has another “blog” about good times around the unique concept of the US Poker Bowl with his Dallas Roughnecks teammates. Though for some reason he doesn’t extol the virtue of Karridy’s team management prowess — he was the bossman of the Roughnecks — in it T.J. does point us to Kenna James’ write-up about the same event — where the singing cowboy discusses how the team concept really got his juices flowing as a guy who played sports in high school but always found himself sitting on the sidelines.

Good stuff. Can’t wait to do the commentationating once they cut it all up.

From Boston to Cali to Las Vegas to Washington DC … it’s all about poker-poker-poker ’til the cows come home.

So wow, so much is going on right about now. A lot of smart people doing a little bit more than just geeking out about poker and the industry’s/game’s/lifestyle’s future. Wish I could be everywhere:

We’ve got the Global Poker Thinking Society getting together at Harvard — featuring Howard Lederer, Charles Nesson, and Crandall Addington.

And then this weekend is the California Poker Conference — where speakers include WSOP Commish Jeffrey Pollack, PPA Executive Director John Pappas, and some influential old-timers such as Mike Caro, Lou Kreiger, Barbara Enright, and many others.

And then on the next day, Pappas heads back to Washington DC, where he’ll be hosting the Poker Player’s Alliance DC Fly-in — a little Beltway lobbying fest on behalf of pro-poker legislation. This is the one I really want to be at — and we’ll try to stay on top of things from afar — because twisting Congressional arms enlightening our representatives is a lot of fun. I gotta say, it also kinda makes me proud to know that our success wooing Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) as a co-sponsor to HR 2610, the Skill Game Protection Act, kinda inspired it.

From CardPlayer:

JP: We had a really great meeting in August with Congressmen Pete Sessions in his Dallas, Texas, office. It was myself and a number of our local PPA members, including Clonie Gowen, who’s a Dallas, Texan, and Robert Williamson III, another Dallas, Texan. We went in and sat down with him and talked to him about the Wexler bill and why it just didn’t make sense that a game of skill is being outlawed on the Internet. And it really resonated and it really came through and what I saw was, wow, this is something we need to replicate, this is something we needed to do more of. Based on that meeting, I thought we needed to get people out to Washington. Whether we make 20 meetings or 200 meetings, I think it’s going to be a worthwhile event.

Very cool! (And well done, Pokeratizen politicos!) Good times, all around. And indeed, we should do more of that.

I’ll be in Vegas … assuming I make my flight, which leaves in — yeow! — four hours, to do the TV Co-hosting thing with Tom Schneider for the inaugural Poker Bowl. This should be a pro-studded affair … even Doyle Brunson will be playing, along with Greg Raymer, Scotty Nguyen, reformed self-colluder ZeeJustin … and Absolute spokesman Mark Seif. Like seriously, we have so much to talk about!

And so little of it to do with how to play [cards]As Ks[/cards] in middle position.

***
Oops, my numbers were off … I was texting with Tom on Saturday about his performance in Day 1A of the main event of the 5-Star World Poker Classic (aka the WPT Championship). He finished with 72k in chips, which I figured should be good enough to get him to Day 3. However, I forgot that the WPT was starting people with double stacks now … so instead of tripling up in this $25k event, he actually only increased his stacks by 50 percent. Still pretty good, albeit five times less good than it initially seemed. I just hope Tom doesn’t erroneously alter his game plan based on my wireless mobile coaching.

Cards go in the air for Day 2 at 2 pm central, with 485 of 639 remaining. I’ll be following the action here — you can do the same. Some of the others still alive I’ll be watching include (in descending chip order) Marc Goodwin, Shannon Shorr, Steve Wong, Lyle Berman, Phil Hellmuth, Jamie Gold, Kido Pham, Doyle Brunson, Gregg Merkow, Phil Ivey, JC Tran, Jim McManus, Tex Barch, Bob Stupak, Chau Giang, ZeeJustin, Robert Williamson III, and Rodeen Talebi.

(First prize is nearly $4 million … which is more than Chris Moneymaker won way back when … if that means anything.)

UPDATE: Will also be following Anna Wroblewski (the button-cute chip leader) and the others over here — love how PokerNews includes the online poker teams sites players are dressing for in their stats. Leave it to the site being updated by bloggers to clue in to semi-relevant minutae. However, they haven’t yet realized Tom from Team Pokerati is even playing.

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