It occurred to me I couldn’t just leave “Doyle Brunson Dies” as the final post on this blog. That would be like ending Star Wars after The Force Awakens. But it’s a new era for poker, indeed. Records already are falling, and we’re almost certain the Main Event will finally break the 2006 record for largest field. And goodbye Rio All-Suites Hotel and Casino … the Horseshoe is the World Series of Poker’s new home. Sad that both Mike Sexton and Brunson aren’t around to see it.

The WSOP’s last year at Binion’s Horseshoe, downtown, was in 2004, which also happened to be Pokerati’s first WSOP. Our traffic then was about 12, and our editorial strategy was to tell friends in Texas what was going on in Las Vegas — complete with results of local players they might recognize from the Dallas underground. To promote this new blog thing, I printed up business cards with this site’s web address and the tagline, “Dude, are you thinking ’bout poker?” I left them atop the urinals at Binion’s men’s rooms (captive audience) and watched the traffic quickly grow to about 40.

It was a good run, but now it’s time for me to move on. Actually, 10 years ago was probably an even better time. But so is now, on the cusp of another poker growth spurt — if not another poker boom, then definitely a poker surge. For certain, a new poker era.

Nightly pic from the trenches. Good to see Pokerati still in some way part of the WSOP.

It’s been a while since Pokerati’s had anything to do with my personal bankroll. And I’m not sure that’s really a direction I wanna take this ship as we navigate new poker waters. But I suppose now’s as good a time as any to hold myself accountable, pokerwise, because even though “the dream” has long dissipated, I do still wanna someday be a winning player able to move up in stakes.

But look at my 2013 bankroll numbers, and ya know what I see? Losing player, LOL? Ha ha, no … Forget for a second that this chart belongs to me, personally, and how removing from my playbook the overcall with unsuited connectors in the small blind could be all that stands between me and two trips to Hawaii … forget all that … because what I think you’re really seeing here is the profile of a so-called recreational poker player:

Recreational players are supposedly all the buzz these days … but do serious players and an industry intent on courting them even understand what that really means? A quick study of the above and you can probably see why I stand in solidarity with McDonald’s workers … but beyond that, we’re looking at a poker life that means about 11 hours a month in casinos, a few tournaments (nothing to brag about, but I did take down a Stratosphere nightly), some casual prop bets, a penchant for at least one house-edge table game … all tallying up to a net negative akin to what it might cost if I were playing similarly recreational tennis or golf or fishing.

Hmm, I suppose that’s psychologically why I’m able to keep coming back for more … because sure I can see the numbers, but also I know I can do better, and maybe next time I will get less unlucky.

I swear Tom Schneider is really starting to piss me off. He knows full well I have little intention of trying to cover the WSOP this year … but damnit, I came up with that strategy kinda-sorta counting on a lackluster performance by our longtime Team Pokerati ambassador — a near certain result as per performance indicators over the past four or so years! But now, like right now, he’s well on his way to taking down trying hard to take down his second bracelet and/or 6-figure score.

With now only five players left, I’m fairly certain he’s gonna win this one, the way he’s barreling through this final table … Greg Mueller, I’d say, is his only threat, as I’ve seen him beat Tom heads-up before with a lot on the line.

You can watch the WSOP live stream here:

http://www.wsop.com/2013/live-video/default.aspx?TID=12827

Though I don’t know the WSOP statistical lore on this one, it would be a rather amazing feat to win a $1,500 HORSE event, and then the $5,000 HORSE, no? And not to get ahead of anyone, but a repeat POY maybe? OK, I’ll cut with the jinxing as Schneider-Mueller have dropped from 1st/2nd in chips to 3rd/4th with four left in the time it has taken me to write this paragraf.

But the important thing to notice, no matter how this event plays out, is that Tom’s hat (Loudmouth Poker, $25) plays well for the live stream:

UPDATE: Now Tom is short, and FBT is chip leader … while the hat tells pretty much the whole story.

UPDATE: Back and forth back and forth … Tom is dominant chip leader now, with hat, um, re-unreversed?

UPDATE: Final four coming back on Tuesday, with Tom in strong position.

Seat Player Chip Count
1 Greg Mueller 140,000
4 Viatcheslav Ortynsiky 680,000
6 Tom Schneider 2,500,000
7 Benjamin Scholl 600,000

Separated at Birth?

Just because I’m onto something new in the podcast realm doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten my original partner(s) in quasiradio crime.

Perhaps inspired by the Oscars or maybe just dismayed by sinking TV ratings for recorded poker — no, wait, it can’t be that because that would require Tom to do something at the table worthy of ho-hum recorded poker TV (rimshot, lol!) — it seems like our ole pal Tom, without a tragedy to exploit for YouTube views, is moving from country music to acting. Check it out … here’s word from, um, Ice Tom, regarding his crime-drama debut with a poker-infused episode of Crime Scene Investigation, called “Last Woman Standing”:

I make my acting debut on CSI tomorrow. I may end up on the cutting room floor and they may not show my face at all, but I did deal some poker to David Cassidy, aka Keith Partridge. You might just see me shuffling cards and cheating a guy. Who knows?

If you don’t see my face, but you see some half bitten finger nails and stubby hands doing some magic with cards that’s me. Next up … hand modeling.

Woot. We’ll be looking for it, as Schneider continues to cross items off his bucket list in time for the WSOP!

There’s a new Tom in town! (And this one has four bracelets, not just two.)

So we may or may not have gotten a little drunk one night … you know how it goes, a little joke, some playful touching, and suddenly somehow our friends at Face Up Gaming are now friends with benefits! The start-up social gaming online poker site will be giving Pokeratizens unprecedented insight into the process of building an online poker operation from the ground up — and we’re happy to have Face Up Gaming as our official online poker subscription site partner!

Read the announcement of our casual maybe sometimes sorta kinky in-bedness here.

So sign up with Face Up  and … well, um, uh …we’ll surely do something special for you! I do know there are lotsa prizes in play already at Face Up. Trips to Aruba, iPads galore, real cash … all up for grabs should you pony up for the US online poker equivalent of a Sam’s Club membership. (It’s the American way to play!)

Executive Instapokerer AlCantHang is big into it, too … I think primarily to make sure the executives don’t eff things up that the Face Up Gaming experience is the best online poker experience in the future of ever!

LOL, but seriously, it should be a great time. Hope to see some of you at the tables.

Even without Pauly here, and Al skillfully holding down the Pokerati fort, I do show up at the Rio every once in a while for the free water and to work on my improv skills. Considering the Bluff Hedline Cam is pretty much just a way for @MartyDerby to pick up chicks, I feel priveliged that I hadn’t yet spilled anything on my shirt and the “air quotes” I added to the script made the cut … even if I do need to practice hand movement with a big honkin sizable microphone.

Oh yeah, and Hellmuth and Ivey continue to tear it up, “Philling” the final table in $10k HORSE. Boom, book it … that’s a wrap?

This hurts me more than it hurts Tom …

https://pokerati.com/donkeybomber-suspended-from-team-pokerati/

But he will be back, we know it! And hopefully more strong and ambassadorial than ever. (Either that or expect him to start turning to the Dark Side.)

What’s crazy is you’d think this all coulda been resolved with a simple Twitter fight … but no.

I want to clear something up that happened during a hand in a $1,500 no limit tournament. I have heard that some are accusing me of using my influence to get a favorable ruling and/or that I took a shot to win a pot.

I’ll let Pokerati readers decide.

On the river, I bet. My opponent calls, to which I announce, “nothing.” My opponent does not turn over his hand, so I table my jack-high. He looks befuddled, picks up one of his cards so only his next-door player can see it. He does NOT table his hand. Only one player sees his one card, which is a queen and would be a winner. He takes his two cards face down and places them on top of the stub of the deck.

The dealer pushes the pot to me. Two seconds go by and everyone is kind of stunned. One guy at the table mutters “sick call” thinking the guy called and couldn’t beat a jack hi.

The dealer does make a little mistake by not mixing all the cards together to make sure that the hand is unidentifiable. Now my opponent looks puzzled and says, “Wait, I had the winning hand.” Yes he did, but he mucked it. Now he’s saying he should get the pot.

We call floor and tell our stories. The floor asks if the hand is identifiable. We all say yes. He leaves and comes back to the table and says that my opponent gets the pot. So I ask, “When is a hand ‘over’? And are you telling me that a player can muck his hand and then get awarded a pot?” He says, “hold on, I’ll be back.”

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Mark Cuban wrote that a sure sign of failure for any start-up is too much promotional gear. I’ve always kinda agreed … believing too many pokerpreneur types come with all the hype but not an actual product (let alone value proposition). But who am I to complain? Everyone knows Pokerati’s business model: to run a haphazard media empire and someday retire by collecting poker swag for future sale on eBay.

Totally coincidental, I happened upon this keyless keyring while cleaning out one of my poker closets last week and couldn’t help but lol-chuckle that none of these three operations made it to a second birthday despite significant hype and promotional spends.

Me in Oceanside, CA

Ahhh, California...

My brother Chris and I, hiking Runyon Canyon above LA

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably either a poker player or fan of the game in some fashion. You know that the games in Las Vegas are plentiful on any day of the week. The weekend crowd consists of tourists from all parts of the US escaping their routine lives for a few days in the desert. During the week, the player ratio skews more towards Europeans on extended holiday, mixed with the company conference crowd and conventioneers. There are always locals in the game and during the daytime, they can represent 50 percent or more of the table lineup, even at Strip properties.

At nighttime the ratio shifts more towards the out-of-towners, but where the tourists are, there will always be local regs scattered about.

It’s so fun playing a heads-up tournament. You get to play every hand… what more needs to be said?

As a poker player and/or fan, you might’ve heard that while Las Vegas is the gambling epicenter of the US, when it comes to poker, the true Mecca is actually located in Los Angeles. And after a recent return visit to my old stomping grounds, I was quickly reminded of that fact. The LA cardrooms are different in so many ways from their Vegas counterparts in everything from the atmosphere to the feel of the cards to the player makeup to what’s comped and what isn’t. At any one time in the Commerce, Bicycle, Hustler or any other casinos that occupy very non-glitzy East LA districts, you won’t find more than 1 percent of the player pool designated as “tourists”. No tourist is going to take time out of enjoying gorgeous Malibu or exploring the weirdness of Venice Beach to grind Commerce Casino. These places are packed with locals who love poker, love gambling, and very much love action. They absolutely have to… how else could you explain these folks braving horrific Los Angeles traffic to get to Bell Gardens to play $2/$3NL midweek? It’s true, you do get comped food from a rather impressive menu at the Bike, as opposed to free cocktails a la Las Vegas. But I have to assume it’s more than that. Poker has become a real part of several cultures that make up Los Angeles’ diverse demographics. It’s been that way for decades now, before the no-limit era and now well into it.

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The Boyd School of Law at UNLV will host an Internet Gaming Regulation Symposium on May 18. The conference is being sponsored by Lewis & Roca. You can read more about the conference and speakers and register for it here. I’m preparing a paper on financial transaction handling (with a focus on anti-money laundering) for the event, and that’s why I haven’t made time to blog on Pokerati lately. (Apologies to Dan.)

The conference is really an interesting concept. True to the symposium definition, different authors with familiarity in the gaming space – and anyone else who wants to attend – are getting together, presenting a series of papers, and critiquing them. Later, each writer or writing team will return home and make further changes and amendments to her, his, or their article. The whole collection of papers will then be published as a book by the UNLV Gaming Law Journal sometime in the fall.

The symposium and the resulting book has as its objective the compilation of selected worldwide best practices in the regulation of Internet gaming and betting. Topics that will form discrete chapters include location verification; fraud and cheating detection and prevention; responsible gaming; accounting, reporting, and audit requirements; taxation; and, advertising. I don’t expect that the presentations will just rehash the papers. I hope that mine, for example, goes beyond what’s in the article to try to explore where international regulation of the igaming sector is going.

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We still love Donkeybomber ’round these parts; just haven’t written much about the famous author and ’07 WSOP Player of the Year lately because … well, um, how do you put this nicely when his biggest accomplishments since then include not having enough money on Full Tilt to actually lose anything, and maybe getting retweeted by @basebaldy AND Jack Effel? (Sorry Pokeratizens for missing the breaking news … )

Well you’re not gonna believe what our balder, gastronomically larger, bi-braceleted pal is up to now: Country music.

Seriously, have a listen to First 5-Song CD, Created in December 2011, a title he apparently shortened prior to mainstream release on iTunes with the simpler, more memorable “EP”, which some say could be subtle commentary on the plight of a one-time WSOP POY seeking recognition as a real pro by Epic Poker.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/tom-schneider/id435732204

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I think I was in Los Angeles at the end of last summer. Somewhat amazingly, that was the last time I was outside of the desert. I did go to Palm Springs with my girlfriend and met some family there for Thanksgiving … but that’s still in the desert. I didn’t go home this past Christmas for the first time ever in my life, and I haven’t left Vegas once in 2012. This can’t be healthy. I need to get out for a while.

This was THE nit festival of all nit festivals. Your normal hourly rate simply does not translate when you remove the fun-loving, didn’t-come-to-fold tourist factor and replace it with the game-has-obv-passed-me-by-but-I’ll-still-sit-here-and-fold-for-$10/hr-zomg-dreams-do-come-true jaded older Vegas reg. I mean, it was truly miserable.

Las Vegas is awesome. We all know about the availability of booze and gambling 24/7, and the ability to keep whatever sleep schedule you desire. As cash game poker players, we never have to endure the pain of an alarm clock’s rouse, as Vegas embraces daywalkers and nightowls alike. The cost of living is relatively low, especially considering the quantity and quality of entertainment options available as compared to other cities with similar offerings, such as LA, San Francisco, Miami. If outdoor adventure is your thing, you can find plenty of that at places like Red Rock Canyon; hikes such as the Gold Strike near Hoover Dam, which takes you all the way down into the Colorado River; and weird natural beauty like the Valley of Fire. And for those less willing to leave Clark County, there’s the peaceful Summerlin suburbs, and the increasingly interesting downtown Vegas scene.

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WASHINGTON DC — About 110 people or so are in DC for the Digital Gaming and Lottery Policy summit … essentially a two-day crash course on gaming regulation. The DGLP confab is addressing everything from technology to legal quandaries to very detailed proposals on taxation breakdowns … like by the percent! We all know online gambling can be a complex issue, with lots of minutiae that can impact the success or failure of businesses built around a sub-industry. And the way American lawmakers are picking it all apart is enough to make you think that we musta either totally forgotten about Europe’s relatively successful regulation of a multibillion-dollar industry over the past decade, or we Americans just consider the other side of the pond nothing worth a study — they are responsible for Full Tilt, after all!

No? Regardless, as part of the process of eventually “getting there” legislatively, and staying true to Pokerati’s motto In Negotio Pro Poker Meliori, my contribution to policy noise today will be addressing online cheating. Below are my notes from which I plan to wonk out with my donk out:

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