The World Poker Tour made its Chinese debut this weekend at the MGM Grand in Sanya. That’s some 400 miles down shore from Macau, where PokerStars recently hosted the inaugural “Asia Championship of Poker”, and next month will hold something similar called the Red Dragon. These events come just as Caesars, unable to get properly licensed in China, is officially retreating from the Communist gamblers’ promised land.

Meanwhile, Stars is apparently trying to  get (back?) into North America by buying a distressed brick-and-mortar casino in storm-ravaged New Jersey — this according to an announcement that may or may not have been conveniently timed to steal buzz from a WSOP circuit event going on in Atlantic City.

Game of Risk: Live Poker in an Online Age
Redrawing the Battle Lines

Check out how the three biggest brands in poker (and the online gaming sites behind them) stack up against each other. I make no claims of these maps being to scale nor anything more than “pretty accurate, I think,” but look past my amateur cartography to see how three Poker World superpowers — the biggest American casino corporation, the biggest European internet gaming company, and the biggest “offshore” online poker operator — have been competing fiercely to corner your neighborhood tournament market.

 WSOP / Caesars / 888
 WPT / BwinParty / MGM Resorts
 PokerStars.net / PokerStars.com

See below to for some historical perspective on how the current live-tourney landscape took shape over the first decade of the 21st century.

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A relatively routine raid of a low-stakes poker game in Greenville, South Carolina turned bloody yesterday night — as police tried to gain entry to a poker house. The game host, now known to be Aaron Awtry, 72, shot through the front door, striking sheriff’s deputy Matthew May with a bullet that went through his arm.

A vice squad in SWAT gear returned fire, hitting Awtry with multiple rounds in his arm and thumb … which was followed by a 20-minute standoff between cops and players, according to a spokesman for the Greenville County Sheriff’s Department. Both shooting victims were taken to the hospital where they are in stable condition.

There were 12 people and Awtry in the house at 502 Pine Knoll Drive when police arrived at about 9:20 pm last night. According to frontline witnesses, they had just finished a small buy-in dinnertime tourney … and a 1/2 cash game was just getting underway when someone saw 5-0 approaching on a security monitor. Before he could clearly vocalize an alert, a battery ram begin slamming the front door and players froze. Awtry, who players say has notoriously bad hearing in his senior years and presumably believed the game was being robbed, began shooting at the door with his pistol, firing “at least once” according to a player, “multiple shots” according to police. At least four officers returned fire at the door with at least 20 bullets from their higher-powered assault weapons.

As Awtry fell back into the poker room entryway, he balked, “Why didn’t you tell me it was the cops?”

click to enlarge

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I’m sure this has absolutely nothing to do with anything, obv … but was going through some old pics and came across this screen-grab from July 2006 (some two months before the UIGEA)… when I hadn’t yet discovered the purpose of labeling images more descriptively than just wsop28.jpg, and the Feds apparently hadn’t yet figured out how to hide an IP address when emailing a link to a small-time poker blogger’s suggestive tag.

At the time, Phil Hellmuth had just won his 10th bracelet, no one thought twice about playing on Ultimate Bet, everyone in poker still had money, and Jamie Gold (of all people) seemed to represent the very worst poker had to offer. Ahh, the good ole days … even Russ Hamilton was presumed innocent then.

Though I hardly recall why specifically, something about this visitor seemed peculiar enough for me to wanna preserve the moment. With the benefit of hindsight, I’m sure I was just kidding.

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The first in a four-part series about Nevada Gaming wrangling with a new era of poker regulation as Harrah’s and PokerStars fight …

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The inaugural NAPT-Venetian was by most accounts a smashing success. PokerStars announced the tournament in January, and less than six weeks later — at a time when big-money players usually would be heading to California for the WPT-Commerce — 872 entrants made it to the Venetian for a televised $5k main event in Las Vegas.

(The February event, and others from the fledgling North American Poker Tour, are currently airing on ESPN-2 and TSN, the leading sports television channel in Canada.)

But it wasn’t the field size, TV cameras, or $4.1 million prize pool that made the NAPT-Venetian special … it was that the Las Vegas tournament was “presented by PokerStars”. Dot net.

Perhaps surprisingly, because we see so much PokerStars on TV … this was the first time since the UIGEA that a licensed Nevada casino partnered with PokerStars (or any site like it) for a major open tournament.

Its success didn’t go unnoticed. And that may prove to be the problem for PokerStars and the North American Poker Tour, as the inaugural NAPT-Venetian will probably — almost certainly — be the last.

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If you missed it last week, one of our more astute hirsute co-panelists on The Poker Beat was break-dancing the fine line between news and conspiracy theory in analyzing the changing legal landscape of poker and what it means to the business we all dabble in.

The arrest of Daniel Tzvetkoff had something to do with that.

Also BJ and Gary look at actual numbers in comparing/contrasting the WPT to the EPT. All while assessing whether or not PokerStars is taking over the world. Plus Liv Boeree kicking arse as Huff celebrates the glorious life of Gang Starr.

The Poker Beat
4/22/10

[audio:http://www.pokerroad.com/download/the-poker-beat:60]
UPDATE: New audio file click here

Dude … it’s gettin’ hot here in the US … specifically in Las Vegas.

Yesterday federal authorities arrested Daniel Tzvetkoff, a 27-year-old Australian national “on charges that he assisted illegal internet gambling companies by processing approximately $500 million in transactions between U.S. gamblers and internet gambling websites and disguising the transactions to the banks so that they would appear unrelated to gambling,” according to a statement from the DOJ’s Southern District of New York.

Illegal internet gambling companies? Yikes …

Tzvetkoff, as founder of Intabill and ACH System, faces up to 75 years in prison for bank fraud, money laundering, conspiracy to operate and finance an illegal gambling business, and … get this … for processing fund transfers in violation of the UIGEA.

I’m pretty sure that’s the first ever indictment to bring up UIGEA charges.

About a year ago the Australia Courier-Mail reported that Tzvetkoff owed Full Tilt, PokerStars, Ultimate Bet, and Absolute Poker more than $30 million as the overextended, ostentatious Gen-Y tycoon’s personal empire was crumbling. Then, Full Tilt (through Kolyma Corporation) sued Tzvetkoff in Australian Court, saying his company Intabill owed them $52 million.

Before his arrest, he was saying Full Tilt tricked him into a bad deal and his lawyer doublecrossed him. He blamed the economy for a multi-multi-millionaire having to declare bankruptcy earlier this year. More on the pre-arrest rise and fall of an online poker payment processor here.

I mean for chrissakes, he drove a Lamborghini with the license plate “BALLER”! And when a bank repossessed a competitive race car of his, they got everything except its $100k engine, which had been stripped out and hidden.

Click below for the official word from the DOJ:

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The funeral for Barron Glenn Boutte is today in Houston. He’s the 24-year-old shot and killed while attempting to rob a Houston underground poker room earlier this month. His shooter is not being publicly identified, though police have determined Boutte’s death a matter of self-defense. Club 203, where the fatal shootout occurred, has been indefinitely shut down.

A few more details about the thwarted robbery, coming to us now secondhand, as opposed to thirdhand …

Apparently the robbery suspects confronted a player leaving the game in the parking lot, and a scuffle ensued. The first shots were reportedly fired at the door to gain entry, and the robbers continued shooting into the air once inside. They did indeed shoot one patron in the leg when he was slow to get on the ground as ordered.

Boutte’s armed nemesis and several others were smoking in the break room when the melee went down. One robber supposedly told these players they’d better not be coming out without cash — thinking maybe they were hiding it — and that’s when the poker-room hero emerged brandishing his own gun.

Boutte was shot at least four times in the abdomen and made it out to the parking lot before falling and dying.

A nervous wave has washed over the Houston poker underground — with action slower than normal, and some rooms looking to hire visible security.

The story behind an underground game in Houston that broke with a flurry of bullets last week — resulting in one fatality and two others wounded — is starting to emerge. Filtering through braggadocio, legal ambiguities, and the inherent fuzziness of thirdhand sources, here’s what we definitely know, what we are hearing, and then some speculation about an “inside job”. And what this robbery may or may not have to do with similar ones in Houston, Dallas, Arlington, and San Antonio.

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Included is a semi-thorough timeline tracking the progression of violent poker robberies across Texas over the past 2+ years. The casualty tally so far: 2 dead, 4 wounded by non-fatal gunfire, at least 1 pistol-whipping, >150 players in the middle of it all (surrendering anywhere from a few hundred to more than $10,000 at a time). 3 arrested so far.

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The game currently being talked about was known as Club 203, located in a southwest Houston semi-industrial warehouse complex, nestled in a nook about a quarter-mile from the intersection of a highway and major thoroughfare.

The dead robber’s name is Barron Glenn Boutte. (Anyone recognize the name?) He was a 24-year-old black male. The official cause of death is homicide/multiple gun shot wounds. It’s not clear where Barron was from, though one mention of him on the internet does suggest Houston.

From the Houston Police Department:

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I recently discovered some new tricks on YouTube, so … In what is sure to be as critically acclaimed as Lucky You, here’s a glimpse of the American political system in action, as seen at a semi-private PPA get-together on Day 1B of the 2008 WSOP main event (July 4th) … where a poker activist braintrust confabbed down the hall, in the Palazzo Suites, about Beltway procedure and parliamentary strategy moving forward:

A moving and dramatic civics lesson, to be sure. Starring Al D’Amato, Howard Lederer, and Annie Duke. Special appearances by Phil Hellmuth and Jeffrey Pollack as The Commish.

Two masked men showed up at a poker game in a South Arlington apartment complex a week or so ago … they knocked on the door, one player got up to answer, and upon realizing that the game was about to be robbed, he struggled to shut the door. Commotion ensued as it became an inverse tug-of-war to see whether the robbers would be getting in or the poker players would be able to keep them out. After a few seconds of scuffle, shots rang out — eight, maybe 10 — at which point players and the dealer fled in the other direction, out a back door, jumping off the balcony. (Not sure if it was from the second or third floor — but three of them suffered minor injuries as a result.)

The player who originally got up from the table to answer the knock (“John” is all I know of his name right now) got hit by at least three bullets … one in the shoulder, one in the leg, and one somewhere else … and he died last night from blood-related complications to his wounds.

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A fascinating (if not challenging) story that you can only presume would be of great interest to anyone in the online poker-room security biz, or anyone who wants to philosophize on the meaning of “good for poker”:

How I Built a Working Online Poker Bot, Part 3: The Million Dollar Pet Project

The programmer in question draws inspiration from Big Blue, the IBM supercomputer that challenged chess champ Gary Kasparov. And thus, at any given time online, here’s what you’re potentially up against:

click to enlarge

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

There’s talk in the comments down below about poppin’ caps in the poker bandits. It’s a shame when your decisions about where to play factor an EV calculated as Expected Violence. (Fortunately most poker players I know are a bit too lazy to hunt down bad guys and show ’em who’s boss with a barrel, and the CHL holders steer clear of premeditated homicide — no matter how justifiable — for fear of losing their license.)

But still … guns were in play in last night’s robbery. Not just on the thugs who obviously come in not wanting to shoot anyone, but also on a player or three … At least one guy last night had to buy the latest AR-15 rifles (legal) on him when being robbed. Afterwards, some apparently questioned his decision not to use it. The rub is that had he fired as robbers were kicking their way in through the wall, the ski-masked duo woulda turned right around and skeedaddled. True enough, but as liberal as Texas is when it comes to shooting people messin’ with your property, the nature of the venue might negate that defense. And what if it was the police?!? Yeow, shooting blindly at what may or may not be a SWAT team can never be good for a game. Hmm, Class C misdemeanor or Death Penalty … decisions decisions.

Clearly a good fold. In general I’d prefer loaded weapons to be in the hands of a rock more than a maniac.

Congress is bucking up for a new legislative season — in a presidential election year, no less — and our representatives have to make calculated principled educated decisions about which bills to stand behind. On Monday, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) signed on to cosponsor HR 2610, aka the Wexler bill or Skill Game Protection Act, which would effectively remove poker (along with bridge, chess, backgammon, and mah jongg) from the aegis of the UIGEA.

Sessions is the second Republican to align himself with this bill, and he promises to lend more than just his signature to the poker cause. “If we decide to get in this thing, it’s not because we’re [just] gonna use my name,” Sessions explained, “we’re doin’ it to get it done. Otherwise it’s like a warm bucket of spit — it’s no good.”

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Before saying yea or nay, he wanted to hear more about the issues behind the legislation from the people it affects. So with the help of Lavigne in Austin, a small group of concerned constituents — including pros Clonie Gowen and Robert Williamson — joined lobbyists from the Poker Players Alliance in Sessions’ Dallas office last month for a roundtable discussion about this bill and online poker in general.

This was a real opportunity to inform an influential congressman in greater detail about the horrors impact of the UIGEA and plea for emergency humanitarian aid a federal bailout sensible government intervention. It also provided a privileged glimpse into how our system really works and a chance to see the new leadership of the PPA in action … But yeesh, 9 am is a little early, no?!?

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LAS VEGAS–This post woulda been much more timely and sensible had it appeared a week ago, but hey, sometimes what happens in Vegas takes a little while before it becomes public. Anyhow, the last day of the World Series is the point where all unofficial media outlets have to take a back seat in terms of coverage. Understandable considering that, for the first time in nearly seven weeks, all eyes are focussed on a single table … and it just won’t be possible for all interested parties to sit ringside until Brobdingnagian dominance forces Harrah’s to make structural changes to the TV stage.

So that left most of us doing what you were doing … following some rather exciting coverage of a relatively unexciting, straightforward final table on PokerNews while listening to play-by-play on Bluff Radio (which was being piped into the media room) while watching live-camera coverage on a flat-screen monitor.

The media room, anytime there was an all-in and a call. CardPlayer decides not to run with the hedline: ESPN blogger violates Rio chair-standing policy

Actually, large-scale LCD screens were sprinkled throughout the hallways and the Amazon itself, so we could watch the overhead cam pretty much anywhere we went. We just couldn’t camp out for more than a few minutes near the real action. But that was fine by me, because we’ll all get to see The Jerry Yang Show soon enough on TV, and the World Series really is about so much more than just poker. As it turned out, there was lots of fun stuff going on away from the table that provided a little insight into how the poker industry really works …

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The Dallas Police Department continues its crackdown on illegal gambling … busting a poker game at the Audie Murphy VFW Post 1837 just several hours ago. There were reportedly seven full tables running when nearly 20 police officers entered the room. It was the vice squad this time, not the SWAT team … though some undercover player-officers were donning black hoods, face masks, and sunglasses to keep their identity sealed — one of whom responded to the name “Curtis.”

No official numbers yet on tickets, arrests, and money seized … but it’s looking to be about 70 players issued gambling citations, and a dozen employees handcuffed and taken to jail[UPDATE: It appears they, too, may have just been ticketed] for “keeping a gambling place.” According to Deputy Chief (Vice and Narcotics) J.A. Bernal, most of the alleged poker criminals “appeared to be hardworking, normal citizens; average everyday working joes. That’s what we found here today.”

Tonight’s VFW bust comes after an attempted armed robbery at one Dallas room Friday night as police were reportedly raiding other poker rooms (including the Island Club and new Top Shelf). DPD tells Pokerati they also hit a couple 8-liner joints Friday … and that more gambling raids are to come.

Meanwhile, legislators in Austin are considering a bill to legalize some semblance of poker games similar to the one taking place at the VFW. Several state and local politicians support this bill ([tag]HB 3186[/tag]) … presumably as an example of sensible government … including Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins, whose office now has at least another 100 poker-related misdemeanors added to it’s caseload.

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