This time we mean it … true freeroll, open registration. Come play for kicks on the new Face-Up Gaming poker site … minimal info required to sign up and play. This will be the first ever blogger tourney with live video interaction capabilities … as our blog-friendly pals at Face Up Gaming want to see their software in action with rough-and-tumble users. Seriously, not to get all tech-geeky, but think of the new dimension of trash talk we can enter with this.

To make it worth your while, Face Up has thrown together some prizes, including a cruise to the Bahamas, some sunglasses, and some swag. Yay, cool … but the real prize, I think, is in the lasts-longest they’ve made special for readers of Pokerati (and Pocket 5s, Ante Up Magazine, and AlCantHang.com). That’s an ipad for each, if I’m understanding things right. We’ve come a long way since the days when people played for an iPod Nano.

More info here.

Date: Saturday, June 9
Time: 13:00ET
Game: NLHE
Buyin: Freeroll
Password: BATTLE (password is case sensitive)

Face-Up Gaming is showing they mean business in the online space by doing more than Full Tilt could do and actually paying out players. They recently had an interesting $10k freeroll where 60 percent of the 316-player subscription field won real American cash prizes, including a $2,500 payday for the winner.

Register here. (And enter ‘Pokerati’ to beat me out of that iPad.)

Sorry, meant to get this out to y’all earlier … occurred to me tunes might work better than video for the holiday weekend, and poker podcasts better than that … so here’s some stuff that caught my ear for an extended period of time in recent days/weeks … I’m gonna presume you already listen to, and probably subscribe to The Poker Beat, the definitively #1 podcast in poker, you know, according to the readers of Bluff Magazine and WPT-Poker, which is the official magazine of the World Poker Tour in Europe. But if you can handle more than that, you might wanna perma-connect with these shows, too — via iTunes, RSS, or muscle memory:

Donkdown vs. Coolio

Donkdown Radio :: The always-NSFW working-class Vegas grinders at Donkdown went to war with Coolio last month before moving on to better things (like hunting down @asianspa). This feud started a few weeks back with an on-air story about how the aging rap star, a recent relo to Vegas, showed up at Binion’s during BARGE … allegedly to buy drugs from a player attending Barry Tanenbaum’s keynote address … only to end up with pictures of himself passed out butt-naked (literally) on the Donkdown forum. Coolio even came on their show and sang a few bars of Gangsta’s Paradise before getting hip to Brandon and Micon’s game a few days later, at which point they allege he began threatening to retaliate … right after the next season of Ultimate Big Brother. [Link]

Laak Extra-Whack

The Strip Podcast :: A worthy leftover from the summertime WSOP … Vegas culture blogger and New York Times stringer Steve Freiss’ talking to Phil Laak 114 hours into his record 115-hour poker-endurance run. If you thought Laak ever said weird shit before, listen to the twisted gems Freiss pulls out of him (or stumbles into) tableside during his final hands. [Link]

More…

This is kinda a leftover link (thanks to Short-Stacked Shamus for sending it to me 10 days ago) … but check out the June 5 episode of the Ante Up poker podcast.

About halfway through this episode of the what is clearly the best poker podcast on the Florida gulf coast, Chris and Scott conduct a phone interview with AJ Benza, who I gotta say is pretty damn funny when not in Gabe Kaplan’s shadow. With genuine Brooklyn candor, he discusses not only what he knows about his own show, but also “Doyle Brunson’s tits,” Dustin Diamond as “a misunderstood asshole,” David Goldhill (the new head of GSN), and what it is about High Stakes Poker that works: “Let’s get guys back on TV who drink, smoke, and punch people in the eye.”

Good stuff from Ante Up.

Click here to download/listen to the episode.

The BTT crew: Poker talk fused with gay jokes and fat commentary was all the rage in 2007.

Some of you have been wondering, why no new episodes of Beyond the Table? Tom, Karridy, and I have been wondering the same thing. It’s been a good run, and with drinks in the air, three guys who clearly love/hate the sounds of their own voices are calling it podcast quits.

Back when we started, our show about poker but not really about poker stood out as revolutionary in a sea of lame poker interviewcasts with questionable audio quality. Soon after iPod sales were booming as more and more of the world got hooked on downloading poker audio with funny intros and Angry Julie cameos. But Tom couldn’t handle the celebrity and Karridy developed a crack addiction lives got busy and producers for Beyond the Table fared about as well as drummers for Spinal Tap. The show hired Shamus at a fraction of a Cambodian farmer’s wage to pump up our numbers — did he ever get his T-shirt? — but with a new generation of poker podcasts getting better and stronger (Lou Kreiger, Gary Wise, 2+2, Pocket Fives, Ante Up, Poker Road, et al) old-school payola wasn’t enough to save us from going out on the podcast bubble.

Listen below to a heretofore unpublished episode (recorded on 2-27, my dream flop) as your favorite semi-amateur yammerers phone it in for the last and final-ish time:

Beyond the Table: Fin

Thanks for listening via RSS, iTunes, play-in-popup, and direct download … we already miss ourselves.

You can still prank call Karridy on the Beyond the Table listener line at 888-820-8091.