Greg Raymer
Photo: Heartland Poker Tour

Today’s Boxscore

Greg Raymer $106,030 – HPT Championship Open
Jordan Scott $168,210 – LAPT Peru Grand Final
Emil Olsson $230,036 – WPT Copenhagen
Cary Marshall $139,260 – WSOP-C Lake Tahoe

Team Pokerati Scores

John Harris $2,160 – WSOP-C Lake Tahoe #12

Greg Raymer seems to have found himself a nice, comfortable home among the regulars on the Heartland Poker Tour. When the 2004 WSOP Main Event champion won his first HPT event in July, it was an interesting side note. When Raymer won his 2nd HPT title in St. Louis on his next bullet, people began paying a little more attention to Raymer on a heater. One month later, another HPT title in Iowa gave him the hat-trick of titles and now everyone in the poker world waswatching.

Now Raymer is just showing off after winning HPT Championship Open for his 4th title on the tour, beating professional Jacob Bazeley heads up, to complete an incredible few months. His $371,967 earned put him atop their all-time money leaderboard and he’s the only player with 4 titles with just a few months effort. It’s unlikely he will miss many HPT events next season.

# Get ready to play blackjack online by playing free blackjack at onlineblackjack.com. #

Link Dump

Tweet of the Day – One of the nice guys in poker and always understated.

Thank you all so much for the many kind tweets. It has been an unbelievable run here the last 5 months on @hptpoker. Winning 4/6 is too much

— Greg Raymer (@FossilMan) November 20, 2012

Nate Silver: it’s the numbers, stupid – Anyone with a least a little knowledge and awareness of things around them already knows about Nate Silver. The former online poker professional turned GOP pundit destroyer looked into the matrix and told the world how the U.S. Presidential election would go. The Guardian has a nice bio piece on the wunderkind.

A (Nate) Silver Lining for Online Poker – While we’re talking Nate Silver, Pokerati favorite Shamus has a look at the numbers behind possible poker legislation.

Lawmakers who backed gambling look now to collect – Maryland voted to approve expanded gaming in the state and the supporting politicians are looking to get paid now, thank you very much.

Cash Game Grinders Want Lederer Banned from Vegas Tables – You might have missed this interesting nugget from Dave Ferrera this weekend. Players seem to have grown tired of having their money locked up by Full Tilt in the DoJ only to watch Howard Lederer stroll into the poker room with a nice chunk of change.

PresidentTracker: One of the world’s 100 Most Influential People of 2009 at the WSOP in 2011.
(Photo: PokerListings)

Plenty of talk about polls as we head into the homestretch of our 2012 US Presidential election. Who’s up, who’s down, who asked what and margin-of-error how? Just remember: no matter where you are on the political spectrum, in the horserace journalism of it all, the mainstream media are primary beneficiaries of a tight race. At least that’s what I keep telling myself after making some rather significant wagers on essentially a “gut” feeling that the national economy was improving and no way more than 43 percent of Americans would vote for a guy who strapped his dog to the roof of a car.

But proper analysis is apparently not so simple.

No wonder so many pundits are looking to a former online poker semi-pro to tell us who’s the best bet for president.

Nate Silver, 34, is author of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don’t … and he’s all the rage among the politerati these days. His book apparently brings multi-level thinking taught by hand histories into the political sphere. And in doing so, Silver puts online poker on the same level as other imperfect but predictive sciences such as hurricane tracking and counterterrorism. (And nobody seems to be laughing at the comparisons!)

The Signal and the Noise came out the chute in September on the New York Times bestseller list, where it’s currently #15 among all non-fiction books. And at the time of this posting, the book ranked #1 on Amazon for books about math, #1 for technology, and #2 for politics and social sciences.

More…