Poker Blog and Poker Gossip

Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear thinks its wrong for the people in his state to make up their own mind when it comes to online gambling. Beshear is currently in the process of getting the latest nanny-state bill passed through that would block access to online poker and other gambling sites for the residents of Kentucky.

According to Forbes.com, Beshear’s administration has “asked a Franklin County Circuit Court judge to give the state control of 141 gambling Web site domain names”. On this list are many of the biggest online poker sites, including: FullTiltPoker.com, BodogLife.com, Pokerstars.com and many others.

“Unlike casinos that operate on land or on riverboats in the United States, these operations pay no tax revenues, provide no jobs and yield no tourism benefits,” Beshear said at a Capitol press conference. “They are leeches on our communities.”

His goal is to “protect the signature industry”, meaning that he is whining that the local casinos and horse racing locations are suffering due to the rise from online poker sites.

Such sites “siphon off money from regulated and legal games such as Kentucky’s thoroughbred racing industry, our lottery and charitable gaming activities,” Beshear said.

Well Steve, if this is the case, why don’t you go the route of regulating online gaming and create a state run site instead of just taking away the rights of people?

According to Point-Spreads.com, Beshear has already had two domains seized that were run by persons located in Kentucky.  On their site they stated that, “Earlier today Point-Spreads.com reported that LuckyPyramidCasino.com was seized and now a second domain name HighRollersLounge.com has its administrative contact information listed as Eric Lycan from the Commonwealth of Kentucky Justice Cabinet.”

A hearing is scheduled for Thursday to see if this goes through, so in the meantime if you live in Kentucky, I’d reccomend giving your ol’ pal Steve a call to see what the hell is going on.  Otherwise, poker might be banned for good in Kentucky!

So Oliver Tse, who’s apparently a super agent wannabe posts a seemingly ambiguous thread about a player getting dropped from Full Tilt Poker. The player winds up being JJ Liu. She was apparently dropped after accepting a trip to play in the APPT and on behalf of PokerStars.net. Not a big deal because let’s face it, who the hell cares about JJ Liu?

Well the original poster (Tse) was very vague, not naming the player and using —— —– instead of the name Full Tilt Poker. The back story (according to the thread) is the Oliver is a tard and has some sort of vendetta against Liu (and perhaps her mom?). Many are attacking Tse as a half ass agent and one who is ruining his reputation to take jabs at ex-clients. You see Liu was one of Tse’s clients back in 2006-2007 but the agreement was terminated because Liu apparently had another deal with another agent.

Oh the drama! If you want to read this 20 page saga check it out http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29/news-views-gossip/ftp-drops-pro-jj-liu-303844/

Now for the tough decision, file this under poker gossip, or poker babes!

Filed under the category of “the dumbest shit we’ve read today” comes this little press release from a site called CircusCasino.com (Link bait, I know but I’ll play along). So these folks have hired a real-deal “personologist”, aka a face reader to tell us the top traits that winning poker players have. According to this person the best traits for a winning poker player include cupped-out ears, a Roman nose, and wide set eyes. Interesting that they didn’t mention gold chains, rings, and bracelets. What about the wet hair look, ala Scotty Nguyen?

Taking the silliness one step further, they even posted a picture of what the ultimate poker player would look like. Patrick Antonius? WRONG. It’s this guy:

You’re damn right son, this is the face of the ultimate poker player. It’s the facial traits of:
1. Roman nose of Chris Moneymaker
2. Wide-set eyes of Jerry Yang
3. Head width of Greg Raymer & Noel Furlong
4. Sloped-back forehead of Robert Varkonyi
5. High forehead of Carlos Montensen
6. Jutting chin of Scotty Nguyen
7. Outer corner of the eye of Joseph Hachem
8. Cupped out ears of Chris Ferguson (funny, I would picked Gus Hansen for this one)
9. Flared outer edge of the eyebrow of Jamie Gold
10. That “Axe body spray covering up my ass stank” smell from Mike Matusow (ok, we made this one up but it’s true)

So if you happen to find this guy walking the street, let him know we’d like to stake him in the 2009 WSOP.

Source http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/9/prweb1239884.htm

Manro Haydan, a London trading company is looking to stake a bunch of online poker players and create the worlds first poker hedge fund. Essentially a large scale backer operation, Manro is going to create a large fund appropriately called “BadBeat” to fund the players. BadBeat covers all losses and splits the winnings with the players.

The guy at Manro is clearly NOT a poker player but had this to say, “There aren’t enough players that would accept our terms because 99 per cent of them want to fund it themselves. It is a quite different mindset.”

Clearly he’s never been to many Internet poker forums, where beggars run up and down the virtual rail, asking for a stake. While Manro is clearly targeting the nosebleed players, the result may still be disasterous. First of all, there are many player “collectives” where they’re pooling their funds to back each other. The trust level is higher and frankly, more convenient to the players.

So whether this little venture works remains to be seen. In the meantime, I hear Mike Matusow is looking for a little bankroll injection…

Source http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c749205e-86ab-11dd-959e-0000779fd18c.html

We just reported the hack of another popular online high stakes grinder and hot the heel of that story comes this. It’s been reported by Poker News that Peter “Zupp” Jepsen was the target of a sophisticated scam network. The goal? To get his passwords to apparently hack his poker accounts which likely hold hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars.

Taking the “Durrr” AIM hack to new levels, these guys went way beyond a simple hack. One of the scammers contacted Jepsen claiming he was from a large Swedish media company called OTW Media. They tried to get Jepsen to sign a contract to appear on an upcoming poker TV show that was hosted on a mirror site that looked just like the real OTW Media web site. Here’s where it gets interesting – The contract was supposed to be a .pdf but it was actually an executable (.exe) that held a Trojan horse. The Trojan horse was a key logger that would have given Jepsen’s private passwords to the scammers.

Fortunately Jepsen caught the switch-aroo and didn’t open the program. Both Swedish authorities as well as OWT have now launched a large investigation themselves. We’ll continue to report on this developing story, as it’s likely other pros were contacted in this scam.

He offers 50K bounty on the dudes head…

So what do Nigerian scammers do when their email scams quit working?  Hack into winning online poker players AIM accounts and scam for cash, obv. Tom “Durrr” Dwan was the victim this week of an unknown hacker who is using his AIM account to fleece Tom’s buddies for cash. The typical scam goes down like this (from the 2P2 thread)

Smartazz26: you busy right now?
MIKEY41414: no
Smartazz26: could you do me a huge favor? Ill send you $1400 on ftp if you go moneygram $900 for me Im stuck and cant go do it , Buying these sick shirts off ebay I know someone will do it for vig
MIKEY41414: what do you mean?
Smartazz26: ugh
MIKEY41414: where do you want me to send it?
Smartazz26: Id get the info for you
Smartazz26: Its to Lima Peru
MIKEY41414: why would I send money there?
MIKEY41414: ?
Smartazz26: Yes
Smartazz26: I bought something and need to pay for it
MIKEY41414: how about I get Tom to give me 10k to find the person behind the computer right now and cut your ****ing throat out you disgusting little rat ****
MIKEY41414: I hope your children get ritualistically raped for the next 30 years and that your face gets burned with a blow torch like that **** from Hostel – get a job you ****

So essentially MIKEY41414 was onto the scheme and proceeded to out the whole scam on 2P2. And he threatened to torture the guy with a blowtorch, nice touch. So during the thread, Tom chimes in and offers a 50K bounty on anyone who finds the guy and gets him jail time. Interesting story and a developing one so we’ll keep an eye on this.

Oh yeah, the biggest tipoff that it was a scam? Obv the fact that he was going to buy these “sick shirts from Ebay”. We all know that Durrr wears womens clothing and prefers to shop at stores like Ann Taylor…

Picture from Cardplayer.com