Poker Blog and Poker Gossip

Today the International Mind sport Association (IMSA) announced that it
has officially recognized poker as a mind sport, or a game of skill. 
It has put poker on par with games like Chess and Bridge.  IFP
(International Federation of Poker) President embraced “a major
milestone in our campaign to have poker accepted throughout the world
as a game of strategic skill.”  One year ago yesterday (April 29th) the
IFP was founded for the purpose of having poker accepted as a “mind
sport.”  Poker now has a place at the IMSA’s World Mind Sports Games,
which will be held in 2012 concurrently with the London Olympic Games.

The next step for poker is for the IFP to secure membership to SportAccord (formerly the General Association of International Sports Federations (GAISF))
to maintain it’s IMSA status.  This will not happen until the 2011
SportsAccord conference, however it’s still a positive and necessary
step; one that will entrench poker as a mind game for as long as people
are playing poker.  SportsAccord is the organization that manages and
unites all of the recognized sports on a global scale (this includes
soccer (FIFA),Go (IGF), Chess(FIDE).  To read more about SportsAccord
click here. 

What does this mean for poker?  According to Doyle Brunson “The
IFP deserves our thanks and congratulations, I believe that history
will show this was a key moment for poker. All over the world the game
has been faced with governmental controls and other obstacles. Yet it
is obvious it calls for qualities and skills that go far beyond a
capacity just to take a chance.”

Next year IFP
will be launching poker’s first annual world championships, both team
and individual, as well as participation in regular IMSA events.  I
wonder what this will mean for all the already major poker tournaments
out there.  Will the WSOP still be the defining “Best in the World”
competition for poker, or will the new, internationally recognized IFP
be spearheading a whole new world order as it applies to poker?

I was reading an article over at Pokerstarsblog.com, and the general thrust of the article is this: Why am i fairly profitable when i play Live poker, and generally not as profitable (or a losing player) when i play online poker? 
The short answer to that question is this: you aren’t as good as you
think you are.  That was enough to get me to read on….and comment
(note: i will reprint parts of the article, they will be in
italics…if you want to read thePokerstarsblog article, click here)..

First
things first.  When figuring out if you’re a winning player or losing
player, having a good idea of what stakes you’re playing at, what your
monthly win/lose rate is and how much time are you committing to your
poker game are crucial.

Although poker is recreational for
me I take it very seriously and constantly work to improve my game. I
play live poker 8-10 hours a weekend and average close to $1200 a month
in earnings. It’s a good thing my live play brings home money since I
probably burn $400 a month online in about 8 hours a week play. So I
experience 1,000 live hands a month versus around 2,000 online.

So
this guy spends about as much time online playing poker as he does
playing live, and his win rate live is fairly good.  Online however, he
sees roughly double the hands and loses 1/3 of the money he won to
online players.  The reason for this is many fold, and that’s the meat
and potatoes of this article.  Why is it that if all he did was play
live poker he’d be up $1200 in a 3 month period rather than down that
money? 

More Hands = Ught Oh!
The common wisdom on
this is that by seeing double the hands in the same period of time the
true statistical nature of your game comes out…right out of your
profits.  If you normally get caught throwing away some of your stack
to your live opponents with 7/8 suited, this happens far less live
(because of the fewer hands seen) and so you lose less money to that
donkey play.  When you have multiple holes in your game, your online
losses will be significantly higher. 

Distractions
We’ve
all done it…your wife is watching American Idol, the kids are playing
with something or other, and you just want to escape to online poker. 
Nothing wrong with that…right?

I believe at the end of the
day it is because I don’t take it as seriously. Live, my focus is on
the game. I’m not much of a sports guy so there are usually no
distractions for me….I am never just playing poker online I am doing
work, writing email, have my kids on my lap, have my wife calling,
video editing, messing around onFacebook or CNN, watching TV, etc…
Very rarely just playing poker. In fact, as I write this I am playing
online. Sometimes I’ll catch myself watching poker on TV while playing
online and have to remind myself what an idiot I am concentrating on TV
games.

I think that paragraph is a good representation
of how powerful a distraction can be.  It’s not only that you’re not
100% paying attention to the game, you’re actively doing something
else.  “Oh, those cards aren’t that good, soi’ll just quickly check my facebook
/update my twitter/ finish getting that blowjob…whatever….more
cards will come any second.”  While that’s true, there are a lot of
people who believe that there aren’t as many “tells” in online poker. 
The reason is that people have so many distractions that they actively
aren’t looking for tells.  Use the time when you’re not playing a hand
to see how your opponents play…you will pick up some pretty big tells.

Experimenting With Your Play

I
am a cowboy much more so online than live. Online I take many more
risks and push the boundaries of my creative play regularly. I treat my
money with less respect online since I play with smaller buy-ins than I
do live. It is, in a sense, now monopoly money. Sometimes I just have
much less patience and do stupid things.

This is
as self explanatory as it gets.  If you aren’t respecting the $400
bucks you’re losing a week, of course you’re going to lose it.  I dont
believe the “lower stakes = less respect for the buy in” or even that
lower stakes = more donkeys (even at the $200/400 tables there is
someone there that $50,000 means nothing to and will call your river
bluff), but if you defeat yourself before you even get on the table by
devaluing the money then you deserve to lose it.  “oh, it’s only a $5
sit n go, and there is another one right here when i
lose”…yep..because you will lose.

There is a lot there to think about…….and now that i’m done writing that..i think i’ll fire up my online Pokerstars account…

Just because it’s the biggest online poker room in the world,
doesn’t mean expansion has to include more players or absorbing a
smaller online provider.  It looks like Pokerstars is set to broaden
the frontier of what an online poker room is all about.  Pokerstars has
recently acquired three of the most well respected poker blogs in the
industry, betting that branding and affiliating those poker rooms with
Pokerstars and providing players with a “one stop shop” to play and
read all about poker, 24 hours a day will pay off big time.  And
they’re probably right!  If you think for one second that Full Tilt
isn’t eyeing up the remaining major poker blogs, well, you haven’t been
watching the these two follow each others major moves over the years.

The three blogs purchased by Pokerstars are Pokerpages.com, PlaywinningPoker.com and Poker-Babes.com.  All three
have their own strengths, and specific information niches, and all
three have been providing solid poker related news since early 2000, if
not before.

PokerPages.com’s speciality lies with it’s
worldwide live tournament results archive.  Need to know who won a
tourney in 2002 for a prop bet?  Bet you’re going to Pokerpages.com.  It also houses an article database, and has over the years had articles written by T.J. Cloutier, Lou Krieger, Tommy Angelo, Mike Caro, and Andy Glazer.

PlaywinningPoker.com
is mostly about strategy.  The sites former owner (Steve Badger) says
“It’s about strategy, and none of that resume stuff guarantees anything
anyway! Keep in mind this site’s principal lesson: if you want to be a
winning player, you need to think and decide for yourself. Creative,
logical, sensible, situational thinking is key to winning. Even more,
it’s the key to winning big.”

Poker-Babes.com has evolved over
the years, but was originally started by a Bicycle Casino cocktail
waitress Shirley Rosario.  Her mission was to get the word out about
talented female poker players that had been overlooked.  While this
aspect of the site is still active, it’s main bankableresource is
personal profiles that Rosario has collected on poker players over the
years.  If you’re ever heading to a major live tournament and need to
have some idea of the opponents that you’re about to face, you’d do
well to head over to Poker-babes.com and have a read.

But the
question now is: what will be Full Tilts response?  Will they dismiss
it out of hand and concentrate on delivering superior game play instead
of attempting toacquire and manage an online blog community, or will
after seeing the value and the loyalty created by having a “community,”
put a bid in for 2+2?

I haven’t done a “poker Babe” post in a while, mainly because i dont
want to just put another pretty face who happens to play cards now and
then as a “Poker Babe.”  If you wanted random chicks..well..you are
currently surfing the web…

That’s why this weeks Poker Babe is a bonified, tournament winning Poker Babe…..and she’s British to boot!

Olivia “Liv” Boeree
did not start out with intentions of being a pro poker player.  She in
fact, attended the university of Manchester to study physics with
astrophysics.  She then moved to London, where she of course became a
TV presenter and Model (shock..i say again..it seems like a right of
passage to be a model, then tv presenter, then pro poker player….for gal’s anyway..).

She got introduced to the world of poker by being selected as a contestant on the British reality show “Ultimatepoker.com Showdown.”  While on the show, Phil Hellmuth
helped her with her poker skills, and after the show she began taking
poker a little more seriously.  In 2006 she became a presenter and
journalist for Gutshot TV at the WSOP, and currently she writes a regular column in poker magazine “Bluff Europe.”

Liv has been playing poker and winning since 2007, with a first place finish at Ceasers Palace, winning her entry to the 2007 Five Diamond Poker Classic at Bellagio.  Recently, in 2008 Live won the Ladbrokes European Ladies Championship ($30,000) and cashed in 2 2008 WSOP Events: $2000 PLHE (49th $4,074) and $1500 Mixed LHE (64th
$2793).  More recently, on April 21 2010 Live won the European Poker
Tour and cashed €1,250,000. She became the third woman ever to win anEPT title.

Keep up the Great Work Liv! 

Back in 2006, if you thought major poker tournaments, automatically
World Poker Tour would come to mind.  They had big names, big prize
pools, and for a while there, the buy in for a WPT Tourney was as big
as the World Series of Poker.  This worked well for them in a lot of
ways.  It attracted big names, it got armatures playing on the same
table, and even made some armatures household names (the Mizrachi clan
comes to mind..Michael got his start on WPT).

But, in recent
years their WPT Championship has been hemorrhaging chips, and players. 
During their 5th season, the championship game had 600+ players
competing for a prize pool worth tens of millions of dollars.  Then in
2008, they saw a dip in players, but nothing concerning. 
However last year, there was only 300 players showing up for the
tourney.  Not only does the pageantry of the tournament suffer, but so
does the prize pool.  People who come to these tournaments for the
money took notice, and this year only 200 players showed up for the
tourney. 

Daniel Negreanu, who is attending the tournament,
commented to Poker Listings “The EPT and the NAPT, and anything
PokerStars does tour wise, kicks their ass. The thing that the WPT was
always way too foolish to understand, what completely destroyed their
model as a company, was not attaching themselves to online satellites.
They need to compete and get these events popular by running online
satellites. All the PokerStars tours work because of the satellites.”

When
Partypoker purchased WPT in 2009 they had intentions of adding online
satellites to the big tourneys, however most brick and mortar casino’s
in the USA are not legally allowed to accept online satellite money as
a buy-in to a tournament. 

For now it looks like the WPT will
have to abide by the rules of the land, and have to hope for a change
in the near future.  In the mean time it seems that the WPT has
tentatively scheduled a season 9 World Poker Tour Championship to take
place may 21-27th, but so close to the WSOP?  Not sure how that’ll
play…

An Australian National found this out the hard way when he was arrested in Las Vegas on a bevvy of charges, ranging from money laundering to gambling conspiracy and Bank Fraud Conspiracy.

Now,
while playing online poker in the United States isn’t strictly illegal,
what IS illegal is funding online poker in the states.  Anyone,
including banks, who process payments to online poker rooms are
technically breaking the law, even with UIGEA not being enforced yet.  With that said, Daniel Tzvetkoff is an idiot.

Tzvetkoff
is, obviously, the Australian National who was arrested; prior to that
he was the man that ran an online poker payment processing company
calledIntabill. The company went under last year, leaving some poker sites out money,. and Tzvetkoff 30 million bucks richer.

So,
you would think if you took your former customers for that much money,
you’d stay out of one of the countries that could potentially arrest
you on some pretty serious charges.  You’d think.  But Tzvetkoff decided to attend a conference on Internet Billing in Las
Vegas.  That was his first mistake.  His second? Attending the
conference with the very people he basically stole money from.  So how
did they respond?  They turned him in.  If convicted he could face up
to 75 years in prison (according to an Australian news article..).

Two things have been made abundantly clear with this news.  1: The American authorities aren’t messing around, and they WILL arrest people suspected of laundering money or committing fraud.  2: No one is invincible, even guys who (were at one point) worth $80 million dollars.  I mean, c’mon guy…you tube the conference…..