PokerListings Blog

It's my last day home, in Florida, for at least a month. Tomorrow night I'll be off to Los Angeles to start my reign of terror on the west coast.

I'll be in LA for 9 days playing a bunch of 1k prelims. I have played basically no poker since busting the Borgata main event.

I had a flight booked for Sunday morning to go to Tunica, having booked it long before I realized it was Super Bowl Sunday. I didn't really feel like going to Tunica and sitting there in a hotel all alone to watch the Super Bowl.

After figuring out there was no practical plan to get there the morning of the event, I decided to bag the trip and just post up for a couple more days at home.

I watched the Super Bowl with my family which was a lot of fun, ate wayyyyy too much food. I only booked two small bets both of which I lost.

I took tails on the coin toss- it was heads. Then made a bet with Scott Clements - I had the colts to win, he had the Saints.

If I won, I would get 80$ in equity of him in a live tournament of my choice, but because I lost I have to give him 100$ in equity in whatever live tournament he chooses that I am in. I will probably win whichever one he picks, which I'll be fine with lol.

I have only played 2 online tournaments since coming home, one-tabled the Sunday Million during the Superbowl- no good there. And I just got 2^nd in a NAPT satty on stars which was awarding one package- AK cant beat Q5 for the seat. L

O well, looking forward to getting back to the live grind ASAP.

Next blog will probably be after I ship first event I play in LA.

Jmerc

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Not long ago we released a list of the Top 10 Poker WordPress Themes.

We restricted the list to strictly poker-specific themes and many of our readers suggested that by limiting our scope we were missing out on some great non-poker themes that would work equally well as poker blogs.

In light of this we've decided to take another look, and not just at poker themes.

First we'll give you a quick intro to setting up a WordPress blog and then we'll look at five of our favorite themes.

There are a sick amount of themes out there but if you want to skip the searching and get right to the blogging, any of the following themes will give you a clean-cut and professional looking site.

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We know how much you love free money (who doesn't) so we've got a $50 caption contest on right now over at our Facebook page.

God help us all if this needs an explanation but ...

Click over to the PokerListings Facebook page, become a fan, and comment on the caption contest update with the best caption you can come up with.

It could be funny, stupid, thought-provoking or all of the above. Tomorrow morning the PokerListings staff will sit down and choose the one we like best.

We're actually giving away a fair bit of cash over on the Facebook page so it's worth your while to become a fan and keep an eye on the status updates.

Unless you don't like free money, then stay far, far away.

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A few days ago reports arose in French publications about a vast scam involving one Cyril Mouly, one of the biggest whales to play in the big game at Bellagio.

The details are hazy but it seems like this is a legitimate story. Mouly, and others, are wanted in connection to some sort of advertising telemarketing scam.

In addition to lining the pockets of the players in Bobby's Room, Mouly also appeared on Full Tilt's Million Dollar Cash game filmed in London at the end of last year.

First of all we have to give some pretty serious props to Cyril if all this is true. Instead of taking his millions of euros and fleeing to a non-extradition country he decided to become a high-profile, high-stakes poker players.

Well played sir. It sure looked like you were playing with someone else's money. Now we know why.

Cyril also gained international fame in a long series of threads on the Two Plus Two forums. Funnily enough if you google him you're going to get a lot of photoshopped stuff from the threads.

We'll just have to wait and see what becomes of this whole thing, whether it's for real, whether he's innocent or what.

One thing is for sure, the players in the big game can't be happy about it.

For the French speakers out there here are the links to the news stories.

http://www.sudouest.com/accueil/actualite/economie/article/850346/mil/5651044.html

http://news.fr.msn.com/m6-actualite/france/article.aspx?cp-documentid=151954394

http://france-amerique.com/articles/2010/01/30/mandat_d_arret_contre_cyril_the_frenchman_l_as_du_poker.html

*Credit for the photoshop above goes to Conz of the 2p2 forums.

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Yes, I know there are lots of online or downloadable programs for tracking your poker results, but if you’re old school like me, or just like to do shit yourself, this is the article for you.

Excel is a far more powerful of a program than most people know. It has the ability to do things that you’ve never even thought of.

For example, I once worked as a tech-guy/website developer/network engineer… read GEEK for a large retail company.

One aspect of this company is having multiple locations across Canada and the U.S.A, all with their own inventory and full service physical locations. The business also makes a lot of money from its website selling the same stuff, but online.

Now, to keep shipping times and costs as low as possible, all physical locations ship product for web orders, rather than having one warehouse dedicated to online ordering. This is a cost effective way to operate, but requires some in-depth solutions to inventory management and control.

To manage this we created an excel spreadsheet which automatically updated with the actual inventory count for each product for each store location.

It did this buy parsing the accounting software end of day sales figures. On top of this it stores months of sales results allowing forecasting and trending of product sales, all updated automatically and fully configurable.

If Excel can do something like this, it can certainly handle your poker stats with flying colors, you just have to learn how to use it. Here are some quick tips and tricks you can use to make your spreadsheet a little more rad.

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We found a pretty interesting segment on BBC1's Inside Out featuring none other than high-stakes UK players Luke "Full Flush" Schwartz and Andrew Feldman. We've got the clip embedded for you to watch right here.

It's actually a pretty cool little profile of these two players but, like so many like it, it doesn't really tell the truth about what it means to be a high-stakes player.

This line from Full Flush sums up what I mean.

"From opening the laptop I can be playing a game in less than a minute. In ten minutes I can be winning $10,000. Then I can just quit or I can stay on and win $50,000."

The best part of the FF segment though is the constant close-up shots of his Jakey.

The show then moves on to Andrew Feldman to showcase the potential pitfalls of young people playing poker. Feldman has talked about his downswings a lot in the past, and his gambling tendencies.

Tell us what you think in the comment section below.

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I had the opportunity to chill with Michael Phelps a few times while out here at Borgata. He was out here playing a few tourneys and chilling with his friends.

He's a really cool dude, we partied at a club on Saturday night, and then a bunch of guys played online in his suite all day on Sunday. 

My friend Phil and I were talking the other day about Phelps and how he has to be considered, one of, if not THE greatest athlete of our generation or the last 50 years. Definitely, hands down, the most dominant athlete at their given sport.

Anyways, poker out here had been pretty miserable up until today. I had played the 2k heads up, which was a double elimination tournament, lost my first 2 matches. Then played the 1500 the next day, and busted about 4 hours in.

My friend Phil final tabled that one, but got 8th sigh. Then Sunday I played about 25 tournaments on stars and only cashed one, 20th in a 50 cubed... yuk!

So today was Day 1b of the main event out here... $3500 event. It drew over 750 players and first place is over 600k... SICK!

I had a fairly steady day... stack was between 25-55k all day... lot of interesting pots, anyways ended the day with 50,825 chips. We restart at 11 am tomorrow which is too early if you ask me. Oh well, I guess that's what you get when you have a good structured tournament.

You can follow updates on borgatapoker.blogspot.com/ or my personal updates on www.jasonmercier.com, which is my facebook fanpage.

Pz 

J Merc

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Seriously though, that wasn't just to get your attention. I mean it. I just had the worst 4 days of poker I've ever had.

Remember when I posted that sick graph of my shot taking chasing a fish around at much higher than my normal stakes? Well this is basically the opposite of that. Though obviously not the exact opposite or that would really, really, suck.

So, I'm done with taking shots.

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Luke "Full Flush" Schwartz has always had a big mouth but when it comes down to it he's usually backing up his smack-talk with success at the poker table.

The Party Poker Premier League playdown is coming up in about a week in Las Vegas and, as we should have expected, Schwartz is ready with some choice words for his opponents.

This ran in the Party Poker blog today.

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In the first two parts of this blog, I ranted about everything on my vacation to the Bahamas going wrong (and I do mean just about EVERYTHING) and my sick cooler hand to bust out of the main event.

Oh well, I could be left with a ton of down time in a million worse locations than the Bahamas. I'll just grab a drink and head to the beach, right?

Wrong. The temperature was in the 60s and peaking in early 70s most of the week. It's not bad weather, but when you get wet and have ocean winds blowing it's not particularly enjoyable.

I had high hopes of spending four days on the mile-long Lazy River, which is basically tubing with rapids and water slides. I spent several relaxing hours on it last year, and planned on putting in a LOT more on this trip. I went twice for about an hour each time, but I just couldn't take the wind and cold.

Then came the breaking point when I couldn't suck it up and just be happy that I was on vacation anymore. Some scumbag managed to hack my online poker accounts.

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We received word that super-swimmer, bong-hitter and skirt-chaser Michael Phelps is playing in the $2k heads-up event at Borgata as we speak.

It's a double-elimination format and he must have lost his first match since the first we saw of him was in the loser's bracket. So far he's defeated two experienced players in Paul Wasicka and Adam Gerber.

10:45 Pacific Time:

Right now he's playing Basilios Diakokomninos and, should he emerge victorious, he'll be playing an extremely talented player, Olivier "livb112" Busquet.

We're going to keep an eye on the action so check this page for updates throughout the day.

12:30 Pacific Time

Michael Phelps is busto! He was defeated by the guy with the really long name. Back to hitting bongs and chasing skirts I suppose.

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Although it's impossible to be 100% certain, as Apple could make changes before actually launching the product, it's not looking good for playing online poker on the iPad.

The iPad (which I'm shocked they went with for their name, especially since the whole world was already calling it the iTablet), is basically an overgrown iPhone.

Check out the specs.

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I'm sitting here in the Atlanta airport with my buddy Phildo, waiting to get on our flight to Philadelphia, where we then have to get a cab to Atlantic City.

We left Biloxi, Mississippi a few hours ago. We were both hoping we were going to be staying in Biloxi an extra day, as our buddy Dan O'Brien was still in the main event in Biloxi late last night.

They were playing down to the final 6, but unfortunately Dan busted out in 9^th. This was another deep run for Dan, I know he's going to win a big one soon, the kid is playing amazing.

I'm going to be playing only a few tournaments in AC at the Borgata. There's a 2k NL heads up tomorrow, a 1500 NL on the 29^th, and the 3500 main event starts on the 31^st.

As soon as I bust the 3500 in AC, I'll be heading back to Florida for a few days before heading to Tunica for the 5k WSOP circuit event and then off to Los Angeles for the LAPC.

I was happy I was able to have a successful trip to Biloxi and am looking for more of the same at Borgata.

At the beginning of the year, I booked a bet against Mike Matasow. He said I won't have 1 million dollars in cashes in 2010. I am on pace now, with just under $70k, but I hope I can lock this up before the World Series even starts.

Bluff Magazine's next issue will be coming out soon and I am supposed to be on the cover, which will be pretty cool. Also, the World Series of Poker Europe starts airing on ESPN in a few days, and I should be on the majority of the coverage making my US TV debut.

Word!

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Now don't get us wrong, we don't have anything against Tiffany Michelle and we're not here to talk smack but wtf?

Fox News has decided to bring Michelle on their Business network to discuss presidential politics in what can be described as a never-ending parade of poker metaphors.

Terms like "bad beat" and "chip lead" are used to talk determine whether Obama is "playing a good hand" when it comes to his presidency.

This interview is guaranteed to get flamed to hell on the forums but to me it's more interesting that it happened in the first place. Seeing a poker player being asked to speak about real issues on a fake real network is pretty cool.

In reality though, the premise that being an "expert" in gambling and poker qualifies you to speak on isses like health care reform is pretty suspect.

As an entertainment network Fox Business knows its audience pretty well and this is likely a winner for most of their audience.

Watch the video and tell us what you think.

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At first we thought Tony G's odd behavior was an indication of some sort of bizarre obsession with bikes but then we realized, he's just trying to make the world a cleaner place.

"On yer bike!" is not an insult after all, but instead a rallying cry to help people cure their dependency on oil.

Tony G's not an obnoxious poker player who kicks people when they're down. He's actually a fierce activist for environmental awareness!

In his latest post on the Party Poker Blog he uses the word bike no less than 13 times, with a few trikes thrown in there for good measure.

At the Aussie Millions he showed up riding a bike, and according to the photos in his blog he spends the rest of his time walking beside girls riding on bikes.

He started small, by trying to persuade just one player, Ralph Perry, to get on his bike. Now he's bringing his message to poker players around the world.

Well done sir. Well done.

Our Facebook caption contest is complete and the winning caption can be seen in the photo above. Become a fan of our Facebook page and you can get in on these mini-contests. I know we can do better in future caption contests!

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Ok, the top 10 is a completely subjective term, and the theme you use really depends on the type of blog.

If you’ve ever typed “free WordPress themes” into google, you’ll know that there are approximately 18 million free WordPress themes out there. This might seem like a good thing, but unfortunatey for you 99.9% of those themes suck.

To save you some time, I’ve thrown together a quick list of 10 themes that I’d be happy to use myself. Since I like to think that I’m totally awesome, this must mean these themes are rad.

NOTE: Just about every free WordPress theme out there requires you to leave the theme’s footer intact exactly as it was when you downloaded it. The links and text in that footer are the fee you pay to use the theme.

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In my last blog, "Bahamas: Trouble in Paradise," I outlined how a beautiful vacation in the Bahamas can start to go to crap (Cliffs Notes: girlfriend cancels last minute, suitcase lost for two days, local weed is beyond bad).

Fortunately, I managed to get my suitcase back just in time to play Day 1B of the PCA $10k main event ... almost two days after arriving. Apparently it had been left in Orlando during my layover and didn't get to the island until the next day.

I even managed to get a little REAL (ie green, containing reasonable levels of THC, glorious, unlike the putrid Bahama Brown I wrote about in my last blog) ganja from a buddy. I'm not sure if he would want his name publicized here, but in case he doesn't I'll just say THANK YOU, MINI-ME!!!

The pieces were coming back together and everything was starting to look up again...

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Day 2 of EPT Deauville has begun and when we took a look at the chip counts a very familiar name was sitting in the top 10, Ludovic Lacay.

Ludovic, which we assume is French for Ludacris, is among the best at building big stacks in tournaments.

We’d be lying if we said he was a stable player, he’s not, but he must be doing something right. His results prove it.

The first time we saw him play was back in October of 2007. I flew to Barcelona to cover the first WPT Spanish Championship.

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Money and poker are like the lyrics to that classic song Love and Marriage; you can’t have one without the other.

In poker we deal with cash on a daily basis and making good monetary decisions is crucial to a player’s success. The game requires good bankroll management in the long term and analytical +EV decision making in the short term.

One would think, given how frequently poker forces tough decisions, card players make better money related decisions than the average Joe. Well, not really.

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My last blogpost, I mentioned how I wasn't going to take my flight that morning to Biloxi because I wasn't feeling good and didn't want to fly sick.

I ended up finally leaving the walk in clinic that Sunday night around 2 am, prescriptions in hand, and made the decision to stay up and leave for the airport at 4:45 am for my 630 flight.

I hadn't packed yet or anything so I headed to Walgreens to get my prescriptions, and then back to my place to pack. I had to take 2 flights each around 1 hour and 45 minutes long to get to Biloxi, with a short layover in Charlotte. 

It was a pretty miserable trip as my ears were clogged, I was really tired and falling in and out of sleep, but luckily I was able to make it here safely, arriving at 11 am.

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