All Posts Tagged: Cold Hard Facts

We've seen people playing poker underwater, but we've never seen pirates playing poker underwater before. This past weekend that's exactly what happened at the Key Largo Pirates Fest.

Apparently someone has organized a festival to give people with the uncontrollable urge to dress like a pirate an opportunity to do so in a looting- and pillaging-free setting.

We're not sure about the authenticity of this festival given that one of the activities was underwater poker, assisted by scuba gear for all participating pirates.

Pirates were a gambling group of people but as far as we know they didn't have poker back in the pirate days, or scuba gear for that matter.

At any rate, here's a video of them playing. Kind of gives a new meaning to the old saying, "If you can't spot the fish at the table in the first ten minutes …"



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Ask nine out of ten children what they want in life and they're going to say a slide in their living rooms. The sad thing is that 8.9 out of ten kids' dreams of slides go unfulfilled. Phil Galfond has given hope to children worldwide, however, by installing a slide in his living room.

Maybe his parents used to tell him that the house wasn't a jungle gym and he vowed to prove them wrong. Maybe he needed an escape route from the bedroom and the stairs just didn't cut it.

Whatever the motivation, the result is sheer awesomeness. Some people might argue the aesthetics of having a giant metal tube coming through the ceiling into your living room but I say to them, "Shut up."

Galfond is finally doing something worthwhile with his poker winnings. Watches and cars are all well and good but nothing says, "I've got too much money," like a giant slide built into your living room.

Check out Galfond's blog for a couple more pics of his condo.

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October 15 is Blog Action Day, the day when the otherwise ineffectual and self-centered blogging world is directed towards something worthwhile.

The issue is climate change and if you read this blog you're probably already part of the solution, whether you realize it or not.

By playing online poker you are literally saving the world. There, I said it. So go ahead and contact all those people in your life that said you'd never amount to anything and that playing online poker was a waste of your life.

I might be a little narrow in my definition of saving the world but as a blogger on the internet I feel I'm entitled to a certain amount of creative license.

The fact that you have to play poker is a given, there's no changing that. So, you're presented with two options: Drive to your local casino and use up a bunch of gas in the process, or sit on your couch and play on your computer.

If you chose the latter I applaud your good judgment and hearty social conscience! So the next time someone brings up Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth, just tell them you play online poker.

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Phil Hellmuth made another one of his Roman-themed entrances today at the World Series of Poker Europe main event but things didn't exactly go as planned.

PokerListings was front and center outside the Casino at the Empire waiting for Hellmuth to show up, but mostly just to check out the girls he had for the show.

After a bit of a wait Hellmuth showed up in the full Centurion gear with the guards and everything. I guess the plan was to roll up, join the group of girls and then walk into the casino. This is when the problems started.

Hellmuth and the girls got to the front door and the bouncers stepped in their way and asked for ID! As you can see by the photos the girls didn't exactly have a convenient place to keep their wallets and obviously had no ID.

Bear in mind that ESPN has cameras rolling and about 20 media people are taping and shooting photos. You think the coordinators for this stunt might have cleared it with the casino beforehand? Apparently not.

So the girls aren't allowed in and Hellmuth is just stunned. The ESPN people are less than enthused and the bouncers aren't budging on letting the girls in without ID. A lot of standing around and hand gesturing followed and we pretty much gave up on the whole thing.

Before long someone gets the bright idea to just go and get the IDs from wherever they were and eventually the entrance went on as planned.

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We do a ton of interviews for stories here on PL.com but every once in a while there's just too much good stuff to fit into the feature. In those cases we think it's only fair to give you a look at the full and unabridged interview.

That's exactly what we've done here.

What follows is the transcript from an interview done by our News Editor Martin Derbyshire with Andrew Feldman at the 2009 World Series of Poker Europe.

If time and/or patience is an issue for you check out the feature news story here.

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I just listened to an episode of Mediocre Poker radio that really surprised me. Steve Sung was their guest and the topic they discussed for most of the show was how Sung was basically busto.

I was surprised for two reasons. The first was that Sung could actually be close to broke. He won the $1k Stimulus event at the WSOP a few months ago for like $800,000 to bring his career total to almost $3 million.

The second thing I wasn't used to hearing is someone talking about it so honestly and nonchalantly. It's sick that someone who's posted so many huge results is actually right back where he started financially.

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We've discovered that teen heartthrob and star of the finely-crafted epic I Know What You Did Last Summer Freddie Prinze Jr. is here at EPT Barcelona, posing as a Euro-rounder named Simon Munoz.

Brandon Schaefer is sitting at his table and told us "Simon Munoz" is playing the best of the nine at the table. We're not sure where he learned to play between catering to Buffy and the rest of his teenage fanclub but he has.

You heard it here first, FPJ is here in Barcelona.

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It's been one of my life long goals to have a term I invented become colloquialized.

I'm asking for all of your assistance in bringing my new word into your poker world: spread it like a plague.

Nut*shot (Noun): Having an inside straight draw (gutshot) to the best possible hand (the nuts).

Example: I needed to hit a nine on the turn or river to complete my nutshot.

There you have it, now go forth and spread it with vigor.

Thanks for the help

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Well it's now 4:21am and I've officially given up hope of going to bed before my flight leaves from the airport in Vegas at 9:10am, so I might as well get a blog post in before I get to Jersey. I'll sleep when I'm dead I suppose. Oh, and on the flight.

Anyway, I'm really excited about what I mentioned in the title. Lock Poker, a member of the Cake Network, recently signed a group of pros including myself, Jason Young, Lee Childs, Mike 'GoLeafsGoEh' Leah, Joe 'JoeytheB' Brooks, Kyle 'kwob20' Bowker and Jonathan Jaffe.

Eric 'Rizen' Lynch, who was the first Lock Pro before the rest of us were signed, was also announced as VP of Product Development in the same press release.

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American law books are filled from cover to cover with random, obsolete, and outright strange laws created in a time long passed.

As I have surmised after spending no time doing any actual research into the subject, laws were created in the olden days only as a reaction to an odd situation. Some laws are so ridiculous I'm just not sure how they ever came to be in the first place, such as:

In Connecticut, by law, a pickle is not officially a pickle unless it bounces.

Or better yet:

In Florida, having sexual relations with a porcupine is illegal.

If you need a law to tell you that having sex with a porcupine is a bad idea, you have much bigger problems than needing to know a lawyer ... mainly the hundreds of quills you now have stuck deep into your bird.

Here are the craziest American laws pertaining to poker:

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Before one can understand the differences in poker players they must be classified into specific groups, or taxa.

As any responsible poker blogger would do, I've worked diligently to put together the official poker player taxonomic scheme.

Under the kingdom Riverrilla Bluff there are many different orders, genera and species. Here's the official poker player Hierarchy. Match up the definitions with the graphic representation to your right.

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In case you haven't seen it, Face the Ace is a new poker show on NBC. I'm not sure when it airs, and I can promise you I'm not going to try and find out.

The idea behind the show was exciting enough for me to tune in for the premiere: regular Joes with a shot at playing heads-up against the greatest poker players in the world for as much as $1 million.

Unfortunately, NBC not only dropped the ball, they left it in their own end-zone and walked to the sidelines.

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It was with great sadness that we heard about the closing of the Sapphire topless pool at the Rio in Las Vegas.

It's not like we were regulars there during the WSOP, sipping blended drinks while frolicking with a bevy of nubile young strippers on their break from Sapphire … no way, that ain't us.

But it's still one less place for topless girls to hang out and there weren't enough of those to begin with.

The best thing about this story is that the pool was supposedly shut down after failing an "integrity test" that Harrah's insisted on. I'm not sure how big a role integrity should play at a pool full of naked strippers but that's just me.

In honor of its memory we bring you the video we shot with some of the girls while they were holding a charity bikini car wash earlier this summer. Maybe the power of our combined prayers will reinstate the topless pool.



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Rounding the corner in front of the Flamingo, my friend and I run into Dustin Dirksen, high-stakes online professional and full on LAG-tard.

After the initial hellos and handshakes, Dirksen, beer in hand, jumped straight into his latest Las Vegas story.

At around 2 a.m. on a Monday night, Dirksen and his friend were sitting at a $1/$2 No-Limit table at O'Sheas.

As you would imagine from a player who plays games with a big blind equal to the entire buy-in at a $1/$2 table, he can only play the game for so long until something sticky has to hit the fan.

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It's happened before but few people have had the success multi-tabling that Nam Le has had today. Even more incredibly both events are Day 2's!

He's been playing the $10k Pot-Limit Omaha championship as well as the $1,500 No-Limit Hold'em.

He just ran over to his seat in the $1,500 and was sitting for all of one minute before tripling up! He got it in with kings against A-Q and tens and made it hold up to increase his stack to 330,000!

Just moments before he did the same thing in the PLO event, sitting down and promptly doubling up.

We've said it before but it bears repeating: Nam Le has mad skills.

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For all who say poker writers are nothing but failed poker players I cite three two examples from our own PokerListings.com staff.

As we speak our head strategy writer Dan "The Boy" Skolovy is sitting with 33,000 or so in today's $1,500. The blinds are 200/400 which means Dan is very comfortable at the moment. Skolovy is out. Kings into a flopped set. He got way too deep in the hand, presumably value-betting his over-pair.

At the time of writing 710 of the original 2638 are still in which means the average stack is right around 2,600.

Yesterday we had two of our writers deep in another $1,500. Martin Derbyshire, finished 29th for $14,000 and Olle Sundin, a writer for PokerListings.se, finished 33rd for the same cash.

So yeah, maybe not all poker writers can play but we sure as hell can. At least you know you can trust some of the stuff we tell you, having had some experience on the felt to back it up.

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Look at that baller's grin! Only one well-known poker pro was born with a grin like that…

Need a hint? For this Kid, Poker changed his life.

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The Brits are descending on the Rio faster than Jenson Button in his Formula One Brawn vehicle right now.

We just bumped into online phenomenon Stephen Devlin aka allinstevie, who is sharing a house with fellow online pros Chris "Moorman1" Moorman and Paul "Leadboots" Foltyn.

Quite the line-up of online talent with over $2.5 million in online winnings between them, allinstevie told me that they were having a pretty balla time in Vegas so far.

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Some late-breaking news has just made its way to PL.com's inbox.

For anybody out there that is planning to play the $1,000 Stimulus Event, but hasn't registered yet, you had better uncheck auto post blind, unregister from the nightly tournament, or turn off the XBox and get down to the Rio ASAP.

Harrah's is expecting the first-ever $1,000 Stimulus Tournament to bring in the largest number of players for a non-Main Event tournament in WSOP history and the seats are selling fast.

In an effort to keep people from going through the trouble of flying out here at the last minute with WSOP Bracelet dreams fresh in their eyes, Harrah's is advising that the open spots are selling like hot cakes.

To prevent people from getting shut out of the event, Harrah's suggests that players planning to enter this event act fast and register as soon as possible.

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There has been quite a flurry of reporting in the poker community and elsewhere (the Wall Street Journal had coverage) of the findings of a study by Cigital, a consulting firm in Washington, DC.

The report presents what some are calling "definitive" data that "proves" that poker is a game of skill.

Now, poker is a game of skill. Luck plays a role, of course, in the impact of the random turn of a card, the flukiness of the flop, the unlikely river card. That's not only the nature of the game; it's an inherent feature of every interesting thing that people do.

But the Cigital data do not support the conclusion reached. Let me explain why.

In scientific research we hold dear to a singular principle: you have to control alternative possibilities that might be causing the effects seen. The Cigital study does not do this. In fact, it has a large logical flaw in its design.

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If you had asked Taylor Caby in 2005 what he thought would become of his new brainchild - Cardrunners.com, an online poker video coaching site - he probably would have said nothing; that it was just a time-killer.

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Online poker multimillionaire. Highly sought-after high-stakes CardRunners coach. Well-read and controversial blogger. Famous former housemate of Tom "durrrr" Dwan.

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Part 2 of 2 of PokerListings.com's interview with David "raptor" Benefield, one of the most successful high-stakes online poker players in the world.

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At long last it has arrived - PokerListings TV! Reading is great but the Internet was supposed to make things easier. That's where the TV part comes in.

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So I have been reading up on the origins of poker. Some accounts argue that early versions of the game appeared in Germany in the 15th century as Pochspiel and in the late 19th century Persian game As Nas.

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