Do you like poker? Do you like wasting time on your iPad? Do you have thumbs? If you answered yes to all three of those questions, or just the last one, Poker Drop might be for you.

Launched by Granville Games for iOS devices, Poker Drop takes poker hands and slams them into the age-old Tetris drop down game format. By arranging cards into five card hands both horizontally and vertically the player battles his way through ten levels of increasing speed and difficulty.

Most online poker players know the ins and outs of keeping their online accounts secure.

For new players just getting started in online poker, there are a few basics everyone should know before depositing or transferring money online.

The infographic below goes over the basics of securing your online accounts including your poker account.

Tired of playing with the same old chips? Boy have we got the poker chip set for you.

Famed designer STAHL is auctioning off a special “Meteorite” chip set on November 29 that includes diamond-encrusted chips filled with fragments from an actual ancient asteroid.

Each individual chip is cased in 18-karat white gold and topped off with the aforementioned diamonds, Burmese rubies and Sri Lankan sapphires.

The chips come in a luxurious handmade leather briefcase with Swedish calf skin and a reindeer calf suede inside.

So what does it cost for 120 gem-studded poker chips, five ivory dice and a deck of playing cards in a custom leather briefcase?

If you’re a true PNS reader you’ll know that we’ve rigged online poker to be played using voice-control and Rock Band guitars and drums. Since then Microsoft released the XBOX Kinect and the second we saw it, we knew it would make the greatest poker controller ever.

While the Kinect truly is an impressive piece of technology, the games made for it are childish at best. Luckily many hackers around the world have spent the time to create drivers and applications allowing you to use the Kinect hardware to interface with a windows PC.

From there it was just a short jump to all-out gesture-controlled online poker!

This is one of those ideas that's really cool and makes you wonder, "Why didn't I think of that?"

For a relatively low price you can now buy a DIY kit that will turn your home poker table into a super-teched out RFID-powered poker show set!

Using RFID-equipped cards and chips, sensors embedded below the felt on the table, and a few simple webcams, you can turn your home game into a poker TV show complete with real-time graphics, odds and hole cards.

Check out the video above but like we said, it's devilishly simple.

By now chances are you’ve heard about the new Home Games feature on PokerStars.com.

Today we’re going to lay it out for you in detail and tell you everything you need to know to get started.

Some people will tell you that playing online poker is about as lethargic an activity as you can get. You're sitting down and the only real movement needed is a few clicks of the mouse and the occassional keyboard tap.

We're here to tell you those people are dead wrong.

In this Poker Gimmick of the Week we look at the Wireless Poker Controller App for the iPhone and iPad and how it can make online poker even easier to play.

No other form of poker has quite the “broad audience” of strip poker.

This, of course, makes perfect sense. After all, procreation is fundamental. Even more so than money.

Essentially as soon as man invented the binary number system, he started drawing digital nude pictures.

Early console-based strip poker games may seem awfully pixelated and unsophisticated but they were all necessary steps in the evolution of this important technology.

Have you ever been on a bus, or waiting for your date to show up at a restaurant, only to wish there was some poker-related way to pass those bothersome minutes? Now there is.

Full Tilt Poker has taken their hit poker format, Rush Poker, and put it on mobile devices that support Flash 10.1.

We’ve got a full list of supported devices below but chances are if you’ve got a new smart phone that isn’t an iPhone you’re going to be able to play Rush poker on the go.

If you’re a poker player into gaming or a gamer who dabbles in poker, Rockstar Games’ open-world Western, Red Dead Redemption, just got a lot more interesting for both of you.

Head to Switch Poker to play real money poker on the iPhone and iPad now!

Now, for the first time ever, it's possible to play iPhone poker for real money without a hack!

My name’s Sean Lind, some of you might remember me from when I wrote exclusively for this site, and taught you all how to play poker on your iPhone using some clever Remote Desktop hacks.

I'm sure you've all seen VR images (google maps street view is a decent example), If you haven't here's a link to VR tour of an airplane cockpit.

Now what you may not know, some smart tech geeks have figured out how to take this technology and apply it to video.

Although it's being used in a few places, mostly sporting events, a new website called all360poker.com has started the initiative of posting full 360 degree VR video from a camera placed directly above the center of some of the poker tables at the WPT Bellagio $25k championships.

The site has over a dozen streaming videos, with plans for high-quality downloadable videos to come soon. The camera uses a bunch of coordinated lenses and is operated by a logitech gaming controller.

We've got a sample of the video below as well as a bunch of photos we took of the actual camera in action at the WPT at Bellagio today.

Make sure you're on the post page to see everything

It seems just about every pocket these days is home to one form of Smartphone or another - phones which can do pretty much anything ... other than play poker.

The iPhone wasn't the first smartphone offered to the public, but it was the first device targeted to the average person - someone looking for a phone which is as fun and easy to use as it is functional.

Since the iPhone changed the landscape of the mobile phone market, just about every company manufacturing mobile phones has at least one smartphone to offer its customers now.

In a few months Microsoft will unleash the Windows 7 phone on the world in an attempt to displace the iPhone as the king of the smartphones.

While playing poker on these devices is sort of possible (through various remote desktop hacks and such), a native app or in-browser poker support has yet to be offered to the world.

For poker players, all of this is about to change.

About five months ago we did a blog showing how to use your Rock Band guitar to play online poker. After it launched I got a lot of feedback and requests for a similar article using the drum kit. So, naturally, I did just that.

The Rock Band (or Guitar Hero) instruments are basically just large controllers with unusual buttons. Instead of pressing the X button, you hit the big green drum. Since these controllers are conveniently compatible with your Windows PC, it's easy to use them for just about anything you want.

Play Poker with Your Rock Band Drum Kit

It's not hard to do and should take you less than 30 minutes from start to finish. If you just want to see how well it works and already know (or don't care) how to set it up, save yourself a couple of minutes and watch the video at the bottom of the blog.

This all started after hearing, for the thousandth time, someone tell me how pocket aces never hold up online, how the sites are programmed to let people suck out.

As a person firmly rooted in logic, I kind of lose my shit when I hear people spout ridiculous superstition and bullshit as if it's fact. Unfortunately, I've come to learn that telling these people they're being dumb isn't really sufficient as an argument.

Then, I came to realize that since I have never actually run the numbers of online poker myself, I really was unable to say that these myths are false. Without any proof my word is no more valuable than theirs.

So, I set out to get some proof. I decided to take a large number of real-money online poker hands to run statistical analysis on, then compare my results to the perfect math. First, some details:

• Although I downloaded 60gig worth of hand history text files (somewhere in the neighborhood of 47 million hands), my Dell laptop wasn't really able to run queries on a database that large. So for the following myths I used a total of 3,102,773  unique real-money hands played almost exclusively on Full Tilt Poker.
• These hands range from $0.25/$0.50 to $500/$1,000.

For more details on where I got the hands, and how I came up with my numbers head to the last section of this article: Geeks Only - Technical Details.

Regardless of where you play, how many tables you're on or how long your sessions are, every online poker player needs a good mouse.

Even though any simple computer mouse (including those old shitty trackball mice) will technically do the job, getting yourself a serious mouse might be one of the smartest things you can do for yourself.

Aside from reducing frustration and muscle strain, a good mouse can increase your precision and productivity, which has the potential to increase your bottom line.

At the very least all of the mice below will also help you absolutely rape at COD:MW2.

Since we're looking at mouses for online poker I'm ranking them based on the following criteria:

• Precision (both tracking, and mouse movement)
• Comfort
• Well placed fully customizable extra buttons

Because we're looking for peformance the only mice worth considering are the ones marketed towards the gaming crowd. These mice are built for razer sharp precision, and hours of extended play-time.

There are literally hundreds to choose from but don't worry. We've narrowed it down to the the best of the best.

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.

Update!! Play real-money poker on the iPhone and iPad at Switch Poker now! If you want more information before signing up, check out our review of playing iPhone online poker at Switch Poker.

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.

In case you haven’t heard (really?), Google has re-invented the wheel, and is gearing up to release their brand new Operating System.

Until this year (it’ll like be released in the second half of 2010), there have been three choices for operating systems:

• Windows (PC)
• OSX (Mac)
• Linux (Geek)

Yes there are hundreds of different flavors and versions, but there really are only three main OS’s being used by any sort of numbers.

That is until Google announced they’re going to change the world with Chrome OS. Since it’s not out yet, it’s not possible to tell you everything about it, but we already know a lot. Here are the facts:

• Open source, this means it’s free.
• Is built to run on specific hardware with no local data storage.
• Requires the internet to function.
• No programs are installed locally; all applications used must be Web Apps.
• There are no program updates, patches or viruses, since nothing is actually stored on your computer.
• You can never “lose” data, since it’s always stored on Google’s servers.

Regardless of how often you play online poker, installing TableNinja might be the greatest thing you can do for yourself.

And by greatest, I mean it’s pretty sweet - and you’ll at least be happy you did.

TableNinja is a poker shortcuts app similar to the “Poker Shortcuts” app used for the Rock Band Wireless Poker Controller video.

The idea is simple: Instead of having to use your mouse or type out the amount of your bet, you can hit one key and have the program do the rest.

When you think about it, you only typically make a small number of actions at a poker table:

• Fold
• Check/Call
• Raise min
• Raise 3bb
• Bet Pot
• Bet ¾ pot
• Bet All in

For most of the poker players in the world, this list is almost 100% of all the actions you’ll ever make.

When it comes down to it, using your mouse is always going to be a lot slower than using your keyboard.

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