The final list of 62 players invited to compete in the third NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship has been set.
The eighth-annual World Poker Open returned to the Gold Strike Casino Resort in January. With four tournament events taking place in three different countries over 21 days, this World Poker Tour event was one of several overlapping January tournaments that left circuit participants spending as much time getting from venue to venue as they did at the felt. At the Gold Strike Casino Resort, the hotel and tournament staff turned up the Southern hospitality as weary participants enjoyed a slower pace, much like that of the majestic Mississippi River running behind the venue.
As the rage for primero gradually subsided over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, the most pokerlike pastimes in Europe were brag, pochen, and the newer French game of poque. An updated version of prime, poque was limited to four players, each of whom was dealt five cards before vying for the antes and straddle bets.
The United States government has spent a good part of the last five months beating up online poker.
While watching Poker After Dark on NBC (at 2 a.m. Monday through Saturday "nights") recently, I saw some very interesting plays. Because they show every single hand that was played, you really get to see the caliber of the play, whereas in regular televised poker tournaments, you get to see only the highlight reel hands.
Why would you ever want to play a silly hand like the 4 2? Well, sometimes a hand like that can win you a big pot, and it's hardly a coincidence that guys like "The Grinder," Phil Ivey, Erick Lindgren, myself, and others are often caught in big hands with goofy little suited connectors.
Jennifer Harman is the only female to survive in the Big Game for any length of time, period. Any other story you hear about this woman did this or that and won in Vegas high-stakes poker is simply not true. While Jennifer suffers from emotional swings brought on by hormones (which she is forced to take to prevent her body from rejecting her kidney transplant) as badly as any woman alive, she somehow overcomes it and comes out a big winner by year's end.
As we all now know, Canadians Stephen Lawrence, 46, and John Lefebvre, 55, former directors and founding shareholders of NETELLER, have been charged in the United States with laundering billions of dollars in illegal gambling proceeds.
I was a small winner after struggling in my previous several sessions, and was pretty happy about it. Often, when I have not been running well, I leave a game in order to ensure a win. This puts me in more of a psychologically positive frame of mind for my next session. Also, the game had just lost several weak players who were replaced by players with whom I was unfamiliar.
If you are going to survive over the long haul in the poker world, you need to be effective at dealing with some serious adversity. In other words, you need to learn how to be good at running bad. Recently, a couple of my good friends and I had plenty of practice at this, as the cards didn't go our way over the course of a couple of months. Having been a professional poker player for the better part of 12 years now, this obviously isn't the first time that this has happened to me. In this column, I thought I would share a few of the techniques I use to break out of my poker funks.
