Poker Guru Blog

Cake Poker’s card room manager and tournament director, Lee Jones and Serge Ravitch, announced on Tuesday that they resigned from Cake Poker.

Lee Jones

Lee Jones, former senior manager of PokerStars as well as CardRunners, signed as card room manager for Cake Poker in May, 2009. He was behind the Gold Chip and the Gold Card programs, among other things; as of Tuesday, however, he is no longer member of the Cake Poker team.

In this interview done by PokerStatic's regular interviewers Eric Bickel and Bret Oliverio,  we can get know the Canadian NLHE cash game pro, Martin 'DrgGiggy' Giguere better. The 23-year-old ultra-aggressive mid-stakes player talks about his friend Jonathan Duhamel and his victory at WSOP, his 5% of the winnings, but also about his poker style, personality, and much much more. Highly recommended.

Miramax, "leaked" (which is really phoney, and I don't really understand how such a huge studio can afford advertising like this) the following video of their upcoming reality show following the lives of 4 young online poker pros living moving together to a fancy Hollywood villa for 2 months. The show is going to be called "Young Guns".

There has already been a show called 2 Months, 2 Million, if you missed it out just search YouTube, it's a pretty good show. Young Guns will be basically the same: 4 online pros moving together to a house and living their dream: earning a ton of money playing poker, partying and having fun. The 4 players in the video will not necessarily be the same people in the final show, so there's hope for the guys at 2+2, who complain that the players are playing at low stakes and one of them is a massive loser. There's also no known release date yet, it's rumored it will air in the 2nd half of 2011.

Well, the day has finally come, it's officially Christmas! What this means is that we (and I hope you as well) leave the computer, poker and everything behind, and spend some time with our loved ones, and of course, stuff ourselves to bloatation with the most delicious holiday meals. Therefore, I wish you a Merry Christmas and that your happiness will have no limits! See you after the holidays!

If you are a tech guy, and into mobile gaming, you must have thought that the Zynga people are bastards, because they won't release an Android version of the Zynga Poker app, available to Apple iPhone and iPod Touch users since 2008. Well, that changed now.

Zynga Poker on Android

Rumors had it that Zynga will port their application to the fast-growing mobile smartphone platform, Android sometime, but it not happened as quickly as some of the Android fans might have thought. As Android's market shared doubled, and seems to go through the roof nowadays (even surpassed iPhone's OS in August)  they finally decided to release the application.

PokerTube has recently released a brand new training video, created by gripsed, revolving around planning a hand in poker. Addressing above all novice and intermediate players, the 23.5 minutes long material provides useful hints on how to see the big picture in a hand, instead of thinking street by street.

Considering that the optimal outcome of a hand is that if you can make the villain fold, avoiding giving out information about yourself and reducing the chance of bad luck later on, there are several points you want to keep in mind. Gripsed discusses how to bet depending on your aims, maintaining control of the size of the pot, as well as some late street tricks later in the video. All in all, you can learn how to dominate your opponents unaware of the importance of hand planning.

I posted like two weeks ago the pilot episode of The Micros, John ’JimmyLegs’ Wray’s and Jay ’Krantz’ Rosenkrantz’ animated series. The second episode, the Holiday Special is out now, while the next comes in January, 2011. Although it was JimmyLegs alone in the director’s seat this time, the show still features guests none other than TGOOP creator Eponymous as well as Erik Seidel himself, not to mention the unique humour. Enjoy!

Part VIII, the final part of Eponymous’ Photoshop comic strip ‘The Godfather of Online Poker’ is here, and I'm not giving you any teasers right now, because anything I say would spoil the great finale. Enjoy!

Phil Hellmuth, 11-time WSOP champion, my favourite tilt monster can now try anger management at another genre: dancing. He tweeted this weekend that he might be on the next season of "Dancing with the Stars":

"OMG! Phil Hellmuth (me!) on 'Dancing with the Stars!' Outrageous! Might make a fool out of myself on Worldwide Television one more time..."

Phil Hellmuth is Next?

The "poker brat" has already auditioned for the previous season of the show with professional ballroom dancer Karina Smirnoff (pictured above), but she danced with Steve Wozniak, Apple's co-founder instead. Which is funny in itself, really, you should search for it in google, to get a grasp of what you can expect from Hellmuth if he makes it.

The official cast has not yet been revealed, it is expected to be announced until next month, so we must wait a few weeks to see this confirmed.

Isildur1, the famous Swede lost his first SuperStar Showdown to Isaac 'philivey2694' Haxton, his first challenger. As I announced last time, as soon as PokerStars signed Isildur1, they offered challengers the chance to take down the young Swedish player. The first showdown was played yesterday at the $50/$100 NLHE tables at PokerStars. The challenger came to be Isaac 'philivey 2694' Haxton, runner-up of the 2009 WSOP $40,000 NLHE event.

 

If you happen to be female and want to be respected as a poker player you have to put in about twice as much effort as men. This can be considered as a fact, even though there are more and more famous female poker players.

This 29 year-old beauty Sandra Naujoks (blonde at the moment), is a very talented poker player. Her total live career winnings almost reach $2 million, but this is not her real profession.Sandra is a teacher of German and History, a successful graphic designer and model, and here comes the best part: she is a huge supporter of various good causes, like the tutoring of poor kids, for example.

Sandra has set up her own ’brand’ called ’All In 4 Kids’, with the main profile of helping children living in poverty in Cambodia. She is also inviting fellow poker players to join her cause and donate money from their poker winnings.

Sandra Naujoks

'My last occasion when I cried was in February. I was standing in the Cambodian killing fields thinking about all the lives that were taken there. I went to Cambodia because I support a schooling project there. This summer we are building a new school for 500 children.’ – said Sandra in a WPT magazine interview earlier this year.

Now that Christmas is coming, I think this is the kind of message poker players should convey all around the world, so I am very happily giving the ‘Girl of the Week’ title to Sandra Naujoks.

Jenji Kohan and Matthew Salsberg, creator and executive producer of Showtime’s popular series ‘Weeds,’ are now working on a new show revolving around poker: ‘Whales.’

Matthew Salsberg

Tom ’durrrr’ Dwan and Daniel ’jungleman12’ Cates work hard lately; Durrrrr Challenge 2 is on with a new, 1,214 hands long session played yesterday. Dwan managed to reduce his deficit by around $60,000, while Cates swept in the biggest pot in the Challenge so far.

Jungleman cs. Durrrr

In two hours time, durrrr and jungleman got 1,214 hands closer to the 50,000 mark of the Challenge yesterday afternoon. Although Dwan closed in significantly on Cates, reducing his deficit to $200,000, the latter eventually succeeded in keeping up his considerable lead of $500,000. Three pots were over $150,000 and another totalled at $210,000; this was won by jungleman. He also leads in total number of pots won with 8,265 (58%).

Since 2010 WSOP Main Event runner-up John Racener has been arrested for the 4th time, a lot of confusion and debate is on at 2+2 forums. To clarify some of the misconceptions, I collected some now information that surfaced about the case and the Racener also commented on his behaviour for the first time.

Johnny Racener was arrested for his 3rd DUI (driving under the influence) 5 days ago in Tampa, Florida as you might have heard. Now Gambling911.com received the official police report, according to which he raised the attention of the police by stumbling to his car looking drunk. Police officer Julius Cannon followed the poker pro as he ran the red light in his grey Range Rover, after that, he was pulled over by the squad car. He refused to complete all the field sobriety exercises and asked the officer to go home on foot. After refusing to take the breath test (which is also a misdemeanor), he was taken into custody. He stayed there for 9 hours and after that, after paying the $1,000 bail (which is a really small pot for him, really), was released. What he was doing in the area where he was caught remains unknown, but as Tampa Police Department spokeswoman told Gambling911.com, "The area where Racener was observed walking along and stumbling is right near an area of town with a lot of bars and nightclubs."

WPT's Royal Flush Girl Melanie Iglesias from New York has won Maxim's 2010 Hometown Hotties contest. The hot young model beat more than 7,000 contestants from all over the US, including all the 9 finalists to win the title. From now on, she will also be a spokesperson for Maxim, not "just" a Royal Flush Girl.

Royal Flush Girls

I personally congratulate Melanie, and wish her all the best, she was really the hottest out there, but WPT must also be mentioned here, their sense for business is awesome: now that one of the Royal Flush Girls is even more famous, hopefully much more eyes will be drawn to the screen when the 9th season of WPT starts airing in February. In case you aren't familiar with her, here are a few pictures and a video of her. Enjoy!

Oh, and by the way, she is single at the moment, so if you feel like you could make her happy, go ahead and try, life is short! A hint: she's a fan of Orlando Magic, and loves "Dontcha" by the Pussycat Dolls.