Poker Guru Blog

An extraordinary hand was dealt at Full Tilt Poker's $40/$80 NLHE 6-max table, where 'Sauce1234' and 'AAROOKIE' played one of the most interesting parties ever. Even Phil Galfond, experienced pro commented on his twitter this was "One of the coolest HHs I've seen in a while".

Ben 'Sauce1234' Sulsky started out with $33,739 while AAROOKIE had $42,479. Two players folded, then KidPoker705 raised to $178 from the button. This is where it started to become interesting:

Sauce1234 (sb) raises to $680
AAROOKIE (bb) raises to $1,840
KidPoker705 folds
Sauce1234 raises to $5,127
AAROOKIE raises to $9,055
Sauce1234 calls

Here’s a hilarious video I found at the Cake Poker Blog to kick off this nice day, and I felt I must share this with you.The video portrays a donk stopping by TwoPlusTwo, the popular poker portal. He expresses his unique and awesome ideas about poker and he has some good questions as well.

Check it out, brilliant stuff!

Interestingly enough, Sega, one of the biggest gaming companies in the World closed down its relatively new site, Sega Casino. The site was launched this March and was powered by Playtech. On the site the company offered 125 games including slots, blackjack, poker, and themed Sega games such as Virtua Fighter and House of the Dead.
There is only a note to existing customers at segacasino.com:

One of the biggest online sportsbetting and gambling operators, Sportingbet has settled with the US authorities to pay $33 million for violating US gambling laws.
Preet Bharara, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, has announced that they have reached a non-prosecution agreement with Sportingbet, according to which Sportingbet will pay $33 million because of having provided illegal Internet gambling services to US customers.

Sportingbet has been offering real-money sports betting, poker and casino games to US players between 1998 and 2006. In 2001, Sportingbet decided to start using certain methods to confuse the issuers of credit cards that were disallowing Internet gambling for their cards. Sportingbet displayed gambling transactions in a way that could be misinterpreted and also disguised payments of winnings to US customers.

Sportingbet has now agreed to cooperate in the federal investigation by providing all the documents required and making employees available for interviews with investigators.

It seems the players who missed out WSOPE for some reason are attending  WPT Borgata Poker Open, which boasts of the largest player pool ever in WPT history, a total of 1,042 players. FYI, last year’s record was 1,018 players attending.

Do you know how often you are dealt pocket aces? Or what Doyle Brunson’s favourite cards are? Do you recognise the most important faces of poker from the first glimpse? Yes? Than here is a quiz for you to put your knowledge of poker strategy and the world of the game to a test. No? Well, it’s time to find the answers out, then, so head for this little questionnaire and see if you truly are a novice or have some guesses in terms of poker after all...

You can find the quiz here.

I have been paying close attention to Miss Lauren Kling, the talented blonde beauty who’s becoming more and more successful in poker. I already wrote about her in July, when she was participating in the WSOP Main Event and again in August, if you missed that out. Now she’s into tournaments, at the moment she takes part in PokerStars’ WCOOP events and a few smaller tournaments. In this video she was caught by Kristy Arnett in her 5 minute break, so now you all can get an insight to what a poker pro lady does between tournaments.

There is much debate among poker players about which poker site has the best, most profitable games. In a recent review by PokerTableRatings, they compiled these charts that show which site has the most winning regular players, and how their number correlate with the total users online, giving us the percentage of winning players (good players) at specific sites.

The World Series of Poker continues, the second event has already ended, which was all about Pot Limit Omaha, in which Jeffrey Lisandro finished first. I wrote about Event #1 not so long ago, which was won by the 'Unabomber' Phil Laak, scoring his first WSOP victory.

Jeff Lisandro at WSOPE

At the Ł5,000 Pot Limit Omaha tournament, huge sums of money were won by the finalists, but a total of 18 players finished in the money. Lisandro, known to be one of the best Seven Card Stud players have won his first non-Stud title, and earned a total of £159,000 with his victory.

Eponymus’ Photoshop comic strip ‘The Godfather of Online Poker’ continues with Part V, in which Patrik Corleone makes a pass at Maria Ho, we get to meet Don Tonygi and the XOR encryption is as a piece of cake to crack as ever.

A new variation of Texas Hold’em is now available only on PartyPoker’s tables, the Double Hold’em. For the most part, it is played the same way as normal Hold’em, except you are dealt three hole cards, not two.

The Double Hold'em in action

This is how it works: upon receiving your cards, you have to choose one of the three to be your point (or common) card after the flop but before the betting round. Once you picked yours, it moves to the centre and it cannot be altered. There is only a limited time to choose your point card, however; in case you fail to do so, the system automatically picks the one with the greatest value. If you have two high cards that are of the same face value, the one that has a suited match with the third card will be chosen. Should there be no suited match at all, both face and suit values are considered.

Michael Mizrachi is a very lucky man. Or he just might be very good with the small letters in contracts. Last time I reported that he was sued by his previous sponsor, Deliverance Poker because of contract breach. The poker firm demanded a Temporary Restraining Order on Mizrachi by the Jurors.

The Judge (by the name of James Nowlin) denied their request however, because at first they did not include a "relevant contract" and when they did, the judge was still not convinced: “Even with the additional support attached to the Plaintiff’s amended pleadings, this Court is still not convinced there is ‘substantial likelihood’ that Plaintiff will prevail on the merits.”

There was also a problem with the Deliverance Poker contract's 'Effective Date'. Judge ruled that "There is no indication anywhere in Plaintiff’s pleadings that the ‘Effective Date’ has taken place.” Hence, Mizrachi’s contract also has a clause stating that the contract automatically terminates if the Effective Date has not occurred by August 24th, 2009, nearly one year before he progressed to the later stages of the WSOP Main Event dressed in Full Tilt Poker gear.

The first event came to its end at the WSOPE at the third day, where Phil Laak (the one that recently broke a few bones at a horrific ATV accident I informed you about) have won his first WSOP bracelet.

Laak is one of the poker players who are talked about as the most talented, who do not yet possess a bracelet. He is now out of the league, Phil Laak now has his first WSOP bracelet, which he won on his girlfriend's, Jennifer Tilly's birthday, which, as he comments "just makes it that much more sweet! Holla!”

Phil  Laak enjoying WSOPE finals

He went heads-up against Andrew Pantling a few times during the game, and they also met at the final table, where they fought the final heads-up. It took Laak 3 hours to finish him, winning Ł170,802 and the gold WSOPE bracelet.

FOX TV has aired the second “Best of” instalment of the PokerStars high stakes show The Big Game. The clash between the three loose cannons (Troy Howard, Aaron Jensen and Andre Capella) from the past weeks with some of the biggest names of poker (like Daniel Negreanu, Doyle Brunson, Tony G, Phil Hellmuth and Barry Greenstein) provided quite a number of memorable moments; these are revisited here. 

The inaugural British Poker Awards took place earlier this week at the Kensington Close Hotel in London. Hosted by Michael Caselli and Antonio Esfandiari, eleven awards went to poker players, contributors, providers and forums, according to a public online voting as well as the decision of fellow poker pros and editors.

The nominees for each category were selected by poker journalists and around 3,000 people voted for the eight that were Reader’s Choice. These are as follows: Best Cash Player, Best Tournament Player, Best Online Player, Best International Player, Best Poker League, Best UK Card Room, Best Contribution to Poker and Best UK Poker Forum.