Poker Guru Blog

Although it is definitely the silly season for poker right now, PartTimePoker.com presented their usual compilation on the week ahead in poker – and things don’t seem to be as bad as I thought they would.

To begin with, after the successful broadcast of the Player’s Championship, Tournament of Champions airs today on ESPN, ’starring’ among others Phil Ivey, Daniel Negreanu, Johnny Chan, Doyle Brunson and Phil Hellmuth. Regarding live action, we also entered into the second week of The Legends of Poker tournament with Events #3-12; meanwhile, three international events commence this week: the $2,600 Main Event of the Latin American Poker Tour Florianopolis (Brazil), the €2,000 Russian Poker Tour Riga (Latvia) as well as the $2,750 Scottish Poker Open. Also, FTOPS XVII with 34 events and a guaranteed $19 million prize pool launches tomorrow.

Norwegian PLO pro Andreas ‘Skjervøy’ Torbergsen has recently been announced to join CardRunners, also acquiring the Full Tilt Red Pro title.

Andreas ‘Skjervøy’ Torbergsen

Torbergsen is chiefly an online player of both micro and high stakes games but he has some live results as well. In 2008 he finished 551st in the WSOP Main Event and won $23,160. In addition, he went ITM two times in the Norwegian Poker Championship. This year’s WSOP, however, was a little less fortunate for him: “In the end I lasted 3 1/4 day in the Main Event without cashing,” he said in an interview posted on CardRunners.com.

After about a 3-months break, the Durrrr Challenge continued with Dwan and Patrik Antonius playing 280 hands. This weekend was more profitable for the Finnish, winning $244,672.

This Sunday’s turn of the 50,000 hands ’event’ saw Antonius taking the biggest pots, including one of $185,000 and another of $160,000. Although the final balance was as written above, Antonius finally managed to reduce Dwan’s lead in the challenge to $1,6 million, as pokernewsdaily.com reports.

Tom 'durrrr' Dwan and Patrik Antonius

Antonius has recently been considered the biggest loser of July, nevertheless he eventually raised about half a million dollar profit. Still, NEKOTYAN, the Russian player who beat him as well, finished well ahead of him with his winnings of $900,000 in total. Meanwhile, ’durrrr’ seems to be in a downturn with a loss of around $500,000.

While there are still 11,000 hands left for Antonius to beat the Durrrr Challenge, an achievement he might have a hard time to reach, the identity of the next candidates, Brian Townsend and Daniel ’jungleman12’ Cates, may already be considered confirmed.

PKR, the unique online poker room with 3D client visuals, signed a sponsorship deal with the first fully licensed gambling venue in London, The Fox Poker Club.

Fox, located on the famous Shaftesbury Avenue in London’s West End, will be able to seat 200 players on about 600 square metres (6500 square feet) and will include a poker library, a smokers’ deck and a lounge. Named after Charles James Fox, an 18th century politician (and gambler), the club opens its gates on 7 August; however, an exclusive eve party is going to take place on 6 August with a $5,000 Guaranteed tournament. Once launched, FPC will provide daily tournaments, cash games as well as free afternoon tutorials, according to marketwire.com.

Technical inventions are long proved inevitable in order to develop and progress in every field of life and poker is not an exception. To make tournament broadcasts even more exciting, the hole card cams were introduced in the late 1990’s, and now here is the latest revolution: All 360 Media’s 11-lenses camera system.

According to PokerScout.com, the newly introduced French online gambling sites fare well on the worldwide market. Although players from the country are banned from foreign rooms, players from outside France are welcome on the .fr sites.

Last week’s most successful of the licensed rooms was PokerStars.fr with an average of 1520 plays daily and a 2823 peak, which were worth the 9th place on the listing. Right behind PS finished EverestPoker.fr with a 1280 daily average and a 2392 peak. These actually exceeded the results of the international Everest site.

The next French room, Bwin (Ongame.fr), was ranked 17th (750 average, 1381 high) while PartyPoker.fr was 20th (660/1219). FullTiltPoker.fr, a late addition to the licensed companies in France, was doing a little worse with 235 players per day and a 420 peak, worth the 25th place.

You can follow the changes of the rankings weekly at pokerscout.com.

Annie Duke (Poker Players Alliance) was invited to a TV mini-debate with Tim Kelly (National Gambling Impact Study Committee) on online gambling. Her main argument is the estimated cash income, a by-product of the regulation, while Kelly nevertheless deems online poker undoubtedly harmful. 

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Besides Zynga, another Facebook game provider, Disney-owned Playdom, has its own poker application on the social network, Poker Palace. Only it is called World Series of Poker now.

According to the Games.com Blog, in a world of brands developing their promotional games, re-branding an existing application is far from usual. Nevertheless, with Facebook being crammed with poker-related games, it seems to be a wise decision not to introduce yet another one into the market, not to mention the difficulty of building up a community around a new game. The merge provides a solid base instead and also helps Playdom popularise their application with the venerable brand.

’Think you’ve got the guts to break down the action with brutal honesty? Prove it.’ This is what WPT’s latest contest promo reads. Who are they looking for? Perhaps You to host ’The Raw Deal.’

WPT’s upcoming TV segment needs ’an opinionated and outspoken personality’, although Bill’s Poker Blog has aptly put it in a more... outright way. The expectation is not to be shy and call out anybody and everybody in the poker industry, including the most respected players. The audition is open; the only thing you have to do is watching a video (see below) and recording yourself in no more than 45 seconds, presenting your opinion on what’s happening. You only need to edit your performance and include the phrase ’World Poker Tour’ in it.

According to Sky Sports, Jesus has recently not been satisfied with the position he had been playing at in Heaven, this is the reason why he accepted Manchester City's offer immediately.

Roberto Mancini, the coach for Manchester City acknowledged in a press release that it is not enough for the team to have only mortal people playing, this is why they settled on Jesus Christ himself. 

You can view Sky Sports' report below:

Born in 1986, Lauren Kling is one of the most beautiful characters in today's poker scene, and one of the most talented female players as well. She started playing poker when she was 18, but only registered to online poker rooms at the age of 21, of course. Her nickname is 'locoencabeza' on PokerStars, 'locoenlacabeza' on Full Tilt, and 'supermodl' on UB. 

Her all-time live poker career winnings reach $91,000, with her biggest win being $24,079, won by placing 565th in this year's WSOP Main Event. 

Her most notable live results include a 3rd place at the WSOP Caesars Palace Circuit Event, a 63rd place at the WPT LA Poker Classic and a 104th place at the NAPT Deep Stack Extravaganza. 

Her most important online results include a 9th place in Full Tilt Poker's 2009 FTOPS Main Event for $27,856 and a fourth place in the Sunday Mulligan for $20,491.

The real breakthrough for Lauren came in 2010, when she managed to place 3rd in FTP's $1K Monday for $44,760. After this came her best result so far: she placed second in the UBOC $1M Championship, winning $163,244. 

If you ever decide to visit downtown Boston, you will definitely stumble upon this very interesting building called the Liberty Hotel.

It used to function as a prison in the mid-19th century, and has been renovated to become a hotel three years ago. In this architecturally very special building, the structure of the cells remains as it was 150 years ago, except for the decoration and the materials used.

If you would like to stay one night in this luxury hotel, it would cost at least $320, with the elite suite having a nice price of $5500.

This is how to win a tournament!

Caution: Serious luck is needed for this kind of gameplay.  

Full Tilt Poker’s traditional championship, the Full Tilt Online Poker Series (FTOPS) will be held between the 4th and 15th August.

The total prize pool of the 34 tournaments will exceed $19 million. The series feature a very wide range of tournaments, including No-Limit and Limit Hold’em, Omaha, Razz, HORSE, Stud and 7-Game.

Miami Heat has recently signed Eddie House for two years (a contract worth $2.8 million), adding him to a selection of players including superstars like Lebron James, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh.

Eddie House

Experts say Miami Heat should not have any difficulties winning every single game in the season and becoming champions in 2010-11.

On top of that, BetUS.com now offers +175 odds of them winning the 2011 NBA Championship, which is almost unbelievable and sure not to last too long. The defending champion Lakers are the second favourite at +300 to win their third NBA title next year.

“Those odds are almost unfathomable. Some of us feel that is like taking candy from a child.” says Don Shapiro.

“When your foundation is the trio of Bosh, Wade and LeBron, it doesn’t matter if the rest of the house is made of hay, spit and aging veterans. (...) With the NBA Championship Futures being released, it’s almost shocking that the Miami Heat are +175 to win in the 2010-11 NBA season.” writes Tim Furious of BetUS.com.

If you have ever considered betting on the NBA, this is probably the time to do it, as these odds are truly worth the money.