Poker Guru Blog

Liv Boeree, winner of the PokerStars European Poker Tour (EPT) San Remo gave a video interview to Gambling Online Magazine, in which she tells the public about her future WSOP plans and her musical taste. 

Liv Boeree came out first at the EPT San Remo on 21st April. The tournament had 1240 participants, and the two players competing heads-up were Liv and the well-known Swedish online pro, the 22 year old Jakob 'mendieta19' Carlsson. Boeree received €1,250,000 for the victory, which gave a huge boost to her all-time live winnings (currently standing at $1,932,770), with her previous biggest earning being $42,000.

Liv Boeree

The gorgeous British poker pro, recently voted as one of the 30 hottest poker ladies, has been giving interviews ever since her San Remo victory. The latest one was made by Gambling Online Magazine, you can view it here. The video interview makes it pretty clear why she has received the nickname 'Iron Maiden'.

Rima Fakih a 24-year old Brunette from Michigan is now Miss USA 2010 after winning the title this Sunday in Las Vegas. Rima managed to knockout 51 other competitors as she progressed her way up through the swimsuit, evening gown and interview competitions to secure the number one spot.

In our day-and-age where obesity has unfortunately become a global pandemic, one man is showing us that self-discipline can be the key to living a healthy lifestyle, even at old age. The 72 year old former ‘Mr. America’ Jim Morris is turning heads and dropping jaws with his ripped and buff body, leaving many speechless.

Jim who has been bodybuilding for close to a century now is showing no sign of slowing down. He has a strict work out which he abides by and manages to fit in all in an hour a day, six days a week. But this is not all; Jim also watches what he eats as well. His diet consists of a vegetarian’s line up of vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts and he does his best to avoid all meats and cheeses. For all his hard efforts over time, Jim has the health and physique of a 20 year old. 

Although the Cereus Network has announced on the 14th of May that they have taken care of the security gap that made it possible for hackers to view their opponents' hole cards and access others' poker accounts, employees of PokerTableRatings (PTR) were once again easily able to get around the system.

As I have mentioned in a previous post, PTR found a security gap in the software of the well-known Cereus Network. The main concern was that the network wasn't using the industry standard SSL encryption, but their own XOR coding system, which proved to be inefficient against outside threats. Programmers of the Cereus Network started to fix the problem immediately, and according to announcements made by Cereus, they managed to rewrite their software with the SSL encryption technique.

As Cereus had requested PTR to test their system after the repair process, they tried once again to hack the software. To everyone's surprise, they have succeeded once again. Although they weren't able to view hole cards this time, the did manage to access poker accounts.

Cereus has once again kindly thanked them for their help, and the programmers are once again sterted to work on the issue.

On the 16th of May Cereus patched again and have informed PTR that they believe the issue is solved. After some testing PTR confirmed that SSL is now being used everywhere for Cereus. The login vulnerability no longer exists. They are not ensuring a proper implementation, but it seems like the biggest problems have been addressed.

As I was browsing through the 2+2 forum the other day I came across a hilarious post by 2+2 members. In the thread entitled 'Phil Ivey Photoshop potential', a newbie member ‘jaybeee’ displayed an already funny photo of Phil Ivey getting a head massage at the EPT Grand Finale in Monte Carlo. Jaybeee then goes on to encourage all the Photoshop wizards out there to have a go to increase its potential, with some very funny results.

The epic thread-starting photo

PokerStars will introduce Perlego, its latest innovation in poker broadcasting on the 16th May, at one of the side events of the United Kingdom & Ireland Poker Tour (UKIPT).

Perlego is an automated card reading and graphics generation system, which is changing the way poker and other card games are produced and broadcast. It utilises a brand new camera technology to ensure recognition of all cards dealt to the players. All cards are supplied with a barcode, which is only visible when infrared light is shed on it. The algorithm of the program decodes this and recognizes the value and color of the given card. Of course, the system is also capable of recognizing community cards.

Daniel Negreanu’s blog post concerning wearing sunglasses at the poker tables is raising more and more controversy. The Canadian player would be happy to have shades banned from the tables, while other players find this ridiculous.

The topic that shades have a bad effect on poker was first raised in the GSN show High Stakes Poker. Later on, Daniel Negreanu has paraphrased several times why he thinks sunglasses should be banned.

The blog post ended up generating a huge debate, with Negreanu’s opinion being discussed on several online forums. It seems that the idea of banning shades divides the poker society. The latest to comment on the issue was the winner of the 2007 WPT Borgata Winter Open and Full Tilt Pro Roy Winston, who finds Negreanu’s idea completely outrageous.

PokerStars has set out yet another goal for the near future: they are about to create the mobile phone version of their software and have purchased Cecure Gaming, a company whose profile is the developement of casino and poker software for mobile phones.

Cecure Gaming, established in 2000, has been developing poker and casino software for cell phones and can be brought in connection with brands like Orange, T-Mobile, 3 Mobile and Vodafone. Apart from operating the games World Poker Tour mobile and Ladbrokes Poker Million mobile, they also had their own gambling brand called Aces Royal.

Aces Royal

The six-time WSOP winner Layne Flack will let us have a sneak peek in his not-so-everyday life in the new reality show titled ‘Life in the fast Layne’.

Layne Flack used to be mentioned among the most promising poker players of all time. He has won five WSOP bracelets between 1999 and 2003. After winning two consecutive WSOP events in 2002, Layne earned himself the ‘Back to Back Flack’ nickname. His drug-related problems nearly broke his career in two, and although he continued to participate in poker tournaments (and even finished second in the $6,000 NLHE Final Day behind Eric Brenes at the 2004 WPT), he was unable to deliver the performance that was expected from him by his fans and the poker society.

Shooting of the long awaited PokerStars high stakes poker show, The Big Game, has ended last week and the first episode will be aired on the 14th June by the American Fox Sports TV channel.

Although the PokerStars Big Game has no official player listing yet, we already know for sure that Daniel Negreanu, Vanessa Rousso, Barry Greenstein, Phil Hellmuth, Freddy Deeb, Tony G, Phil Laak, Doyle Brunson and Todd Brunson will be featured at the six-player table.

Besides them, one seat will be reserved for the so-called ’Loose Cannon’, whose $100,000 buy-in will be paid for by the poker room. If the Loose Cannon wins, he can keep the amount won above the $100K, if he loses, he won’t have to pay. In order to become the Loose Cannon, players need to win one of the four daily PokerStars satellites and then prepare a self-intorductional video. PokerStars will choose the lucky one based on these videos.

The two-time WSOP champion Michael ’The Grinder’ Mizrachi has gotten himself in serious financial trouble. Despite his $7,000,000 career winnings, even his house is getting sold by auction.

Michael 'The Grinder' Mizrachi

Full Tilt Poker has now signed a contract with one of the most talented players of the new poker generation, the 22 years old Andrew ’luckychewy’ Lichtenberger. Lichtenberger, born in New York, gained reputation as an online cash game player, and this year he was already a regular threat at the Full Tilt Poker high stakes tables. His current earnings exceed $602,094, which secure him the 19th place on the poker room’s yearly profit leaderboard.

What a year it has been for the Finnish high stakes poker professional Patrik Antonius. Not many of us could say we would have kept our cool and to continue playing after having a rough downswing period as Patrik went through. At the start of the year he was like a skinning ship and nothing was working out right for him.

With over $3 million dollars down Patrik was in trouble but with his strong perseverance he managed to turn this around and even post a small profit in just two months.

In this month’s issue of CardPlayer magazine there is an in-depth interview with Patrik Antonius where you can read about these pass couple of months and his future outlooks to getting back on track. Patrik also talks about ways to relieve your stress and the top competition out there he faces.

Steve Jobs, one of the biggest IT gurus of our time, showcased and released a new product for his company Apple this January. The iPad, the bigger brother to the iPod, could not only have a positive effect on Apple’s sales, but maybe also on online poker.

Is Steve Jobs ready to give up Apple and begin a poker career?

Basically, the iPad is a bigger and better performing iPod and considering this it makes it a prime launch tool for online poker. The screen has a dimension of 9.7 inches and supports the resolution of 1024x768, about the same as a reasonable price netbook. But where the iPad comes out stronger is with its sleek and ultra-thin design, as well as touch capabilities.

The GT-R produced by Nissan was first released in Japan on December 6, 2007 and it wasn’t until March of 2009 that it arrived on the shore lines of the rest of the world. The Nissans GT-R also known as the Godzilla is truly an engineering master piece designed from the ground up. Either it be, form it sleek aero dynamic design, to its intelligent computer system with launch control, everything about this car reeks of Supercar status.