There was a recent interesting post about poker on Metafilter. Link (via Guinness and Poker)

I've recently come across a number of blogs that readers here may be interested in.

Guinness and Poker is an interesting online diary about one person's online poker adventures.

STICKandMOVE is mostly about baseball, punctuated with posts about online poker.

Tao of Poker is a well-written, detailed poker journal from a northeast player.

A Poker Odyssey is another journal of an online player.

Decker's Journal is another online poker journal. The guy always posts his hourly rate which is interesting.

If you know of any new poker sites, drop me a line.

Lakes Entertainment put out a very well-written, gushing press release about the World Poker Tour's second season. I'm excited about the season just reading it!

"The World Poker Tour is an unstoppable juggernaut in the poker world," says Steve Lipscomb, founder and CEO. "America's newly discovered passion for tournament poker is escalating tournament numbers and creating monster prize pools never before seen in poker rooms nationally or in other individual sports. The industry is reaping the benefit of our show's success on Travel Channel. Anyone can enter and compete -- you don't have to be a pro -- so, new enthusiasts are flooding into casinos and going online to play poker."

Link

The San Francisco Chronicle ran a long article on the growing popularity of poker, focusing on the west coast scene and TV Poker, including some interesting tidbits about upcoming programming:

Meanwhile, on Thanksgiving, Fox Sports Net will show, in six back-to-back one-hour episodes, "Showdown at the Sands," a tournament played earlier in the week in Atlantic City. On Dec. 2, Bravo will premiere "Celebrity Poker Showdown," a charity tournament to be shown in six weekly installments in which such stars as Affleck, Coolio and Tom Green will vie for $100,000. Once eliminated, they will comment on one another's skill while in the "Loser's Lounge." Hellmuth, the Palo Alto pro, says he is in negotiations with FX and MTV to appear in programs.

Link

The Casino and Gaming Television Network is set to go to air next year on digital cable and satellite!

The new network is scheduled to launch in 2004 as a digital cable and satellite channel with shows such as "Winning Hand," with poker experts offering tips on the game, and "Dusk 'Til Dawn," a tour of night spots in Las Vegas, Monaco and other gambling destinations.

Link (via SongMonk)

There have been a couple interesting threads on rec.gambling.poker about what the theoretical worst bad beat in poker is.

For those of you new to poker, a "bad beat" is when a hand that is very poor and has little chance of winning gets its miracle card(s) to win the pot from a better hand. An example from holdem would be where a player is holding A♠A♣ is up against a player with 2♠3♣. The aces are a huge favorite. Then, say the flop comes A♦7♣2♦. Now the aces are even more of a favorite. But by some miracle the turn and the river bring 2♣2♥, giving the underdog four of a kind, thus beating the aces. That would be a very bad beat.

I quantify a bad beat as a situation in which a player with very low Expected Value gets his cards to win (or occasionally tie) the pot. I'm going to measure the E.V., or average E.V. for multi-round situations, to try to come up with the worst bad beats possible for every game of poker. This list will be incomplete, with games coming as I get to them.

To get the numbers shown below, I have mostly used the pokenum program, which you can use online at this link.

Why does this matter? Well, it doesn't really. It's mostly an academic exercise. The next time someone says "I got hit with the worst bad beat EVER!" - something commonly heard in cardrooms everywhere - I'd like to be able to say "really?? You had a made king-high straight flush in five card draw and got outdrawn by a guy who redrew five cards to the only remaining live royal flush in the deck??"

Regarding the use of dead cards, some people on the R.G.P thread didn't use dead cards in coming up with bad beats, I guess because they thought of them as "cheating". I use dead cards here, as long as they could feasibly be known to be dead by the players during the course of a normal (non-misdealt or misplayed) game. So for hidden games like 5-card draw, hold'em and omaha, I don't use dead cards; for stud games and the like, I use them provided the quantity doesn't exceed what players could see in a normal, full-table game.

Also, I'm not including "chop only" beats where the only outs the underdog has are to a split pot. If you split the pot with the underdog, it wasn't a bad beat :)

The worst beat in hold'em after the flop is where a player has exactly two cards ("perfect-perfect runner-runner") to win the pot. There are many possible situations like this in hold'em -- runner runner straight flush, runner runner quads being the most common.

If we combine this situation with the worst pre-flop heads-up situation, we get the worst possible bad beat possible in hold'em.

Hand	Pre-flop EV (Wins)	Flop	Flop EV (Wins)	Turn	Turn EV (Wins)
K♠K♣	0.949 (1,612,287/1,686,112)	K♦7♣2♥	0.999 (989/990)	2♦	0.977 (43/44)
K♥2♣	0.051 (73,825/1,686,112)		0.001 (1/990)		0.023 (1/44)

Similar to hold'em, the worst beat in omaha after the flop is where a player has exactly two cards that must come to win the pot.

If we combine this situation with the worst pre-flop heads-up situation where the underdog still has outs to win, we get the worst possible bad beat possible in omaha. I'm not yet 100% sure this is the worst possible beat in omaha, but it's the best I've come up with so far.

Hand	Pre-flop EV (Wins)	Flop	Flop EV (Wins)	Turn	Turn EV (Wins)
A♠A♥K♠3♥	0.938 (1,017,155/1,086,008)	A♦A♣5♠	0.999 (819/820)	6♠	0.975 (39/40)
3♦3♠3♣2♠	0.062 (66,463/1,086,008)		0.001 (1/820)		0.025 (1/40)

The worst possible bad beat on the end in 7-card stud is a situation in which the only way the underdog can win by getting one perfect card, while the favorite also catches the only card in the deck that does not improve their hand. Here's one such situation (from Perry Friedman) where the underdog has to catch the only remaining ace while the favorite catches the five of spades:

Hand	Dead Cards	EV (Wins)
Q♣Q♦J♣T♣9♣4♦	A♠A♥7♦7♥6♦6♥5♦5♥3♥3♠2♥2♠	0.999 (755/756)
A♦8♠7♠6♠3♦2♦		0.001 (1/756)

The worst possible beat in seven-stud hi/lo is similar to that of seven-card stud hi-only in that it's also 755:1.

Hand	Dead Cards	EV (Wins)
K♦K♠8♣7♣6♣5♦	A♠A♥7♦7♥6♦6♥5♦5♥3♥3♠2♥2♠	0.999 (755/756)
A♦8♠7♠6♠3♦2♦		0.001 (1/756)

Similarly to seven-card stud, a five-card stud bad beat occurs where one player catches perfect while the other catches their loser. Here's an example (from Tom Weideman) where the underdog has to catch the case king while the favorite has to catch the only remaining deuce:

Hand	Dead Cards	EV (Wins)
K♦K♥4♥3♠	2♣2♦	0.9994 (1721/1722)
K♣5♦4♠2♥		0.0006 (1/1722)

OK, so it's not REALLY poker, but the worst beat possible in Pai Gow is nonetheless interesting and here for completeness. If you are dealt a royal flush with a pair of kings, using the bug (joker) to complete your royal, it is possible for you to still lose! The dealer has one way to beat you: with a royal flush of the suit of the remaining king, plus the case aces. There is only one way to make this hand.

A♠K♠Q♠J♠? K♥K♦

vs

A♣K♣Q♣J♣T♣ A♥A♦

Now that's a bad beat and a half. Assuming that you are playing the common version of Pai Gow where the dealer shows one card, and you see the dealer has one of the required cards to beat you, the odds of the other 6 cards being exactly what the dealer needs are 1 in 7,059,052.

If you are playing a version of Pai Gow where you don't see one dealer card, the odds of the dealer beating you are much worse -- an astronomical 1 in 45,379,620.

If you play Pai Gow for long enough, you will eventually get beaten this way. But you would have to play for an extremely long time.

In compiling this list, I've come across some interesting scenarios. These are questions to exercise your knowledge. You should be able to independently verify your answers, but if you have questions you can e-mail me (address on the left).

In Omaha hi-only, A♠A♥2♥2♠ is a huge favorite (EV of 0.879) over 3♠3♦3♥2♣. Out of the 1,086,008 possible boards, the two hands tie on just 900 (0.08%) of them. What boards do they tie on?

The world has a new Rock-Paper-Scissors champion!

The man who did win -- and netted himself a purse of C$5,000 ($3,825) -- was Toronto's Rob Krueger, a member of the team "Legion of the Red Fist."

To achieve the lofty title of World RPS Champion, he threw a combination of rock-paper-paper, defeating his opponent's offering of three rocks.

Link (thanks, MZ!)

For those of you who haven't incorporated RPS into your daily lives, I highly recommend it. Very useful for settling bills, determining who gets the door, who drives to the movies, making decisions, and really any situation that needs a binary outcome. The suggested usage is to play best 2 out of 3 which introduces an element of skill.

UK poker heavies The Hendon Mob apparently pulled some strings to get a screening of Stuey in London. From the StueyMovie mailing list:

Thanks to a petition by The Hendon Mob, a popular London Poker group, STUEY will Screen at Raindance in London on October 30th @ 5pm. "They made us an offer we, or Raindance, couldn't refuse," said A.W. Vidmer, the film's creator. "We're happy to see that interest in the film stretches far overseas." The group then conducted a competition, giving away free tickets, posters, and even signature "Stuey glasses" for the screening.

Link

"The Hendon Mob" is made up of Joe Beevers, Barny Boatman, Ross Boatman and Ram Vaswani. They've built a fairly well-recognized brand name on the poker scene over the past several years, and recently got a sponsorship deal with Prima Poker to do a poker world tour, competing in 60 events. They've so far hit the Four Queens Poker Classic in Vegas and the Poker Classics 2003 in London, and have already made an impressive total of 14 final table finishes.

UGO features a preview of Dead Man's Hand, an upcoming first-person shooter set in the old west, and which features poker as part of every mission!

Our first mission started off, surprisingly enough, with us playing poker. As a matter of fact, each mission will start this way, as winning a few hands will yield more ammo or health at the start of a mission. Once again, you can skip right past these sections, but if you want to reap the rewards, you'll have to hope for Big Slick to come down before the flop (thanks, World Poker Tour!).

Link (via BGGamer.net)

Jim Albrecht, well-known poker tournament director and commentator, died this week at 53. I enjoyed Jim Albrecht's commentary during some of the early ESPN WSOP broadcasts. Link

More good news for poker players in Florida: the Jefferson County Kennel Club just got permission to open a poker room, making it the 14th pari-mutuel card room in Florida. Link

Business 2.0 has an interesting-looking article on the "computer jocks and math whizzes" who are having successes in major poker tournaments. Unfortunately, you can only read one page of the article online -- you'll have to subscribe or buy the November 2003 issue to read the whole thing. Link (via As I Please)

Another good article about the success that Florida poker rooms have had since the new laws went into effect, allowing games up to $1-$2, this time from the Florida Times-Union.

It took years for Florida's pari-mutuel facilities to convince the Legislature to loosen the rules restricting card rooms at dog tracks, horse tracks and jai alai frontons across the state.

But it only took one night to convince Mike Cernobyl it was working.

Link

Si Redd, one of the founders of the huge video gambling company IGT, passed away this morning at 91. Link

Tomorrow, October 15th, is the Bicycle Casino's "Classic TV Poker Invitational" in Los Angeles. If you're a fan of classic TV and/or past famous faces, it's probably worth checking out. Some of my personal favorites Adam West, Dom DeLuise and Tom Bosley will be there. The tournament will be filmed for a new "celebrity reality series" airing in early 2004 on cable channel TV Land. Link

The official press release for Holland Casino's Master Classics of Poker, "Europe's biggest poker tournament", went out today. The MCOP will be held from the 2nd to 10th of November. Link

This columnist from the Oregon Daily Herald has a fever... and the only prescription is more poker.

I watch the Travel Channel because it has The World Poker Tour, the third-best show on television behind ESPN's World Series of Poker and Joe Millionaire.

I watch these shows because I, like many others around the nation, have Poker Fever. My doctor is 2003 World Series champ Chris Moneymaker (yes, that's his real name). My pills are straight flushes and full houses. My hospital is somewhere between "the turn" and "the river."

Link

The Miami Herald ran an article on the effects of the new, "higher-limit" poker law that passed earlier this year in Florida and allows games up to $1-2. Link

Decent article on the World Poker Tour and Lyle Berman's Lakes Entertainment, the company behind the WPT. It focuses on how much impact the WPT has had on the popularity of poker, as well as some interesting facts about Lakes and Berman.

The World Poker Tour has "turned the poker world upside down," said Randy Sampson, president and CEO of Canterbury Park in Shakopee, where poker revenue is up more than 40 percent since the WPT debuted this spring.

Link

Mike Sexton (WPT commentator) and Andy Bloch (who runs wptfan.com) will be giving a free poker seminar on Saturday October 25th at Foxwoods casino as a kickoff for the World Poker Finals which start the following Monday. If you are around that area it would definitely be worth checking out. Link

Last week, a Bermuda bar ran a 60-person charity poker tournament, which was deemed to be totally legal based on local laws because the prizes were not cash but vouchers instead. Caribbean vacation spots are light on poker and gambling in general, so regular poker in Bermuda would be good news for poker-playing holidaygoers. Link

Apparently encouraged by the success of televised poker this year, ESPN will be televising a Scrabble tournament made up of the top 24 North American players later this year. It will be interesting to see how it does. Link

Andy over at wptfan.com has put up his review of Poker Face. It's a very good "non-critic" review from someone who certainly knows poker.

I buy many more books than I ever open, and I don't finish most of the ones I do start. I bought Positively Fifth Street a couple of months ago, and I still have 50 pages to go. But I found Poker Face such good reading that I finished it in a day or two. Because Katy sticks to the story, rather than philosophizing and pontificating, the book is just 209 pages. There's a lot in the book, but thankfully very little that doesn't belong.

Link

Eric of the Home Poker Tour just let me know that the Home Poker Tour now has its very own domain -- homepokertour.com. Eric has put up some new content on the site, including latest rankings and player profiles for the HPT (which takes place in Seattle).

It's a great concept and I'd love to see similar programs come out in other cities around the US, or even better see the Travel Channel pick it up and take it to different cities!

Fox News has an interesting column on TV viewer habits during bull and bear markets. There is little hard evidence presented, and it's mostly anecdotal, but it's interesting nonetheless. The theory presented would probably make a good dissertation. Poker is presented as the ultimate in bull-rally-in-bear-market programming:

...the poker is No Limit Texas Hold 'Em (search ) -- an all-or-nothing showdown where most of the cards come face up and there's no cap on the number of raises. The environment is merciless. There is only one winner, whose success comes at the expense of every other player.

In a bullish rally within a larger bear market, optimism is replaced by ...

Ruthlessness.

Link

Some time ago, there was an intriguing write-up in NC's News & Observer about Koleman Strumpf, an economics professor at UNC-CH who specializes in research on illegal gambling operations (and P2P file sharing!). Link

I went to Strumpf's page here and was pleased to find the very interesting paper mentioned in the above article. I recommend it if you have any interest in the way in which bookmaking operations (legal or illegal) operate.

An amusing 1860's poker story from History of Wyandotte County Kansas and its people:

A history of Wyandotte, in speaking of Judge John Pettit, the second judge of the Wyandotte district court, says: "Pettit was ill-natured, petulant, high-tempered, profane, tyrannical and abusive, but withal as clear-headed and able a jurist as ever donned the judicial ermine of Kansas. It was nothing unusual for him to go to Kansas City and play poker and drink whisky all night. The bar generally had to suffer for it the next day. In this connection we cannot refrain from giving an incident that occurred at the Garno House during one of his terms of court. S. L. Norris, a young man from Vermont, who lived by his wits, brought out a carpet sack of bank notes on the St. Albans Bank, which had burst in the crash of 1857. Judge James, Colonel Weir, Norris and one or two other parties, set up a job on Pettit and got him to playing poker. The old man was permitted to win nearly every game, and every time he won the boys put out a $20 bill on the broken bank of St. Albans, Pettit making the change in good money. At the close of the term the old judge was in high glee, as his capacious wallet was filled with $20 bills. But when he came to pay Mrs. Halford his hotel bill and presented one of his $20 notes, he learned the bank was broken; a second and third tender meeting a refusal on the same grounds, he saw that he had been sold. He returned to Leavenworth minus about $300 in cash, with about $1,000 in worthless money, a sadder but wiser man."

Link to this story; the Kansas State library has quite an array of material online, and a few of the items have interesting references to poker. See here for the complete list.

Interesting article from the Washington Post on the apparently impending approval of casinos in Maryland, and the preparatory steps casino executives are taking in scoping out the market there.

Maryland represents an "unbelievable, just incredible market," said Timothy M. Hinkley, president and chief operating officer for Isle of Capri Casinos Inc...

Link

The Washington Post has an article on how Vegas is abandoning the family appeal that was pushed in the 1990's and going back to more adult-based attractions.

The 1990s effort to build a "family-oriented" Las Vegas was always a challenge to the town's flamboyant history. Ever since mobster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel erected the first oversized sign outside a casino here in 1931, Las Vegas has been a place for adult pursuits -- and it remains so today.

Link (thanks, Pyrate!)

If true, I'm fine with it. I think Vegas is not really a great place to take kids anyway. But I also think Dave Schwartz is right on the money when he says it's a "now-tired observation that Las Vegas is becoming less family-friendly and more adult oriented. Just like the 'family fun' story was overstated in the mid-1990s, the 'skin city' angle is getting more print than it deserves now." These stories make it seem like all Vegas resorts were converted to Disneylands in the 1990's, and now they're being converted to Bunny Ranches. To me, Vegas feels almost identical now to how it felt in the 90's.

Mort Olshan, founder of the original sports handicapping guide, The Gold Sheet, passed away this week at the age of 77. Link

The Gold Sheet is legendary in the sports handicapping world, and played a large role in sports betting becoming more legitimate and more of a science. There's a good selection of Olshan columns here.

If you read Card Player magazine, you probably have heard of The Gold Sheet. Its senior editor, Chuck Sippl, has a sports betting column in each issue.

There's a small company that has developed a video poker game for the blind, based on audio cues. Link (via samaBlog)

Which is cool, but what sound do they play to you when you have a high pair with three to a royal flush?

There's a well-written article in The West Australian about Packer's takeover of Burswood, with a lot of detail about the history of the casino agreement and a prediction that Burswood's Western Australian monopoly may be ripe for ending:

...with the expiry of the exclusivity agreement went the guarantee of a monopoly and now that the ownership cap has been lifted, the argument for retaining the monopoly starts to wear thin. If someone wants to take on Burswood and invest millions in a new casino, say for Kalgoorlie or Bunbury, why not let them?

Link

Prediction: WA's #1 gold town Kalgoorlie gets a casino within five years, and Western Australian miner productivity reaches all-time lows :)

Global media magnate and high-rolling gambler Kerry Packer made a surprise bid for the Western Australian Burswood Casino this week, acquiring a controlling stake in WA's only casino. Link

It's not clear what changes Packer will make, if any. I'd suspect they'd be for the positive; Packer's Crown Casino is a better-run and player-friendly casino than Burswood. It also sports a large poker room, something Burswood is sorely lacking.

I'm interested in the story because as a former resident of Perth, Burswood was my "home casino" and it's still a haunt of several of my family members.

A new production company has been formed that is going to develop films and TV shows that are focused around Las Vegas. Their biggest bombshell is this:

Insomnia also has some big projects on the drawing board. The most notable is a film biography of poker legend Doyle Brunson. That movie will have a major star in the lead, and a Hollywood-sized budget of $50 million, or even $100 million according to Othick. The script is ready and will be shopped soon to potential directors.

Link

Films that do not yet have committed stars or budgets have a high incidence of getting shelved or delayed, so I wouldn't get too excited about a Doyle Brunson movie coming out just yet. However, this does appear to be a legitimate company with some legitimate names - and more importantly, wads of cash - behind it.

Hopefully they'll hire some real film talent to back up the dollars and dreams, and crank out some long-overdue first-rate entertainment focused on poker!

The latest celebrity to "come out" as a poker fan: Jack Black.

"Lately, I've really been into the Poker Championships' no limit hold-'em," Black says. "You get to see their cards, which is amazing. You get to see them bluff and move around ($5,000) piles of cash."

Link

Latest bit of poker trivia you probably didn't know: legendary porn actor John Holmes was "discovered" in a Gardena poker club men's room, changing him from forklift operator to Johnny Wadd. Link

USA TODAY ran an article today on the growing popularity of poker, with a spotlight on the World Poker Tour and "Sweet. Chatty. Cute." Jennifer Harman. Link (thanks, tmhsiao!)

Wagerline is a nice site I came across (via The Gambler) which allows you to create an account, and make picks (and a "unit" amount from 100 to 500) across all major sports. They have competitions you can enter, or you can just make picks to have them recorded for posterity, which are tracked both by accuracy as well as net unit gain based on an 11-for-10 line. The interface is nice, apart from a few too many flashing ads, the site is fast, and they have about 10,000 picksters registered. It appears to have been going for almost two years now.

It seems like a good, low-maintenance way to track your theoretical winnings and losses, especially if you're not betting all the games you pick.

The net winnings leader for NFL is 69-35-2 (66.35%) for +15250 units, while the leader for all sports combined is 1621-1497-143 (51.99%) for +57978 units.

I might start tracking my picks in there, but trust me, I won't be going 69-35.

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