Party Poker Blog

Poker Blog

"Poker is the game closest to the western conception of life, where life and thought are recognized as intimately combined, where free will prevails over philosophies of fate or of chance, where men are considered moral agents and where - at least in the short run - the important thing is not what happens but what people think happens."
John Luckacs

I discovered today that I have a few poker aficionados at work. Of course, these young guns don't know a damn thing about poker basics like position and starting hand requirements. Of course, they haven't heard the terms implied or effective odds, but still, you can tell they love the game. I'm really looking forward to running my no-limit tournament in January and giving these guys a taste of a multi-table WSOP style tourney.

Let's fire up the links:

First off the bat is this nifty new TV Poker Guide site. What a great idea and best of all, it's devoid of flashy banner ads and/or gratuitous poker site "review" pages. I gladly hoist a Guinness to the fine folks at Penguin Poker (coming soon!) who developed this site, and hell, I don't even have cable.

RGP - GCA Update: Russ Gorgiev is now saying "January" for his upcoming Poker Mafia site. Now I'm genuinely curious about the damn thing. What on earth is he putting up as content? His insane rambling diatribes from RGP that he's posted 800 times already? William (Ramashiva) Coleman posting more pro-Osama Bin Laden bullshit? How those two guys banded together is beyond me. Birds of feather fly together, I suppose.

Ok, back to reality. Here's another article about poker's explosive popularity:
Full House: High-Stakes Poker Is Packing Casinos and Making a Run on TV

Need more proof that we are in the golden age of poker?
Iowa State Daily
Poker tournament spills into Great Hall
Crowd is six times larger than expected for first-ever Texas Hold 'em tournament

And this is an interesting development relating to the expansion of the World Poker Tour.
WORLD POKER TOUR Joins Forces with Casinos Nationwide to Develop New WPT Satellite Events
Snippet:
The WPT now has an answer. The WPT and Lakes Entertainment, which owns 80% of the venture, have formalized a WPT Satellite program designed specifically to encourage casinos and online poker rooms to run low cost satellite events that will feed directly into the season-ending World Poker Tour Championship, April 19-23, 2004 at Bellagio, Las Vegas, where the total prize pool is estimated to reach over $5 million.

And good gravy, I have to comment that apparently a poker site (Paradise perhaps? I can't recall now) was running advertisements on Monday Night Football. Is this for real? When will the madness end?

I'm sure everyone who reads this blog is sick and tired of hearing me whine about never having seen a World Poker Tour episode. That may be coming to an end as I discovered copies on sale for $100, which seems far more reasonable. So tell me, is it worth it?

Found a new poker blog by Chris Halverson, who's a grad student playing low-limit at Empire. Good luck, Chris, and follow Fuzz's (see prior post) advice! His latest post title is an oxymoron, 'Whiskey and no poker.' I can't imagine Guinness and no poker. /shudder

And lastly, I actually had some interesting reads in the Psychology forum of Two+Two. You are better off going there on your own, however, because of the 1996 technology being employed by the webmaster, Mat Sklansky, at this site. You would think they would WANT people to link to them, considering how important Google weighs incoming links. Arrrrrrrg. Screw it, I'll link to one post.

My "Tilt" Problem (or, "Dr. Al, Please Psychoanalyze Me!") from the talented Yahoo blogger, Felicia Lee.

DAMN, I hate their site. It's worth digging through for posts by Clarkmeister, Fossilman, David Ross and others, but GawdDAMN, I wish they'd fix it.

PokerGrub has a superb post from his sister, of all things. Hell, I wish my sister played poker.

Allow me to leave you with a great column by Rolf about "being polite" in poker games and why saying "nice hand" probably isn't for the best.
Nice Hand?

I'm still running well on Empire. Only played for about an hour last evening but still won $45. Slow and steady, says the grinder. Think about it, there's never, ever been a better time to be a winning poker player than right now. There are more bad players playing poker right now than ever before in the history of cards. Play TIGHT, damnit. It's as much fun as watching paint dry, but it gets the money in the long-haul.

Thanks for reading and don't forget to come back tomorrow.

Link of the Day:
Another oldie but goodie, one of my favorite sites for years now:
Landover Baptist