Party Poker Blog

Poker advice from a poet.

"Dont be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid."
John Keats

Thanks for stopping by this humble poker blog. I am absolutely crunched at work and this is the first damn time I've had a chance to breathe all week, but I'm here to attempt a post. Humour me, please.

First of all, a huge thanks to everyone who took time to give me their two cents about short posts versus uber-posts. I truly understand how the tangential, massive posts can be confusing to some readers. I think yoboo had some valid points about breaking posts up into sections, but quite frankly, I don't have the time to format that correctly. Hell, I'm struggling to find the time to even post right now, much less do so coherently. But when if work ever lightens up, I will do so.

Grubette: expect more pictures. Excellent advice.

To the helpful blog lady who wrote the column about promoting your blog and said:
Keep your posts and paragraphs short. People will come back daily to read your fresh new work but spare them the one thousand word diatribes.

Fuck you. My readers have spoken. :D

I was going to write an addendum to my Aruba poker adventures, but upon finding out that Wil is writing a poker book, I'm afraid of giving away lucrative screenplay ideas. Wil, this blog is protected by a creative commons license! ;)

I hope to someday buy Wil a tankard of Guinness. All the poker bloggers should go buy his book for his thankless pimping of our scene. Seriously.

In that vein, I'm announcing that due to the altruistic generousity of professional party planner and drinker, Al, I am flying into Philly - Atlantic City next Thursday evening for a weekend of debauchery with any East Coast bloggers who want to make the scene. I think we'll be hanging at The Borgata on Friday with Pauly, and I'm not sure who else. Grubby? Anisotropy? FTrain? Cubanlinks? Helixx? The Mighty BoyGenius is coming in Saturday and Al is talking about running a Saturday tourney at a tavern. Hell, check Al's blog for details please, I'm just along for the ride.

Oh the humanity.

It's fitting, actually. It's almost been exactly one year since I began writing into the BlogSpace and meeting my peers now seems long overdue, even though I feel like I already know most of them. I never once thought that starting my silly poker blog on September 28th, 2003, would ever be at this point, a full-fledged poker blog community.

From an October, 2003 post:

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PartyPoker.com finally hit 20,000 total users a few nights ago. Brian and I have been watching and wondering when they'd hit this high water mark. That's from 2,000 online poker players before the World Poker Tour and the Moneymaker 2003 WSOP victory. Truly amazing.

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It's been a crazy ride, eh? Party Poker is now up to 60,000. Pinch me, I'm dreaming.

There is always an element of luck involved in any successful venture. Being at the right place at the right time. Sure, hard work counts too, but I feel that Poker as Cultural Juggernaut was simply the winds of fortune blowing a certain way. Varkonyi. Moneymaker. McManus. Party Poker.

And it's true, both Destiny's kisses and Her bitch-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in your life. In other words, almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; Destiny always leans trench-coated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't hear because you're in such a rush to or from some carefully engineered endeavor of perceived importance.

A friend told me once that 99.9% of what goes on in one's life is actually none of one's business, with the .1% under one's control consists mostly of the option to accept or deny one's inevitable powerlessness over the other 99.9%, which just trying to parse this out makes my forehead turn purple.

And this humble poker blog was like that. What started as an accident helped spark something pretty fucking cool in the blogging world. I can't even believe that article I wrote for PokerSavvy about the poker blogs was nine months ago.

It's awfully hard work to write uber-posts over and over. Because my b&m friends unmercifully mock me for writing a blog, it's tough. It's my cross to bear, I suppose.

I'm just some goofball who loves poker and Guinness. It could be worse, I suppose.

I could be Phil Helmuth.

Allrighty then, enough of this pithy pontification. I need to do what I do best. Blog about fucking poker.

And here we go:

The World Poker Tour releases their schedule for the next three years, announcing a pros only tour, to boot. Here's the press release:
WPT Enterprises Extends World Poker Tour's Casino Partner Commitments to Ten Years

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WPTE member casinos are among the world's leading hotels and poker rooms. They include: Aviation Club de France (Paris, France), The Mirage and Bellagio Hotels (Las Vegas, NV), Borgata Hotel & Casino (Atlantic City, NJ), Foxwoods Resort Casino (Mashantucket, CT), and Horseshoe & Gold Strike Casinos (Tunica, MS), plus California properties: The Bicycle Casino (Bell Gardens), Commerce Casino (Commerce), and Bay 101 Card Club (San Jose), as well as tournaments sponsored by online poker rooms: Ultimate Bet (Aruba), PartyPoker.com (a cruise to Mexico), and PokerStars (a cruise to the Caribbean).

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Someone said that anyone thinking about playing poker professionally or quitting their job to play poker MUST read this article. As someone who would never dream of playing professionally, I think it's perfectly titled:

Poker Dream Reality Check

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And it's not just the traditional touring pros that are facing the untold challenges of life on the felt. Online players spend countless hours of countless days in isolation. Bad beats, and even stellar victories, are played out only to the constant hum of your computer or at best shared with a pet ready to bolt when your opponent catches a two-outer on the river. And a run of bad sessions strikes at your very being, as every poster on every poker forum denies their existence.

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Poker is a fickle mistress.


Minnesota Poker Pro's

If you AREN'T playing on Party Poker, you are deeply retarded. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so do I. Go sign up on Party Poker, please. 60,000 players and 100 poker bloggers CAN'T be wrong. That's bonus code IGGY, damnit.

I also assume my astute readers are using Poker Tracker, as well. i heard a vicious rumor that a help guide is coming out. Lord knows I'm buying a copy.

And this deserves a Hot Damn! Party Poker is now saving hand histories to your hard drive!! Hot Damn Redux!

Here is Pat's email and tidbits about the new Poker Tracker beta patch:

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PT's fix for Party hands is out (beta patch)

Poker Tracker Forum Post

Quote:
I have uploaded the latest beta that includes support for the Party hand histories that are stored on your hard drive. RING GAMES ONLY FOR NOW, tourney support should be ready in a day or so.

Download is here: www.pokertracker.com/hdbeta.exe

After you install this, it should say v2.05.00h in the title bar of the PT window.

PLEASE - take the time to read this page that describes how to use the new feature, especially the 7 items at the bottom of the page.

http://www.pokertracker.com/partyhd.html

Lastly, I want to stress that this is a beta. If you don't want to be bothered with finding some bugs or possibly having to purge and reload hands because of problems that are found then please wait until the official release of this new version.

Please post any problems you have here and again, please read the help link above first.

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This is great. But just a little heads up for people who are unaware.

This is from Pat:

Some items to keep in mind:

1. Party Poker starts logging hand histories immediately as you sit at the table and continues to log them until you leave, even if you are sitting out of the hand. This is unlike their emailed hand histories that don't include hands you weren't in.

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This is a leap forward in poker tracking database history. You ARE tracking hands, aren't you?

Dear Lord, I found these search engine referrals to my blog today:
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=how+to+preserve+your+testicals+from+getting+hot&meta=
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=josh+arieh+asshole&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t&cop=mss&tab=
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=video+george+bush+gyno+love+speech+video
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=fuck+poker&btnG=Google+Search

Weirdos.

Moving on, Johnny Chan discusses treating Poker as a business in this article from Card Player magazine.

Treat Poker as a Business! by Johnny Fucking Chan

Here's an interesting article from Motley Fool entitled:
Milking the WSOP

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Now if you've followed my coverage of the gaming industry to any extent, you know how I feel about Harrah's marketing. First of all, I think the emails are brilliant (see The Game of eMarketing). On the other hand, the corporate-run Harrah's of recent years has been anything but friendly to card players, closing down poker rooms in exchange for profit margins, stiffing blackjack players with continuous shuffling machines (see Harrah's Gains, Gamers Lose), and tricking similarly unsuspecting low-limit blackjack players by offering an unplayable 6:5 "Single-Deck Blackjack" game and marketing it as the classic single-deck game (see Casinos Get Greedy).

But poker is back in vogue, and Harrah's is now leveraging itself as the proud owner of its holy grail, the World Series. Harrah's has been opening new card rooms and reopening once-closed ones in markets (including St. Louis; Kansas City; Lake Charles, La.; and Council Bluffs, Iowa, near Omaha). To celebrate, the company brought in last year's world champion, Chris Moneymaker, to play in a single-table tournament with lucky Harrah's patrons, who picked up raffle tickets to get in the game by playing virtually any casino game, including blackjack and Shuffle Master's (Nasdaq: SHFL) Three Card Poker.

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I saw this eloquent and touching post in the RGP cesspool. I miss Andy, too.

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I Miss Andy Glazer More Than Ever

I haven't had a chance to watch much ESPN WSOP coverage. Hopefully I'll catch the main event in a marathon or something down the road.

I did, however, read Andy's daily reports during the event itself. Comparing them to the dreck and ad hominem attacks I'm seeing here, I am reminded of what a class act the man truly was. His will be large shoes to fill next year.

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Damn, this is a pretty good article on Real Poker. Not that pansy shit they play on TV. This is about the real deal. The Bellagio Game. Biggest game on Earth. Check out his other poker columns on left hand side. Worthy.

I'll bet they wished they had played poker in a Hurricane, though.

Getting taste of ultimate sin

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Day in and day out, the action at Table No. 1 is the largest stakes poker game in the world.

Eight seats. Eight players from among the world's best 20 or so – Doyle (Texas Dolly) Brunson, Johnny Chan, Chau Giang, Jennifer Harman, Howard Lederer, Sammy Farha, Chip Reese, Lee Salem, Phil Ivey, Gus Hansen, Barry Greenstein, Daniel Negreanu, John Hennigan, Doyle's son Todd, Ralph Perry (a former New York City limo driver) and a player known simply as Cuco.

"Real poker is not the No Limit tournaments. They're for TV," says Manhattan resident Abe Mosseri, 31, who was mentioned in an earlier PPT column. "The real games are the money games, like this one."

The poker room crowd gazes in awe as world champ Johnny Chan joins the fray.

"This is the biggest game in town," he says. "You have all types of top players - businessmen and high-limit players. The action is great."

Chan, 49, tells me he also prefers side games over tournament play. "You don't have to sit there for hours and hours. You can go to dinner and take a break whenever you feel like it. A tournament is like going to work. You play two hours, you get 10 minutes to go to the bathroom."

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Is this an uber-post yet? Hell, it is what it is. Thanks to anyone who tries to read this dreck. I only write this because it's the kind of poker blog that *I* would enjoy.

I could actually make a lot of money selling this on Ebay but for you, gentle reader, I'll give it away for free. Here is Phil Ivey in his high school graduation picture:



Damn, I have a TON of shit on Josh Arieh in the WSOP. Josh Himself trying to apologize, Erik Lindgren, Daniel Negraneau, Lou Kreiger, Greg Raymer and so many flames I can't even think about formatting them right now.

Damn Guinness.

Thanks again for stopping by. I'll post the Josh "insight" tomorrow or the next day.

Final attempt at futile shilling:
Bonus Code IGGY on Party Poker! Sign up for a 20% deposit bonus.

HOT DAMN!

Link of the Day:
Seniors Rule
After viewing PlanetDan's collection of senior photos, I can't decide whether to order knee-deep-in-water girl or 1988 Mary Steenburgen.