Party Poker Blog

Forget living on Tulsa Time - I'm on Vegas time, just now waking up. The wife is a tad irritated now with my upside down sleeping habits.

Here's a press release a buddy emailed me to tide you over until I fully regain my faculties. You can go read the article that our own Hank wrote about the poker blog scene for ALLIN Magazine here.

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Placing bet on poker mag All In


A former dot-com dealmaker is now dealing a new hand in publishing.

All In, a bimonthly magazine about the world of poker, will be launched next month by Bhu Srinivasan.

A 28-year-old former director of business development with InfoSpace.com, Srinivasan once hungered to take over the online mag Salon.com.

After publishing two test issues of All In from Seattle, the editor and publisher moved the mag to Manhattan and lined up Time Warner to distribute the premiere to Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble and other big outlets.

"We expect to be the fastest-growing magazine in 2005," he told the Daily News yesterday, saying he'll guarantee advertisers a circulation of 150,000 by February.

"We believe we'll reach more than 500,000 copies next year, in terms of acquiring new subscriptions," he added.

Srinivasan is counting on the surge in poker-playing shows on TV, starting with the Bravo channel's "Celebrity Poker Showdown," to help boost interest in his mag.

Indeed, "Celebrity Poker" co-host Phil Gordon writes for All In, whose premiere will feature his account of a poker game with quarterback Tom Brady and other New England Patriots. The issue will also carry a 25-page instructional section.

Ben Affleck, who won the California State Poker Championship last summer - a $350,000 prize - was on the cover of the second test issue.

Poker champs Howard Lederer and Chris (Jesus) Ferguson also contribute to the mag.

Srinivasan has talked big before. In 1999, he went from high-flying InfoSpace, which provided infrastructure support to hundreds of Web sites (and enabled him to drive a Jaguar and a BMW), to found and obtain funding for something called ThinkView Inc.

It equipped a bunch of newspapers, magazines and broadcasters to syndicate their content across the Internet before folding in 2001.

That's when Srinivasan boasted about wanting to buy financially challenged Salon.com, ax most of its staff and use the Web site as an ad magnet for showcasing stories from The New Yorker, The Economist and other titles.

Now, as he plans other launches after All In, he said, "I just love the magazine business."

His Web site can be found at allinmagazine.com.