Party Poker Blog

10 pm update.
Damn you, blogger. Was all set to uber it up and you failed me.

Leaving on a poker road trip. I'll be back Sunday night and will see ya'll in the tourney. Good luck to everyone and thanks for playing.

In case you didn't see, Otis at UpForPoker has an FAQ up about the impending WSOP satellite on Sunday.

I'm also very close to announcing our next WSOP tourney - for both readers AND bloggers. This will be an official WPBT event, of course. Stay tuned.

I wasn't especially taken with the 60 Minutes piece on poker. Twas pretty much all fluff, but hell, showing poker in a positive light on TV is always +EV.

Party Poker Bad Beat Jackpot update: $494,000.
I'm on my way....

Update:

MattInNC has hit the Progessive Bad Beat Jackpot and won $173655.36.
willow224 won the hand and received $86827.68. kurtis, rusty1028, Time_Release, mtpockets99, khaithedog, Sal25, Coachrfc played in the hand and received $12403.95 each.

The next Progressive Bad Beat Jackpot has been reset to $99231.66.

Damnit. :)

Alrighty then, we have 48 players signed up. It's a done deal.
Can you say poker bloggers in the WSOP?
I can.

And because I had many readers imploring me to allow them to play (to no avail) - I am fooling around with the idea to run ANOTHER WSOP satellite for all of us, bloggers AND readers. Why? Because without our readers, what fun would blogging be? And frankly, I think this could be the largest tourney we've ever put on. And that's a good thing.

Details forthcoming if I can make this a reality. This one WILL qualify for the WPBT tournament leader board.

I figure for a $30 tourney:

50 players = 1 seat
100 players = 2 seats
150 players = 3 seats

150 players should/could be attainable, imho.

I'm looking at the first week of May, if I can pull this off.

I really owe you an uber-post so expect one soon. I've simply been too busy playing. It's often a tough call - to play or to blog - and the games have just been too good to ignore lately.

Case in point: The Bad Beat Jackpot on Party Poker is at $410,000 right now, the largest I've seen in quite a while. Take a shot while you can!

Guess what I'm doing right now?

Thanks for stopping by - I'll be back very soon. And don't forget about Chris Moneymaker on 60 Minutes tonite!

Random photo of the day:

Just a quick note before I go back to work sunbathing.
Also, the Party Poker Bad Beat Jackpot has just rolled up to $334,000. Guess I'll waste some time there.

Anwyay, we're up to 40 players registered for the tourney. I'm fairly confident we'll hit the 50 needed to give away a WSOP seat.

But the big news right now is that 60 Minutes is running a feature on poker Wednesday night at 8pm EST. It will apparently have Dan Rather interviewing 2003 WSOP champ, Chris Moneymaker.

This is some kind of watershed mark but I can't put my finger on what exactly...

Back soon - but here's the press release:

--


BEST POKER PLAYERS REVEAL THAT THEIR SUCCESS IS NOT IN THE CARDS
-- ON "60 MINUTES WEDNESDAY"

The world's best poker players say their success has nothing to do with the
cards and everything to do with faces, words and body language -- theirs and
their competitors'. Correspondent Dan Rather's report on the poker phenomenon
will be broadcast on 60 MINUTES WEDNESDAY April 20 (8:00-9:00 PM, ET/PT) on the
CBS Television Network.

Chris Moneymaker won the 2003 World Series of Poker. He was a 27-year-old,
$40,000-a-year accountant from Tennessee who learned the game on the Internet.
"When I first got out to Vegas, it was my first live tournament with the World
Series and I went out there and I was completely nervous, so I wore shades and a
hat to cover everything up," remembers Moneymaker. He would not have had a
chance at winning the tournament if it were not for the kindness of a stranger.
"A person told me the third day of the World Series that whenever I was
bluffing, I would flair my nostrils," says Moneymaker. "I didn't know I was
doing it...."

Daniel Nagreanu -- a high school dropout -- became the 2004 poker player of the
year after winning nearly four-and-a-half million dollars. "If I come to a
table where I'm sitting with eight people that I've never seen before, I think
within 15 to 20 minutes I can have a rough idea how they play poker based on
what...they're wearing, based on things they say," says Nagreanu He is also
always observing himself. "I see some of the things I do, so I'm constantly
changing up what I'm doing....I study the tapes...like an NFL coach would study
the NFL."

Chris Ferguson, better known as "Jesus," is one of the brainiest players -- he
has a PhD in computer science. His also won the World Series of Poker in 2000.
"An education doesn't make you intelligent," says Ferguson. "You're going to
be intelligent whether you have that education or not. An education just makes
you educated, but one thing all the top poker players have in common
is...they're incredibly intelligent. They're incredibly good at making these
very, very difficult, very close decisions and making them accurately."

Jeff Fager is the executive producer of 60 MINUTES WEDNESDAY and Steve Glauber
is the producer of this report.
* * *

Press Contact: Kelli Edwards 212/975-6795 kee@cbsnews.com