Greg Raymer, when recently asked if Jamie Gold would get respect or not as the 2006 WSOP champion, said that he (Greg) and Joe Hachem weren't truly respected as champions until they'd won another tournament. Greg said that if Jamie Gold could win another tourney, maybe he'd earn some respect from fellow players and the poker community. Greg wisely didn't comment on what an epic douchebag Jamie Gold was at the WSOP.

Well, Jamie Gold just won another poker tournament, but will it earn him the respect he wants?

The 2006 World Series Champion took a break from his reality show about America's Hottest Mom and sat down at a tourney put together by his sponsor, BoDog dot lame. He worked his way through a deadly field, populated by such notables as UFC champ Phil "The NY Badass" Baroni, CFL Hall of Famer Tom Europe, and multiple-bracelet holder* Michael Eklund, who you may know from Bloodrayne II. When the bodies were counted, Jamie Gold stood atop them all, winning a shiny new watch. Seriously.

Wow, Jamie. Way to get out there and earn that respect, man!

So . . . uh . . . if beating a bunch of D-list celebrities is all it takes to earn respect in the poker world, I expect to be invited to every tournament in the world from here on out.


*Ha! Ha! Not really.

All you online poker pros who were planning to triumphantly move up to the Great White North and continue that poker career you dropped out of college to pursue may want to think about skipping Ontario.
Lou Krieger says, "A proposed bill in the Canadian province of Ontario would prevent advertising illegal online gaming sites in the province.

Online gaming is not regulated at the provincial level in Canada, and current enforcement of existing regulations has not been a priority. The proposed legislation would ban advertisements that promote online gaming sites. More importantly, enforcing this new law would take place at the provincial level, allowing Ontario to step up enforcement."

Hey, no worries! You can just pack up and move to France, right? Not so fast, monsieur. Get ready to order a plate of Freedom Fries next time you're at the casino, as you read this little gem from Launchpoker: "The French proposal, launched after the riots in that country in 2005, includes a couple of items referencing online poker. The first, similar to the UIGEA, would require banks to block transactions to online gambling sites. The second would require any online portal with a French facing to post warnings about site content that the French government finds objectionable or face severe fines and imprisonment."

Awesome. The USA is once again setting a shining example of freedom for the rest of the world to follow.

Barry Tanenbaum has another great column up this week. This time he's discussing what makes a winning player, how long it takes to actually calculate if you are a winning player, and exactly what you should work into your calculations to determine if you are a winning player.

Barry says that you should take a few factors into consideration, including the rake, when you decide if you're a winner. (I really suck at math, so I'm using nice round numbers to reduce the likelihood of you all laughing at me.) For example, if you play a hundred hands at .25 a hand, you're being charged $25 (100 * .25 = 25. Yay! Math is easy!) This means that if, over those one hundred hands, you leave with ten dollars more than your buy in, you are not a winner! ($10 win, minus $25 rake, equals -$15 net.)Ha! You're a big loser and you didn't even know it! Ha! Your daddy never loved you! Yeah, I'm stupid. I messed up the logic and the math in my brains. It made sense to me in my head, but clearly I'm entirely wrong. Math is hard. I am stupid. Back to the post:

Ahem. Sorry.

Of course, if you're screwing around in a casino with your buddies, like some of us did during the WSOP, and you're pounding drinks and trying to tilt your buddies, then you just factor the rake (and whatever money you spend trying to catch your two outer to put me on mega-tilt, Amy Calistri) into the cost of your entertainment.

Anyway, Barry makes several very good points that any hopeful professional should consider, not the least of which is always keeping track of the rake (easy if you're playing online, probably tougher to estimate if you're playing live) so you know if you're actually winning or not. Barry recommends a tool called StatKing to track your win rates.

Barry also discusses ways to figure out if you're winning as a tournament player, and what's an acceptable BB/hr rate in both limit and no-limit games. He also takes a look at, and offers a good return for SNG players. Yes, I'm being deliberately vague because Barry is a friend, and I don't want to jack his entire post, so follow the link, and fill your head with all kinds of useful facts.

For those of us who play in home games or privately-run live touneys, it's easy to forget that, in a lot of cities, playing poker is illegal. Sure, there are varying degrees of illegality, with some cities making it illegal to wager any amount of actual money, while others only make it a crime if the house is taking a rake.

In Dallas, Texas, poker's popularity is exploding, and if a recent series of police raids is any indication, so is the local law enforcement effort to stamp out illegal games.

Over the weekend, Dallas police busted over 100 players and operators, in one location taking $43,000 in cash, in a series of raids across the city. The police spent some time putting the raids together; one of the locations was under video surveillance prior to this weekend, and the SWAT team participated in at least one of the raids.

I'm sure the citizens of Dallas can sleep well tonight, knowing that this is where their taxes and law enforcement resources are being invested.

For years, I've done various charity fundraisers for lots of different causes. The most well-known and most successful have been the breast cancer marathons and walks my wife and I have done (closing in on 100K so far!) but I've also done my share of charity auctions and celebrity bingo events.

Recently, charity poker tournaments have begun to sweep the nation with a speed and fury not seen since the phrase "Baby fishmouth" caught fire over a wagon wheel table so many years ago. In the aftermath of Katrina, I hosted some charity tourneys at PokerStars, and a bunch of people came together to help raise over 120K for the American Red Cross, Phil Gordon has done some "put a bad beat on cancer" tourneys at Full Tilt, and there have been a few fundraisers for WPBT folks, too. Of course, not everything has been as awesome as turning a flush and continuing to get action from the guy who is chasing his non-nut straight. Last year, a group of anti-gambling whackos left Colorado and went all the way to Texas to stop a charity tourney, and it put a halt to charity tourneys all over the place.

However, poker players and charitable folks are resourceful, and charity tourneys continue to raise lots of money for lots of worthy causes, while giving people a chance to play a game that we all love. Yeah, it's been all kittens and bows, until some jerks recently held up a charity poker game in a Long Island VFW hall, and jacked around $50,000 from the players. The bandits also stole wallets and cell phones from the players, and in the linked article at Newsday, you can read the most heinous crime of all: quoting "The Gambler."

Last night, I sat down at a .50/1 LHE on PokerStars. The software had been updated, and I wanted to see if there were any spiffy new toys that only become obvious when involved in a hand.

I didn't see anything new and shiny, so it must be some behind-the-scenes stuff that was changed, but I got stupid lucky, and may have experienced some of that post-UIGEA crazy play I keep reading about on the 'tubes. The table was loose/weak and calling-station-filled, so when I had AJo on the button, I raised after four limpers. The SB called, the BB raised, an EP limper re-reraised, and it was called around to me. There was enough money in the pot for me to call and see a flop, even though I was pretty sure that anything sort of a miracle straight on the flop was the only thing I'd be happy with. I flopped a gutshot, and the crazy table gave me the right odds to take one more card off . . . which I hit, and eventually scooped a $30 pot, cracking aces and kings (which had flopped a set.)

Normally, I'd never, ever, ever chase a gutshot without at least a pair or some other draw, but I was getting 16.5:1 on the flop. How could I fold? The aces guy freaked out, and the kings guy seemed to take it a little better; everyone was wondering exactly why the other players were in the hand -- and stayed in the hand -- with nothing but very thin draws (ahem.) If I hadn't been in position, I never would have been able to call like I did, and if I'd been playing out of my "gulp limit" I wouldn't have made the call, either, and though I was a little embarrassed, I was happy to take the big pot and recoup my entire 2-7 TD loss the other night.

So. I was embarrassed, but each time a player called after the aces guy or kings guy bet or raised, they were increasing the odds that someone behind them (me) would stick around and make a big hand. I think that, at low-limits like this, it's silly to be making those loose calls out of position unless you're drawing at the absolute nuts, but I'm sure the guys without aces or kings between them and me weren't thinking like that, and because of them (and my natural 20 luck of Teela Brown roll) I got to jump up from my chair and do a happy dance.

Anyway, all of that is secondary to the story I sat down to write just now: Party has slipped to third in cash game players, according to Launch Poker, falling behind PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker. Captain Obvious reports that the drop is due to Party closing off its US customer base.

I, for one, welcome our new Party Poker refugees.

Echoing the sentiments of, well, everyone who isn't named Bill Frist or Jim Leach, MGM/Mirage executive Terry Lanni said that it was ridiculous that the UIGEA was attached to an entirely unrelated port security bill, and passed in the middle of the night before congress recessed for the election.

Lanni said "It makes no sense whatsoever . . . prohibition didn't work, this isn't going to work."

Great, dude. Tell us something we don't already know; now what are you going to do about it?

"We're looking even in the lame-duck session to reintroduce this bill with some of our compatriots in the House and Senate to study (Internet) gaming . . . we think it can be taxed, we think it can be regulated, we think it can be licensed."

A study is the first step down a very long road to repeal the UIGEA, if I understand how congress works.

In a related story, the Poker Player's Alliance did a telephone poll in Iowa, where Jim "click the mouse and lose your house" Leach was narrowly defeated by his Democratic challenger Dave Loebsack. While one in 10 cited Leach's stand against Internet gambling as a strong influence in their vote for him, a greater proportion, nearly one in seven, cited it as a strong reason to vote for Loebsack.

Pollster Thomas Riehle said, "It looks like on balance, Leach's position on Internet gambling hurt him more than it helped him."

PokerStars has added some new draw poker games, including 2-7 triple draw, and 5-card draw. The games are offered in limit, pot-limit, and no-limit versions, at a variety of limits (you'll find me at the .50/1 limit tables, thankyouverymuch.)

According to everyone I know in the WPBT, the 2-7 TD games are the softest on the Internets at this moment. I took a shot, and discovered that, yes, the average player really doesn't know what he's doing (including me), and 2-7 TD can be as maddening as Razz from a junk-kicking perspective, but it was still a lot of fun.

There's a very useful primer on triple draw at Poker News (which includes a great picture of The Hammer) so go give it a look and then head over to PokerStars. Just try not to throw a Q9 and redraw a Q9, or throw and redraw all four sixes in the deck to keep making a pair like I did -- it's very hard to win that way.

So I haven't had much time for poker over the last month or so. After the WCOOP was over, I think I was a little burned out, anyway, and needed a break, so I didn't make it much of a priority, and got busy geeking out with various forms of geey geekery.

But I was scheduled to play the TLB match on PokerStars on Sunday, and if I lost, I would drop below .500 lifetime, so I put down the graphic novels and walked away from the Internets for a few days, and tuned up my game. I reviewed all the notes I've made over the last year or so, and had long conversations with myself about being patient and playing smart. I sat down for the match on Sunday afternoon, ready to play the best poker of my life as we battled it out, and promptly turned into a cardrack, and lucked my way into a victory in less than 15 minutes when I flopped a set vs. TPTK.

While I'm happy to get a check in the W column for Team PokerStars, I honestly felt like my cards played themselves, and it's a technical win, more than a personal victory. Well, I did successfully drop the hammer, so that was pretty cool.

After I was done, I felt that poker buzz, and started to look forward to playing the WWdN tourney last night. In fact, I was so excited about it, I made two tourneys this week: the main one and a second chance / West coast tourney a few hours later and I made a rare announcement about the tourneys on my blog, hoping to draw in more players. (No luck; small turnouts for both, but extremely good play. Goddamn these tourneys have gotten tough!)

I played okay in the main tourney. I lost a lot of chips early on with unimproved big aces where I folded after getting repopped on continuation bets, and making good-but-tough laydowns with TPBK and one busted hammer bluff.

(Question: When you make a good laydown, but it cost you a significant amount of chips to get the information, do you feel smart that you made the good fold? I feel smart, but I'd rather have the chips; how do you get the information for less, do you think?)

I ended up making it to the break, but my M was 4ish, so I switched to the shortstack strategy I love (and unfortunately know all too well.) I picked up a lot of dead money in pots by jamming with good blackjack hands, cards that looked to be live if I got called, and a couple of pairs. I got back up to 10ish, and found AK in MP. I figured this was a good time to race and double up before the blinds went up again and dropped me to 5ish, so I pulled a Hoy against SoxLover. It was awesome, as I goaded him into putting me all-in with Q4o . . . until the flop paired his four. All I could do was laugh as I missed my outs (I had a flush draw that didn't come in) and waited for the second chance to begin.

We drew a very small field, just 4 tables, IIRC, and I donked off about 1/3 of my stack early on, trying to be way too aggressive. So I settled down, became a cardrack, and got dealt aces four times in less than twenty hands. I am not kidding; at one point, I was dealt AA 55 AA AK JJ. In a row. Yeah, probability, suck it, bitch! I pwn you!

I worked my way up to fourth in chips, again just by letting my cards play themselves (this is not satisfying to me, at all. Anyone can play big cards, but it's the really good players who can extract maximum value from them, and of course make the big moves without them.) and found myself at the final table. Through a confluence of great luck for me and bad luck for everyone else, I got to 3-handed with Sweet Chuck (who liveblogged the whole thing) and sloshr. We battled for what seemed like a long time, before sloshr busted Chuck, and we started heads up. Sloshr had a 3-1 chip advantage over me, but I offered the even chop I always offer when I'm a thousand miles behind in chips. I expected sloshr to laugh at me, but he agreed, and we played out for bragging and naming rights. I was really happy with the way I played heads-up, even bluffing with The Wheaton (93o) to take a significant pot down, and get within striking distance. On the last hand, I jammed with JJ and sloshr woke up with QQ. There was no miracle luckbox suckout for me, and IGHN in 2nd. It's the highest I've ever finished in one of my own tourneys, and it was the most fun I've had in ages playing poker. Sure, it's easy to have fun when you're winning, but the company really makes a difference for me, and as usual, the players in this week's WWdNs did not disappoint.

Thanks to everyone who came out to play!

The eleven people in the world who were shocked and stunned when Pamela Anderson withdrew her endorsement of Pamelapoker.com last week can rest a little bit easier today: According to Online Casino News, Doyle Brunson's poker site, Doyle's Room, has stepped in to take over.

For those of you who really need to have your online poker experience associated with a nearly-naked woman of questionable intelligence, don't worry: Cindy Margolis has just signed a deal to endorse Tropical Poker.

And here's something I managed to miss during the 2006 WSOP: There was apparently a staged "wedding" between Pam and Doyle, which, according to Michael Craig, wasn't pretty: Two people who attended, both respected journalists, told me it was a fiasco. Pam looked ridiculous flouncing around in a bridal veil. Doyle Brunson was there and looked stricken. Neither journalist had ever spoken to Doyle, so neither was up to speed on his involvement in online poker - the commitment, the financial opportunity, the competition, etc. - but both had the same message for me: What on earth was Doyle Brunson doing this for?

I love Michael's writing not just because he always gets right to the heart of a story, but because he writes about the absurd aspects of the poker world with a dry, ironic humor that I wish I could match on my own. Witness Michael's reaction to Pam's, uh, thoughts, in her online diary:

1. Pamela Anderson writes like a fourth grader.

2. Pam has a pattern, from what I can tell from reading her diary, of getting into businesses and then disavowing her involvement in them.

3. Anderson disclosed in her diary that she is now, for the first time, applying her own make-up. From September 2: "The most liberating thing I've done lately is learn to do my own makeup. "

4. She talks about her new (third) husband, Kid Rock, with the same enthusiasm she talked about poker a few months ago. Rock, you might want to keep your bags packed.

You really need to go read the rest in Michael's entire post titled, "The Short, Brief Life of Pamela Anderson's Poker Site."

(Trashy picture of Pamela Anderson found on Google Images, and included for Bad Blood, per his request.)

When I reviewed High Stakes Poker during its first season, I wrote, "GSN starts out with a very strong hand, but misses the flop entirely. The show is only a few episodes in, though, so maybe they'll pick up a draw on the turn, and make a winner by fifth street. I just hope that the audience ends up caring enough about the players to stay in the hand."

I haven't watched every episode since then, but I have tuned in a few times, and I think the show did improve dramatically, both in production and dramatic value. During the 2006 WSOP, I met Gabe Kaplan, and spoke with him briefly about the show. He told me that they do their commentary live, while the hands are actually playing out, which went a long way toward making High Stakes Poker's commentary that much more interesting to me, and addressed one of the issues I raised in my review. (On all the other shows, WPT and ESPN included, they edit the hands in advance, so the announcers know exactly what's going to happen, but on HSP, when someone wonders what's going on, they're really wondering what's going on; it's a small point, but significant enough to warrant a long parenthetical statement.)

If you enjoy High Stakes Poker, or if you're the type of person who waits until you can see, oh, four shows in a row before you'll tune in, you'll want to watch GSN tonight, from 8pm to midnight Eastern, for their High Stakes Poker marathon, which will include interviews with the stars of the new James Bond film Casino Royale.

Lou Krieger, notable poker author and all-around really good guy, posted on his blog that he'll be playing in the charity tournament I wrote about yesterday. Lou's books helped my game a lot when I was a noob, and he's always been kind and generous toward me when I've pestered him about poker. He's also been a valuable source of news, analysis and commentary on the various poker prohibition bills, via always-informative posts on his blog. He's also a fan of Dr. Pauly, but we won't hold that against him.

Regarding this tournament, Lou writes, "The tournament, now in its second year, raises money to underwrite a holiday party for children of US Marines stationed at nearby Twenty-nine Palms."

So if you go to play, you're supporting the troops and you're helping the children. Let's watch the anti-poker nuts try to spin this one.

Pamela Anderson, who made a name for herself bouncing along the beach in slowmo on Baywatch, then rocketed herself into infamy and permanent celebrity status with the honeymoon video that made the catchphrase "You're so f'in rad, lover! Where are we, baby?" a national phenomenon, has closed her online poker site, PamelaPoker.com.

The former Baywatch actress, Hepatitis C carrier, and Playboy model wrote on her website that she was getting out of the online poker business because, there were "[t]oo many shady areas" and that "I made a mistake getting involved in something I know nothing about for a quick buck! Yuck. So unlike me. Glad it's over."

Displaying her brilliant understanding of the game, Anderson also wrote, "I really don't want to encourage people to gamble." So we shouldn't expect PamelaLotteries or PamelaHorseRacing or PamelaFantasySports any time soon. Dang.

Also displaying her brilliant understanding of the Internets, she uses Comic Sans, embedded music and enough javascript and flash to cover Ted Stevens' bridge to nowhere six times.

All seriousness aside, I'm sure Pamela will find a way to come out of her foray into the online poker world stronger and wiser. I mean, you don't win the World's Sexiest Feet award five times if you don't know what you're doing, right?

Right?

What?

This weekend, the Dick Van Patten charity poker tournament will be played at the Fantasy Springs Resort Casino in Indio, a community about two hours east of Los Angeles near Palm Springs.

The tournament will raise money for the US Marine Corps, and a bunch of well-known personalities have been invited to play, including a few of Dick Van Patten's former television co-stars, and his son Vince, who is on some poker show that apparently is solely responsible for the current poker boom.

The Desert Sun has a highly entertaining story today, where they posed some poker-related questions to a few of the invitees and printed their answers. I learned that Connie Stevens likes to "play with the guys every now and then because I think it's so much fun." and she's a self-admitted "a gutsy player, and they never know what the hell I'm going to do." And I also learned that Eileen Davidson "tried to fake out James Woods once by making faces, but I just couldn't."

If you're in Indio this weekend and would like to play, it's limited to 400 players, with a $300 buy-in. More details are in TFA, linked below.

A few politically-minded poker players kept live blogs during yesterday's midterm election, and today, Amy Calistri looked at the results through a poker prism. Her analysis is at Poker News.

I was hoping that Arizon's anti-gaming whacko John Kyl would go down in flames, and at one point he was barely under 50%, but he managed to hit his hand on the river to send his Democratic opponent Jim Pederson to the rail. (Updated Note: Fellow blogger, ass-kicking poker player, and BLUFF Radio talkin' guy Jason Kirk points out that, while Pedersen out-flopped Kyl, Kyl went into the hand with the best of it; he was the incumbent.) However, in Iowa, power-loving, poker-hating, anti-gambling, Christianist-pandering zelot and author of what eventually became the UIGEA, Jim Leach, was defeated by his Democratic challenger, bouncing who Amy calls one of the "four horsemen of the online gaming apocalypse" right out of Washington. Hey, former Senator Representative Leach, I hear there's an opening at this church in Colorado. Maybe you should give them a call.

Of course, there was a lot more at stake in this election than online poker, but because this is a poker blog, I'll just say: Bill Frist's pandering to a tiny group of moralizing busybodies may have been for nothing, come 2008, if the wave that broke yesterday rebuilds over the next few years and continues to wash Frist and his allies right out to sea.