Poker and etiquette don’t often go together. A game with rich traditions of shootouts, boozing, and drugs seems beyond polite protocol. And yet there are rules of decorum generally followed at the table. I know. I broke one recently.

Matt Mason, winner of the Heartland Poker Tour at Golden Gates in Black Hawk, CO will use part of his $188,955 prize money to wed his fiancée Jackie Wright. Their plans to marry had been on hold more than a year due to financial struggles. Mason outlasted 419 entrants in the Heartland main event to claim his prize.

Golden Gates at Black Hawk hosted the event that included qualifying tournaments in which a player could win entry into the main event for a much smaller investment. Second place finisher John “Bubba” Holdren invested just $180 for a prize of $94,478.

Pennsylvania’s infant casino industry is preparing to launch itself into a boom period when table games open this summer.

According to Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board Chairman Gregory C. Fajt, “Since the Horse Race Development and Gaming Act was passed in 2004; all but two of the fourteen licenses available for slots casinos have been awarded.” The licenses are held by five stand alone casinos and six racinos that feature horse racing at the same site.

I’ve written before about my pet peeves while trying to enjoy our wonderful game of poker. Today, I’m calling out the offenders of my favorite peeves and calling them pinheads. In no particular order allow me to offer up what I believe to be the five most egregious, teeth grinding rituals of rudeness and boorish behavior that are regularly perpetrated by the pinheads of poker upon all of us who aren’t pinheads. See if you agree with my list. Caution, if you do not agree, you may be a pinhead.

I have a math problem for you. If you can do simple multiplying and division in your head then you don’t need a pencil and paper. Otherwise go grab them.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could count your opponents’ outs?

Serious players know full well the importance of counting outs: How many cards remaining in the deck will help your opponent’s hand become a winner?

During the 2008 WSOP Main Event, quad aces lost to a royal flush with both hole cards playing. (You can view the two-minute video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XunAlp2azhA)

In post-production ESPN’s math consultant rummaged around in a place renowned for its lack of sunshine and pulled out a number for the odds. In the show’s airing, ESPN’s Lon McEachern announced that number to the world, 2.7 billion-to-1. Wrong. Nope. Nyet. Non. No way. Not even close—that number misses by two orders of magnitude! Let’s calculate the right odds.

I hold in my hands the names of 57 card-carrying Communists! —Senator Joseph McCarthy.

[This is a work of poker fiction set ten thousand hands in the future. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.]

Wildhorse Resort and Casino’s annual Spring Poker Roundup, comprised 12 days of play and included the always popular no-limit hold ’em, HORSE, Omaha/8, limit hold ’em, and ladies no-limit hold ’em.

Event No. 7 was named in honor of the late Bob Thompson—a pioneering tournament director who died last December. Thompson was the tournament director at the Bicycle Casino’s Diamond Jim Brady poker tournament, which during his tenure there was second in size only to the World Series of Poker in prize money and attendance.

“If you pay attention to the wrong things, the very best you can hope for is to get lucky.”—Lou Krieger and Richard Harroch, Poker for Dummies

How did you first learn to play poker? How do people generally learn to play games?

If you are like most of us, somewhere between the ages of five and twenty-five, someone—a parent perhaps or a sibling or friend—taught you the rules and how to play the game. The same applies to any game—poker, chess, Monopoly, tic-tac-toe, you name it.