Hawaiian Gardens shift manager Nancy Grout says it was the long ago phone call from a girlfriend that changed everything, taking her across the country and into a new life.

She was back home in Pittsburgh on a break from studies at a Miami fashion school on a day in the mid- 1970s when she got a call from the friend whose family had moved to Las Vegas.

"Her father had been a policeman in Pittsburgh," Nancy says, "and he went out to Las Vegas to be a security guard at the MGM which was then the new big place in town."

The new Women in Poker Hall of Fame (WIPHOF) is scheduled to launch with a luncheon and induction ceremony at 11 a.m. on February 2, 2008 at Binion's in Las Vegas, and will honor some of the top females in the poker industry, including Barbara Enright, Susie Isaacs, Linda Johnson, and Marsha Waggoner. World Poker Tour's Mike Sexton will be the master of ceremony. The event and is open to anyone who wants to join the organization. I have the honor of being a guest speaker at the ceremony.

I love turbo sit-and-go online tournaments, which are like regular SNGs except they have an accelerated blind structure with shorter levels. They are the crack cocaine of online poker and a quick fix for people who don't have too much free time on their hands, much like myself.

Every so often I get an email stating, "Taxes are voluntary, right? So I don't have to pay taxes on gambling if I don't want to" Of course, you don't have to do anything. If you don't pay your taxes and the IRS or your state tax agency catches you, you'll likely end up paying the taxes, plus interest and penalties. And you could find yourself in prison.

Sometimes you'll hear a recommendation that you should always take a specific course of action in poker under certain conditions. Such advice is almost always wrong. Note that I said almost always wrong-that "almost" modifies today's word, "always" "Always" has its moments, but not many.

Your best tactics in poker and in everyday life come from assuming you're always going to routinely do something and then try to find reasons why you won't.

Here's one way to look at it: A turbo tourney is just like a regular tournament-if we can just imagine that this regular tournament is hyperactive, on speed, and has drunk about three pots of very strong coffee. In a turbo, blinds increase very rapidly, usually every five minutes, though sometimes they'll go up as quickly as every three minutes. From this one difference the entire texture of the tournament alters dramatically.

About four years ago, I wrote an article about tilt. I said that, "When you abuse a pinball machine it will go on "tilt" and stop playing. The same thing will happen with many poker players. If they feel abused, they will go on 'tilt' and stop playing their best game" What I didn't realize until lately was that other players don't cause tilts. We do it to ourselves. What I didn't say was that we often tilt our own poker games. No one can put you on tilt without your consent. So I thought it would be worth while to re-visit the land of tilt and see how we put ourselves on tilt.

Varied wisdom has been espoused concerning evaluating what fights one should enter in many diverse fields of endeavor. If your evaluation is sound then the only time one should enter into harm's way is when you are an overwhelming favorite to prevail. Ah ... if only it was that easy.

All poker players, with the exception of the most beginning of beginners, know that the single most egregious error that is made in hold'em is playing too many hands. Today let's look at a hand that on the surface appears very playable, but maybe we are blinded by its good looks.

I'd like to use this column to urge all poker players to read more. Reading opens up your mind to the thinking of other people-broadening your mind by broadening the experiences you can understand and consider. Whether it's poker strategy, fiction, or just life experience that you're reading about, you're entering a world you would not normally enter yourself. By broadening your mind you broaden your perspective and expand how you think- which, in my view, can only help but develop your ability at the poker table.

Online poker has introduced many new developments to this beloved game.

One of these is the advent of intentionally short-handed tables. Despite the popularity of these games, few books have been devoted to examining the special circumstances surrounding short-handed play. One of the few to do so is Limit Hold'em: Winning Short- Handed Strategies by Terry Borer and Lawrence Mak, with assistance from Barry Tanenbaum.