2012 Feburary 27th

by Ashley Adams
 
 I enjoy taking trips to places where I can play poker. I think of them as poker adventures. So when my daughter Hannah announced that she was going to spend a semester studying in Delhi, India, I started to look into poker playing opportunities there. I figured that meeting up with her would be as good a reason as any to look to India for my next poker adventure. She and I decided to meet in the state of Goa, a resort area on the coast of the Arabian Sea, in the southwestern part of India. It also happened to be one of very few places in India that had legal, live, poker and casino gambling. How could I say no?

by Roger Rodd
 
“There’s No Place Like Home,” “Home on the Range,” “Home Is Where the Heart Is,” and the list goes on. All are solid implications of the safety one feels in their own domicile.

 We live in a country where “support our troops” is mindlessly chanted, usually by a draft dodging politician. Most often it’s the “hawk” who snorted half of Bolivia while AWOL from the National Guard he joined to avoid service in a combat zone. They’re the same people who turn a blind eye towards helping the enormous percentage of the homeless population who are former combat veterans. Being homeless is a tragic condition-regardless of the circumstances that caused it.

by Russell Fox

 Before tax season hit, I had some fun playing a local casino’s $100 HORSE tournament. HORSE is five limit poker games: hold’em, Omaha/8, razz, 7-card stud, and 7-stud/8. I enjoy playing different forms of poker besides no-limit hold’em, and I especially enjoy stud. It’s a game where you have lots of information, and how you use information helps determine whether or not you become a winning player.

 On the money bubble, I was dealt split kings—one king was buried and the second was my door, or exposed, card—along with a jack. We were fivehanded at the time. The 6c had the bring-in. I completed, by raising to the lower betting limit, and only the 6c called. The door cards that folded were the 6h, Qs, and 8d.

by Paul "Dr. Pauly" McGuire
 
I once played online poker every single day for a hundred days in a row. I skirted the fine line between passion and addiction as online poker became a major driving force in my life. Obviously, it’s been a long and frustrating ten months since I last fired up my favorite online poker site and played pot-limit Omaha late into the night. Online poker was my biggest passion outside of writing. A day would not pass when I didn’t think about online poker or hear “alert sounds” rattling around my head.

by Barbara Connors
 
Everybody knows about tilt. You’re playing poker, doing fine, winning at your usual rate— and then trouble rears its ugly head in the form of bad luck. A series of tough losses or one soul-crushing loss at the hands of an obnoxious moron can be enough to make the wheels come off. Desperate to win back what was so unjustly taken away, you begin to make impetuous calls and hopeless raises. Whatever the original trigger that brought it about, a bad case of tilt is powerful enough to wipe out years of hard-won poker skill and knowledge—not to mention a good-sized chunk of your bankroll.

FTP MADE PRIVATE LOANS TO HIGHSTAKES PROS

Private loans,funded directly from FTP coffers, were made to a group of high-stakes pros, including Phil Ivey, Erick Lindgren, Layne Flack, David Benyamine, Mike Matusow and PokerStars-sponsored Barry Greenstein. They collectively owe nearly $20 million. Greenstein quickly acknowledged a debt of less than $400,000 and explained the circumstances, while the others remained silent on the matter.

 FULL TILT RICO ACTION DISMISSED

by Debbie Burkhead

Wynn Classic is on the Horizon! Get ready; get set for the Wynn Classic which runs from February 22 - March 15. The first no-limit hold’em event kicks off at noon, February 23 with a $550 buy-in and a whopping $250,000 guaranteed prize pool. The first event comprises three flights, one per day for three days, and players who have been eliminated may re-enter on a subsequent flight day. All three flights will come together on February 26 at 2 p.m. for this five-day event.

If you are feeling suddenly maniacal, maybe it’s because Turning Stone’s March Mania is upon us. Turning Stone Resort and Casino in Verona, New York shows why they have always been a favorite destination for dedicated poker players.

 Player rewards are great, and poker room manager Jason DiBenedetto always insures they are generous with giveaways. I believe every time I’ve played there, I have seen some sort of big piece of machinery being given away. From motorcycles to garden tractors, it’s always been interesting. When you are playing cash games it seems like you are constantly hearing announcements about something being given away, and in the past, I too have won a drawing for a free seat in an event. If you play long enough, you’ll probably win something— it’s the law of averages hard at work for you. And if a garden tractor isn’t your idea of an ideal take-away gift, two-hundred seats for two upcoming events will be awarded too. The first one-hundred seats will be entries into a deep stack turbo, no-limit hold’em tournament on Friday March 9, where players will begin with starting stacks of 30,000 chips and play 20 minute rounds.

By Wendeen H. Eolis

As a privately held company, the walls of secrecy surrounding senior management and the operations of Poker Stars were rarely challenged before the United States Department of Justice cracked down on online poker last year.

In the Government’s April 15, 2011 indictment, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York finally honed in on the former “Big Three” online poker companies—Poker Stars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker/Ultimate Bet—in a bid to end online poker in the United States and put key executives of these companies in jail.