Young Gun Joe Cada stops by the Deal bringing his own brand of Michigan madness to Bristol.
News from PokerNewsDaily.com:
In breaking news from Capitol Hill, Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) will introduce legislation to license and regulate online poker in the United States on Thursday, according to Dow Jones Newswires.
During National Poker Week, which occurred from July 19th to 25th, it was revealed that Menendez would likely drop legislation during the festivities or the following week. Then, Poker News Daily learned that a bill similar to last Congressional session’s S 3616 would likely be introduced this week. Poker Players Alliance (PPA) Executive Director John Pappas stated during a working dinner to open National Poker Week, “Pushing poker will be an immediate lift and will be easier than [legalizing] other things.” He also reminded over 30 of the PPA’s State Directors, a handful of poker pros, and media in attendance, “Poker has always been played in people’s homes. We are the Poker Players Alliance. We aren’t the Roulette Alliance. We love the Menendez bill because it focuses on our core beliefs.”
The PPA had a draft of the bill in mid-July. Menendez’s S 3616 was introduced last September and dubbed the Internet Skill Game Licensing and Control Act. The bill’s definitions specifically included online poker, explicitly legalizing the game in the United States: “The term ‘Internet skill game’ means an Internet-based game that uses simulated cards, dice, or tiles in which success is predominantly determined by the skill of the players, including poker, bridge, and mahjong.” The bill called for the legalization of skill games not backed by the house, meaning that the action was primarily player versus player. Online poker rooms like PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker raise revenue by taking a percent of each pot or tournament buy-in, dubbed the “juice” or “rake.”
In order to apply for a license to operate a skill game online and solicit customers from the United States, complete financial information was required. Also required were an outline of an organization’s corporate structure and the “names of all persons directly or indirectly interested in the business of the applicant and the nature of such interest.” Background checks of individuals and directors associated with each licensee would have been conducted and betting on sports was specifically prohibited. S 3616 vanished from the record after the 110th Congress adjourned.
According to the PPA, the legislation to be introduced by Menendez on Thursday will be similar to S 3616. The Dow Jones report notes, “It would establish a regulatory framework that would allow online poker companies to register in the U.S.” A 10% tax on deposits would be added, 5% to State Governments and 5% to the Federal Government. During the last Congressional session, Congressman Robert Wexler introduced a similar measure in HR 2610, the Skill Game Protection Act, which exempted poker and other skill games from existing internet gambling legislation.
At the beginning of May, Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) introduced HR 2266, which would delay industry compliance with the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) by one year to December 1st, 2010. In addition, the Massachusetts lawmaker unveiled HR 2267, which establishes a comprehensive licensing and regulatory framework for the internet gambling industry in the United States. HR 2267 currently boasts 54 co-sponsors, while HR 2266 has 35.
We’ll have full details on Menendez’s new Senate bill as soon as it’s released right here on Poker News Daily.
From PokerListings.com:
The 33-year-old professional poker player topped a field of 125 to take the $300,000 first prize in the three-day, $10,000 buy-in event at the Paiute Golf Resort.
“I’ve played in a lot of high-stakes poker games, but this was a whole different kind of pressure,” Garaventa said. “There were times out there when I missed shots because my hands or knees were shaking, but it’s an unbelievable rush.”
Poker personalities Daniel Negreanu, Gavin Smith, David Benyamine, Chris Ferguson and David Oppenheim joined Ray Romano, former MLB pitcher Greg Maddux and footballer Jorge Campos in teeing off in this unique event.
Negreanu, Benyamine and Oppenheim would all cash for the minimum $10,000 after winning their first round, but none of the three would survive the second day of play.
Campos took fifth place for $30,000 after busting out early on Day 3.
The World Series of Golf is open to any amateur golfer with $10,000 to spend and adds a No Limit Hold’em-style betting element to the game.
Players are given a 10,000 bank of chips and post ante at each hole. A random draw is made to determine the shooting order, with the button being given to the first player to act.
After the first round of shooting, the button can either check or bet and each successive player must match his wager (or raise) in order to stay in contention for the hole.
Following the betting round, each player still in contention hits another shot and another betting round commences.
Action continues until one player has won the hole, either by stroke count or by forcing his rivals to fold. The last player standing in his group of five wins the round and advances.
Previous champions include Mark Ewing (2007) and A.J. Johnson (2008), both of whom took $250,000 for their efforts.
From OnlinePokerWebsite.net:
This week Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank introduced a set of bills designed to freeze the UIGEA and allow US residents freedom to play poker on the Internet. Frank’s bill establishes the Department of the Treasury as the licensing and regulating authority, and provides for the consumer protections the gambling ban does not offer, including age and identification verification, responsible gaming systems, and measures against money laundering and cheating.
Alphonse D’Amato, chairman of the Poker Players Alliance, praised Frank and his efforts.
“Online poker is a legal, thriving industry and poker players deserve the consumer protections and the freedom to play that are provided for in this legislation,” said D’Amato. The ex-Senator said he promised to “activate the alliances grassroots army made up of over one million members to help him drive legislation”.
The bill grants states the right to opt out, meaning states that don’t allow land-based poker do not have to accept online play. Licenses will only be awarded to operators that respect the laws of individual states, so such non-gambling states as Hawaii and Utah will likely be blocked by regulated poker rooms.
Also, players used to pocketing winnings on a regular basis without reporting them to Uncle Sam will now find their take a little lighter. Frank includes clauses that require the online gambling operator to set aside taxes against winnings before paying patrons.
Still, the legal gray cloud may be lifted if the bill can pass through Congress. Monitoring for cheating will ease the minds of many online players, and security of personal information may bring thousands of new players to the Internet.
“The government should not interfere with people’s liberty unless there is a good reason,” said Frank in a press conference on Capitol Hill. “This is, I believe, the single biggest example of an intrusion into the principle that people should be free to do things on the Internet. It’s clearly the case that gambling is an activity that can be done offline but not online.”
From BluffMagazine.com:
The word is being spread that Rep. Barney Frank plans to introduce pro-gaming legislation in the days ahead. And with that news has come speculation from the poker media and beyond as to the viability of a standalone bill in favor of online gaming passing through Congress. The response from the Poker Players Alliance on the issue has been brief but strong. They have support in Congress and $3 million to lobby everyone else.
Once Frank divulged his plans to reintroduce H.R. 2046, the Internet Gambling Regulation and Enforcement Act, when Congress returned from their spring break this week, many applauded the upcoming effort but wondered aloud if it even had the support to break through a committee. One of the publications who posed such questions was The Hill, a Washington D.C. policy publication, which brought a fervent response from PPA chairman and former NY Senator Alfonse D’Amato in the same publication.
On April 14, 2009, D’Amato wrote, in part:
“Liberals and conservatives in and out of Congress are opposed to the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act for a number of reasons: It does nothing to prevent children and problem gamblers from playing online; it overly burdens the banks, making them, not the federal government, policemen of the Internet; it costs the taxpayers billions in unearned revenue, not to mention the loss of capital and jobs when these companies are forced to move out of the U.S.; and it’s simply unenforceable… As House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and many Democratic and Republican members know, now is the time to do what’s right for all interested parties, not based on party politics. That means protecting Internet freedom and the public interest through taxation, licensing and regulation - not prohibition.”
Days later, the Associated Press reported that D’Amato said the PPA has $3 million to lobby Congress during the upcoming session. Some of the funds have been collected through the memberships of its one-million-plus member base, and more is coming from the Interactive Gaming Council in Vancouver. The Canadian trade association represents a number of online gaming websites and looks to gain from a possible U.S. pro-gaming law.
While the opposition to the yet-to-be-introduced legislation consists of a number of groups, conservative religious groups as well as sports organizations like the National Football League among them, the PPA hopes to let people know that there is widespread support for the legislation as well, and that backing spans both major political parties. And what the opposition may fail to realize is that there is more money where the Interactive Gaming Council funds came from, as the online poker industry alone has quite the investment in seeing Frank succeed.
For now, all eyes are on Rep. Frank to take the first step in the process, but the PPA, led by Chairman D’Amato, is waiting to lobby for its passage with strength that may not be underestimated for long.
From NewScientist.com:
IS POKER a game of skill or luck? For regular players that’s a no-brainer, but showing that skill wins out has proven surprisingly difficult for mathematicians. Now two studies that tapped the vast amounts of data available from online casinos have provided some of the best evidence yet that poker is skill-based. Many hope that the results will help to roll back laws and court decisions that consider poker gambling, and therefore illegal in certain contexts.
Most players insist that poker is predominantly skill. “I depended solely on that skill for my food and rent,” says Darse Billings, a former professional player who co-founded the Computer Poker Research Group at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. In many jurisdictions, however, poker websites and organised games are heavily regulated or even banned under gambling laws, partly because chance is considered the dominant factor.
Previous attempts to quantify the relationship between skill and chance have involved building theoretical models or playing software bots against each other. However, Ingo Fiedler and Jan-Philipp Rock at the University of Hamburg’s Institute of Law and Economics in Germany argue that these methods fail to reflect real games, and this may explain why some courts and lawmakers have yet to be swayed by them. So over three months, the pair recorded the outcomes of 55,000 online players playing millions of hands of poker’s most popular variant, “no-limit Texas hold ‘em”.
They reasoned that if skill dominated, this would eventually show itself over many hands, so they chose two factors to define this threshold. Firstly, they measured how much each player’s winnings and losses fluctuated: the higher this variance, the greater the role of chance. Secondly, they measured the average value of a player’s winnings or losses: highly skilled or terrible players would do noticeably better or worse than would be expected by chance alone.
Based on these factors, they found that the threshold at which the effects of skill start to dominate over chance is typically about 1000 hands, equivalent to about 33 hours of playing in person or 13 hours online, where the rate of play is brisker. So although chance plays a role, they suggest that because most players easily play this many hands in a lifetime, poker is more a game of skill (Gaming Law Review and Economics, DOI: 10.1089/glre.2008.13106). “Our results should have greater impact on the legislators than the results of other studies; they refer to reality,” says Fiedler.
The threshold at which the effects of skill start to dominate is typically about 1000 handsHowever, Sean McCulloch, a computer scientist at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, says the results may fail to sway a judge or jury. “If you want to use a mathematical argument as the basis for legislation or court decisions, it has to be easy to explain, easy to follow and intuitive,” he says.
McCulloch used an alternative method to explore skill and chance in poker, also based on real games. Together with Paco Hope of the software consultancy Cigital of Washington DC, he looked at 103 million hands of Texas hold ‘em played at the PokerStars online site and calculated how many were won as the result of a “showdown” - in which players win thanks to their cards beating their opponents’ cards - versus those that were won because all the other players folded. They argue that the latter hands must be pure skill, because no one shows their cards. Their analysis, released on 27 March, revealed that 76 per cent of games did not end in a showdown, suggesting that skill is the dominant factor.
John Pappas of the Poker Players Alliance (PPA) in Washington DC says both studies are badly needed to help properly define the law. In many US states, judges and juries use a so-called “predominance test” to gauge skill and chance, based on the opinions of expert witnesses. Although courts in Pennsylvania, Colorado and South Carolina have all ruled this year that poker is a game of skill, not all courts do. “It would not be wise for any of us to rest on our laurels,” Pappas says. The PPA expects the Cigital study will now be used as evidence to fight appeals against court rulings that decided poker is a skill game.
However, Preston Oade of law firm Holme Roberts and Owen in Denver, Colorado, who worked on a separate poker case in Colorado, cautions that the studies still may not persuade juries, as this is a “moral, political and social issue”, as well as a mathematical one.
Pappas hopes the studies will help to persuade the US Congress to grant poker an exemption from the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, due to come into force in December 2009. The act will make it illegal in some states for banks to process transactions from gambling websites.
Gambling has existed for literally thousands of years and will probably exist forever. Human nature drives people to gamble; to take risks and to hope to win big.
Gambling took on many forms throughout history, whether it was wagering bets on who would win a war or a battle or chase down a wild boar the fastest. Then came dice games and other forms of relatively primitive games which allowed mankind its much needed outlet for risk taking and later on came cards game, roulette, sports bets and all the other gambling options we have today. All of these games had something in common though: they were all games played in one specific place, by a group of people who could see, hear and sometimes, unfortunately, smell each other.
Casinos were and are often a classy place to gamble in. They offer a glamorous and unique atmosphere in which to play with fellow gamblers.
All this changed with the help of technology and a little thing called the Internet. The Internet has changed our lives in many ways and in practically every aspect of life. Gambling, of course, is no exception. Online gambling caught on like fire and is today one of the most prosperous online industries in the world with billions of dollars in revenue each year, and the numbers just keep growing.
Continue reading.
Sharpen up with some tips for Texas Hold ‘em from Yahoo!:
To clarify the phrase limping is when you bet the absolute minimum needed to stay in a hand. Often used when the small blind simply calls the big blind instead of raising.
Some players feel they can see some flops cheaply with average hands this way. And of course if you are in a hand, you always have the chance to land a big pot.
This can be successful if you have the discipline to get away from the hand if the flop doesn’t work out and then you can get away from the hand for a small investment.
On the flip side, if the flop is positive then you are in position to take someone’s stack.
The alternative approach is if you raise when you enter a pot, that will put people off who are looking to get involved in the hand on the cheap. If there are less people in the hand then there are less chances of an opponent taking the pot.
Simply if your pocket cards are good enough then raise otherwise throw in your cards.
In truth, a mix of the two approaches based on your opposition is the shrewdest approach.
If you are holding a hand like a small pair or suited connectors, hands that get their value from hitting a specific flop, then limping in can be handy.
Raising can cost you if you raise and are re-raised as you will have to fold since your risk-reward ratio is no longer in your favour.
When facing a passive table in tournament play, limping in can allow you to see some extra flops that just may connect well. If you’re seated early at the table, you may be able to build your stack up early by limping in and then collecting a monster hand.
Also you can limp from early position with big hands when there are aggressive players behind you as you can count on an opponent raising and then you can re-raise.
But if an opponent is preventing you from seeing cheap flops then there is no future in limping in and raising first is the only course of action.
Of course if you know when to limp, you can also counteract opponents who are trying to limp.
Some experts advocate increasing the amount you raise by the amount of limpers in front of you if your hand is up to scratch. So when on the button with three limpers in front who are trying to see a cheap flop then raise by three times the big blind plus one for each of the limpers so you raise it six times the big blind and this will often pick up the pot.
But as always assess the situation and make the decision to limp or raise based upon how the table is playing.
In Limit, the situation is a little different and if you are the first person in the pot in a limit Texas Hold’Em game, you should almost always raise.
This instantly gives you control of the hand and makes the opposition aware that you are a threat.
A raise always gives you the chance to win the pot uncontested, and in a limit game where bets are fixed, being able to win just the blinds is great for your overall positive expectation.
The last thing you want to do is limp in because if everyone else folds, that will allow the big blind the opportunity to compete for the pot with you for free.
From Mlive.com professional poker player Daniel Negreanu weighs in on the differences in playing in a cash game versus a tournament:
There is plenty of discussion on Internet poker forums about the differences between tournament and cash game players.
The general consensus is that cash game players are superior.
While I believe there is some truth to that sentiment, it’s important to recognize that the skills required for each format are vastly different.
The most obvious difference between a cash game and a tournament is that in tournament play, once your chips are gone, so are you.
In a cash game, you can dig into your pocket for more money.
As a result, tournament players think in terms of survival and play their hands to avoid losing all of their chips.
A different mentality
Cash game players think differently.They are concerned about getting full value for hands when they’re ahead, and try to minimize losses when they’re behind.
Another difference between big buy-in tournaments and high-stakes cash games is the caliber of players that compete in each.
Even in the $10,000 World Series of Poker main event, you’re sure to find a high percentage of low-skilled amateur players.
That’s not the case in high-stakes cash games where the tables are littered with professional sharks.
I think most people would agree — it’s much easier to beat a bunch of amateurs than it is trying to outwit elite professionals.
Yes, you might take a few bad beats against amateur players who don’t know what they’re doing.
But at the same time, it will be much easier to get all their chips in situations where pros would fold.
Beating amateurs in tournaments is all about taking their money by playing fundamentally sound poker.
That approach isn’t good enough when playing pros in cash games.
That’s where Phil Hellmuth comes in.
Even though Hellmuth has won 11 World Series of Poker bracelets — all of them in Hold’em events — he doesn’t get a lot of respect from cash-game grinders.
But Hellmuth has mastered two of the most important concepts of tournament play. He knows survival is king and bluffing should be used rarely.
He knows weak players will make big mistakes eventually, and when that happens, he’ll clean up.
Or else he’ll take a bad beat and throw one of his patented temper tantrums.
Why it works
If Hellmuth tried that same patient, nonbluffing style of play against top cash game players, he’d see his chip stack slowly dwindle.He would never be able to trap his opponents — they would see right through his strategy, and he would be finished.
Hellmuth would be hammered into submission continuously before and after the flop.
Hellmuth’s successful approach to tournament poker just doesn’t translate into the world of high-stakes cash game poker.
Some major differences
Tournament play demands patience to survive and win.Winning at cash games demands a whole other level of thought and deception.
You need to reach into your bag of tricks and run the occasional big bluff to be a consistent cash game winner.
Not as easy as it looks
Don’t get me wrong, not all cash game players properly adapt to tournament play and tournament opposition either. They attempt bluffs that might work in cash games but fail miserably in tournament play.They don’t realize that many amateur players aren’t skilled enough to recognize when they should just fold their hands.
I am challenged the most by playing cash games against the world’s top players.
These games force me to think several moves in advance. I like this, as it reminds me of playing a game of chess.
Though I find tournaments fun, they just don’t provide the constant brain buzz that cash game players crave.
Early on Tuesday, the Poker Players Alliance released a statement authored by its chairman, former Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, regarding the unfolding insider-cheating situation at UltimateBet and a similar situation at Absolute Poker that was exposed months earlier. D’Amato’s statement called for a full and public disclosure of the affairs and included a renewed call for the United States to implement a licensing and regulatory framework for online poker to protect American citizens’ interests. D’Amato also noted that the PPA is not a regulatory body per se, but that the unfolding events compelled the organization to make a statement on the matter.
“Trust is paramount in poker,” began the heart of the D’Amato/PPA statement, the complete text of which is available at the pokerplayersalliance.com site. “Sadly, this foundation has been undercut by admissions from two well-known online poker companies, Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet, that cheating has occurred on their poker sites. The Poker Players Alliance condemns any and all cheating in poker no matter the forum in which it is played. Because of the current legal uncertainties and the lack of federal regulation and oversight, it is especially troubling when cheating occurs in online poker. This has created an untenable atmosphere and has denied the proper means to investigate allegations, administer due process and then apply appropriate penalties for the wrongdoers. We urge these companies and their regulating authority, the Kahnawake Gaming Commission, to provide a full and transparent accounting of these breaches of the public trust to help lift the black cloud that has been placed over the industry.”
Read the rest at PokerNews.com
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