Casino Planet Cash

When it comes to “legal stuff” and online poker, I never feel entirely comfortable offering my opinions. Or even simply reporting what the hell is going on. I mean, I think I am a decent reader and even once in a while stumble on a good ideer or response to this or that. But when it comes to commenting confidently on this particular subject, my first instinct is usually to try to change it.

The fact is, current state and federal laws regarding online poker/gambling here in the U.S. are ambiguous at best, and the process by which new laws and regulations come to be is often also mysterious for most of us. Rarely does anything seem perfectly clear, and when it does, such moments of clarity are often frustratingly fleeting. There’s always an appeal, it seems. And an appeal of the appeal. And so forth. Never mind “running it twice.” These guys appear willing and able to run it a hundred times if they have to, with the rules changing each time along the way.

This week came a couple of stories regarding some of many ongoing legal machinations, neither of which necessarily offered any further clarity for us on this subject. Or comfort. One was a ruling from the Kentucky Supreme Court on the Commonwealth’s efforts to seize 141 domains hosting online gambling sites. Sounds like that one has turned the other way once again. For now, that is. (It’s always “for now.”)

If you recall, it was back in September 2008 that we first heard that a Circuit Court judge had granted Governor Steve Beshear’s order to “seize” the domains which hosted sites allowing Kentucky residents to gamble online. Seemed like a pretty obvious usurpation of authority, as though somehow Kentucky could rule the entire interwebs and take control of sites according to its own predilections.

A hearing was held the following month, and the Circuit Court ruled in favor of Beshear et al. If the offending domains didn’t start blocking Kentucky from accessing the sites they were hosting within 30 days, the domains would be forfeited to Kentucky. A “forfeiture hearing” was then scheduled, then delayed. Then the case wound up in the court of appeals, where it was determined Kentucky wasn’t king of the internet after all.

The sucker then went to the state’s Supreme Court — an appeal of the appeal — where it has been for the last long while. Finally, this week the Supreme Court ruled that, in fact, the ruling in the Court of Appeals didn’t hold “due to the incapacity of domain names to contest their own seizure.”

In other words, the owners of the domains — who remained “anonymous registrants” and were represented by others — have to come forward and defend themselves (says the Ky. Supreme Court). So the decision in the Court of Appeals has been reversed. (Full decision here.)

The Poker Players Alliance has commented, saying it “understands the technical nature of the decision” made by the Supreme Court, and that it “remains confident that, once that issue is cured, the Supreme Court” will see the light and uphold the previous decision of the Court of Appeals to deny Kentucky the right to seize the domains. I like the choice of metaphor there — what we are looking at here is in fact an illness than needs to be “cured” before we can go forward.

Is this incurable, though? Who knows?

The other item of special note this week concerned House Representative Barney Frank (D-MA) telling PokerNews that he did not anticipate another delay would be granted for implementation of the final regulations of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006.

Another story that sounds, well, a little sick-making.

If you recall, those final regs were set to go into effect on December 1, 2009, but the feds granted six more months to consider other legislation, meaning the current deadline for U.S. banks and financial institutions to start blocking transactions with online gambling sites is now June 1, 2010.

Earlier this year, Rep. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) — one of the first authors of the legislation that ultimately became the UIGEA — decided to use his standing in the Senate to start blocking the President’s nominees to fill positions in the Treasury Department. Frank told PokerNews that Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner has said he wouldn’t allow any further delays specifically because of Kyl’s tactics.

Frank remains confident, however, that even after compliance with the UIGEA becomes mandatory in June, its standing will be tenuous. “Once it goes into effect, banks are going to raise hell,” he told PN, anticipating the banks’ subsequent complaints will lead to the UIGEA’s repeal.

As I have written about numerous times here, even if the UIGEA is an ambiguous, murky law that probably couldn’t hold up to any court challenges, its going into effect is nevertheless going to have consequences on U.S. players of online poker, knocking many out of the game due to increased difficulties getting money onto the sites.

When I appeared on Lou Krieger’s “Keep Flopping Aces” podcast last month, he asked me what I thought would happen with regard to the UIGEA during 2010. I told him my sense was that I did not feel very confident that it would be repealed this year, nor did I think any other legislation would likely be passed.

By way of explanation, I said hoping for either a repeal or the passage of new legislation was sort of like pulling for a poor player in a poker tourney to win. He’d need a lot of breaks just to reach the final table, then still more examples of good timing and fortuitous cards to win in the end.

Of course, using that analogy served a particular purpose for me — it enabled me to avoid speaking more particularly about things about which I have little clue.

In fact, I suspect most of us are essentially short-stacked when challenged to understand “legal stuff” and online poker.

A new issue of Bluff Magazine arrived in my mailbox this week (March 2010), containing an article by Mike Caro in which he shares what he calls “My Least Popular Poker Opinions.” As we all know, Caro has had a lot of opinions over the years regarding not just poker strategy, but the rules and functioning of the game, too. And being the iconoclast he is, his ideas generally tend to illustrate genuine attempts at rethinking traditional approaches — one reason why I always find Caro one of the more interesting poker writers.

One of the ideas Caro briefly discusses in the article was his campaign back in the 1990s to introduce a four-color deck — i.e., a deck featuring blue diamonds and green clubs to go along with the red hearts and black spades. The piece notes how players immediately objected to the attempted innovation, thus forcing him to add it to his list of “failed” ideas.

The story of Caro’s campaign has been told many times in many places over the years. Apparently it was at the World Poker Finals at Foxwoods in 1992 that Caro first successfully persuaded tourney organizers to employ the four-color deck, the colors of which had been determined following a vote among students at one of his seminars. Incidentally, Caro has insisted that he didn’t “invent” the four-color deck — in fact, he believes the two-color deck was itself an “innovation” of sorts, borne from a desire to save money on printing costs.

In any event, the new deck was not appreciated at Foxwoods, partly due to the fact that the colors hadn’t been properly shaded, causing some confusion to go along with the general opposition to change. By the second day of the tourney, the decks were removed and the traditional two-color decks restored.

In the Bluff piece, Caro makes reference to a later attempt to introduce the four-color deck, a story that Diane McHaffie describes in more detail in a 2006 article in Poker Player Magazine. There McHaffie tells how Caro tried once more to introduce the four-color deck in early 1995, getting 65 different cardrooms to employ the decks on a single day — dubbed “C-Day” (or “Color Day”) by the Mad Genius of Poker.

“Although most players seemed impressed,” writes McHaffie, “some were indifferent and then there were those who voiced their discontent rather loudly.” And, in predictable fashion, losing players “took this opportunity to blame their misfortune on the color change” of the decks.

McHaffie quotes Caro explaining how he’d “spent years lobbying, cajoling, and publicizing an event [C-Day] that was intended to change the very nature of playing cards forever and it just resulted in two hours of agony.” The decks were thrown out, and thus ended the experiment. In live poker, anyway. Online poker — which allows players to modify the playing experience individually in numerous ways — makes the four-color deck an option which I would venture to guess most players choose to take.

I have trouble coming up with a good reason not to use four-color decks in live play, though I assume some have objections that go beyond the uncritical appeal to tradition. I suppose one could argue that poker is a game that rewards attention to detail, and thus requiring players to make the extra mental effort of distinguishing hearts from diamonds and clubs from spades is yet another way to test that skill. Then again, one could find ways to make the cards even more difficult to read (remember those “Poker Peek” cards from the 2007 WSOP?), providing an even greater challenge — something no one could rationally argue for, I wouldn’t think.

Printing costs probably remain a factor here, although probably less a factor than in the past. So what other reasons might there be not to use the four-color deck?

Earlier this week I had an opportunity to attend a talk by Gloria Steinem, the feminist and political activist whose name is synonymous with the women’s liberation movement of the ’60s and ’70s.

Younger folks don’t necessarily recognize Steinem’s name or her once iconic cultural status the way those of us of a certain age do. Ask those who were around a few decades back, and we’ll instantly associate Steinem with women’s lib, Ms. Magazine (which she founded in the early ’70s), N.O.W. (the National Organization of Women), her support of “reproductive freedom,” and the (ultimately unsuccessful) fight for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.

The talk was thought-provoking. Actually Steinem herself was suffering from laryngitis and so a younger woman delivered the speech while Steinem (now in her 70s) sat next to the podium. There were a few observations made in the lecture regarding cultural attitudes toward the older generation — thus did those points about ageism sound a little funny being delivered by a woman in her 20s. Steinem did step up to the mic for the Q&A afterwards, though, and gamely answered questions for at least half an hour despite her ailment. In both the lecture and her answers to questions, Steinem was highly engaging, witty, smart, and even occasionally inspiring.

Steinem is a controversial figure, of course, who has been and who continues to be opposed by many for her views. Not being fully acquainted with all of her writings or positions, I’m not ready to endorse her without qualification, although I will say I respond well to her general message to avoid prejudging people on the basis of categories like sex, race, class, age, or faith.

Listening to Steinem got me thinking a bit about that piece I wrote recently for Woman Poker Player. I mentioned last week how I’d written half of a “He Said/She Said” column with Jennifer Newell in which we discussed the issue of women and online poker site sponsorships. I believe the plan is to write more of those columns going forward. Here are links to those again — He Said: Women and Sponsorships / She Said: Women and Sponsorships.

Writing that caused me to think more specifically about stereotyping in poker — both in terms of the way men and women poker players are differently treated and judged in the media (and thus in the sometimes mysterious world of online site sponsorships) as well as how a person’s sex potentially is given a certain significance at the poker table. Indeed, while many of us instinctively resist stereotyping others — or at least try not to and/or are aware that it is wrong to do so — at the poker table such stereotyping is not only understood as acceptable but some would argue essential.

Those who play a lot of live poker develop certain ideas about, say, women players, or those of a certain race or ethnicity, or older people, and so forth. Such ideas are difficult to resist, and in some cases prove useful when up against a new opponent for whom one has little or no information about his or her playing style.

When this topic comes up, I can’t help but think about a book like Play Poker, Quit Work and Sleep Till Noon! by John Fox, originally published in 1977, in which Fox includes a chapter early on about game selection. (Click here for more about this historically significant poker book.) Amid his advice about picking tables at which to play, Fox unashamedly delivers his “general rules for identifying weak players,” many of which involve stereotyping.

In the list of “desirable opponents” that comes at the end of the chapter, Fox includes some benign-sounding categories like “drinkers,” “nervous opponents,” and “players who expose cards.” However, many of his categories directly evoke — in a decidedly pre-PC way — the categories of sex, race, class, age, and even faith as useful indicators. Thus does his list include “rich people,” “young players,” “people displaying religious symbols,” and “ghetto residents.” And women? Important enough to list twice, with both “beautiful women” and “women in general” being desirable opponents for Fox.

Times change, and the significance of these categories evolve. Seems to me, though, that while we might think differently today about categories like sex, race, class, age, or faith, thereby assigning each different meanings to them than we might have back in the ’70s or earlier, we humans still nevertheless find it hard to resist prejudging others, with our prejudgments often affected by whatever ideas we possess about these categories.

Away from the poker table, many of us make a conscious effort to resist such stereotyping. However, at the poker table — where we meet strangers in order to compete with them — it’s a different story.

Earlier this week I had an opportunity to attend a talk by Gloria Steinem, the feminist and political activist whose name is synonymous with the women’s liberation movement of the ’60s and ’70s.

Younger folks don’t necessarily recognize Steinem’s name or her once iconic cultural status the way those of us of a certain age do. Ask those who were around a few decades back, and we’ll instantly associate Steinem with women’s lib, Ms. Magazine (which she founded in the early ’70s), N.O.W. (the National Organization of Women), her support of “reproductive freedom,” and the (ultimately unsuccessful) fight for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.

The talk was thought-provoking. Actually Steinem herself was suffering from laryngitis and so a younger woman delivered the speech while Steinem (now in her 70s) sat next to the podium. There were a few observations made in the lecture regarding cultural attitudes toward the older generation — thus did those points about ageism sound a little funny being delivered by a woman in her 20s. Steinem did step up to the mic for the Q&A afterwards, though, and gamely answered questions for at least half an hour despite her ailment. In both the lecture and her answers to questions, Steinem was highly engaging, witty, smart, and even occasionally inspiring.

Steinem is a controversial figure, of course, who has been and who continues to be opposed by many for her views. Not being fully acquainted with all of her writings or positions, I’m not ready to endorse her without qualification, although I will say I respond well to her general message to avoid prejudging people on the basis of categories like sex, race, class, age, or faith.

Listening to Steinem got me thinking a bit about that piece I wrote recently for Woman Poker Player. I mentioned last week how I’d written half of a “He Said/She Said” column with Jennifer Newell in which we discussed the issue of women and online poker site sponsorships. I believe the plan is to write more of those columns going forward. Here are links to those again — He Said: Women and Sponsorships / She Said: Women and Sponsorships.

Writing that caused me to think more specifically about stereotyping in poker — both in terms of the way men and women poker players are differently treated and judged in the media (and thus in the sometimes mysterious world of online site sponsorships) as well as how a person’s sex potentially is given a certain significance at the poker table. Indeed, while many of us instinctively resist stereotyping others — or at least try not to and/or are aware that it is wrong to do so — at the poker table such stereotyping is not only understood as acceptable but some would argue essential.

Those who play a lot of live poker develop certain ideas about, say, women players, or those of a certain race or ethnicity, or older people, and so forth. Such ideas are difficult to resist, and in some cases prove useful when up against a new opponent for whom one has little or no information about his or her playing style.

When this topic comes up, I can’t help but think about a book like Play Poker, Quit Work and Sleep Till Noon! by John Fox, originally published in 1977, in which Fox includes a chapter early on about game selection. (Click here for more about this historically significant poker book.) Amid his advice about picking tables at which to play, Fox unashamedly delivers his “general rules for identifying weak players,” many of which involve stereotyping.

In the list of “desirable opponents” that comes at the end of the chapter, Fox includes some benign-sounding categories like “drinkers,” “nervous opponents,” and “players who expose cards.” However, many of his categories directly evoke — in a decidedly pre-PC way — the categories of sex, race, class, age, and even faith as useful indicators. Thus does his list include “rich people,” “young players,” “people displaying religious symbols,” and “ghetto residents.” And women? Important enough to list twice, with both “beautiful women” and “women in general” being desirable opponents for Fox.

Times change, and the significance of these categories evolve. Seems to me, though, that while we might think differently today about categories like sex, race, class, age, or faith, thereby assigning each different meanings to them than we might have back in the ’70s or earlier, we humans still nevertheless find it hard to resist prejudging others, with our prejudgments often affected by whatever ideas we possess about these categories.

Away from the poker table, many of us make a conscious effort to resist such stereotyping. However, at the poker table — where we meet strangers in order to compete with them — it’s a different story.

Eighty-two players sat down on Sunday 28th February to compete in Betfair’s popular Sunday night Flagship tournament - the $40k GTD.

Among the regulars was Betfair Pro John Kunkuwap Tabatabai but it was the inventively named HAHA U SUCK who took down the tournament shortly after midnight after a short heads-up battle with schapp.

Was a busy end of February here at Hard-Boiled Poker, highlighted by that trip to help cover the NAPT Venetian. Spent the weekend catching up on various things, including reading through emails and listening to a few poker podcasts.

Among the latter was that highly disappointing 2/25/10 episode of PokerRoad Radio in which the “B-Team” (Jimmy Fricke, Bryan Devonshire, and Court Harrington) kicked off the show by offering a mostly misleading, unfocused criticism of some of the reporting done from the NAPT Venetian.

Am not gonna rehearse all of the details of what was said, nor explain the obvious irony of trying to support a charge of unprofessionalism with misquotes, misattributions, and profanity. (Also, I’m probably a little too close to the situation here to be entirely objective about it, anyway.) Read here for details, and see the comments, too, for further reaction/apologies/etc.

Speaking of misfires, there was another one among the items I found when going back through my email box. Again, others have commented on this one at length and so I’m not planning to do much more than just mention it here — that recent “special invite” to bloggers from PokerStars to write some posts about the upcoming Spring Championship of Online Poker in exchange for a ticket to play in an event. (By the way, click here to see the newly-revised schedule of SCOOP events, which takes place May 2-16.)

I’d noticed this email in passing last week, but only read it more carefully after the Poker Grump told me more about it when I saw him at the Venetian. The title of the Grump’s explanation and response — “Thanks but no thanks” — gives an idea of what he thinks of the promotion. Readers of this blog have no doubt already read the reactions of other poker bloggers, too, to the invitation to write not one but five separate posts containing particular phrases (with links) in return for a $22 SCOOP ticket.

Most of those who have written about the offer appear to have concluded the invite didn’t seem to represent a fair exchange — i.e., less than $5 per post (and we’re not even talking about actual money, but a non-transferable tourney ticket). Some additionally pointed out how the offer implies a kind of disregard for poker blogs’ editorial integrity — as though these were just so many words fired off into the intertubes, the primary purpose of which is to affect search engines or attract click-throughs and not to communicate actual thoughts or ideas.

Again, as with the PokerRoad incident, my instinct here is both to be disappointed and to recognize that having come into the debate a little late, I’m not seeing a lot of point in participating further in the piling on.

There is one common theme in both items, though, that might be worth pointing out. Something to do with that weird disconnect that occurs when people communicate online — via blogs, emails, podcasts, news sites, what have you. This is going to be hard to put into words, I think, but I’ll try nonetheless.

When we read or hear something online, it often seems like it takes a conscious, extra effort to appreciate the “reality” of the person communicating those words and ideas. That is to say, our instinctive response is not the same as occurs in more direct forms of interaction, but rather to take what we are reading or hearing as the product of a “persona” or “character” or something not necessarily fully human but mediated in some fashion that necessarily affects how we react.

I fully realize, by the way, that I am trying to communicate this idea to you via a persona (Shamus). Bear with me, though, and believe that what I’m saying represents a real idea thought up by a real human being.

Because of this “ethos displacement effect” or whatever you want to call it, people are much more willing to criticize or fail to appreciate the significance of a real live human “author” whose thoughts and ideas are represented by the words. The same effect tends to fuel the flame wars in forums, or cause chat box crack-ups. Not believing you’re communicating with a real live human tends to lessen the urgency to be humane.

Seems to me both of the examples of less-than-ideal-communication listed above could be said to have demonstratd this phenomenon in different ways.

Lou Krieger is one of the most prolific and well-regarded poker authors around, having written or co-written 11 different books on poker and gambling as well as numerous columns for various publications over the last two decades. Krieger is also the editor of Poker Player Newspaper and hosts a weekly podcast called “Keep Flopping Aces.”

Given his authorship of so many poker titles and his familiarity with the publishing industry, I thought Krieger would be an interesting person to talk to about the current status of poker books and how that status may have changed over the years. We ended up discussing a number of topics when I appeared on his podcast recently, but I’d like to share with you some excerpts from the part of our discussion that specifically dealt with poker books and publishing.

I began my questions of Krieger with one about an ad for an online poker site I recently saw that had something to say about poker books.

Short-Stacked Shamus: In the latest issue of Bluff Magazine one finds an ad for Full Tilt Poker. On the left-hand side of the ad there is a stack of books with the following written over them: “Books can tell you about the strategies, the common scenarios, the mathematics, odds and proven methods, and all the ways you are supposed to play the game.” Then over on the right one sees a photo of Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, next to whom is written “But books don’t play poker.”

As someone who has written a lot of poker strategy books and has thought a lot about the purposes they serve, how do you respond to the ideas present in an ad like that?

Lou Krieger: First of all, I think it’s a good ad, because it’s compelling.

SSS: Yes, it is.

LK: Secondly, I think where it sort of leads you astray is that yes, you know, [the ad is right to say that] books can tell you things but they don’t play poker… they certainly don’t play poker at the level of Chris Ferguson. Anybody who thinks that his book will make somebody a poker player of the ability of Chris Ferguson is absolutely mad. It will not.

For me, I consciously said to myself when I sat down to write my books, “Who am I writing for? What’s the audience?” I have always written pretty much for the beginning and moderate poker player because that audience is infinitely larger than a book I could write that will be helpful to somebody at Ferguson’s level.

SSS: I guess in terms of achieving the widest possible audience, too, you might write a very useful and interesting book to the more experienced player, but you’re destined to sell fewer copies of a book like that.

LK: Yes, absolutely. And that’s the truth of almost any how-to book that you can imagine. All of the books on how to improve your golf or how to play tennis, they’re not aimed at the pros. They are aimed at the players of limited ability like the vast majority of us are who are going to go out and buy those books.

SSS: You’ve written 11 books. The first one was Hold’em Excellence, yes?

LK: Right. That was written in 1995, I believe. Way before the poker boom started… it was a totally different universe.

I wrote Hold’em Excellence and More Hold’em Excellence, which was the follow up to it. Then I had a proposal to do Poker for Dummies. I really wanted to do a “For Dummies” book because I thought that, you know, there’s a book that’s a brand, and if I do a “For Dummies” poker book it really legitimizes me in terms of being a good poker writer and in the marketplace, because it’s a big huge publisher and not a small self-published book.

[So I did] Poker for Dummies [with Richard D. Harroch], then the poker boom hit. It sounds like the dark ages, but it was less than a decade ago. Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker, and every publisher and his brother wanted a poker book written.

Since I already had books out and I’d written a “For Dummies” book I was a known quantity so they called me. I wound up writing about five or six books in four years. It was just nonstop writing, and I knew that I might as well do it now because this poker boom is going to be like hula hoops… it ain’t lasting forever. So as long as they’re sending me advances and asking me to write a book for them, I might as well say yes. And so I kept writing books. I think one year I had four books come out, which is just insane.

SSS: Tell me about your motives for writing poker books.

LK: I think the motivation for writing is twofold. Number one is I like to write. So I enjoy writing. And [number two,] the process of writing, of having to put words on paper, forces you to clarify your thoughts. You can’t be ambivalent. You can’t believe it’s one way on Tuesday and another way on Wednesday. You have to take a position about something. You have to offer advice that’s clear, concise, works, and holds up, so you have to think it through.

As a result, the act of writing, like the act of teaching… the person that often gets the most out of it is the writer or teacher himself. I’ve learned more from writing books than I could have gotten any other way I can think of.

SSS: So how has the poker publishing world changed from before the poker boom to after?

LK: [With those pre-boom titles] there was some [degree] of the market crying for [them]. Unfortunately that’s not the case anymore. The market for poker books is pretty swamped. And during that same time [i.e., the mid-90s to today] the publishing industry at large has been undergoing incredible changes, shrinking and collapsing, etc. So you have that happening.

SSS: How about the very recent past — the last year or two. It seems as if in the industry there is less buzz now about books. I’m really just speaking of the last year, maybe two years…. There is so much more to compete with books today. If you’re a poker player and you want information, you can go online, you can go to the forums, you can go to training sites or forums… there are a lot more exciting ways to get that information than from books.

LK: There’s also that phenomenon of how publishers are a lot more risk averse than they used to be. It used to be that 10-15 years ago they would take chances on a book if they liked it, if it was literate, if it had something going for it, whereas now they are looking for pretty much sure things…. More and more publishers are looking for “me too” kinds of books, whatever the subject matter is. And the general thinking in the publishing industry is that poker, at least for right now, has pretty much played out as an interesting topic for a book….

[You could say] the publishing industry is hunkering down. They are getting very conservative about what they release, and they’re unwilling to take risks. They are only playing aces and kings. Whereas in the past they would take a flyer on a nine-eight suited.

SSS: Yeah, that’s right.

LK: You know what’s a very interesting phenomenon… when we talk about poker books being played out, we’re really talking about hold’em books being overdone. Nobody’s writing about the other forms of poker. In fact, Mark Tenner, who came in second in last year’s WSOP Omaha/8 event, he and I wrote a book called Winning Omaha/8 Poker in 2003. And we are in the process now of doing a second edition, adding a substantial amount of new material.

But in the seven years since this book has come out there’s not been another book written about Omaha. There have been a gazillion books written about hold’em, and Omaha at one time was called the game of the future. Yes, there’s been one or two PLO books written…

SSS: Yes, Jeff Hwang has written a couple of PLO books that I like a lot. [Note: Hwang's first Omaha book, Pot-Limit Omaha Poker, does contain a section devoted to Omaha/8.] There probably is an Omaha/8 book [written since 2003] somewhere, but you guys are pretty much alone on the shelf there.

LK: Yeah, and so we’re going to come out with a second edition. The publisher says he’s getting interest from some people who want a new one, so we’ll see what happens. But when we talk about the poker book business we’re really talking about the no-limit Texas hold’em book business.

Much thanks to Lou Krieger for taking the time. If you are interested in hearing the full interview — as well as Krieger asking me questions about my background and poker writing — you can download and listen to the archived episode of “Keep Flopping Aces” over on the Rounders Radio site. Also, for more information about Krieger, his blog, and his books (including ways to order), visit his website at LouKrieger.com.

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Full Tilt Poker and Karma Foundation are teaming up to present the annual Kandy Masquerade. Known for its seduction and mystery, Kandy Masquerade will take place on Saturday, February 27th, at 8:0 PM at the world famous Playboy Mansion.

The Kandy Masquerade will provide toiling L.A. Poker Classic poker players an opportunity to take a break from this season’s longest running tournament. To accommodate players attending Kandy Masquerade, LAPC tournament director Matt Savage has slated an 8:00 PM break on Day 2 of the main event.

In addition of all the excitement and poker event, the party will feature live music by World renowned DJ’s DJ MisterE and Paul Oakenfold. All proceeds from this event will benefit the Nevada Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Kandy events are synonymous for sexy themes, great entertainment, exquisite décor, and best of all, lots of beautiful women clad with only masks and intimate lingerie partying and dancing with gentlemen masked in dark clad attire, reminiscent of a Venetian Carnival. Dress code requires men to wear masks and black attire.

Tickets are $1,000 in advance. The price includes admission, complimentary parking at the Roosevelt Hotel, shuttle to the Playboy Mansion, heavy hors d’ oeuvres, dinner, dessert, open premium bars, and live entertainment.

Discuss this article in our forum

World leading online poker site FullTiltPoker.com, is offering a new $50 bonus to all its players to celebrate the arrival of Full Tilt Poker’s revolutionary new poker format: Rush Poker.

Full Tilt’s “Rush Poker”is an innovative poker concept designed to minimize wait time between hands and keep players in the action at all times, Rush Poker has set the online poker world on fire since its launch in January.

Compared with the standard ring games offered by many online poker sites, players are dealt up to four times more hands per hour in Rush Poker, making it the perfect game for players looking to earn the necessary Full Tilt Points to convert their bonus money into real cash.

Players have until 23:59 ET on March 14th to accept their Fast $50 bonus offer. Players who have made a real-money deposit at FullTilt.com and have no active bonus on the site can accept their Fast $50 bonus offer immediately. All other players have until 23:59 ET on March 10th to make their first deposit and finish any active bonus, at which time they’ll receive a Fast $50 bonus offer. To see if you have an active bonus, go to the Cashier in the Full Tilt game lobby, then click the Bonus Account button.

How to Accept Your Fast $50 Bonus Offer:

To accept your Fast $50 bonus offer, simply open the Full Tilt Poker game software and log in. Click on the Requests menu at the top of the lobby. Select Check my Bonus Offer, a window with your bonus offer will then pop up. Click Accept Offer to activate your bonus.

For more information on the Fast $50 bonus, please visit http://www.fulltiltpoker.com/fast-50.
To learn more about Rush Poker,  go to http://www.fulltiltpoker.com/rush-poker.

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