Poker and gambling

6 Weeks Ago  T-42 days It’s my dream.     Sarah needed to go see her elder grandmother and she gave me a pass to go play poker in Atlantic City for 3 days.  I’ve logged enough time in the Tropicana poker room under my Poker Card that I now can call and get a room…

The robberies on these games started a few months ago, right after it started to become normal to have Fairfax County bust the games themselves. I find it ironic that the District of Columbia regards private poker games as legal.  I’ve got to look into that. 🙂 In the meantime, you’ll see me in Atlantic…

So I’ve been planning a trip to the World Series Of Poker this year.  Not because I think I can win an event, since I’m way outclassed.  I’m treating it more like Poker Fantasy Camp.  I’m going to pay a bunch of money to play with really good professionals and learn something while getting my…

So I’ve been perusing the World Series of Poker schedule for 2006 and have noticed there’s something fascinating.  There are low cost tournaments at both ends of the month of poker.  I was going to go for a week and was thinking I would go from June 25th through July 2nd.  I figured I’d play…

Over the last two years I have had several near misses with illegal poker games.  Two illegal home games I played in regularly were raided, and a third one I played in whenever I was in New York was raided as a part of the latest crackdown.  In one case I simply decided not to…

If you didn’t see the 60 Minutes piece last night about online gambling, you missed one of the best spokespeople for the industry around.  Nigel Payne, who runs UK-based SportingBet.com, practically begged the US to regulate them so he could pay taxes and help legitimize the industry.  It certainly what you expect to hear from a business owner, but it makes sense.

After Katie’s $7,000 win, her urgings to me to play the $50,000 guaranteed tourney on the site with the awful players seemed like good advice.   Katie, I, and 735 others sat down this past Sunday and played no limit Hold’em.   Throughout the tournament we were never at the same table, but instant messaged constantly, talking about the general mood of the players, and when the blinds were getting too expensive to just sit back and wait for cards.  For the most of the tourney our stacks were almost exactly the same.

I’ve been hanging around the lower limits of Omaha 8 or better for several months now.  I play best at a full ring, and so I’ve been sticking to 9 and 10 handed table as much as I can.  I finally moved up to $5/$10 limits.  This means that the early bets are all $5 each, and the later bets are all $10 each.  The most I can lose in a single hand, if I bet like an idiot and had someone else betting with me, would be $120.

Thomas ‘Thunder’ Keller is a young player who won a World Series of Poker event this year only days after getting married.  He interviews his wife on what it’s like ot be married to a professional poker player in this two part series.  My favorite quote: When you go through big swings, I go through…