Poker Condoms

No one really knew what to think about Kevin Schaffel when he secured himself a spot in the November Nine.

Phil Ivey was already, of course, a known commodity. Jeff Shulman, Eric Buchman, and James Akenhead had previously established themselves in the poker world with some recognizable success. Joe Cada and Antoine Saout seemed like your stereotpypical solid Internet-age players, while Darvin Moon had his common man mystique and Steven Begleiter carried with him his Bear Stearns past.

But Schaffel was initially a mystery to most poker fans. In his early 50s, he is the oldest player at this year’s final table. B (Read the full post about ‘World Series of Poker November Nine Profile — Kevin Schaffel’…)

The Shark is waiting for you at LAPT Playa Conchal.PokerStars released the official schedule for the third season of the Latin American Poker Tour this week and it includes a plan to bring the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure under the LAPT banner.

This season the tour will offer five stops including Costa Rica, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina and the Bahamas.

Easily the biggest poker tour in Latin American, the LAPT has steadily grown since its inception in May of 2008.

Season three of the tour will begin with LAPT Playa Conchal in Costa Rica, which will run Nov. 19-22, 2009.

“In just two seasons, the Latin American Poker Tour has become the biggest poker tour in the region,” said Team PokerStars Pro Humberto Brenes. (Read the full post about ‘PokerStars introduces LAPT Season 3 schedule’…)

‘I am not a professional player, I play for fun.’A French businessman who plays more for the love of the game than the money won himself a PokerStars European Poker Tour title in Warsaw this weekend.

“I think I was lucky today,” said Christophe Benzimra, who beat Italian pro Alfio Battisti heads-up to win the Polish leg of the tour and its almost €360,000 first-place prize.

“I am not a professional player, I play for fun. I really enjoyed it, but I’m not giving up work. I play poker just for the pleasure of it.”
(Read the full post about ‘French businessman wins EPT Warsaw’…)

Phil Laak has won the invitation-only PartyPoker.com World Poker Open V, beating Austrian player Jan Veit and recording one of the biggest cashes of his career.

The final table was a star-studded affair and featured Luke ‘Full_Flush1′ Schwartz, Andy Black, Mike Sexton and Laak’s girlfriend Jennifer Tilly.

Laak’s progress through the tournament was by no means straightforward – he dropped from his starting stack of 300,000 to 187,000 and could have been eliminated by Schwartz when he got it all-in with A-J against A-Q.

(Read the full post about ‘Phil Laak wins World Poker Open V – PartyPoker.com World Poker Open V’…)

The High Heels Poker Tour (HHPT) is inviting male poker players to one of its poker events for the first time in its history. The HPPT will be co-sponsoring the Battle of the Sexes No-Limit Hold’em poker event on October 10th, 2009 that will be held at the Tampa Bay Downs, Florida to benefit the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

A spokesperson for the High Heels Poker Tour said that they are very proud to be able to create a one-of-a kind poker competition to include everyone, male and female poker players since breast cancer is not a gender specific ailment.

The tournament will feature a unique gaming format that has male and female poker players play separately until only five male and five female players remain in contention.

(Read the full post about ‘High Heels Poker Tour Hosts Battle of the Sexes No-Limit Holdem Poker Tournament’…)

‘I have better things to do than worry about what these retards want to think about me.’It wasn’t a cheese and pickle sandwich. It wasn’t egg salad or cucumber either.

If you really want to know what kind of sandwich it was that led to Luke “__FullFlush1__” Schwartz being barred from Grosvenor Casinos in the UK for the second time, he’ll be glad to tell you it was actually smoked salmon.

But the high-stakes London loudmouth, whose reputation for his own personal visceral brand of chat and confrontational attitude may actually exceed that of his considerable poker skill, doesn’t really understand why you want to know.

“There’s like 44 pages on the topic of this sandwich on the forums,” he said. (Read the full post about ‘Fullflush comes clean on ‘Sandwichgate’’…)

Part one of Shaun Dean’s series on extracting maximum value can be found here.

Having looked at the basic techniques for extracting value in part one, this time we are going to look at some specific scenarios. Making the most money when we think we have the best hand doesn’t necessarily mean we are betting every street expecting to be called by a worse hand. Sometimes, slowing down may actually win us more money.

There’s no point in us flopping a monster, then betting for value only to see our opponent insta-fold. We have to weigh up our opponent’s range against board coordination, against our own hand and also against what our opponent thinks we may have. Then

(Read the full post about ‘Make Money From Big Hands II – Maximum Value II | Cash Game Poker Strategy’…)

Online poker room Full Tilt Poker is the subject of another recent lawsuit. The online home of poker pros like Chris Ferguson and Howard Lederer, Full Tilt has been accused of a number of underhanded methods of play, such as using their own poker bots to make slow tables more profitable. Also on the list is the accusation that Full Tilt sponsored pros are using Full Tilt money, which would make the online poker room more of an online casino – which would make it illegal to access in the US state of California, among other places.

Pro H.O.R.S.E.

In the blue corner we have TJ Cloutier, two-time main event runner-up and hall of famer. Cloutier has amassed six WSOP bracelets and around $8m in tournament winnings.

It’s easier to win the lottery these days than it is the main event at the World Series of Poker. It’s still the same format as it was when I first started out – meaning you had to try and beat your own table – but nowadays you have to do it so many times more, and you have to bet the field against the known players. If you took 100 of the best amateurs and pitted them against 100 of the best pros, the pros would win every time.

(Read the full post about ‘Pro vs Pro: H.O.R.S.E.’…)