Poker Under Siege in Kiev, Ukraine

Poker got caught up in the violent events in Kiev during Day 2 of RPT 5th Anniversary Tournament. The last tweet from Russian Poker Tour was sent at 5:05 PM, Feb 18th and ran: "Dear Players! We strongly urge you to refrain from coming to the Khreshchatyk Club until further notice."

The Fifth Anniversary Russian Poker Tour Tournament kicked off on February 17th in what some have argued to be an unwisely chosen location - the Khreshchatyk Club in the very heart of the Ukraine capital, Kiev (RPT has to be conducted in neighboring countries due to Russian legislative restrictions).

In fact, in what was a very difficult decision for the organizers, just one week before the scheduled Day 1, the tournament start date was moved from Feb. 1st to Feb. 17th, on account of the escalating tension and clashes in Kiev between pro-European Union protesters and the police.

Though it seemed for a while that the situation was improving, hopes for a safe and untroubled poker event were dashed yesterday with the latest outburst of violence. Tuesday is now called ‘the nation’s bloodiest day’, with the death toll rising to at least 25 and 250 injured.

Photo: Efrem Lukatsky, AP

With the explosion of violence, the 150 players who had come to the Kreschatyk Club for RPT Day 2 were locked inside the premises and noone was allowed to leave or enter.

PokerNews reported yesterday:

"We are in a very bad situation right now. Not only for the Russian Poker Tour, but for the whole Ukraine", tournament director Oleg Udovenko told PokerNews, confirming that around 150 players are now locked in the Khreschatyk Club, right in the heart of Kiev.

"There is not much we can do now," added Udovenko. "We can just wait and try our best to keep people as calm as possible. Even if the mood in here is not very good. People are trying to keep playing poker. We have shut all doors, and we are not allowing anyone to come in or to leave the club. Luckily, we have still enough water for everyone."

 "We will not go anywhere from here," Vitali Klitschko, opposition leader and former heavyweight boxing champion, told the crowd, speaking from a stage in the square as tents and tires burned around him, releasing huge plumes of smoke. "This is an island of freedom and we will defend it," he said.

The tournament will most likely be postponed or moved to a safer location far from the violent clashes in the city center. Regretfully, the Ukrainian protesters do not have recourse to either postponement or safe havens…

New Jersey Gambling Data Points to Complementarity Rather than Cannibalization

The two biggest land-based casino operators in New Jersey - Ceasars and the Borgata - are also the most successful in the online gaming market and are in the best position to dispell the cannibalization fears spurred on by Sheldon Adelson's campaign against Internet gambling.

In its public messages, Sheldon Adelson’s Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling has been playing on some of the worst fears and concerns of Americans. The communications are executed in the best prohibition-era or totalitarian-propaganda style and the regulation of online gambling is compared to allowing heroin use or giving free rein to terrorism. Regulated online gambling would allegedly facilitate money-laundering and serve the interests of organized crime, all at at the expense of the young, the poor, and the elderly.

The messages of the Coalition to Stop Internet are reminiscent of the prohibition campaign

Albeit in a low-key manner, one argument that is always present - and which some suspect is central to Adelson’s own motivation - is that Internet gambling “destroys jobs” and would have a devastating effect on the 300,000 Americans working in the casino industry. Never mind that this is refuted by statistics and research in the European countries where online gambling has been regulated for many years.

"The online gaming sector is growing but its growth is not taking place at the detriment of the land based sector." http://www.egba.eu/pdf/EGBA_FS_MarketReality.pdf

Fortunately America now has its own data-generating test markets for regulated online gambling and poker in particular. New Jersey is very valuable in this respect with the - lucrative! - involvement of the major brick-and-mortar casinos - Ceasars and the Borgata. Because of the short time period, the body of evidence may as yet be too thin to convince the opponents of regulation but the data confirm the very different product and player profiles for online and land-based gambling.

Keith Smith, president and CEO of #BoydGaming (the company that operates the #Borgata and shares ownership with #MGM) recently commented on Borgata’s market-leading figures in New Jersey:

“These results also once again demonstrate online gaming’s potential to expand our business. Online gaming is growing our database, creating a long-term opportunity to market Borgata to an entirely new group of customers.”

Borgata COO Tom Ballance confirms Internet gambling is not a threat to land-based casinos. "When we match up databases, the great majority of players who were playing online have not been to Borgata in well over a year. And the vast majority have made fewer than two trips in the past year. So it's a different customer."

Out of the Online Jungle - Daniel Cates Bursts Onto the Live Poker Scene

@Daniel Cates won the WPT #Alpha8Johannesburg on Sunday, Feb. 16, against eight other top players, including @Phil Ivey and @Erik Seidel. This is his first major title from a live event and probably heralds many more to come.

Daniel Cates‏@junglemandan Going to south africa soon to test my tournament luck... and also get in touch with my jungle side

This is what Daniel tweeted on February 2nd and Africa certainly drew out the best of his 'jungle side'. His tournament luck stood the test and won him $ 500,000.

Daniel was born in 1989, started playing poker in home games in his teens and by the age of 18 had become hooked on online poker, giving up his earlier addiction to the Command & Conquer video game. He learned fast, worked hard, dropped out of college to pursue poker full-time and did not have to wait long for success. In 2010 #jungleman12 was online poker’s biggest winner.

Photo credit: Christopher Morris for The New York Times, 2011

Also in 2010 he accepted the famous Durrrr Challenge - an online match consisting of 50,000 heads-up poker hands. At the time of #BlackFriday and the Full Tilt Poker shutdown, when the challenge was temporarily postponed, Cates was leading the match against Dwan. It is still unclear how - and if - it will be settled.

Though badly hit by Black Friday and with a lot of money locked up in Full Tilt, jungleman12 continued his successful career and is considered by many the best online heads-up player around.

Cates conducts a Heads-Up Strategy Seminar, 2013

Meanwhile the lure of live poker seems to have taken hold at some point and Daniel Cates ventured into the real world, registering several ITM in 2012-2013.

In an extensive interview for New York Times Magazine, in 2011, Daniel talked about the “balance of life” he wished to achieve and what it might mean:

“I don’t know. Exercise. Girls. Basically, I need to figure out how to be Daniel and not jungleman. If you draw a Venn diagram of Daniel and jungleman, you’ll see that jungleman is completely encapsulated within Daniel, but he isn’t actually Daniel. This hurts me when I meet people, because all they see is jungleman and not me. I become aloof to them. If I can achieve a balance of life and allow a balanced Daniel to shrink jungleman, I should have more success in my human interactions.”

Well, his victory in Johanessburg seems to be a sign that jungleman is indeed ‘shrinking’ and Daniel is about to master another ‘level’ in poker and in the game of life in general - one where social skills and human interaction count as much as the lightning-fast reactions and decisions in online multitabling.

The Cover Girls of Poker - Liv Boeree

Splash Your Bitcoins

With the cryptocurrency being all over the media since a few months, it is no surprise to learn that it'd been endorsed by the tech savvy poker community a long time ago.

I must say I've been into Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for a while now. I've used it for online games (Linden dollars, ever heard about that?), or for more urgent and meaningful reasons. It proved the eprfect tool while raising funds for NGOs in troubled countries and sending funds to some IT freelancers in developping areas while avoiding Western Union ruinous fees. I've bought Bitcoins at a 2$ rate, sold some at 120$, and the (very) few ones I've been able to keep since are cherished and well preserved. So would I use these for playing poker online? Well...

After Black Friday, there were few alternatives left for US players to join online cash games. Bitcoins (now known as BTC) then raised a few eyebrows - and little interest at first - in the poker community with innovative features allowing easy and fast deposits and cashouts, but were shortly fully adopted by a growing part of the community.

It is an urban legend that BTC are fully anonymous - it’s a bit more complicated not to be traceable on the web - but this modern tale proved to be very attractive for many poker players around the world in search (for whatever reasons) of privacy, and also allowed a few US players not to have to move to cope with the canadian Winter.

Since then, BTC value has been hurled through the roof by a goldrush-like craze during 2013, making it almost a gamble in itself to keep your bankroll in this currency - a thing poker players can take easily. And it proved to be a winning one for early entrants: an e-wallet with about 100BTC (about 1300$) early January could have offered a six digit sum if cashed out late November. Since then volatility and lawmakers (especially in China) have tamed down a bit the hopes of many investors, but the regular use of the currency hasn’t been slowing at all.

Satoschi Poker and Seals With Clubs are the two main operators of the moment with several hundred players live online. Expect downsides with software glitches and bugs being too often reported, plus poor customer support and clumsy cashout management. Mind, not a very different experience from the other small online cardrooms. Though no FBI raid and shutdown are to be expected anytime soon, things remain fragile.

Many BTC poker sites have come and go along the years, some of them being scams or having been hacked. At the time this article was written, Seals With Clubs website was down and its user database hacked a few weeks earlier, a classic on commercial website accepting bitcoins. Satochi seems to be the one standing best the test of time and hackers exploits, but for how long. Best advice is to stick to the most well-known operators and listen to the community.

As an online player, there are for now no known risks others than being scammed by playing with Bitcoins, as most countries still have no legal framework on the matter and no proper tax regulation as well. BTC commercial use is still an adventure, so to join in and help can be as much fun as winning a few bucks more at poker.

So: would I risk my beloved Bitcoins on offshore poker operators websites? Probably not. Would I choose to cashout my winnings on a regular online poker room were the option be offered? Definitely (though I would even prefer physical gold, but it's another story). That is the next big step for the BTC community in order to convert newcomers in the safest and most straightforward mode.

Resources: PokerNews Guide To Bitcoin, Pt1, Pt2, Pt3

The Propositions They Just Couldn’t Refuse - Poker Pros and Food Prop Bets

Pro players love to engage in #PropBets to take their minds off the game but still keep the adrenaline rushing in their system. Many of those wagers come about  at the poker table and unsurprisingly involve food.

One of the most famous prop bets is @Mike Matusow’s weight loss wager with @Ted Forrest back in 2007-2008. Matusow had exactly one year to get down from 241 lb (127 kg) to his high-school years weight of 181 lb (82 kg) and stood to win $ 100,000 if he managed the feat.

19 days before the deadline Matusow only had 8 more pounds to lose but was booked to go on a cruise with his girlfriend and knew this was going to ruin his strict diet. Ted Forrest refused to settle for 70,000 and after the 7-day cruise, Matusow had indeed gained seven pounds and now had 9 days to lose 15 lb.

“I didn’t eat for the last five days, did a master cleanse and spent time in the Jacuzzi. It was sheer torture. But I did it. I got down to 179.”

As so often happens, the tables were turned some time later and Forrest won $ 2 million from Matusow when he managed to get his weight down from 188 to 138 pounds (85 to 62 kg, respectively) in two months.

Ted Forrest before and after his $2 million weight-loss bet with Matusow.

@Howard Lederer  once broke his strict vegetarian diet and had a cheeseburger that won him $ 10,000 in a bet with @David Grey. He offered Grey the chance to get even by eating an olive, but Grey hated olives so much he declined.

In another well-known high-roller prop bet of 2010, @Tom Dwan  agreed to pay @Phil Ivey  $1 million if he stayed off meat for one full year. Ten days later they settled amicably with Ivey paying $ 150,000.

Since so many of the prop bets revolve around food and quite a few have had successful weight-loss outcomes, it makes you wonder if diet experts might have some lesson to learn from the poker table… (Perhaps some kind member of the RankingHero community might dare me to lose a few pounds to see if the gambler in me will prevail over the glutton?..)

More about prop bets: Team PokerStars Pros @Johnny Lodden,@Theo Jorgensen, and @Ville Wahlbeck discuss all elements of prop bets.

Happy Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's and a hearty  3♥ A♥ 6♥ 9♥Q♥ to all Ranking Heroes!

The Cover Girls of Poker - Gaëlle Garcia Diaz

Poker In Asia: The Art Of War (Redux)

Asia will never cease to amaze by its unrivaled craze for gambling. Thanks to superstition as much as the strong social pressure in many eastern societies, gambling is the way to make your mind work and have some fun while hoping for a life changing gain.

As an industry, asian gambling has now offered the continent its new richest man Lui Che-woo, Macau’s biggest tycoon with his company Galaxy Entertainment doubling its revenue in 2013. The wave of fresh cash hitting China’s new millionaires its growing middle-class has allowed many to fly to Macau and Singapore’s resorts to heavily spend their money. Asians tourists can be met as well in many high-end casinos around Europe and in the US, Chinese now leading the pack of avid gamblers on the floors from Las Vegas to Monte-Carlo.

Macau is beating revenue records every quarters for the last two years.

In the poker community, many of them are too often seen as some fresh fishes and many pros are making the trip to Far East in hope of lucrative tournaments with mind blowing sums and cash games with lunatics local businessmen. But don’t get fooled, there is a long tradition of poker in asian countries and pro players originating from Viet-Nam or Hong-Kong have already proven that they travel well to beat the top Western players. Their young guns - such as Hong Kong’s native @Winfred Yu - are used to tensed nosebleeds cash games and handle gigantic stakes with ease.

The main limitation to a real growth of the player field depth is related to the poor state of online poker on the whole continent. A Japanese remake of Chris Moneymaker's rise to stardom could inspire millions of asian teenagers, and the wind could furiously blow to the East. Singapore is now the main hub for online gambling in the zone - under threat of a new restrictive legal framework - but coming regulations in the Philippines, Viet-Nam or Malaysia on that matter are far from being defined. China’s internet being what it is, the biggest hope is to see Japan loosen a bit it’s regulations and at least allow its citizens to access foreign operators. So #Macau is clearly the place of choice with its coming regulations that will define the shape of asian online gambling for the years to come.

Still, the main threat to Asia booming game industry is not a shortage in Greyhound dogs but the global economy. The current surge of money and the colossal investments forecasted for new resorts from South Korea to Viet-Nam will quickly dry up if things slow down, and there is only a finite field of players and liquidity available. Hence, online gaming - and more specifically virtual card rooms - are the fittest to survive a potential meltdown of the economy while providing much welcomed tax revenues may things go wrong.

Deep stacked, the asian way. 

Not that online gambling and poker are far from being unknown on the continent but depositing and cashing out remains a tough task, even after you’ve managed to find a decent offshore operator. Counting countries among the most connected in the world (Japan, South Korea), with financial and game hubs such as Hong-Kong, Macau and Singapore plus (once again) growing economies of the size of the Philippines and the South East asian zone, the potential is mind boggling. But many investors may well loose more than there buyin.

Some reading: 40 Poker Tips From Sun Tzu’s Art of War