Sports Editors Missing the Poker Boat

TC Shannon 7-29-2005

Sports editors from around the globe continue to cry foul when it comes to reporting the news related to gambling and poker. Some editors simply refuse to add any poker news to their coveted sports sections saying the "game" should not be considered a sport at all but rather a pasttime or recreation. Recreational activities such as boating and hunting already fall under the sports sections of most newspapers,so why not poker? If we consider climbing into a tree to shoot a whitetail a sport then what's the difference between that and climbing into a chair to shoot down a fish! ( A "fish" in the poker world is an amateur player w/little poker experience)

The explosion of poker not only has millions of players flocking to the tables but it has also spurred a lot of controversy over whether its a sport or not. The internet community seems overwhelmingly divided on the subject, with good arguments on both sides of the fence. One journalist said he would never consider a bunch of men with 300 + cholesterol levels playing a game of cards to be a sport, so the question remains....Who should report the poker news??

The world as a whole is fascinated with poker and many people want to know what's going on. The blogger community as usual is not afraid to report the latest news regarding gambling but the "world" simply has not tuned in to the blogging thing....YET. Sure blogging is growing by huge amounts every day but there is still a void that needs to be filled outside of the poker blog. People are begging for information and our sports editors are standing their ground. Recently, the NY Times has sprinkled a few poker articles into their sports section but it's still up in the air as to whether the majority will follow or not

I did a search on Yahoo this morning for "poker news" just to see what came up and all the sites listed in the top 25 were poker related in one way or another. Either promoting affiliate programs leading to online poker or poker rooms themselves. Nothing from PR Web, NY Times, Seattle Times or ANY other major news reporting agency. This leads me to believe that the journalists are ignoring the public fascination with poker or they simply put it at the bottom of the list as far as priority goes.

With the billions (yes billions) of dollars being spent on the game of poker, one would think it would be worth a little effort to cover the story. One things for sure.....this blogger will continue to cover the story and the saga goes on. The boat is already cruising at 40 knots, better jump while you can!

2005 WSOP Tournament Schedule

Even though the 2005 World Series Poker tournaments are already underway its still not too late to get in some good action! With gold bracelets and millions of dollars waiting to be claimed it is no wonder that boatloads of our youth are flocking to the sport of Poker. This "new" found pleasure is turning into a full time living for thousands every day and with the opportunities that await the winners who could really blame us??

2005 WSOP Schedule

Australian man won 7.5 million dollars a couple of weeks ago simply playing this game of Texas Holdem. Its all in the cards as my Grandfather use to say,but there is a lot more than just the fall of the cards that determines who wins in a game of no-limit holdem. The wrong move at the wrong time could be a million dollar mistake literally. On the other hand....the right move at the right time could also be the big payoff we all seek.

Contrary to popular belief, In my opinion there is no "magic" formula for success in Poker. Everyone spends an awful lot of time focusing on odds and percentages when for the most part it's a waste of time. Did you know that there are 2,598,960 possible poker hands in a deck of 52 cards....now that we know that what do you think the "odds" are in winning with a 9-7 offsuit against a k-10 suited?

Some will say the k-10 is a 3-1 favorite but seriously....wouldnt this be more common sense than a mathematical probability? The reality is this, given that we don't know what cards were folded and we don't know what cards were burned,the odds are about the same and SOLELY depends on the cards that follow! So use your chart if you want but I'll just continue to win the old fashioned way

2005 WSOP Schedule

Yahoo Poker and Spam

Whoa nellie......This new database that Yahoo has rolled out really has the spammers jumping for joy as their sites now take up most of the top 50 for damn near every keyword related to poker,online poker,free poker and on and on and on! As a webmaster, checking the serps (search engine result pages) is something i do on a regular basis to make sure all this hard work i'm doing is paying off, instead of finding some decent sites all you can find is spam,spam and more spam.

I mean seriously, what in the hell do we as legitimate webmasters have to do? I refuse to use software to spam thousands of blogs everyday and I damn sure can't even begin to write those bullshit pages they post. I'll give you a link to one of these pages at the end of this article just so you can see what i'm talking about. I went to Yahoo's blog and put my 10 cents worth in a comment and THEN had to "edit" my comment because the word "poker" was in my url......You gotta be kiddin me! They can filter any and all posts (even legitimate ones) but we cant keep the bullshit out of the SERPS.

I hate to be harping on Yahoo as I know they are genuinely trying to solve this problem but it's really starting to piss me off. Yahoo is by far my favorite SE but it's frustrating to see the spammers manipulate the pages over and over. Google seems to have the problem under control (at least somewhat) and MSN is horribly littered with spam (even more than Yahoo's latest fiasco).

On a brighter note....Yahoo says they aren't done and we need to be patient. I just hope that they are really setting up the spammers by putting them in all the top positions so they can recognize their work and give them the boot....right out the fu&^%ing back door into never never land! I'm done bitching for now and take a look at the cached pages for #1 THRU #10 for the term "free texas holdem" to see what I'm talking about!

Click Here

Yahoo Refilling their Database

According to the Yahoo blog, they are in the process of updating/reorganizing and reindexing their search database. So far it seems to have a lot of people stirred up. They are saying it will be a couple of weeks before the serps settle down into the actual new index...so i'm anxiously awaiting the "final" result to see how much more money i'm gonna lose this month!
With SE spam at an all time high its nearly impossible to compete with these guys. Most if not all of the sites ranked higher than mine have anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 backlinks from spamming blogs . Yahoo is working hard to keep them out of the serps but it seems to be a nearly impossible task. Anyway.....stay tuned for the final report on how the spammers fared with the new SERPS

Read More Here

Women and Poker..Where are They?

After reading the article below in the NY Times this morning I have to admit that i'm somewhat shocked. I thought there was a whole lot more women playing poker these days. These figures sound like something you would have heard in the late 1800s not 2005! With women holding prominent positions all over the world, why aren't more playing poker? There are huge amounts of money to be won every day and women are prime candidates to win this money.

A lot of men don't take women too seriously when they sit down at the table to play some texas holdem which should be easy pickin's for women. My previous experiences playing with women is they are harder to read.

Now I'm not saying they put on a better "poker face" but as we all know their train of thought changes every few seconds which leads to unpredictabilty.....or is that just my wife?? My wife can call all-in while talking on the phone AND yelling at the kids. Hell, I dont ever know what she's thinking about anything, much less what kind of hand she is holding! Ladies...Where are you? You can't let a bunch of big mouthed men keep you from playing the game. C'mon out and take my money

By JAMES McMANUS

Published: July 23, 2005
The winner of every World Series event this year was a man, as were all nine final tablists in the championship. So are the 69 highest-ranked tournament players. Jennifer Harman is No. 70, Cyndy Violette No. 72, Annie Duke No. 374. Harman, Violette and Duke have all won bracelets, and Harman more than holds her own every night in the Bellagio's famous mixed game, which requires mastering a dizzying variety of poker forms and putting about $100,000 in action.


These three and a few dozen other women make handsome livings at poker. Even so, a woman has yet to win the main event at the World Series. In 36 years, only Barbara Enright, who finished fifth in 1995, has even made the final table. Nor has a woman won a single World Poker Tour championship.

One reason is that very few women choose to compete in the major events, which cost between $5,000 and $25,000 to enter. Of the 5,619 players in the $10,000 World Series finale, only 202 (3.6 percent) were women. You've got to be in it to win it.

The game played in almost every major tournament is no-limit Texas Hold'em, the form that most consistently rewards an aggressive approach. The leverage it provides to win pots without the best hand gives forceful risk-takers a significant edge. These "table captains" and "bullies" will raise (or call a raise) before the flop with just about any two cards, aiming to bust the conservative "rocks" - male or female - who patiently wait for big pairs. Even when the flop misses the bully's hand, he often proceeds on the assumption that it missed the rock's, too, and attacks with a sizable bet. This is how young guns like John Phan and Phil Ivey have been dominating big-money tournaments.

John Tierney, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, recently reported on the biological aspect of competitiveness. In a University of Pittsburgh study, women did as well as men, both individually and on four-member teams, in a math game that paid $2 per correct answer. But when offered the chance to either consolidate their profits or risk them in a tournament with much more at stake, most women declined to compete, even the ones who had previously done best in the game. Most men chose to enter the tournament, even those who had fared poorly earlier.

"Even in tasks where they do well, women seem to shy away from competition, whereas men seem to enjoy it too much," one researcher concluded. "The men who weren't good at this task lost a little money by choosing to compete, and the really good women passed up a lot of money by not entering tournaments they would have won."

Tierney, in a follow-up column, quoted the anthropologist Helen Fisher as saying, "Evolution has selected for men with a taste for risking everything to get to the top of the hierarchy, because those males get more reproductive opportunities." And as a result, "Women don't get as big a reproductive payoff by reaching the top," Fisher said.

This anticompetitive bias might be even stronger in no-limit tournaments, because money not only flows to the top of a pyramid of risk-takers but is also the game's very language. (Balancing this bias, perhaps, is that poker also rewards patience and what is often called women's intuition, the empathetic ability to read what others are thinking or feeling.)

There are plenty of aggressively competitive women, of course, in poker and other arenas, as well as patient, intuitive men. But the fact that men produce about 25 times as much testosterone, a hormone linked to both stamina and competitiveness, probably makes it easier for them to stay aggressive for the week or so it takes to win a major no-limit event.

Age is also a factor. Testy young males not only love tournament action, but also have enough time for it. As a group they may have fewer family responsibilities than women, or than men over, say, 35. Young men might also be better able to cope with the physical toll of traveling from event to event.

Danica Patrick, Annika Sorenstam, Michelle Wie and others are proving that women can compete against men in some physical sports. Pokeristas are closer to achieving full parity and should get even closer as reinforcements arrive. According to EmpirePoker.com, women made up only 4 percent of its players in 2003, but 20 percent two years later. Anxiety about competing is presumably less of a factor in online games, even though intuition is thwarted. But as women learn the game in small-buy-in virtual tournaments, more might be willing to risk part of their bankroll in lucrative on-land events.

Harman, for one, is impatient. She recently told me that many women still seem intimidated by men at the table. After granting that women have made progress over the last decade, she added, "At this rate it'll be a couple hundred years before we're winning half the events."

Here's hoping she'll prove to have been unduly pessimistic.

U.S. Declares Poker as a Sport

Before everybody starts freaking out...the headline is NOT true, but thats not to say it won't be a reality before long

Just another article about the controversy over poker being a sport or not? It won't be long before there is an x games poker and maybe even a poker gameday.....Are you listening ESPN?? With the popularity of poker at all time highs somebody better wake up and smell the coffee before it's too late. Every other country in the world is cashing in and most of the money is coming from us Americans....some figures say as much as 70% of online gambling comes from America. Kind of ironic that most view it as illegal in the USA. Deal me in....PLEASE



When it comes to poker, America is all in.

We're glued to it on television, where it's a ratings boon for ESPN and the Travel Channel. College kids are playing it in their dorms, sometimes gambling away their tuition money. Middle America is holding poker nights — and it's not just the guys who are playing.

Catalogs and mall department stores offer an array of poker-related merchandise.

But where the phenomenon has really taken off is on the Internet.

Online poker took in an estimated $1 billion in revenue last year, and that's expected to keep growing. Some Web sites offer poker strategy; others teach how to cheat and spot other cheaters.

Even the venerable New York Times has caught poker fever. It — and other newspapers — cover poker play in their sports sections.

That's not as odd as it seems at first blush. Poker has its own world series, which concluded last week in Las Vegas, with a grand prize of about $7.5 million going to the top Texas Hold ‘Em player.

Like sports stars, the best poker players are courted for endorsement deals.

Fans bug them for autographs.

They have their own Web sites and instructional videos.

They tout special diets and exercise regimens that keep them alert and physically able to tolerate long, grueling hours sitting at the poker table.

(Preparation H is missing a bet if it doesn't strike an endorsement deal.)

Further evidence suggesting that poker's a sport: Some players have admitted to using ‘‘performance-enhancing'' drugs such as speed to supposedly get an edge over their opponents.

But they probably don't have to worry about drug testing in Vegas.

For most fans, poker is something they play occasionally for fun.

But for a growing number of young people, it's a career choice.

They spend their days gambling online, their nights at high-stakes games. Once they might have dreamed of starting their own dot.coms — now they want to be poker pros.

In their defense, one might argue that the odds are better in poker than in startups.

And there's less cheating at the poker table than on Wall Street.

The difference between poker and other activities considered sports is the element of luck.

Some luck enters into every sporting event, to be sure.

Lance Armstrong might be the best cyclist in the world, but if he hits a rut, crashes and breaks a leg, he won't win his seventh Tour de France.

Generally, though, luck isn't as much of a factor in athletic sports as it is in poker; even the best players can't win if they keep getting bad cards.

So is poker a sport? It is if your idea of a training regimen is beer and pretzels. Deal us in.

Is Poker A Sport?

Ok...The debate is on! This thing bout poker being a sport has apparently pissed off some sports editors and journalists as you can see in the article below but....if poker isnt a sport then what section of the newspaper does it belong? The game of poker and Texas Holdem has simply exploded not only online but offline as well. You dont have to go very far to find an article about poker and as a matter of fact...the article I wrote about yesterday was posted in the sports section of the NY Times...How's that for an authority.


Is bowling a sport? How bout badmitton or olympic water ballet (i'm not real sure what its called but it looks like a bunch of people trying to dance in a pool) I mean c'mon, why are these sports editors bitching about poker and not wanting to cover the story? Some people say it isn't a sport unless you sweat....SO what you are saying is that the sweat that rolls off your forehead when you call all-in on 1.2million with a king-10 suited isn't real? Poker is just as stressful and competitive as hitting a little white ball 300 yds so you can ride in a golf cart only to hit it another 300 yds.What's the difference, it takes luck and skill to compete at golf and the same goes for poker. Millions of people watch golf on tv and millions watch poker on tv. Golf pays good if you are lucky, poker pays great if you are good!

My opinion (yeah,I know you have one too but this is my blog) is poker definitely is a sport and if those sports editors don't want to cover the story....I know for sure that the bloggers will. Welcome to the next generation gentlemen.


UNION-TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICES
July 18, 2005

Poker may be starting to rival traditional sports for attention – the recent World Series of Poker had 5,619 entrants and online poker took in an estimated $1 billion in revenue last year – but is it a sport itself?



Did you know that there are 2,598,960
different poker hands in a fifty-two card deck and that 2-3-4-5-7 offsuit cannot beat anything. You can win with a lot of hands but not that one


That question is a conundrum for those accustomed to defining sports in America, the sports editors of major newspapers. As poker has surged in popularity, sports editors find themselves in news meetings debating where poker news should go. For instance:

Bill Dwyre, sports editor of the Los Angeles Times, has no question about whether his section will cover poker. It won't.

"It will be a cold day in hell when ESPN sets the agenda for me," he said. "It's not a sport. We're not going to follow them."

"We've decided that poker is no more a sport than the 'Survivor' series or 'American Idol,' that it's more a creation of television and we'll be damned if television is going to dictate to us what we cover," Las Vegas Sun sports editor James Barger wrote in an e-mail.

"Because of the level of interest in it as measured by the TV ratings on ESPN, we've covered it," said Bill Eichenberger, deputy sports editor of Newsday on Long Island and a past president of Associated Press Sports Editors (APSE). "We're not staffing it, but we are running the wires every day. My sense of it from readers is that people are following it."

Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly took on televised poker in October and pronounced it lifeless. "Where is the thrill in watching guys with 300 cholesterol levels play cards and rattle their chip stacks 1,000 different ways?" he wrote. "What's ESPN going to put on next, the World Hairline-Receding Championships?"


Players' perspective
Poker players are as divided as journalists about whether the game that's sweeping ratings rates the title of sport.

"People compete at it. There's a discernible skill level. You can't throw in an average guy and expect him to do well," said Aaron Bartley, a pro poker player who lives in Las Vegas. "All things considered, it should be considered a sport."

Lee Munzer, a poker player and a columnist for "Card Player Magazine," said poker involves skill, but not enough activity to be a sport. "My feeling is if you don't sweat it's not a sport," he said.

Erick Fink, a physical therapist from Raleigh, N.C., who played in this year's World Series of Poker, thinks poker is not a sport and the debate about where it fits will fade with its popularity. "These sorts of outrageous numbers we're seeing now, I think that's unusual and it will decrease as something else becomes the new fad," he said. "But right now, it's like the biggest thing since the hula hoop."

Now there's another question: Is hula hoop a sport?

Poker's Popularity Doesn't Appear Ready to Fold

By RICHARD SANDOMIR

Published: July 12, 2005


Poker's sudden ubiquity on television calls to mind the rush of figure skating programming that followed the hugely rated 1994 Winter Olympics and the tulip mania in Holland in the 17th century. Can the popularity of anything grow so quickly, as televised poker has in the past two or three years, without crashing?
Or has poker found the mother lode by appealing to youthful Texas Hold'em devotees who cannot get enough of stars like Doyle Brunson and Howard Lederer.

"I equate poker to Nascar," said Neal Pilson, a television consultant hired by Harrah's Entertainment to negotiate a new deal beyond 2007 for its World Series of Poker property, which has performed spectacularly well on ESPN. "Everyone drives, so they have an instant recognition for the skill and drama of Nascar. Well, there's a huge population that plays poker. It's reality programming, with drama, excitement and a tremendous amount of money."

Read the rest of this article at the New York Times......

Poker's Popularity Doesn't Appear Ready to Fold - New York Times

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Video Poker

Video Poker is a card game played on machines similar to slots all around the world. The object of video poker is to put together the best five-card poker hand from the cards you are dealt. Five cards are dealt, then you can hold anywhere from 1 to 5 of these cards and discard the rest.

The discarded cards are replaced by new cards from the deck. Depending on the card combination, you are awarded an amount of money according to the payout chart. These payout charts are listed according to which game you are playing. It could be jacks or better,tens or better,deuces wild or any other variation of video poker. In most games you must make at least 1 pair of tens to break even. If there is no combination, you lose your bet.

Video Poker has come a long way since the beginning of the computer chip. The cards are dealt according to an RNG or random number generator which is basically a computer program designed to deal the cards at random (makes sense huh) and is not based on any decision you make with your cards. So if you keep a 10Hearts and 4clubs or 2 aces it makes no difference and doesnt affect the draw at all.

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