How To Win At Poker | Stock Discussion Forums

Sponsor

From: FUBHO	10/18/2011 2:13:22 PM
	of 1269

Upcoming Hearing on Internet Gaming The PPA has learned that the U.S. House of Representatives’ Subcommittee for Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade will hold a hearing on Internet gaming on Tuesday, October 25, 2011. The subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee will bring forward a variety of witnesses to discuss regulation of Internet gaming and gather information for a future hearing to examine the merits of Rep. Joe Barton’s Online Poker Act of 2011 ( H.R. 2366). At the time of this email the witnesses for the hearing are still unknown. The PPA and its lobbying team will continue to meet with members of the subcommittee and their staffs leading up to next week’s hearing. We will be asking PPA members whose U.S. Representative is a member of this committee to contact their member directly before the hearing. Please check the PPA website and your inbox for future announcements about this very important hearing. Weekly Update from Rich Muny, VP of Player Relations I wish to thank the entire poker community for taking the time to stand up for our right to play. We are being heard on Capitol Hill and across the country. As I mentioned last week, we have received excellent feedback from lawmakers and our lobbyists on the effectiveness of the efforts of the poker community, so let’s all keep this effort growing! We have a nice opportunity to make ourselves heard today, so I encourage everyone to participate. CNN is airing this evening’s GOP presidential debate live from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET from the Venetian in Las Vegas. CNN is seeking questions for candidates via the CNN Politics fan page on Facebook, Twitter (using the #CNNDebate hashtag), and their website. So, let's all submit some pro-poker questions. As this debate is being held in Las Vegas, our issue will be seen as topical. To participate: Submit pre-filled pro-poker debate questions via Twitter HERE, HERE, and HERE. Either submit these as-is or, even better, edit them a bit to give them some individuality. Like the pro-poker Facebook CNN debate questions HERE and HERE, then like and post pro-poker questions/comments there and on the CNN Facebook debate page main wall HERE. Just post something straightforward, like, "To all the candidates: What is your position on the licensing, regulation and taxation of online poker?" (To find all the poker questions, scroll to the bottom of the page and click “more posts” until a day’s worth of posts are visible. Then, hit CTRL-F and search for "poker". Use "highlight all" to spot the poker posts quickly.) Submit pro-poker questions directly to CNN HERE. Again, try something like, "To all the candidates: What is your position on the licensing, regulation and taxation of online poker?" That is all it takes! With this, not only will you let the candidates know you demand your right to play poker in your own home on your own computer…you will also let CNN know that many of its viewers are deeply interested in this issue. *Interviews* PPA comes before poker media to take on the tough questions as often as possible, as the questions we receive at these interviews are representative of the issues in which the poker community is most interested. I will be on Short Stacked Radio this evening (10/18) at 9:30 pm ET. You can listen live at http://shortstackedradio.com/radio. If you have a question for me that you would like me to address on the show, please email it to me so I can answer it for you. Thank you again for your support! Proud to play, Rich Muny playerrelations@theppa.org www.facebook.com/rich.muny The PPA wishes to keep active members like yourself updated on the latest poker advocacy news by periodically sending out select events and headlines. We hope you find it informative and thank you for your continuing support. A Look at a Future U.S. Online Poker Market: Part 2 - CardPlayer (10/11/2011) Online gambling backed by Barney Frank, Joe Barton - Politico (10/12/2011) NBC Cancels National Heads-Up Poker Championship - Poker News (10/13/2011) Web poker advocates eyeing 'supercommittee' - Las Vegas Review-Journal (10/13/2011) D.C. Lottery makes its pitch for Internet gambling - Washington Post (10/14/2011) Online Poker Likely Not the Answer for Nevada’s Widespread Unemployment - CardPlayer (10/14/2011) Poker has become a game of the young - Chicago Daily Herald (10/16/2011) Letter to the Editor: The risks of online poker - Washington Post (10/16/2011) Read more news click here Receive PPA featured headlines on a daily basis, click here Tell a friend to sign up by going to theppa.org/subscribe Unsubscribe from this email, click here (note: This will not unsusbscribe you from the PPA Newsletter or Action Alerts). The Poker Players Alliance Dedicated to Protecting America's Favorite Card Game The Poker Players Alliance is a nonprofit membership organization comprised of poker players and enthusiasts from around the United States who have joined together to speak with one voice to promote the game and to protect poker players' rights. Visit us at theppa.org

Share	Recommend \| Keep \| Reply \| Mark as Last Read \| Read Replies (1)

From: FUBHO

4/14/2012 11:15:33 AM

of 1269

BIG ONE FOR ONE DROP TO AWARD LARGEST PRIZE IN POKER HISTORY

APRIL 12, 2012 - 9:00:00 AM PST

WSOP Staff
wsop.com

Las Vegas, April 12, 2012 – With 80 days until the BIG ONE for ONE DROP kicks off, ONE DROP Chair and Cirque du Soleil® Founder Guy Laliberté announced today that 30 players have now committed to participate in this historic event at the 2012 World Series of Poker.

The largest buy-in poker tournament ever conceived, with a $1,000,000 entry fee, is slated to take place from July 1-3, 2012 at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas and will be televised on ESPN.

Thus, with 30 committed participants, the prize pool is projected to exceed $26,000,000, with the winner to walk away with an estimated $12,266,668 – the largest amount ever awarded in a poker tournament, breaking Jamie Gold’s $12 million haul at the 2006 World Series of Poker Main Event.

This is all if no one else is added to the event. However, organizers do expect the event to reach its 48-player cap, thus increasing the prize pool, the first place prize and the monies raised for ONE DROP.

“It is an exciting moment and it is wonderful to see the poker community’s generosity, where organizations, players and fans are all coming together to support ONE DROP,” said Laliberté. “Whether entering the BIG ONE for ONE DROP, becoming a poker ambassador, making a donation, or simply changing their water consumption habits, everyone can get involved and everyone should be concerned, because a child dies every 20 seconds from a water related disease and that together we can beat the odds.”

The new players to confirm their participation in the event are:

Bob Bright	CEO, Bright Trading
Cary Katz	CEO, College Loan Corporation
Arnaud Mimran	French businessman
Paul Newey	Co-founder, New Wave Ventures, LLP. (UK)
Paul Phua	Asian businessman
Erik Seidel	U.S. poker professional
Justin Smith	U.S. poker professional
Richard Yong	Asian businessman

Confirmed players have secured their entry to the BIG ONE for ONE DROP via advance deposits. Some players have requested and the World Series of Poker will respect a players right to remain anonymous prior to the tournament , so publicity doesn’t impact their personal and professional matters.

From each entry fee, $111,111 will be donated to ONE DROP with a goal of raising enough money for a legacy project that will help a country with access to clean water. With the commitment from 30 players already, more than $3.33 million is slated to go to ONE DROP.

The event will be rake-free allowing $888,889 of each entry fee going directly into the prize pool.

Here is the complete list of players who have committed to playing in the BIG ONE for ONE DROP:

1.	Guy Laliberté
2.	Phil Ruffin
3.	Andy Beal
4.	Montreal private citizen group (Sean O’Donnell)
5.	Loto-Québec/Casino Montreal seat (Lottery scratch-off/live satellite)
6.	Cary Katz
7.	Paul Newey
8.	Richard Yong
9.	Erik Seidel
10.	Anonymous – U.S. Venture Capitalist
11.	Anonymous – European Hedge Fund Manager
12.	Anonymous – U.S. Hedge Fund Manager
13.	Anonymous – French businessman
14.	Caesars Entertainment seat
15.	Caesars Entertainment via June 30 $25,300 satellite at Rio
16.	MGM Mirage Satellite seat
17.	Bobby Baldwin
18.	Patrik Antonius
19.	Gus Hansen
20.	Daniel Negreanu
21.	Johnny Chan
22.	Tom Dwan
23.	Tony Guoga
24.	Jonathan Duhamel
25.	Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier
26.	Daniel Shak
27.	Justin Smith
28.	Bob Bright
29.	Arnaud Mimran
30.	Paul Phua

A profile of most of these players are posted on the new All In for ONE DROP website at www.allinforonedrop.com. The All In for ONE DROP campaign, launched last November, is designed to raise awareness on water-related issues and encourage the poker community to take action and create a powerful ripple effect.

Currently, Caesars is organizing a comprehensive series of step-satellites to the BIG ONE for ONE DROP with licensed casino partners. All will lead to a mega satellite with guaranteed entry to the $25,300 Big One Satellite on June 30th at the Rio.

In May and early June, more than a dozen properties are expected to hold qualifying tournaments with starting buy-ins under $100, culminating in a guaranteed $25,300 entry awarded at each venue to the June 30th satellite in Las Vegas, with airfare and hotel provided by Caesars Interactive Entertainment. The satellite locations, times and schedule will be updated regularly at wsop.com

The culminating mega satellite on June 30 will award a minimum of one guaranteed entry to the BIG ONE for ONE DROP regardless of the number of participants and will create one seat for every 40 entries. The satellite will run one day, have a $25,300 entry and allow rebuys. It will include all of the regional qualifiers and also be open to the public.

The tournament, to be played as No-Limit Hold’em, is expected to pay out 20% of the field—double the typical World Series of Poker tournament payout structure and a specially-designed WSOP platinum bracelet will be awarded to the victor.

Subject to the rules of the tournament, anyone age 21 or older is eligible as long as they have the $1 million entry fee.

The BIG ONE for ONE DROP is the creation of ONE DROP Chair and Cirque du Soleil® Founder Guy Laliberté in collaboration with fellow Montrealer and Caesars Interactive Entertainment CEO Mitch Garber. Making use of WSOP’s poker expertise and global reach, it is an unprecedented effort to raise awareness of water-related issues amongst the poker community and to raise funds to allow ONE DROP to continue to deliver on its important mandate. Funds will be directed to ONE DROP projects around the world, where the team is hard at work dealing with the local water crisis.

About ONE DROP
ONE DROP—an initiative of Guy Laliberté, Founder of Cirque du Soleil—is a non-governmental organization established in Montreal, Canada and active worldwide. ONE DROP’s mission is to fight poverty by supporting access to water and raising each and every one’s awareness of water-related issues through its distinctive approach based on social arts and popular education. In the U.S., ONE DROP is a public charity that undertakes innovative activities in which water plays a central role as a creative force to generate positive, sustainable change worldwide. ONE DROP continues to reach out to the world to realize its dream of safe water for all, today and tomorrow. To learn more about ONE DROP, visit ONEDROP.org.
About the World Series of Poker
The World Series of Poker (WSOP) is the largest, richest and most prestigious gaming event in the world awarding millions of dollars in prize money and the prestigious gold bracelet, globally recognized as the sport’s top prize. Featuring a comprehensive slate of tournaments in every major poker variation, the WSOP is poker’s longest running tournament in the world, dating back to 1970. In 2011, the event attracted 75,672 entrants from 105 different countries to the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas and awarded over $192 million in prize money. To learn more about the World Series of Poker, visit WSOP.com.

Recommend | Keep | Reply | Mark as Last Read

From: FUBHO	2/10/2013 8:19:17 AM
	2 Recommendations of 1269

Casinos without borders: 'I moved to Mexico to keep my job playing online poker' By Trent Wolbe on February 7, 2013 12:00 pm theverge.com "Effectively, there’s no online gambling in the United States." Shane Schleger is a professional poker player with a remarkably chill grin on his face, considering. "Well,” he goes on, “except for fantasy sports. The fantasy sports lobby is strong, I guess." Shane collects all his income from the biggest online poker portal in the world, PokerStars. For eleven hours a day he’s plugged into their software, playing in a dozen simultaneous tournaments at any given time, which amounts to five or six thousand hands every day. Needless to say, he's good at it: he's part of the site's elite "Team Online," and in addition to the money he wins at the virtual tables he's also compensated for simply trotting his avatar ("shaniac") out in public — his mere virtual presence inspires other players to buy more chips. His screen optimization isn’t just impressive: it’s a competitive edge. And get this, haters: he’s a Mac and a PC. Before he had poker, Shane held a pretty standard résumé for an aimless 20-something living in New York City: waiter, bike messenger, customer service representative. "I came up playing poker in clubs — the successors to the ones you'd see in the movie Rounders. That was my scene," he says. "There was a poker boom in 2003 — it became a huge fad, and you started seeing things like the World Series of Poker [on ESPN]. Online poker started coming around at that point too, and I started meeting people, smart people, who were making their living playing online." And so began a new career. He eventually moved from New York to Santa Monica, where he still lives with his fiancé. Like me, he used to enjoy a five-second commute from his bed to his desk. But now his office is three hours south of Santa Monica, near Rosarito Beach in Baja California. George W. Bush signed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Actinto law in October of 2006: it was an eleventh-hour congressional add-on to an unrelated port security bill, but up until then, online gambling still existed in a legal gray area. Players bought online chips with e-wallet transactions and were able to withdraw their cash winnings directly into their American bank accounts. But on April 15th of 2011 (Shane and his colleagues call it Black Friday) the gray area was blackened: the federal government indicted PokerStars (and its poorly-run competitor Full Tilt Poker) for violating the UIGEA. Money laundering, bribing banks, and miscoding transactions were a few of the items on a laundry list that eventually spelled a very specific end to their doing business in the United States. Real border, virtual address HE NOW WORKS FROM A HIGH-RISE ON THE BEACH THAT'S FLANKED BY ABANDONED REAL ESTATE DREAMS"For all I know, there are people that use VPNs, but it's completely against the rules. Most serious players would never do that from a risk / reward perspective. The idea of being forced out of California, of having to move to a different country — at the time it was very shocking and disturbing to me," Shane recounts. He decided to move to Vancouver with a partner who was in the same predicament, but trying to maintain a life in both countries proved to be disastrous. Canada is known for taking its admissions very seriously, so Shane's partner had tried to legitimize his northward border-hopping with a Canadian student visa: a good concept, but when he tried to enter the country in September, the authorities wanted to know why he was coming to school four months before classes began. He was ultimately denied entry, and that’s when Shane saw the writing on the wall. Apprehensive of an unwanted knock on the door from the Mounties, Shane began poking around and discovered a community of expat players that had set up shop a half hour south of Tijuana, and suddenly a new path made itself crystal clear. "I rented a car, packed up all my computer equipment, and by the next week I was set up in Mexico." A big reason Shane had initially looked north instead of south was linguistic. "It feels very weird to not speak the language — I'm very reliant on people who facilitate the gringo passageway." He now works from a high-rise on the beach that's flanked by abandoned real estate dreams, huge concrete skeletons that will never see glass in their window frames or paint on their walls. It's a common enough sight on Mexico's newly-renovated Highway One, a bilingual toll road that shoots down along the beautiful rolling coastline. It’s captivated adventurous American minds (and wallets) for centuries: it seems as if every native Southern Californian I meet blew a chunk of their college years on trips to Tijuana (also known as "TJ") for the lower drinking age and cheap thrills the border town served up to depravity-seeking co-eds. All of that ended in 2007 with the wild narcoviolence that destroyed the tourist trade Tijuana had thrived on: nothing spells terror in UCSD moms like the public decapitations Mexican druglords are particularly fond of. While Tijuana is slowly outgrowing its violent reputation, the drug violence there has migrated away almost completely, favoring the larger and more desolate expanses of the Texas border. A small culinary boom in taking shape in TJ, and its most visible outpost is Javier Placencia’s upscale taco joint Mision 19. Shane and I met there to discuss the ins and outs of living with his feet in two worlds. “I live a compartmentalized life. I’m down here for work, and I go back to LA for, you know, living.” Shane’s work week in Baja is usually four days, Saturday through Tuesday. He has a Mexican debit card, a Viva Mexico plan for his iPhone, and a Mexican iTunes account, since he couldn’t buy the real-money PokerStars app through the US store. “It’s about a three-and-a-half hour drive from LA, plus the wait at the border. That’s the big variable. Once you’ve waited two or more hours at Tijuana, that’s when you really start to feel like something is wrong, like you’re trapped and isolated.” His crossing methods are always becoming more refined — he recently acquired a US Passport card that allows him access to the “ready lane.” He travels late at night on Mondays, Tuesdays, or Wednesdays, the relatively quiet crossing nights. And he never crosses through Tijuana, preferring the relatively less-busy Otay Mesa crossing. Continues...

Share	Recommend \| Keep \| Reply \| Mark as Last Read \| Read Replies (1)

To: ~digs who wrote (1267)	2/10/2013 9:40:56 AM
From: FUBHO	of 1269

Zynga Shares Soar 11 Percent as New Jersey Moves Closer to Online Gambling Tricia Duryee All Things D February 8, 2013 at 3:10 pm PT Zynga’s stock is seeing its first big leap in more than six months, fueled by a decent fourth-quarter report and evidence that online gambling is starting to make progress in the U.S. On Tuesday, Zynga appeased investors by beating its already lowered expectations for the period and exceeding analysts’ expectations. It also showed critical progress on mobile, where one-quarter of the company’s monthly active users are now playing its games — that’s 72 million people out of 298 million monthly average users in total, making for a very large market across both Facebook and smartphones. Just yesterday, there was some additional good news for the struggling games company. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie gave conditional support to in-state Internet gambling, a market that will benefit Zynga as it looks for potential new revenue sources. To date, most of Zynga’s real-money gaming efforts have been focused in the U.K., where online gambling has been legal for a while. Zynga confirmed on Tuesday that it still plans to launch games there during the first half of the year. Additionally, it said its real-money games would also be available on Facebook in the U.K., where the social network has only conducted a few minor tests to date. Zynga’s stock soared 11 percent today, or 34 cents, to $3.43 a share. The stock has not traded that high — at least consistently – since July. While today’s rise is encouraging, shares are still down more than 75 percent from a high of $15.91. Other gambling stocks also jumped following the news out of New Jersey, including Caesars Entertainment, which saw its shares rise 38 percent, or $3.84 a share, to close at $13.91. What’s particularly important to note about the measure that Christie has endorsed is that it would permit a kind of reciprocity with other states where online gambling is legal. Zynga has already begun the long process of getting licenses in Nevada, so conceivably it would not have to jump through as many hoops to begin operating in New Jersey. And reciprocity would be essential to making a big enough market. While many investors are obviously thrilled about the prospects of online gambling, it’s hard to know how much revenue it will produce. Dennis Farrell, a gambling-industry analyst for Wells Fargo, told The Wall Street Journal that online gambling could generate between $650 million and $850 million in annual revenue for the industry in the near term, assuming around 5.8 million people gamble on the sites. allthingsd.com

Share	Recommend \| Keep \| Reply \| Mark as Last Read