The feel of real chips and cards and the general hum of the casino has got to be one of lifes pleasures.  Gambling up a little money, dreaming of an accumulator jackpot, sharing a few laughs (and moans) and seeing 8 hours flash by in a blink of an eye.   You know you’re having a good time when the hours slip by with ease, and at times at which you’d normally by shattered, you still upright, entranced by the game.

No longer are you confined to playing at home, or confined to bulky power-hungry laptops.   With poker on the iPad you can slip it into any bag and just fit in a game of poker at your complete convenience. 

It is also fantastic for those occasions when you’re stuck in a tournament and running late and really need to get moving.  You can simply hit the road and close out the tournament on your iPad without being late or stressed.  The future of online poker is here, and here today.

In a way it combines the best of both worlds.   If you’re too lazy to leave the house you can stay at home, but you can still get a proper sense of having a real live poker game, instead of just a virtual one.  I assume you can actually chat to the dealer via the chat box too.  I am guessing no asking them out on a date though!

Then during this weekend just gone Isildur1 took on Haxton at higher stakes with a $1 million winner-takes-all agreement.  Suddenly one of the two men was going to lose $500K of their bankroll.  And over the course of 3 days Isildur out-aggressed his counterpart and pretty much took Haxton to school.   It felt somewhat like a pool hustle.  Lose a few games for not much money, then suggest a rise in stakes and then suddenly start cleaning up.  

Let’s be fair to Haxton, he’s an excellent player.  But Isildur is capable of destroying poker players online, as durrrr found out back in the day, and this time the destruction took place at casa del haxton.   No doubt he’s nursing his wounds a little now.   I certainly doubt he’ll be seeking out a rematch any time soon.

It is believed they started a relationship after meeting on the TV show The Bubble a couple of years ago. 

It’s an interesting match up, I guess for no other reason than there are few very well known female poker players, and for one to get married to a famous comedian feels like somewhat of a Posh-and-Becks incident.   Good luck to them

They’ve got a license craftily set in hibernation from the AGCC which can more than likely get reactivated within a 28 day timeframe.    And some new licensed markets, notably Spain, are right in the middle of the licensing phase.

What can we expect from a re-launched FTP?

Well the change of ownership to GBT and the change of top level managment are obviously certain.  We can probably expect some form of promise of segregated funds.  And we can probably expect some fairly decent player-retention bonuses and promotions to discourage too many players from instantly cashing out.

It’s certainly a crucial step towards a recovery of the non-US poker industry, as millions and millions of dollars will finally become available to be re-activated into the poker economy.

1. Dealers Choice (Whoever’s on the dealers button decides the game).
2. Win the Button (Whoever wins the pot gets the dealer button for the next hand).
3. Random Bounty (Bounties, both large and small, get allocated completely at random to players entering the tournament. Knock bounty holders out and you’ll win that cash).
4. Turbo Rivers (Each player gets their own river card, making for some very interesting assessments of comparative hand strength at the river).

And of course we should not forget the Main Events, which are naturally the most lucrative of the lot. Often these have a first prize of several hundred thousand, if not million, euros. You can qualify for EPT events at Pokerstars.

What he did was play 23,493 hands over an 8 hour period. He was playing up to 40 tables at a time on Pokerstars. And he made a total profit of $7.65 whilst doing so. Not exactly a profit to set the world alight, but making a profit was in fact part of the volume play being considered a legitimate world record.

Officials from Guinness World Records were there to observe him doing it during the Pokerstars Caribbean Adventure. And nanokoko, who is already very accustomed to multitabling many online poker cash tables, didn’t even take a toilet break. A sure sign of a true grinder!

The first task is to come to the realisation that all of the money worth making is at the final table. So placings such as 14/3500, 22/2340, 11/3165 whilst they might look very good at face value, are basically not a hell of a lot better than a min-cash.

The second task is to make sure you dont get knocked out needlessly early. You cant win a poker tournament if you are not in it. Gambling it up too much when say 40+ BBs deep too early is not really going to dramatically improve your tournament chances, but it will certainly increase the chances of you busting out.

So now try to combine the two. Play pretty tight early on, but as you get a few hours deep into the tourney start to crank it up a bit and take a lot more risks. If the poker gods are with you (which they occasionally will be) and you get to the last ballpark 100 players, now is the time to really start pressuring your opponents. Be prepared to risk your tourney life now in the quest for a big stack here. For every 5 or 6 times you may fail, it will be more than made up for by making a final table and achieving a good score.

If you can get through to the top 100 (of a tourney with 2000+ entrants) about 5-7% of the time, and then convert that to a final table about 15-20% of the time, then you will make profit. Conversely you could finish in-the-money 30% of the time in a tourney and still be making a loss.

In summary, lack of final tables will be the death of your bankroll, so be prepared to risk a lot whilst deep, and occasional bomb out more than you feel would happen in your natural game. The times you get to the final table with a good stack will be the paydays which keep you afloat and in profit.

1 Pius Heinz $8,715,638
2 Martin Staszko $5,433,086
3 Ben Lamb $4,021,138

Pius has become a member of Team Pokerstars, so no doubt we’ll be seeing a lot more of him over the coming months and years.