Internet Casino Cheat Soft

An especially long one yesterday — about a 16-hour workday, all told. Still a little tired this morning, but ready to get back over to the Atlantic City Casino to see how the story of LAPT Lima continues to unfold.

There were 197 players returning for Day 2 of the $2,700 buy-in Main Event. The plan was to play down to 24. (That picture to the left shows the main feature table starting to be constructed at the far end of the poker room.) After ten one-hour levels there was talk of just stopping things after two more levels (at the end of Level 20), regardless of how many players were left. As it happened, the elimination of Costa Rican player Luis Jaikel in 25th place happened just a few minutes before the end of that level, and so we’ll have the three eight-handed tables as planned when play restarts today.

As the day wore on, I began more and more to notice differences in the way the players interacted and what might be called the “culture” of the LAPT event when compared to, say, the World Series of Poker or U.S.-based tourneys.

As happens at the WSOP, there have been occasional displays of emotion as players react to various situations, most often during the all-ins when a player’s tourney life is on the line. And there have been a couple of dust-ups about rulings and such, but nothing terribly out of the ordinary.

I’ve found it interesting, however, to witness what seems like a lot of genuine human interaction at the tables as well, with much conversation and smiling. You’ll see that at the WSOP, too, now and then, but not with as much frequency as I have here, I don’t think.

For example, another player from Costa Rica, Steven Thompson, is one of the 24 coming back today. He has been kind of a gregarious type, talking and laughing quite a bit. And his tablemates seem often to be following suit. Even a simple blind-vs.-blind hand between Thompson and another player in which one bets the other out of a pot seemed always to elicit a lot of grins and good-natured back-and-forthing.

There was one particularly funny moment yesterday when there were just 51 players remaining. The top 48 spots paid, and so the tension had risen somewhat (and play slowed down a lot). Suddenly I noticed a player at Thompson’s table — Leandro Csome of Argentina — standing up with a piece of paper. He had written the number “48” on the paper, and with a huge grin was holding it up over the “51” on the electronic board indicating players remaining.

Csome let out a cheer, and Thompson immediately joined in the celebration, hugging Csome and drawing huge laughs all around. A very funny moment. Felt bad for Csome when he in fact went out soon after, just missing the cash, but he still had a smile on his face as he left.

There were other interesting stories yesterday. American player Martin Mathis started the day with 20,075 chips — just 75 more than the starting stack for the tourney — but survived multiple all-ins early on, then showed a lot of savvy to make it into the money before getting knocked out in 42nd.

There were a couple of other huge comebacks yesterday, too. Probably the most remarkable was that of U.S. player Ben Barrows. Sporting a t-shirt that said “Dazed and Confused,” Barrows started the day with just a little over 18,000, but is still in the sucker, currently in 11th place.

Also — and this is kind of a wild one — the last woman in the event, Pamela Espinosa of Chile, went out in 31st place, and was followed in 30th place by her husband, Mauricio Zeman! Not quite the Mizrachi brothers both making the final table of the $50K Player’s Championship at the WSOP, but remarkable nonetheless.

The big story as we ended the night — told by my blogging partner Brad “Otis” Willis over on the PokerStars blog — is the fact that the two previous winners of this season of the LAPT are first and second in chips heading into Day 3.

Amer Sulaiman, the chip leader, ran especially well during the last hours of play on Day 2, picking up pocket aces at least twice, and seemingly always having the goods when short-stacked players were pushing all in against him. The Canadian Sulaiman won the LAPT Playa Conchal event in Costa Rica last November which kicked off this Season 3 of the LAPT.

And Team PokerStars pro Jose “Nacho” Barbero of Argentina is second in chips. Barbero is an especially tricky player whom I remember covering at last summer’s WSOP when he made a final table in the $1,500 limit hold’em shootout (won by Greg Mueller). Barbero won LAPT Punta del Este in Uruguay this past February.

Both Sulaiman and Barbero had vocal supporters on the rail yesterday, and indeed the scene was pretty raucous at times with a lot of cheering and singing as more than 100 spectators crowded the action.

Incidentally, there wasn’t too much talk yesterday about the Joran van der Sloot situation. We heard he’d been arrested in Chile, but that was about it.

The only other evidence of the story was the fact that a couple of times during the day there were news crews — not covering the tourney — shooting segments there near and in the poker room. On the left is a picture of one such segment being shot as I walked in early yesterday.

We expect there will be more excitement today as they play down to the final eight. Check in on the PokerStars blog to see the next chapter of the story.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Having started to cover tourneys in a variety of places, I can say that we are especially well provided for in terms of our working conditions in the Atlantic City Casino, where I am this week helping cover LAPT Lima. And I’m not just talking about those helpful signs above our work stations.

First off, the LAPT, PokerStars, and Atlantic City Casino folks are all extremely supportive and looking out for us at every step. The wireless network by which we access the internet is very fast and reliable, too. And we enjoyed what I thought was a fairly incredible meal at the casino buffet during one of our breaks. Another one of those sample-dozens-of-things-without-necessarily-noting-what-they-were type affairs, with just about everything being equally tasty.

The running of the tournament has gone well thus far, too. There were 40 tables set up for play yesterday — 20 filling the main poker room, and 20 more taking up most of the outer area there on the second floor of the casino. They were ready for 400 players, maximum, and ended up seating 384, which came close to breaking the record (398) for entries in an LAPT event.

At one point during the day I went through to see where everyone was from, and counted 33 different countries being represented. Probably two-thirds or more are from South America, but there are a number from the U.S., Europe, and even a couple from Asia.

As was the case at the start of the EPT event in Kyiv, it was a bit of a challenge early on identifying folks. There were a few familiar faces — particularly the PokerStars pros who were there — though there were many with whom I was previously unfamiliar.

Of course, we had a lot of fun with one particular PokerStars pro, Maria “Maridu” Mayrinck, who for a short while early in the afternoon was wearing a disguise. But being a shamus, I was able to see through it, and so got our photographer, Carlos, to snap some pics.

Eventually we learned several new names and had a lot to report. Working alongside Reinaldo (writing for the Stars Spanish language site) and Sergio (writing for the Portuguese site) helped, as did working together with the PokerNews guys, Marc and Rick.

Speaking of PokerNews, Lynn Gilmartin was there yesterday, having arrived Vegas with a story about being delayed in Houston. Like me, she’d had an extra six hours or so added to her trip and hadn’t gotten to Lima until five a.m. or so. It was the first of a few coincidences that marked the day.

The other two happened about the same time, about halfway through the day’s play. Just as the fifth (of eight levels) began, I got messages of support regarding a tournament I was apparently playing against Vicky Coren. She had tweeted that she was “Heads up! Just me and Seamus the blogger left” in a Stars tourney. Shortly after, she tweeted that Seamus had won.

Alas, it was a fellow named Seamus McCauley — also a blogger — and not me who took down the sucker.

It was right about then we heard the news that a Dutch man named Joran van der Sloot, once a suspect in that 2005 case in which the U.S. teenager Natalee Holloway had disappeared in Aruba, was now suspected of killing a woman in Lima.

Adding to the weirdness of it all, the woman had been killed on May 30 — the five-year anniversary of Hollaway’s disappearance. Not only that, van der Sloot and the victim apparently met at the Atlantic City Casino, and some of these reports were saying he was in Lima for the LAPT event. Last I heard yesterday, he had fled to Chile and a manhunt was on.

We were knee deep in covering the tourney and so couldn’t really devote much attention to tracking down further details about van der Sloot or the murder. Kind of reminded me of a plane trip Vera and I had taken back in June 1994. We had changed planes in Chicago, then later learned we were there at the same time O.J. Simpson had been. (Recall Simpson had flown to Chicago the night of the murders.)

I imagine we’ll hear a bit more today about the van der Sloot situation, but again I anticipate being occupied with much else. Will certainly be a long day, as the plan is to play down to 24 before we stop. Check in over at the PokerStars blog to follow along.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

You’ve no doubt heard by now that Liv Boeree took down that European Poker Tour San Remo event yesterday, coming out on top of a huge field of 1,240 players to claim the €1,250,000 first prize. Lot of folks excited about it. Boeree becomes the third woman to win an EPT Main Event, following Vicky Coren (EPT London 2006) and Sandra Naujoks (EPT Dortmund 2009).

Boeree’s win also comes on the heels of Vanessa Selbst’s NAPT Mohegan Sun victory less than two weeks ago. And a month before that, Annie Duke took down the NBC National Heads Up Poker Championship — not an “open” event, but still one in which men had only prevailed in the past.

Some object to assigning too much importance to women winning events such as these, arguing that doing so reinforces the significance of a player’s sex and thus suggests another kind of inequality in the way one views women players as opposed to men.

There’s something to that argument, I suppose. But still, it is hard not to recognize the uniqueness of women succeeding in these big buy-in, “big bet” tourneys, especially given the small number of women entering them as compared to men.

By the way, even before Selbst’s win at the NAPT Mohegan Sun, Jen Newell and I chose the topic of women & no-limit hold’em tourneys for our April “He Said/She Said” columns over at Woman Poker Player. There we were separately responding to a chapter in James McManus’s Cowboys Full in which he offers a few thoughts about why men seem “biologically inclined to sign up for” NLHE tourneys.

As we were working on our articles, Selbst won her NAPT title, and so we both ended up making reference to her win. You can see what else we said about McManus’s ideers here: He Said / She Said.

Last week I also wrote a post here called “Women and the WSOP.” There I mentioned how even though 12 different women had won open WSOP events, none had done so in a NLHE event (aside from Annette Obrestad’s 2007 WSOPE Main Event title). In that post I included a list of women who had won WSOP bracelets in open events, with Vera Richmond being the first to do so back in 1982 in the $1,000 buy-in Ace-to-Five Draw event.

Curiously, when people discuss this topic many tend to overlook Richmond’s victory and cite Barbara Enright’s 1996 bracelet in the $2,500 pot-limit hold’em event as the first by a woman in an open-field WSOP tourney. In fact, when it comes to poker history, Richmond is probably better known not for her WSOP bracelet but for her involvement in that story in which Amarillo Slim Preston allegedly said he’d cut his own throat if a woman ever won the WSOP Main Event — another story the accuracy of which sometimes gets skewed.

According to the story, at the 1973 WSOP Main Event, Richmond — who according to this had to have been the first woman ever to play in the Main Event — enjoyed the chip lead for a time, and during a break took the opportunity to tell Preston she intended to win the sucker. Preston (the reigning champ) responded by telling Richmond that if she were to win the tourney, she could cut his throat with a “dull knife.”

The exchange later got retold in such a way as to suggest Preston had threatened to cut his own throat, and that his threat referred to any woman winning the event (not just Richmond). Preston himself later would exploit the apocryphal version of the story, such as in 2000 when both Annie Duke and Kathy Liebert made deep runs in the Main Event, as recounted by McManus in Positively Fifth Street.

(EDIT [added 1:00 p.m.]: Actually there are other problems with this story, including the fact that Richmond didn’t play in the 1973 event at all. Hat tip to Kevmath here, who points us to an article by Susie Isaacs that suggests Barbara Freer was the first woman to play in the WSOP ME in 1978.)

That was about all I recalled about Vera Richmond, too, other than the fact that she always gets described as a “brusque cosmetics heiress” in histories and on the web. There was, however, a reference to Richmond not too long ago on the Gamblers Book Shop podcast (episode 63, 3/19/2010).

There guest Linda Johnson — the third woman to win a WSOP in an open event (1997, $1,500 Razz) — noted how Richmond “never got credit for her win,” referring to what I mentioned earlier about how Enright tends to be more readily cited as the first woman to win an open WSOP event.

Host Howard Schwartz asked Johnson why that was the case. “Well, she wasn’t very popular,” answered Johnson. “She was kind of mean and nasty… spoke like a truck driver, and nobody liked her. And so when she won her event, she never got credit for it, which isn’t right because plenty of asshole men have won and they are in the record books.”

Kind of interesting — and not that surprising — how the story of the first woman to win a WSOP open event appears to involve ideas of traditional “gender roles” as well as (in the Amarillo Slim story) men showing some resistance to the idea of women playing and succeeding.

Times have changed, certainly. The general enthusiasm about Boeree’s win yesterday — from both men and women — is evidence of that.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Was following that NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship over the weekend in which Annie Duke ended up surviving six heads-up matches, including winning two of three against Erik Seidel in the finals, to capture the $500,000 first prize. I said on Friday that despite the relatively fast, made-for-TV structures for most of the matches — as well as the inherent luck involved in any given heads-up match — “anyone who manages to win… will have accomplished something noteworthy.”

That Duke won will probably further fuel debates over the relative significance of the event in terms of its measure of poker skill. Of course, anything involving Duke tends further to fuel debates in the poker world.

The fact is, besides now being known by many as a reality TV star, Duke is a highly accomplished poker player. Just looking at her WSOP record, it’s kind of amazing. She has 38 total cashes for over $1.12 million (I think the WSOP site is missing one, her cash in the 1995 Main Event), 15 final tables, three runner-ups, and one bracelet (the $2,000 Omaha/8 event in 2004). All in open events, incidentally, and in a wide variety of games (no-limit hold’em, limit hold’em, Omaha/8, stud, stud/8, and pot-limit Omaha).

Of course, Duke’s biggest win in terms of career earnings was that $2 million score for winning the 2004 Tournament of Champions event, which, like the NBC Heads-Up event, was a tourney she was invited to play. In fact, only ten players were invited, and while Duke outlasted a genuinely tough field (Hellmuth, Lederer, Chan, Raymer, Brunson, Negreanu, Ivey, Cloutier, and Reese), some have downplayed the significance of her having so significantly boosted her total career tourney winnings in this single-table freeroll.

So I think there is probably a bit of prejudice already in place to downgrade Duke’s triumph this weekend. Interestingly, two articles turned up on Sunday — before Duke had won — that differently addressed the significance of the event. One was a piece over on Casino City Times by Gary Trask with the headline “NBC Heads-Up event held in high regard by poker pros.” The other was a blog post by Daniel Negreanu in which he rated the “World’s Top Ten Toughest Tournaments.”

At first glance, the articles may appear to share a common focus — namely, to highlight those tourneys the top players hold in “high regard” as genuine achievements if one wins. Indeed, Negreanu’s article does provide a somewhat thorough ranking of tourneys’ “toughness” according to three primary criteria: strength of field, structure, and field size. While his list certainly invites debate — e.g., ranking the WSOP Main Event as the sixth-toughest tourney and putting a couple of yet-to-be-played events at the top of his list — it is clear Negreanu is focusing mainly on how well the events test players’ tourney skills.

The Casino City Times article rather focuses on other factors affecting players’ “high regard” — namely the enjoyment they get from participating, the fun of competing (and earning bragging rights with friends/colleagues), and the intangible benefits of succeeding in a high-profile, televised event.

Trask quotes Phil Gordon noting how “we all want to play in it” and how “the fact that it’s a heads-up, one-on-one match really brings the whole ego thing into the equation.” However, Gordon recognizes how the tourney may rate lower on a “toughness” scale such as the one Negreanu put together. “[W]e all realize that when it comes right down to it, this is a crapshoot,” says Gordon. “There’s just so much luck involved in a one-time heads-up match.”

Negreanu does mention at the end of his list how the NBC Heads-Up event’s fast structure necessarily eliminates it from consideration as one of the “toughest” tourneys. But the question remains of how to rate the achievement of someone who does win the event. As an NBC Heads-Up champ, Duke joins a list of other highly accomplished players — Hellmuth, Forrest, Wasicka, Ferguson, and Seed. Each enjoyed some good fortune along the way to win their titles, but such is true for all tourney winners to some degree.

I’ll stick to the idea that winning it is “something noteworthy,” though doubt Duke’s win will necessarily up the NBC Heads-Up event’s status as an especially “tough” test for players.

Related posts:

1. Full Tilt releases FTOPS XV Schedule FullTiltPoker.com has released the official schedule of events for…
2. Commerce Casino offers LA Poker Open Championship participants $100 discount to Annie Duke Celebrity Poker Night Commerce Casino recently announced that poker players registering for…
3. Annie Duke to host charity poker tournament with 20 Joan Rivers impersonators Annie Duke is fighting back at Joan Rivers’ insensitive…

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Well, it looks as though I might have overshot the 2010 Mastodon Weekend by about, oh, 675 miles or something. While others degen it up in G-ville, I am spending the weekend in West Palm Beach with Vera Valmore, attending with her a dressage competition. Will be, I imagine, a marginally less intense time these next couple of days here in southern Florida, although I have to say I’m very glad to be able to get away with Vera like this.

So far Florida is not the sunny, pleasant place we were hoping to find, but rather chilly and uncomfortably windy. Vera is getting to see some excellent rides, though, including some by Olympians and other top competitors in the sport.

Meanwhile, since I have found myself in a state that actually has live poker, I have already taken the opportunity to play a bit.

Gonna save the live poker report until Monday. I have made one quick (and happily profitable) trip to the Palm Beach Kennel Club thus far. May or may not get to play again — we’ll see. Was an interesting session, though, that included a couple of semi-interesting and/or memorable hands. So, like I say, I will share a bit about it early next week.

Setting that aside, though, since poker-wise we’re all mostly preoccupied with that NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship that kicks off this afternoon. Last night a draw was held to determine the brackets. Funny to read all of the tweets from all of the players, each of whom seems to have responded to his or her draw the same way: “Tough match!”

Here is how that draw wound up:

Clicking the image gets you to a better look. Or just go over to the NBC site and download it yrself.

Even with all of the special invites and other funny business surrounding the selection of folks to play, all four brackets look pretty tough. Once again, anyone who manages to win six matches — even with the relatively fast structures — will have accomplished something noteworthy, I think.

I wrote a preview of the event appearing over on Betfair today. I believe F-Train and the PokerNews folks will be providing coverage, so check that out if you’re interested (here is their live reporting page). Episodes will start airing later next month on NBC, continuing for six straight Sundays until the end of May.

Sheesh. That’ll be just in time for the start of this year’s WSOP. Already?

Enjoy the weekend, all.

Related posts:

1. Travel Report, NAPT Venetian: Day 1 Cool first day at the Venetian yesterday for the…
2. Talking ’Bout Women, Men, Poker, Horses Some — or many — of my readers may…
3. NAPT Venetian Postscript Made it back home safely yesterday afternoon. Quick flight,…

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.