Alrighty then, thanks for reading and please come back. I'll be back with a regular post tomorrow.

Shill groveling alert: Sign up with IGGY on
Party if you are silly enough to not currently be playing there. Use IGGY1 for a $100 bonus on Empire (the same damn site!) if you want to play under a new name.

Saw this post on 2+2. Jason from Poker Odyssey blog taking a break:

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Well, it's a

Mike Laing and Howard Lederer Poker Blogs

"Dishonest money dwindles away, but he who gathers money little by little makes it grow."
Proverbs 13:11

My regular readers will recognize my "prayer for the grinder" that my wife taped to my monitor, months ago. After the Russ Gorgiev's scam web launch, the verse above seems even more apropos.

I've posted in the past about online cheating. I have

I'll be up with a regular post in a bit. Still very surprised that after YEARS of talking about this, Russ FINALLY goes live with his website and only posts a few "columns" (re-posts of the same crap he's posted on RGP 800 times) and as the finishing touch, a membership page that offers all of his "wisdom" for $30 a month. I hope nobody is stupid enough to give a lifelong poker cheat their credit

PokerMafia is up. What a joke. It took six months to deliver this POS? I thought it would be bad, but not this bad.

I want to post some of the responses now that he's finally up. Oh the humanity.

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Russ has had some "word definition issues" in the past.
For example, "soon" means "never". "Never" means "every so often". "I stated" means "I never said". "Game over" means "game just

PartyPoker.net Poker Blog

"Why Ike, whatever do you mean? Maybe poker's just not your game. I know! Let's have a spelling contest!"
Doc Holliday

Is the poker blogger tourney a reality? Stay tuned.

This poker blog thing is catching on. Hell, poker fever is getting out of control. I simply jumped on here to bang out a few poker thoughts, yet now I'm seeing a few new blogs and plenty of poker

Phil Helmuth & Gus Hansen Poker Blogs

"Some people lose their heads cold sober. Cards, dice, pool; it makes no difference. You want to make a living that way, you want to be a winner, you got to keep your head. And you got to remember that there's a loser somewhere in you, whining at you, and you got to learn to cut his water off."
Bert, The Hustler

Yet another long post. Thanks for reading,

Drew Carey & Stuey Unger Poker Blogs

"Beware, above all, of the man who simply tells you he broke even.
He is the big winner."
Anthony Holden, Big Deal

I picked up my first roto baseball magazine yesterday, which is always cause for celebration in these deep winter months. The first sign of impending spring.

Allow me to again state I'm somewhat in a state of flux regarding which poker game

Scott Stapp & Mimi Rogers Poker Blog"If a man who cannot count finds a four-leaf clover, is he lucky?"Lanislaw J. LecWas it really only a week ago that I was running around like my ass was on fire, preparing for a poker tournament? Thankfully, nothing on the agenda today but full-fledged slacking.I didn't play last nite. Boooo - I hate missing friday evening Party Poker but I'm in a state of flux

Phil Ivey & Evelyn Ng Poker Blog

"You know what luck is? Luck is believing you're lucky....to hold front position in this rat-race, you've got to believe you're lucky."
Stanley Kowalski, A Streetcar Named Desire

From the Poker Comic:
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Luck never encounters my mind when playing poker. People that believe in superstitions and say "I hope it's my lucky day" before sitting down at a table are

"No wife can endure a gambling husband unless he is a steady winner."
Lord Dewar

Nine years here.

Thanks to PokerCode, I created this silly, animated Phil Helmuth. Get it while you can, it's deleted in 14 days.
Phil Helmuth trash-talking me.

I'm still winding down after the weekend tourney. Co-workers, friends, and emails were nothing but overwhelmingly positive, so it went as well as I

Phil Helmuth & Russ Gorgiev Poker Blogs

"The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet."
Grantland Rice

Queen City Poker Series

Oh my, where to even begin??

I'm absolutely wiped out. I spent all Friday and Saturday running around, accumulating tables, chairs and massive amounts of other random stuff needed to run a largish poker tournament. I spent

Phil Gordon & Sam Farha Celebrity Poker Blogs

"Nobody is always a winner, and anybody who says he is, is either a liar or doesn't play poker."
Amarillo Slim

Yup, even good players lose often.
Accepting that truism as a student of poker is one thing. Using it as an excuse for poor play is another. Discerning the difference is what separates the long-term good players from the bad.

Especially

TJ Cloutier & Dan Harrington Poker Blogs

"For the true gambler, money is never an end in itself. It's a tool, like language or thought."
Lancey, The Cincinnati Kid

I'm saddened that with this post, the vegan bashing goes into the archives. Lotsa good stuff in da archives.

Alrighty then, where was I? Oh yeah, continuing my dissertation on how to choke in large no-limit tournaments, I finished

Russ Georgiev & Phil Ivey Poker Blogs

Russ Georgiev is back on RGP after a brief hiatus, stating that his site, Poker Mafia, will be up in a few days. I think I'll wear my poker mafia t-shirt to the no-limit tournament I'm running next weekend just to see if anyone comments.

My favorite comment from Russ was:

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A tape about ONLINE POKER has been made. I'll let the public decide
how honorable

Stewart Reuben & Bob Ciaffone Poker Blogs

"It's not luck - there's probably no such thing as luck, and if there is you can't depend on it. All you can do is play percentages, play your best game, and when that critical bet comes - in every money game there is always a critical bet - you hold your stomach tight and push hard."
Bert, The Hustler

Good God, I'm reading that Guinness-fueled post

Phil Ivey blog repost

"One of the healthiest ways to gamble is with a spade and a package of garden seeds."
Dan Bennett

Thanks to a link and cool poker thread at Metafilter, I received some serious traffic. It's been odd, writing this out into the BlogSpace, or perhaps only to myself. Getting my first serious inbound link was kinda cool.

I'm still killing the games at Party Poker. Night

Andy Glazer & Phil Helmuth Poker Blogs

"How long does it take to learn poker, Dad?"
"All your life, son."
David Spanier

TGIF!

Mister Decker alerted me to the nightly $3 no-limit satellites (to the $200 NL tourneys) on PokerStars. They have unlimited rebuys for the first hour and an add-on at the first break. Suffice to say, even with the rebuys, the play is still tougher than PartyPoker.

These damn tournaments are killing me. They last so freaking long and I end up drinking far too much Guinness. Oh the humanity, I'm hurting today.

But YES, I qualified last nite. Typical satellite, players shoving chips in as fast as they can, talking trash. The pivotal hand was getting KK allin preflop versus TT and KJo (? wtf) and tripling through to 120k in mid-tourney.

So now I'm once again

Phil Ivey & Annie Duke Poker Blog

"Las Vegas is not renowned as a literary town. In fact, the word "book" around here, 90% of the time is a verb."
Deke Castleman

Good Lord, where to begin?
I want to rant, to shill, to scream from the rooftop, I LOVE PARTYPOKER!

It's amazing, watching poker undergo this metamorphosis, especially regarding online poker play. Could I have dreamt or ever

Phil Helmuth & Chris Moneymaker Poker Blogs

"After five days in Vegas you feel like you've been here for five years."
Hunter S. Thompson

Ain't that the truth.

I'm full of poker content but I've got a tournament coming up, so I'll just bang out what I can and save the rest for tomorrow or later tonight.

I'm really enjoying my fellow poker bloggers reaping the fruits of Izmet's advice in limit

Homer: "I'm trying to impress people here, Lisa. You don't win friends with salad."

Bart: [forming conga line with Homer] "You don't win friends with salad! You don't win friends with salad!"

Sigh. Vegan bashing. To recap: Over a week ago, PokerVegan posted that he was estatic about MadCow disease in this country. Go read it yourself, I'm not reposting that crap here. I was pretty damn

Nazi Vegetarians. The Nazis took great pride in their fervent beliefs in animal rights and avowedly opposed the idea of eating flesh.

"One may regret living at a period when it's impossible to form an idea of the shape the world of the future will assume. But there's one thing I can predict to eaters of meat: the world of the future will be vegetarian."
- Adolf Hitler. November 11, 1941.

Russ Gorgeiv & Party Poker Blogs

"Your first duty is to the Game; then come Mother, God, and Country."
Motto at the National Press Club, Washington D.C.

Tons of poker links below, so please humor the next paragraph.

Sign up on Party Poker with bonus code IGGY.

Or if you are playing on Party already, but haven't signed up for Empire Poker, the exact same site as Party Poker, just packaged in

I've been asking Fuzz to write another post about beating the 50.1 games. Please dig into the archives if you missed his first one. For the record, Fuzz has ran $50 into $1000 on Party Poker, almost exclusively on the 50.1 tables.

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of management. :)

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I will try to sum up my whole post in one sentence, if you do not have the time

"Judged by the dollars spent, gambling is now more popular in America than baseball, the movies, and Disneyland combined."
Timothy O'Brien

A few tasty things to post.

Most importantly, thanks to the ever-alert HDouble, I discovered that my links to Abdul, were in fact, linking to Izmet Fekali's web site. Turns out that Izmet is as much the expert as Abdul (they are close friends) and both