Interesting article from recent Harpers Magazine called Getting To The End, Gambling and Suicide in Atlantic City. The writer, J.C. Hallman, spent five years dealing in Atlantic City and writes a short account of his remembrances of the many suicides that happened while he was there. The account is more experiential and literary than it is journalistic, but still an interesting read about the ...
The Poker Guys’ The Breakdown videos focus on behavior from televised poker
Jonathan Levy and Grant Denison are two Portland, Oregon-area pro poker players. I first met Jonathan playing some $20-40 Limit Hold’em up in Washington state, as you can often find him doing. For the past year or so, he and Grant have been doing a weekly poker podcast and videos that analyze hands from televised poker footage. They call themselves The Poker Guys and they've named their weekly ...
Mark Sherman: The Greatest Poker Player Ever? (guest blog post)
This is a guest post by David Alzofon about a colorful, loud high-stakes poker player, Mark Sherman, who frequented the San Francisco cardrooms in the 1980s. Here's David's bio: David Alzofon grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area where he spent 20 years slogging away in the salt mines of Silicon Valley. During a brief period of unemployment in the mid-'80s, he chanced to come across ...
New poker tells video series
So the last few months I've been working on a new video series, which I've titled Reading Poker Tells Video. I partnered with Chicago's Windy City Poker Championships, run by Kirk Fallah, so I could use the footage from their cash games and tournaments to make instructional training videos about poker behavior and tells. The last few months I've been watching their footage, analyzing it, and ...
My Experience as a Contestant on the TV Show PokerStars’ The Big Game
This is a guest blog post written by Ken Hrankowski, who appeared as the amateur guest player during a few episodes of the TV show Pokerstars’ The Big Game. This post recounts his experience getting onto the show and what it was like playing with big-name players like Phil Hellmuth, Tony G, and Daniel Negreanu. I started playing poker after the “Moneymaker Effect,” as they called it. I found it ...
Poker Is Dead (brought to you by Legacy Headstones of Ohio)
I get a lot of weird offers from random companies who want to pay me to put up ads or to do "link exchanges" (this is when you put each other's links on your sites, in order to help search engine results). Mostly I get these emails from shady gambling sites who are just trying to ride the coat-tails of more successful sites by getting a link from them. I pretty much ignore all of them. But I ...
Molly’s Game: An Interesting Glimpse Into Private, High-Stakes Poker Games
(Full disclosure: I received a review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a review. I was actually planning on reading it and reviewing it anyway, though, so I took them up on the offer.) Molly’s Game is the tale of Molly Bloom and the super high-stakes private poker games she ran for a few years. These games featured celebrities, billionaire businessmen, rich heirs, famous ...
Well-known poker players and celebrities featured in Verbal Poker Tells book
During research for writing the book Verbal Poker Tells, I watched and took notes on around 100 hours of poker footage, with a focus on verbal behavior. Poker footage I watched included: the WSOP Main Events, Poker After Dark, High Stakes Poker, European Poker Tour events, PokerStars' The Big Game, and the Heartland Poker Tour. In the book, I used verbatim transcriptions of interesting ...
Poker pro Davidi Kitai talks about poker tells
In a PokerNews interview of respected Belgian poker pro Davidi Kitai, poker journalist Remko Rinkema conducts a short interview of Kitai on the subject of poker tells. If you're not familiar with him, here is Kitai's Wikipedia page. Here’s a quick synopsis of the few points Kitai makes in the interview: ...
Poker tells at a Chicago poker tournament
This past weekend I went to a Windy City Poker charity tournament in Chicago. I played a couple interesting hands that featured a good amount of reliable poker tells, which I’ll share below. The tournament was a $1,000 buy-in one; it got about 50 players. It had one featured table, with RFID sensors and camera coverage, that switched players once every hour. The episodes didn’t stream live but ...