After talking to the folks over at Chili Poker we decided that maybe we could do something to help promote their Dublin Deepstack Open tournament. I know it’s a bit of late notice but we were able to put something together I hope you’ll enjoy (and profit from).
The Dublin Deepstack Open is being held at the Ballsbridge Inn Hotel in Dublin (duh!). The main event is a €500 + €50 with 50,000 in starting chips and 60 and 90 minute levels. Pretty good deal if you like deep stacks.
Anyway, Chili’s thrown in $100 bucks into a freeroll so you can get a taste of the deep stack action even if you can’t make it out to Dublin. Just go onto Chili Poker and go to Freerolls under Schedule Tournaments. There you’ll see a tournament called Rini Deepstack Freeroll. It’s password protected so ping me and I’ll send you the password.
The tournament is scheduled for Sunday, Feb 7 at 19:00 GMT. You’ll get 5000 in starting chips and the blinds go up every 5 minutes.
I started to write a very similar post to this when Tiffany Michelle and Maria Ho were on the Amazing Race. During that same week they were running episodes of Celebrity Apprentice and had just watched several episodes of Annie Duke trying to relate even the most routine points into a poker analogy. Tiffany and Maria sort of put me on tilt watching them trying to do the same thing when it was so obviously unnecessary.
My all-time tilt moment came when Annie was telling the board that in poker you have to make good decisions. WTF?!?! In real life you don’t need to make good decisions? Good decisions are a unique poker concept? Why did she feel the need to make a comparison between business and poker when making good decisions is universal across all areas of your life?
I’m not sure how I recovered from that tilt but I didn’t write the post. I thought maybe I was being too harsh. Maybe too critical.
But this interview between Neil Cavuto and Michelle re-tilted me. I’m don’t think I’m being too critical when I say . . . NOT EVERYTHING SHOULD BE MADE INTO A POKER METAPHOR!!!!!!
I mean, the interview became way more complicated than it needed to because both of them were trying to shoehorn the healthcare debate bill into poker metaphors that didn’t quite fit. What a painful thing to watch.
BTW, I can’t remember if I saw this on Pokerati or WickedChops first so I’ll just throw out a prop to both.
This last week has been a little tough. I had a bit of a cold this week. Lots of coughing up disgusting stuff and feeling generally like crap. Things hit the peak on Friday night. My new project, Thailand Friends, had a team in the Asian/European Pool Championships. I went down to lend my support which meant the best thing I could do to help our team win was not play.
Even though I stuck to water the entire evening I hit a wall around 10pm and felt like I was going to collapse. I went home and slept the rest of the night and well into the next day. I was hoping to feel at least a little bit better because the plan for Saturday was to attend a dual birthday party being held for two Thailand Friends members at Bed Supperclub.
Yeah, I know, my job with Thailand Friends necessitates that I attend and throw parties and networking events. It’s a tough job but someone has to do it.
Fortunately, I felt much better and Sunday even a little better still. Monday was good and I’m almost feeling like I’ve kicked it and other than feeling a little foggy from the medication I’ve been taking things seem to be right back on track.
I’m not sure if Rob punching me in the face had anything to do with my recovery.
Here’s the dork patrol. Everybody checking their mobile phones for messages and emails :-)
A few weeks back I mentioned that I had recently discovered that one of my friends, May, is a poker player. She’s the one in the white dress. I’ve been bugging her about writing some guest posts here and she hasn’t laughed in my face so if you guys are lucky she might grace us with some articles about her experiences playing poker.
If you want to see her post here, give a shout out in the comments so I can apply some peer pressure to her. :-)
Follow up
I really don’t enjoy embarrassing affiliate managers . . . okay, just joking. I love it. Seriously though, I do think that it makes the better ones stand out. I’ve received several emails from affiliate managers recently who have read my posts on the topic and they’ve all sent very personal and well directed emails to me. Hopefully they’re also being careful with other affiliates as well. This is a small industry and it doesn’t pay to burn your reputation by sending out spammy messages. This is especially true when many of those same sites specify in their T&C’s that they don’t approve of affiliates spamming players! If anything I’ve written has been a wakeup call for anyone, I’m glad.
I was trying to get something special set up with Chili Poker for you guys for this week’s post but it looks like things haven’t been moving along as quickly as I like. As soon as we have it, I’ll announce it on the blog though.
Remember, if your company has a job opening and you want to list it on Poker Job Search, just give us a shout and we’ll get your job posted for you. And if you’re a in-house recruiter or agency and have a tough spot to fill please contact me about sponsoring Poker Job Search. Your jobs will get priority placement and a specific mention on this site as part of your sponsorship package.
It’s not often that you see a conservative website rip apart a Republican but Big Government does exactly that. They focus on Kyl’s childish attempt to block Treasury nominees in order to get back at the Obama administration for agreeing to delay the UIGEA. Here are some of the more choice parts of [...]
Dan over at Pokerati.com posted a news bit about SEGA’s new poker room. Unfortunately, since it’s closed to US and Japanese players you can’t even view the site if you’re coming from one of those countries. Fortunately, being in Thailand I can access the site (yeah Thailand!) so I thought I would post [...]
In 2003, I intentionally folded pocket aces before the flop in a live, $20/40 limit hold’em game. It was, according to my meticulous calculations, the worst play ever. But that wasn’t the only reason I did it. I wrote an article at the time in which all is revealed:
http://tommyangelo.com/articles/the_worst_play_ever.htm
Today I am here [...]
I just ran across this article on Bluff about Tell Gaming offering stakes in their poker room for loyal players.
Online poker site and casino www.tellgaming.com is giving players the chance to earn a stake in the company by simply playing on the site. Players can earn ‘ownership units’ in the company as they actively participate [...]
During the downturn that followed the banking collapse in the US and Europe many CEOs of publically traded companies were quick to cite the global economic crisis as the reason for underperforming. Well, at least they cited it as a reason. They usually included an increasingly competitive market as a co-contributor.
But [...]
Obviously, the big story of late has been the earthquake that hit Haiti. My thoughts and prayers go out to those impacted by the tragedy and to their families and loved ones who are coping with their losses.
As usual, many of the poker sites like PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker have come [...]
Proof Online Poker is Rigged One can hardly read any poker forum without running across individuals claiming that this or that site is rigged. Usually they are humiliated with the forum .experts. rudely telling them that the reason they.re losing is because they aren.t good poker players. I.m sad to say that I used to be one of those .experts.. I was one of the doubters until I actually caught one site cheating.
Why Online Poker Is Not Rigged In this post I will attempt to address every argument I.ve ever heard regarding online poker being rigged. Mind you, I do work for a company that develops online poker software but my motivation is not to convince people to trust *my* employer.s software, rather it is to have a central place where people can point misinformed message board and blog posters who think somebody is pulling something on them.
Motivations For Rigging Online Poker I.m not sure whether it.s funny or sad that even after my post on why online poker is not rigged, I still get people emailing me trying to convince me otherwise. The funny/sad part is that despite the fact that I.ve all but called people who make that claim without hand histories or other empirical evidence idiots I continue to receive 1 . 5 emails a week telling me some bad beat story and QED, online poker is rigged. So with that in mind, I.m going to expound a bit on some new points as well as clarify previously made points.
PokerBot Pro - Another Online Poker Scam Pauly emailed me this link the other day and I just can.t help calling the guy on his bullshit. He's certainly not the first person to make such absurd claims but he happened to be the one I decided to pick on.
Online Poker Tells Many players will tell you that online poker tells either don.t exist or are difficult to judge. That's a load. All the online pros know the tells but it's some sort of unspoken rule never to let others in on it. Well, that ends right now! I will share with my loyal readers 5 of the top online poker tells that they (and we know who *they* is, don.t we?) don.t want you to know about.
The Wisdom of Bonus Whoring One of the common topics you.ll see mentioned in the poker blogosphere is bonus whoring. Of course, bonus whoring is the act of playing on a particular site in order to take advantage of a reload or some other type of promotional bonus. Many people chase bonuses from site to site and even include bonuses in their monthly win/lose figures. The more I've thought about it though, the more I.m beginning to question the wisdom of bonus whoring.
Seeing The World Through The Eyes of a Fish Have you ever been left scratching your head trying to figure out why your opponent played the hand the way he did? I certainly did so I found a fish and hooked him up to the USB port on my computer and did the same to myself. The results of this experiment are below:
The Ultimate Secret to Winning Poker I'm going to let everyone in on the biggest secret in poker; there is no secret! You can quit looking for that special book, video, website, etc. that.s going to turn your game around and make you into the next Phil Hellmuth Ivey.
Hi, my name is Bill Rini and this is my poker blog. I've been blogging about poker and the poker industry since around 2003-ish. Like most people I started out playing poker as entertainment in home games whenever we wanted to sit around and smoke cigars, drink beer, and eat pizza, and needed a good excuse. I started playing online shortly after the first online card rooms opened and it wasn't long before I was playing 20, 30, or even 40 hours a week or more. One day I received a phone call about a program manager position at Tiltware which was the company that consulted to Full Tilt Poker on software development and marketing. After Tiltware I spent about 2.5 years working at Party Poker where I was the poker room manager.