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Life has been a blur since my return from the Pokerroom.com affiliates conferrence in New York last week. The event served as a wake up call complete with a blueprint of how we should be moving forward. Now we’re all about the momentum. A few of the things we have going on around here:

- Free live seminars in Toronto. We’re offering both mixed and ladies-only events that remove the competitive, condescending of the competitive male from the equation.

- We’re up on Bluff Magazine’s official website, www.bluffmagazine.com

- We’re now up and running on the Corus Group, a set of 26 prominent radio stations throughout Canada, including Q107 in Toronto, where I just heard my name in one of our first promos (chills)

- We’re featured prominently on the website of WJFK, Washington DC’s largest radio station.

- I’ve started conversations with a number of prominent pro players, which can only help the quality of the information we’re providing you every day.

- We’ve brought three new guys into the fold, two of who will be debuting on the site soon

- We’re working on a statistical database with full search capability along with a biography section that will include all of your favorite poker personalities

While the bottom line obviously matters, my attitude is that if we build a great site for poker fans, the money will come. If you have any ideas for things you’d like to see on the site, please, please please let me know at gary@wisehandpoker.com so we can provide you every excuse to waste as much time as is humanly possible on the site. Its starting to feel like this is going to be one hell of a ride.

Gary Wise
gary@wisehandpoker.com

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the show I’ve been waiting for. I’m not a huge tournament player. I don’t have the patience for them and prefer the option of leaving the table after a bad beat that ring games offer.

The Game Show Network’s ‘High Stakes Poker’ - http://www.gsn.com/specific_page_elements.php?link_id=S82 is an old fashioned poker game; the best players in the world just playing for whatever they have in front of them;

- 24-year old Daniel Alaei stares down the classic Doyle Brunson with twenty-seven grand in the pot

- LA Lakers owner Jerry Buss takes on Daniel Negreanu seeking revenge from their first-round National Heads Up Championship match

- Barry Greenstein, Jennifer Harman and the eternal Brunson show us what they do best.

When I look at poker as a whole, I see the big stakes poker games of the past 150 years as the game’s heart. Call me old-fashioned, but without the ring game, we don’t have today’s national sensation. This show is as close as we’ve come to the genuine article in terms of cash keeping the score, which may be the better way to measure who the best player is than the ability to survive. Here, if you lose an all-in, you can always rebuy.

We won’t catch all the nuances because a big part of the ring game is setting patterns your opponents will notice and breaking them at optimal times. It’s a process that takes far longer than an hour can provide. We will see a departure from all-in poker. There’s going to be a lot of maneuvering. It’s a chess game that encompasses every fibre of the players’ being.

Can you tell I’m enjoying the show?

Gary Wise
gary@wisehandpoker.com

Before I start about Annie Duke’s book, let me come out and say I think she’s one hell of a person. The men of the poker world love to disparage their women colleagues, making the climb to poker zenith far more difficult than it is for the male player. Then, to make things worse, when the odd lady makes that leap, they get torn down on the Internet for having the audacity to use tactics that the guys use every day. meanwhile, they’re being dissected by thousands of Internet dwellers for everything from questionable plays to bra size. It’s a brutal double standard, and that Annie’s survived it in and of itself makes her remarkable.

Of course, her talents reach beyond mere resiliency. She has a bracelet and more winnings than any woman in WSOP history. Memorably, the mind job she pulled on Phil Hellmuth in the finals of the 2004 World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions stands out as one of the great half-dozen examples of poker transcending mere mathematics. Criticize her if you want, but on that day, she proved that she’ll always be able to sit with the big boys.

‘Annie Duke

Due to holiday doings and limited ESPN access, I didn