This is a something I wrote because I get irritated by the online poker isn’t illegal argument. It’s mostly a rant, but when 60 Minutes ran the UltimateBet Scandal story people all over the forums were going crazy because online poker was called illegal. With Greg Raymer recently appearing on Fox Business News the argument has surfaced again. It seems that it’s the majority in the poker community that think online poker is legal, and feel the need to correct you if you don’t.

60 Minutes Ultimate Bet Scandal story

Greg Raymer on Fox Business News

Online poker is illegal. As far as anyone actually getting in trouble for playing, it hasn’t happened, yet. A minute fraction of a percentage of people involved will ever be prosecuted for anything, but online poker is illegal. I wish it wasn’t and am all for it becoming legal ( I’m also not as affected in Canada), but until it happens, even though it is in a grey area, it is not legal. Listen to any UIGEA discussion and someone has to bring up the point that online poker isn’t illegal. You can make a strong argument for the legality, but if you are speaking to a regular person, who cares. The online poker isn’t illegal argument is one of the most ridiculous arguments you can use if you consider that as a whole, the entire UIGEA fight is all about making online poker not illegal.

If you really want to know how legal online poker is, go ask Howard Lederer or Chris Ferguson how much of full tilt poker they own or where the full tilt office’s are located. Anurag Dikshit paid $300 million to the US Justice Department, as a plea for illegal internet gaming. This upset some people in the PPA, believing admission of guilt is most likely hurting their cause. If rumors are true then Calvin Ayre, former BODOG owner, is not allowed to enter the States, and there’s some discussion he may not be allowed in Canada either. Its true the average player really has nothing to worry about. The government wants the big boys, they want who is taking the rake. They can’t get the people who have companies that work around the laws, but I guarantee one plan the companies don’t have is moving the offices to downtown vegas, legally. Why do they advertise the .net sites and not .com?

This is in the PPA’s letter to congress they are asking people to copy and send. “Explicit legalization with sensible regulation will allow the Congress to mandate rigorous safeguards” Explicit legalization? It doesn’t matter what adjective you put in front of legal, it’s still asking for legalization. Greg Raymer, who I felt did a great job on Fox Business news, corrected the interviewers when they brought up poker being illegal. When someone brings up this point, the automatic response is “online poker isn’t illegal.” Next is the technical explanation of why it isn’t illegal, which boils down to nothing more than no one has been prosecuted yet, so it can’t be illegal. Taking the stand that something you are fighting for legalization of, isn’t technically illegal is a very confusing stand to take.

John

This quote just jumped right out at me while reading Doyle Brunson’s blog earlier on. It then dawned on me. This is what separates a good percentage of the really good players from great players. They know the stakes in which they belong and they stay there until they feel ready to move up to the higher limits and take a shot at becoming a regular grinder at those levels. These players know their own skill level and can pick the games they play in accordingly. Something I think that I and many other poker players fail in doing before sitting down at a game, yet it is pivotal to any poker players success at the table that he can beat any game that he sits down at.

This is one of the things that I, myself need to work on fixing if I am going to improve my game. I am going to need to use a couple of valuable, yet mostly overlooked tools to help me increase my profit margins every time I sit down. First one is something that I have been threatening to do for around 2 or three years now; Take a notebook to the table and simply write down everything that you see of importance for evaluation after the game or on Dinner breaks. This information you can then use against your opponents when you have it time stamped in your brain after leaving the table to study it. As I said before it’s simple, yet effective. Another thing that I have just recently found in the past few weeks is exclusively for online cash game play though it is an incredibly powerful tool to help you find out more about you opponents or perspective opponents at the table at any given time. It is called pokertableratings.com and it is like the sharkscope of cash game play. I know this does sound like a big huge plug for the site but it is really an awesome website and it is not very widely used yet so it is good to have it on your side and become accustomed to it before anyone else starts to use it.

This week I haven’t been doing much at all; just chilling, posting on forums writing and I recorded a podcast last Monday for Suited-Aces. Feels like I spend my life on my laptop and I think It’s taking its toll on the machine. The hard drive is screaming at me to stop working it so hard, might need to replace that in the next month or so before it breaks down into pieces in front of me. When you start backing stuff up on to memory sticks, which is when you know it could frazzle any minute.

Hopefully I’m going to get back into poker in the next few weeks so I don’t need to oil my brain before playing next time. Feels like an age since I have played but I am feeling confident that this time I will actually stick to a game that I can beat and start showing some results that actually reflect on my knowledge and don’t show how much of a donk I am once again.

We’ll see what happens anyway. Hopefully its good news next time you hear from me.

D

Since I’m new to 95% of people who read this blog, I thought I would write this and slip it in before I do anything else with the site. A short Introduction post if you will.

Firstly, My name is Daniel Reilly and I am far from an online pro, great, player or someone even remotely notable, Since you are reading this then you must have some sort of interest in what I have to say so here I go.

Guess I should start with my humble beginnings and go from there. Like many others my poker journey started off with the Moneymaker Main Event win, though not directly. I was sitting in a pub discussing with some of my dad’s friends a walk we were going to do the following week and planning out our routes. I was 13 at the time (I know, what the hell was I doing in a pub at 14? I had a “sheltered” upbringing) putting the walking chat aside a new subject arose, Poker. They suggested playing once a week on a Monday night for fun and making it a lad’s night. Everyone agreed to the idea and a rule book emerged for Texas Hold’em, Everyone listened intently while we all (5 or 6 of us) learned the rules of the game. At first everyone was against me coming down and playing with them. That lasted around 2 months, those two months I spent looking up starting hands, odds charts, everything I could to make me “good” at the game. They let me come down and watch for a month or two but I had to leave early. In that time, I started to pick up playing habits, reads, Aggression factor and I really started to get a feel for the game. It was at that point where I found Pacific Poker and Poker.com (now the Merge Network) where I started to frantically play freerolls after school and on weekends to get better at the game. I started cashing in these and posting in forums and slowly became more respected and for the first time in my life I felt as if my opinion mattered in something. Then came my first game on a Monday night, by the time I came down, I was absolutely crushing everyone at the table and was easily the best player there. I’ll never forget that first tournament I won when I turned quad aces to win a total of $0. Still the rush was immense and I couldn’t get enough of it.

Another 5 years of doing that exact same thing and here I am. I have learned many lessons in my time, posted on many forums, flopped many flushes and logged around 1,000,000 hands. I have also made so, so many interesting and great friends. The latest of which is Gary Wise, the person who gave me this opportunity in the first place. All that work has really paid off and things can only get better. Poker really has been good to me. Now here I am, trying to share my learning experience with an audience. Who would have thought? I am hoping that this blog will be as beneficial for many a player, not just myself. Maybe once in a while I might say something entertaining, or educational. Not likely though!

I plan on writing about everything from online play to live amateur events to the WSOPE if I actually make it there this year, so stay tuned. You never know what could be in store when I post a blog. Most of the time neither do I, I just open a word document and write whatever is on my mind

D

I guess a good place to start would be with an introduction. My name is John MacLeod, and i’m from a small town on the far east coast of Canada. Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. If you walk out my back door, and walk strait for 15 mins you would hit the Atlantic Ocean. If you turn right and walk for 5 minutes, you’d be drowning in it. I can’t say there that it’s a very exciting life, but I wouldn’t want to be from anywhere else. I suppose most people would feel the same. With that said, I’m on the edge of starting a new career. I’d love to tell you that it’s professional poker player, but alas, i’m settling for the poker reporter. Settling is actually a terrible word in this case. I’m excited. I had a career for over 10 years that I “walked away” from last summer, could never honestly say I came home from work and felt good about the job I did. I’m more proud of this paragraph than anything I have ever done all those years selling eyeglasses and I was good at my job. My apologies to any Opticians.

Since then, I had been trying to figure out what to do. The best plan I could come up with was go back to school. I need a profession thats going to be able to provide for a wife and kids,(I don’t have a wife or kids) but also one that’s going to give me enough money to travel and play poker.I know I’m playing in the Main Event at least once, sometime. This year I can’t think about anything but going there, watching it and telling people all about it. I haven’t even submitted an application anywhere yet, but I know i’ll be applying for every spot that’s available. If it wasn’t for BJ Nemeth starting a thread over on PokerRoad , the biggest problem I would be having would be whether or not I can get the government pay for school. Since getting invloved with that thread, (which anybody who has any interest in reporting - poker or not -should read), i’ve a new enthusiasm for things I forgot I loved.

Poker, is something that i’ve always loved. My mother tells me my grandfather ran a card game back in the day. I guess it’s in the blood. The one problem with living where I live, is the only legal card games I have access to is 1 or sometimes 2 1-2 tables at the local casino 5 days a week for 7 1/2 hrs, filled with regulars. The next closest games are 5 hours away, and forget about tournament poker. I did have some small success in one the 3 live tournaments i’ve played in a casino. I finished 2nd in Canadian Poker Tour rebuy event in Halifax a few years back, when I was first getting into hold em. I got $10,810 and a small trophy. I still have the trophy. It was also taped for local tv, not a lot of people can say they have a tape of themselves pulling off a valu-bet bluff on the river. I play alot of online poker too, for a long time only at party poker, where ive won roughly 25k, not profit, lol tho i did pull a modest one out of there. As it stands now, I’m online busto. I should be getting my fulltilt account back online in the next week or so, and I will probably starting with 200 or 300. I play mostly tourneys $3-$55 and i like heads up sit and go’s. Small stakes.

I’m not too sure on what i’m going to be writing about all of the time, but while I was following the EPT Dortmund online on the weekend, I signed up for a pokerstars account because a $1000 freeroll was starting, for anybody watching the broadcast. Over 7000 players started, and I managed to hit a couple miracles, and a straight flush along the way to finishing 12th and $22 cash. It was fate, lol. I’m gonna blog about starting a bankroll from nothing, and whatever else happens to be on my mind that day. That’s it for now, hope it wasn’t too boring.

John

The 2003 WSOP was the turning point for the Poker community when Chris Moneymaker, an accountant from Tennessee, taught us all what a “bluff” was in Poker, when He moved all in on Sammy Farha and then beat the professional player to win the Million Dollar Prize and the coveted bracelet.

No one knew Chris other than family and friends and I am not sure how many people in the world new Sammy other than family and friends in the poker community.

ESPN brought us a new era of TV made heroes by showing the 2003 WSOP in it’s entirety and even made it exciting. They followed up in 2004 when another unknown Greg Raymer played a masterful tournament with 2500 entries and defeated a young mawho had just begun his poker career, David Williams.

The excitemnet generated by these tournaments caught on like wildfire throughout the country. Casino’s started holding NL tournaments and anyone could say,”All In”like their new found Poker protege did on ESPN on Tuesday Nights.

The 2003 main event with its 849 entrants continued to grow and grow and in three years the Main Event had over 8,000 players. Where else could the average person sit next to the superstar Poker Player TV made for us.

Phil Hellmuth, Mike Matasuow, Johhny Chan, The Godfather, Doyle Brunson. Names most of us never knew until 2003. We were used to Babe Ruth, Johny Unitas, Jack Nickalaus Magic Johnson etc. We as mortal humans could not play the sport that made these men famous along side of them as we could Poker Players.

These players started to teach the game to make some extra cash and on-line sites started popping up over night and making deals with these Players to attract new players (us)to their site.

The WSOP became a spectacle much like Super Bowl weekend and Baseball and Basketball Allstar weekends.
Jerseys with Poker Players names and other lines of pokr clothing became very popular.

With all of this, people whom never held a real job and gambled on everything from monopoly to if a girl or guy was going to walk through the door next became household names and signed autographs wherever they went.

There were several successful business people who left their professions because of all the fame and fortune one could win in these Poker Tournaments. Some of them even won and made more money then they could have in their previous profession.

Now some of them think they are so much better than the rest of us. They have developed ego’s and believe they are better than most. I think they have forgotten where they once were. Living in their car or at a friends house, working odd jobs here and there to survive.

The economy has taken a turn for the worse right now and it has yet to affect Poker. I see people going to the Casinos and trying to double their pay check week in and week out. Sponsorships are becoming fewer in all sports and Poker players need backers more than any other sport with the exception of Nascar.

I play Poker not for fame but for the competition I used to enjoy in Basketball and softball before getting hurt and not being able to play them like I used too.

I enjoy sharing my stories in Poker with all of you and getting feedback in your comments.

Just remember who the real heroes are in society today.

Take care and Be safe

I was going to play today in the inaugural event of Winnin O the Green at the Bicycle Casino at 4pm today, but I am going to Las Vegas to sweat my good friend JC Tran.

I am hoping I can get into the draw party at Pure at 10pm tonite to do some networking for the FallenHeroesLA.org foundation. We took a loss in our event this year and there are many families counting on us to help them in the future.

Go to Pokerroad.com forums and I posted some videos in the OtherPokerRoad suggestions thread I think you will enjoy. They are with Nam Le, JC Tran and David Rheem.

I am still waiting to figure out how to get them posted here first.I am hoping to play a tournament in Vegas while I am there so I will get back to you all this weekend.

Thanks for your support and as always…

Take Care….Be Safe……..