White Belt Poker

BBC Radio 4 broadcast a thirty minute programme last night about the $50,000 Man versus Machine Poker Championships that took place in Vancouver last July when Ali Eslami and Phil Laak took on the latest poker bot software created by researchers at the University of Alberta.

You can listen to the programme on the BBC website (probably for a limited time).

It’s an intelligent look at Laak and Eslami’s narrow win and the implications for the game, particularly online. There are interviews with the protagonists as well as other players like Terence Chan, who talk about how the increasing sophistication of poker software is likely to impact on their potential future earnings.

Congratulations to Joe Beevers, who won the Poker Million VI tournament on Friday night/Saturday morning and claimed the one million dollar prize after beating a high quality final table that included Liam Flood, Julian Gardner, Howard Lederer, Marty Smyth and Ian Cox.

The tournament was shown live in the UK on Sky Sports. It’s unusual to see a live tournament on television these days and there’s a reason for that. The pace of play over the first few hours could best be described as ‘glacial’, with only three flops seen in the first two hours. Pretty much every hand was taken down by the first raise. Some time after midnight Julian Gardner joked to Howard Lederer that they hadn’t seen a turn card yet. That was over three hours into the tournament. I’d got back from a Christmas party and I fell asleep not long afterwards, so I missed the end. There’s a reason why they edit these things down folks.

Anyway, congratulations to Joe. And a nice job by commentators Jesse May and Roy Brindley, who kept the broadcast entertaining despite the slow pace early on.

For the next seven weekends, Challenge TV (the UK satellite/cable channel) will be showing highlights of each of the rounds of the third season of the European Poker Tour.

Each week there are three shows. One each on a Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

It all kicks off at 11pm tonight (Friday 25th May) with the Barcelona event.

Disappointingly, the production company has decided to persist with presenter Colin Murray for the third season, but at least we get to hear EPT boss John Duthie regularly exposing Murray’s complete lack of poker knowledge with the odd well-timed, withering comment.

I often bemoan the lack of top quality play on British TV (well, not on this blog - not in the last year anyway) so it’ll be good to see some top class European players up close. With three hours of coverage per event we should get to see more than just the final table too.

Full schedule is listed here.

Update: An hour after I published this post, I got an email from PokerStars giving more info. It mentions expert analysis from Greg Raymer, John Duthie and Lee Jones - and there’s no mention of Colin Murray. Okay, I won’t get my hopes up just yet.

The four main PartyGaming shareholders yesterday sold another 200m shares between them, which represented 5% of the company. Interestingly,the company’s founders Ruth Parasol and her husband Russ DeLeon were involved this time, rather than just director Anurag Dikshit and marketing boss, Vikrant Bhargava, both of whom had previously sold some of their stake in the company.

The group apparently tried to sell as much as 8% of the company, but were forced to sell less than that due to market volatility and a lack of interest in the shares. The share price dropped partly due to speculation that the main shareholders will try to sell more of their stake in the near future, although they will need to keep a majority stake until 2010 in order to receive lucrative tax breaks from the authorities in Gibraltar, where the company is based.

None of the four shareholders gave a reason for the sale and the suggestion that possible US legislation on online gambling was behind it were rejected. Their broker claimed that the group were looking for “portfolio diversification”.

According to this report on a survey done by the American Gaming Association, “just 19 per cent of US internet gamblers realise – or are willing to admit – that the activity is currently illegal”.

Interestingly, “more than half (55 per cent) believe online gaming companies find ways to cheat, and 46 per cent believe their fellow players cheat.”

It’s a fascinating report with enough pie charts and statistics to make your head spin.