White Belt Poker

My run of good results in WWdN Eurofriendly tournaments at PokerStars continued on Friday. After driving like a maniac to get home in time for the start (and getting back a few minutes late), I was there until the bitter end again, this time finishing in second place after I won the first one back in February.

Obviously you have to be delighted with such a good result, but I was still a little bit disappointed not to win it again. There were a couple of occasions when I had big chip leads at the final table – double the number of chips that anyone else had when we were down to seven, and more significantly, having 30k of the 55k in play when we were down to three. But perhaps that’s being super picky. I thought I played really well, but just got out-played heads-up by fellow British poker blogger TanOrpheus.

I’m really taking a liking to tournaments with longer blind intervals, so I should probably make more of an effort to look for non-WWdN tournaments with similar blind structures to play in.

As I said, I got home a few minutes late so I missed the first couple of hands at my table. That was long enough for Pauly to bust out though, although I didn’t see quite how he managed it. I don’t suppose he’s going to mention it now that he’s out in Vegas at the WPT Championship either, so if anybody was on that table and saw what happened, let me know. All I saw was the aftermath – somebody saying, “wow, that was a brave call” in the chat window.

Incidently, if I ever come across ‘Jemad19′ at the tables again, dude, I’ll be giving you more than the $1 you asked me and Tan to lend you while we were trying to concentrate on playing heads-up. How anybody has the nerve to just walk in like that at the end of a tournament and ask to borrow money is just beyond me.

As ever though, it was a fun tournament to play in. Thanks again to Wil for setting it up. Somehow, I managed to avoid playing at the same table as him again though. Never mind, one of these days.

All of the cool kids are using Google Calendar these days, and frankly if you’re not then you’re different and strange and people will not be attracted to you.

One of the many good things about Google Calendar is the ability to share calendars with friends or with other users. In fact, Google have used the iCal format popularised by recent MacOSs, so you don’t even have to be using Google Calendar in order to view a calendar created in Google Calendar.

So anyway, a bit of easter weekend boredom prompted me to create a calendar that contains all of the events at the 2006 World Series of Poker which I’d like to share with all of you, so that you too will now be able to locate the lone Stud event in amongst the dozens of NL Hold’em tournaments.

If you’re already using Google Calendar, then the easiest way to add my WSOP calendar is to do a search for ‘poker’ and you should find it on the first page of results.

Otherwise you can click on either of the two links below to get an RSS feed or iCal calendar instead, although I’ve tried the RSS feed in Bloglines and it looks, well… rubbish.

Frankly, given the eight hour time difference between my house and Vegas, I’m not sure how much notice I’ll be taking of the live updates, unless of course the final table takes like three days to finish like it did last year, prompting runner-up Steve Dannenman to admit later that he was happy to give up the $7.5m first prize because he was bored of playing.

At some point I’ll probably do some other calendars for major tournaments in Europe and the US.

If anyone has any trouble with this particular calendar (either finding it or using it) then leave a comment or mail me and I’ll see what I can do.

There were more problems for PokerRoom this weekend when a hacker managed to take control of the chat system without anyone from the company’s staff stopping him for about four hours. The response from their security team was posted on the company’s forum here. The replies by the players are pretty scathing. I don’t play there very much any more and I’ve kept a minimal balance for a while now, but there is a lot of concern that if somebody could hack into the chat system, then how much harder would it be to get into the account servers?? That doesn’t sound likely, and most players were just complaining about the amount of time it took to kick the “chat hacker” out.

But on that same thread, there is one report of the hacker exploiting a problem with the login system which was made public almost a month ago, which allowed anyone to have their username and password stolen just from clicking on a link to a website. If this is true then PokerRoom and the Ongame network really need to get their act together. They’ve already got the beginnings of a mass cash-out on their hands if their forums are anything to go by, so they’ll need to take some pretty swift and decisive action and make it look as if they care about security if they’re going to retain player confidence.

As ever, it’s difficult even for people who work in the IT industry to know exactly how genuine these exploits are, but to inexperienced users just dipping their toes in the online poker water, this could be terrifying. Even rational, knowledgable people will start to think about cashing out when a company not only allows something like this to happen, but also gives the impression (fairly or not) that they are indifferent to the consequences.