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.

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.

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 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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.