A Very Scotty Christmas Baby!

It's Christmas at the Nguyen house and Scotty's celebrating like only Scotty can.
The Prince of marked cards Poker is very enthusiastic about the whole Christmas thing. Watch as he tells us of his love of trains, carols and exotic pet presents.

Gimmick of the Week: iPhone/iPad Wireless Poker Controls

Some people will tell you that playing online poker is about as lethargic an activity as you can get. You're sitting down and the only real movement needed is a few clicks of the mouse and the occassional keyboard tap.
We're here to tell you those people are dead wrong.
In this Poker Gimmick of the Week we look at the Wireless Poker Controller App for the iPhone and iPad and how it can make online poker even easier to play.
Here at PokerListings.com we've played online poker wirelessly using things like the Guitar Hero guitar and drum kit, and we've even used voice recognition software. While we have played marked poker online poker remotely on the iPhone, we've never used it as a wireless controller.
The idea of this product is pretty straightforward. Take the mouse and keyboard out of the equation and make it easier for people to really slouch down on their couches while playing online.
The controls themselves are really a miniaturized version of the Wireless Poker Controller hardware that this same company came out with two years ago. The major advantage of the app version is that you don't have to spend $100+ on the actual controller.
There's a free version of this app but it only works on PartyPoker.com. The standard version costs $8.99 but limits the rooms you can play on. The Ultimate Edition costs $14.99 and lets you play on all compatible rooms.
This app works with Pokerstars.com, FullTiltPoker.com, AbsolutePoker.com, EverestPoker.com, 888Poker.com, PartyPoker.com, UB.com, CakePoker.com, LadbrokesPoker.com, TitanPoker.com & ParadisePoker.com
The major downside is that small things are just harder to use. The original controller was designed to cut down on mis-clicks but in our experience the iPhone touch pad is prone to exactly that. For that reason WE RECOMMEND THIS APP FOR THE IPAD ONLY cheat poker.
The main reason we don't see these products catching on in a big way is that people like to use their computers while playing online. Whether it's throwing on a mix to listen to while playing or checking email in between hands, people need the functionality that the mouse/keyboard combo offers.
Get some more info and download links for this app right here.

Towers of London: WSOPE ME Day 4!

World Series of Poker final tables are always important events, but on Thursday's final table at the Betfair Poker 2008 World Series of Poker Europe Main Event, one man has a chance to make real history.

For months, Ivan Demidov has been alleged to be a member of the so-called "November Nine," a shadowy group of largely unknown poker professionals who will battle for over $9 million during the final table of the WSOP Main Event in Las Vegas in just over a month marked cards.

Demidov, along with fellow finalists Scott Montgomery, Chino Rheem, Kelly Kim and Peter Eastgate (as well as, to a lesser extent, their four colleagues) has not been content to rest on the laurels he earned for himself on the evening of July 15, instead putting his new reputation as poker royalty on the line in a number of high-profile tournaments, most notably this one.

Mr. October/November.

The youngster from Moscow entered Day 4 action at the WSOPE's Main Event with an excellent chance to become the first player in the admittedly brief history of the European Series to final-table both the Las Vegas Main Event and its London-based equivalent.
To make matters even more impressive, a berth in Thursday's final table at the Empire would put Demidov in a WSOP Main Event final table in October and in November, making him the only person to make both final tables in the same year. That's heroic stuff.
That's why, at 1 a.m. on Thursday morning, Harrah's representatives sat glued to the TV screens on the tournament floor of the Empire as Demidov called Peter Neff's all-in with 10 players still alive, living and dying with every card the dealer peeled and openly cheering for a win for the Russian.

Clearly exhausted by the pressures of being awesome.

Exactly 12 hours earlier, the final 24 players in the second annual WSOPE Main Event had converged once more upon the increasingly crowded confines of the Casino at the Empire in Leicester Square, ready to play down to the final nine contestants in a no-holds-barred No-Limit Hold'em battle.
Among those still in contention for a space beneath the mood lighting were some of poker's most notable names, including Daniel Negreanu, John Juanda, Andy Bloch, Mike Matusow, Erik Seidel, Johnny Lodden, Brian Townsend, Scott Fischman and Mel Judah. Truly a star-studded affair.
The first hour of play would see Bloch eradicated, busted by fellow Full Tilt pro Juanda in something of a painful hand that saw the 2006 $50k H.O.R.S.E. runner-up get all-in on a J♦ 5♠ 3♦ flop while drawing to the nut flush with A♦ T♦. Juanda held 7♦ 6♦ for the lower flush draw and the gut-shot straight draw, but would only need the rivered 6♠ to take down the pot and send Bloch home in the 23rd spot (get payout information for all finalists here).

And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my trick cards vengeance upon you!

Another hour passed and another red pro hit the road, as a short-stacked Erik Seidel did his best Tom Dwan impression, getting all-in with 7-3 offsuit against Soren Kongsgaard's pocket aces. The board brought no help for the big guy, ending his tournament with a 19th-place finish.
Juanda was cruising, building his stack above the $1 million mark before anyone else had cracked $700k. His fellow FTP pros wouldn't be so lucky - Matusow went broke at the hands of Johnny Lodden in 18th place and Brandon Adams found himself consigned to the rail in 17th place, the victim of Team PokerStars pro Negreanu, who himself had a pretty good day at the tables.
Negreanu would send perennial Main Event chip leader Justin "BoostedJ" Smith to the rail an hour or so later in a brutal hand that saw Smith commit the last of his stack on a 7♥ 6♠ 3♣ flop while holding pocket sevens for top set, only to see Kid Poker table 5♥ 4♥ for the nut straight. The board failed to pair and Smith was a goner, your 16th-place finisher.

Just doing his part.

Scott Fischman would then take it upon himself to execute the next two eliminations, sending Brian Townsend and Philippe Rouas home just before the dinner break. Fischman, who had doubled up Townsend in a bizarre hand the previous night with T-2 against sgrugby's pocket kings, burned Townsend down with tens against A-8 and then roasted Rouas with nines against A-J.
That left only 13 players surviving as the field returned from the WSOPE-trademark two-hour dinner break, and within the span of a few minutes only 11 remained. Talal Shakerchi and Soren Kongsgaard finished 13th and 12th, respectively, and after Johnny Lodden failed to win a race with big slick against Neff's pocket nines, the field was down to one final table and one elimination remaining before the end of the day.

One card from salvation!

It almost happened on the first hand 10-handed, when Chris Elliott rivered an ace to double through Neff with A-K versus pocket tens.  The hand would cripple Neff, however, and within a few minutes of action's resuming for Level 20 he was all-in holding pocket kings to Demidov's A♥ T♥.
All signs pointed to an easy double and the continuation of play, but the flop came T♠ 5♥ 3♥ and the Russian suddenly picked up a ton of outs. The 2♥ on the turn was one of said outs, given Demidov the nut flush and the check mark. Neff was eliminated in 10th place, taking home £81,450 and the loneliness of that TV-table bubble.
With that, the Harrah's people had their story and Demidov his second final table. He'll enter play on Thursday with $1,006,000 in chips, good for third behind Juanda and Stanislav Alekhin and just $4k ahead of Negreanu.
Action will resume at 1 p.m. London time and continue until a winner is crowned. PokerListings.com will have all of the gory details from every minute of play at that final table, so keep it locked where you rest at and we'll do the rest.
Here are the final-table seating positions and chip counts:

Seat 1	Robin Keston	$849,000
Seat 2	Daniel Negreanu	$1,002,000
Seat 3	Chris Elliott	$281,000
Seat 4	Bengt Sonnert	$385,000
Seat5	John Juanda	$1,349,000
Seat 6	Ivan Demidov	$1,006,000
Seat 7	Toni Hiltunen	$386,000
Seat 8	Scott Fischman	$732,000
Seat 9	Stanislav Alekhin	$1,278,000

Top 5 Signs Your Session Has Run Too Long

Today's list is about the marathon session: those nights you've stared at your screen far too long or imprinted your back-pocket logo on the cushion of your now-rock-hard casino chair.
Amid the hundreds of forgettable hands you've folded in the last (fill in the blank) hours, you've undoubtedly experienced some unforgettable highs and lows. The reason for your extended session is highly dependent on which of the two outweighs the other.
If you can't stop because you're on the heater of a lifetime or, on the contrary, if you are trying to dig yourself out of the Grand Canyon, there are several warning signs that should signal you to end the session rather than continue.
5) Auditory hallucinations. This is subtle and not always cheat poker easy to discern, but somewhere near your 17th consecutive hour of poker you may begin to experience the sensation of hearing strange sounds - voices and noises around you that normally should not be there.
For example, when you truly believe you hear safari animals closing in on you, it is probably a good time to call it quits for the night. Unless you're actually listening to the soundtrack for Jumanji, in which case you're still going strong.

Microsleeps: not good for your stack.

4) Microsleeps. These occur uncontrollably when the body and mind are sleep deprived, and cause a brief and temporary pause (a few seconds, or sometimes even a few minutes) in your conscious awareness.
The dangerous part about microsleeps at a poker table is that people are often unaware they have occurred when they awake. So don't be surprised if half your stack is suddenly missing - especially if you are playing online and you've been autofolded.
3) Visual hallucinations. If you start seeing things, shut off the computer or exit the premises immediately and get a cab home.
Just as a mirage in the distance is not actually a pond in the desert, the one-eyed jack in your hand is not actually sending you a wink to suggest a raise of half your stack under the gun.
We've all seen players who, a bit weary-eyed from an overextended session, have misread their hand. Sometimes a four can look an awful lot like an ace, and if you read it as such due to your own self-inflicted fatigue, it's probably a good time to call it a night.
2) Furniture manipulation. The chair you occupy should not be misconstrued as your surrogate bed for the evening. If you find yourself spending more time adjusting your physical positioning instead of your table image and strategy, you're probably not reading the tells that your body is sending you.
It's time to go to bed at this point, not make the bed come to you.
Beware - if you are playing on a laptop and decide that getting cozy with your blanket and pillow is optimal for your multi-tabling needs, you may find a similar fate to #4 above as you wake up with your chips missing and drool on your shoulder marked card tricks.

Go to bed; don't make the bed come to you.

A poker session should be spent trying to maintain alertness and focus rather than comfort and relaxation.
1) Returning players. When enough hours have passed that you find yourself seeing players who have left, gotten on with their day, fulfilled their human sleep requirements, and returned to the same table that you still sit at, you might want to reconsider your current choices.
Alarm bells should be ringing at this point (pun indirectly intended): not only are you not at your optimal level of play, you now have a target on you as a player who will make mistakes due to fatigue.
These returning players will easily dissect your tired game. Don't let this happen. Get some sleep and come back well rested and ready to start a normal-length session. Your roll will thank you.

November Nine Predictions: Steven Begleiter

It's time for the next prediction. Let's go straight to the tape. His name is Steven Begleiter and he goes into the final table 3rd in chips with a healthy stack just under 30 million.

He's humorous and humble. He has no qualms about discussing his many
poker failures. That's my kind of juice cards player. I can root for that.

Poker is something he does for fun with his "many" friends when he's not coaching soccer or dancing between raindrops in a minefield.

Raindrops? Dancing? Minefield? What? I hope for his sake that he can put aside this odd hobby for at least the next few months. Then, after, when he's making it rain with his millions of dollars he can dance between the drops to his heart's content.

Not sure about the minefield thing though but to each his own. Check out the video we shot with him as things were wrapping up a few weeks ago.My crystal ball appears confused and sends ambiguous messages. 'Victory' repeats and echoes relentlessly. With confidence it tells me that Steven Begleiter will soon become a Champion.

However, since I took it in to get fixed cheat poker, this crystal ball has difficulty distinguishing between sporting events. Steven Begleiter will soon be a champion; state regional junior ladies soccer coaching champion. Commendable indeed but lacking the $8.5M payday.

On the felt he's already won, he said so himself. The rest is gravy. He will have fun but will be nervous.

The final table will be a humungous freeroll for Begleiter. It seems he'll be more concerned with performing well for his friends who have a piece of his action rather than for himself - a team player in an individualistic game.

He will play well throughout the session but the lights, the cameras, the glitz, the glam, it will prove too much. One big mistake will cost him but he will go far.

Prediction: He enters 3rd and that is where I predict he finishes.

Steven Begleiter Main Event WSOP 3rd place finisher!
Good luck coach.

Zen's Answer to Poker Tilt

Poker is as much a game of emotion as it is of money. Poker is also more a game of emotional control than anything else. It isn't just the emotions that get stirred up during the course of a hand, a session, a year of play, it's the way in which you grasp those emotions, experience them, react to them.
I maintain that more money is lost at marked cards poker because of poor management of emotional highs and lows than any other factor, more than stupidity, more than bad game selection, more than bad luck.
Most emotional reactions are rapid fire things. See tiger, run. Hear wife snarl, apologize. Watch two outer hit river, die another death. It's fast, unrehearsed and unbidden.
No one looks at a tiger on the path in front of them and says, "Hmm, cute but those fangs and claws look a bit on the dangerous side. I do think I'll get my ass out of here." You don't hear someone blast their horn at you while you're zipping into an intersection and think, "That's an interesting horn, I wonder if it's a Japanese-made car."
There are a bunch of obvious reasons why emotions operate this way. If they're not obvious go pick up a copy of Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (yes, he wrote more books after Origin of Species). He worked out many of the key principles well over a hundred years ago and they still hold today.
But evolutionary biology aside, the interest is poker and your emotions and how to handle them at the poker tables and it's going to turn out that this "speed" thing is important.
Back to the claim about poor emotional management. The reason is tilt. Tilt is the enemy of the poker player. Tilt is the main source of losses for most good players. It is the reason why losing sessions turn into financial disasters; it is why winning session often go awry; it is the principle reason why good players never become great ones.
And tilt may be different from what you think it is easy cards tricks .
Tilt tends to be treated as occurring in moments with high drama, Matusowian meltdowns, maniacal raises and reraises, cards flying, chairs knocked over, steam coming out of someone's ears. Tilt is these things but it is much more.
I subscribe to Tommy Angelo's characterization: Tilt is any time that you're not playing your A-game. You can go on tilt because you're tired or unsure of yourself in this particular game or because you're distracted by other things in life --- but mostly you go on tilt because you've failed to control your emotions and are no longer making the kinds of decisions you would be making if you weren't on tilt.
Let's look at an example, a hand. It's my hand. I played it recently.
The game was $5/5 NLH. I'm on the button with about $800 in front of me. I'm dealt J♠ T♠. There is one limper in the hijack seat with about a thousand. I raise to $35, the blinds fold, the limper calls. He's a so-so player whom I know reasonably well. His range here, I suspect, is anywhere from a middling Ace to a mid-pair.
Flop: 9♦ 8♣ 6♠. He bets $40 which sets off some bells --- set bells. I'm getting the right price to call, and do.
Turn: Q♥. Bingo. Now he pots (told you he was a so-so player). I repot. He goes all in. Insta call.
Now, here're the tilty questions: What should I do right now -- at this moment -- before the dealer burns and turns? What would you do?
I suspect most of you would do what I did --- for the first several hundred milliseconds. I prayed and chanted "Don't pair the board, don't pair the board."
Then I remembered Angelo's definition of tilt and I realized that if the board pairs I will go off like a fucking Roman candle, I will slam the table, stare malevolently at this bozo who opened himself up to get felted with a move that only a total idiot would make -- and I will not be able to play my A-game for at least, oh, an hour, two, a day, a week ....
In the next several hundred milliseconds I did what Angelo counsels. I steadied myself and thought about what I will do when the river lands. Will I rebuy? Will I nod and say "nice hand" (not "nice catch," that would be far too emotional a reaction)? Will I get up and take a walk, asking the dealer (nicely) to hold my seat? Will I enjoy the deep pleasure of stacking nearly $2,000?
I prepared myself for all possible outcomes and resolved to accept each as just another event in the ongoing saga that is my life. I became a much better poker player that evening.

Home-game Cheating Awareness, Part III : Important Facts About Poker Cheats(2)

Low stakes won't discourage cheaters. Some cheaters are more driven by the challenge of tricking others than by profit. They can't play without the thrill of changing the game's course to their advantage and winning. Most home cheaters look for home games in which there is a balance between the profit stakes and the ability for the other players to catch the cheater. Therefore, keep in mind that even when playing for pennies, you might be hosting a cheater who just likes fooling everybody.
Cheaters will try to continue playing after being caught. Even after an embarrassing moment at your poker night, the cheater will continue trying to get invited to future games, especially because they will always deny their involvement, and expressing any kind of shame by not coming back would be like admitting the suspicion was accurate.
Cheaters won't get scared when warned by a knowledgeable host. If you ever thought that warning a cheater that you know what they are up to could deter him/her, you will only be daring the cheater to improve. Therefore, don't make the mistake of waking the cheating beast!
According to Richard Marcus, the cheating technique that wins the #1 prize in home games is marking cards.
Marcus claims that nowadays, the marking trend for home cheaters involves a Mission Impossible style move: buying several new decks, taking the cards out without damaging the plastic packages or the sealing blue sticker on the box openings, marking the cards, putting everything back, and ironing the plastic cellophane wrappings to seal the decks back. Then, the cheats take the decks to a store near the game's location, especially a store that stays open until late, and when the vendor is distracted, the cheaters replace the new decks with the marked ones. Then, at the game, the cheater goes on "tilt" and tears the cards in their bad hands out of apparent frustration. When all the decks available at the host's house are ruined, someone will try to go and buy a deck at the nearest store, the one that is open until late and is now selling the marked decks. And to everybody's surprise, there is no more deck tearing by the cheater for the rest of the game, only the tearing through everybody's stacks.
Therefore, it is important for game hosts to know how far cheating players are willing to expend time and energy for the thrill of fooling everyone, even close friends. Hopefully your own cheater's secrets have been exposed in this article, and you will be able to expel them from your home poker fun.

Home-game Cheating Awareness, Part III : Important Facts About Poker Cheats(1)

Direct access to poker games through television and the effective marketing strategy of today's poker industry has greatly increased the popularity of poker, and more people are now hosting poker nights at home. What most of the poker amateurs don't know is that not only are they risking their and everybody's money to savvy cheating players, but also risking police raids, and in worst-case-yet-real-scenarios, losing their lives. If you enjoy playing and hosting poker nights, there are some basic things you need to know for the safety of everybody involved.
One of my previous series of articles dealing with poker tragedies featured 4 home game tragedies out of 9 that happened during the last century and the beginning of this one, and not every player that ended up killing their poker mates was an experienced criminal. Some of them were average people who wanted to have some fun but found themselves in a situation and reacted impulsively and regrettably. Therefore, home poker games can certainly be dangerous and prone to the unthinkable if people are not cautious.
According to Richard Marcus, a now retired professional casino cheater, talks about the alarming increase of home-game cheating that can lead up to dangerous incidents.
"If cheating is blowing up sky-high on the Internet, it's gone nuclear in home games. How do I know? You'd only have to read my e-mails. Eighty-five percent of them querying me about cheating in poker ask about incidents occurring in the senders' home games."


Thus, what signs or traits would a poker host look for when suspecting of the honesty of some player? Whether a poker host would like to get rid of their cheating buddy or learn everything about cheating before hosting his/her first poker party, there are 4 important facts to consider about poker cheats, according to poker player and author Marc Wortman.
Cheats will do anything rather than admit they cheated. If you think that confronting a poker cheat about their shady practices is going to embarrass them and make them admit and repent of their actions, then, you definitely don't know much about poker cheats.
Even if you or others at the table catch a cheater red-handed, they will deny it with all their might. The only thing you can get out of confronting a cheater is a nasty argument, which may escalate into something more unpleasant, depending on the circumstances and the feelings of the other players.