The bots are coming

I've got off to a great start on Full Tilt this week. In the past Full Tilt is a site that I've had my share of bad beats on. This week the level of opposition has been quite soft, certainly a lot softer than Pokerstars. So if you are a small stake NL player looking for a change give Full Tilt a try. They currently have a great $600 bonus on offer for new signups use bonus code "DAZZA".

Big poker news this week is the start of the Man vs Machine poker playoff. Polaris vs. The Unabomber (Phil Laak) and Ali Eslami are going to match up and play 2000 hands against each other.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence is putting up the prize money of $50000. This is not like chess or backgammon that have proven a bot can beat a human. Poker is a game of incomplete information. It's essentially a psychological game with elements of chance as well as mathematics. I think that currently man still has the edge, but with continuing advancements in AI it is only a matter of time before online poker succumbs to the ever looming bot threat.

If you want to catch up with the latest happening in this match up then follow this link.

I've been watching ESPNs coverage of this years WSOP and so far it has been disappointing. There is very little poker shown, the bracelet events are packed into1hour segments. After introductions, and player profiles, there is very little time left for Poker. Hopefully this won't be the case with the main event.

Good luck at the tables all.

High stakes poker

Congratulation to Jerry Yang. Winner of this year World Series of Poker main event. He beat 6,358 players to win $8.25 million in prize money.

The overall amount of players was unsurprisingly down from last year’s record of 8773, but still a very good turnout considering the effects of the American UIGEA legistation. Overall the amount of players competing in all WSOP events was up from last year, which is encouraging for the future of poker.

Personally I was a little down playing on Ipoker poker today. Flopped 3 sets but was outdrawn by 2 flushes (people just love flush draws, doesn’t matter what the odds are most people at NL100 are going with their flush draw no matter what the price), and a straight. That’s the way it goes some days.

Saw an interesting article on http://highstakes.nu regarding biggest winners and losers in online cash game poker so far this year, the figures are amazing. Most of the action seems to happen on Full Tilt Poker. Some great hands to view.

NL Holdem Winners

Alias Results Sessions Hands Hours

Sbrugby $3.142.267,55 680 85702 665
pr1nnyraid $1.698.352,65 144 25542 157
durrrr $1.200.998,55 435 61553 501
Till_I_collapse $966.090,50 35 2908 24
jinsokkp $775.572,10 547 59562 464
mjorgenson13 $766.410,00 431 44390 338
traheho $740.711,50 426 47165 382
Genius28 $699.822,50 321 37503 290
whitelime $694.392,90 113 16504 125
93TilInfinity $692.183,70 236 27470 212

Losers
noataima $-3.429.854,75 190 38458 377
D Benyamine $-1.300.177,90 289 45217 353
magicpitch1 $-1.207.884,35 112 22848 191
SheFaLLs $-531.084,45 80 9640 84
Gus Hansen $-522.607,55 95 8007 91
A_Hoffman $-505.281,70 37 5037 31
Ram Vaswani $-485.786,50 42 8144 52
Luigi66369 $-470.426,10 119 14366 149
Mike Matusow $-441.525,55 177 18270 174
Ziigmund $-416.237,05 102 8533 58

Nearly all of these high stake games take place on Full Tilt Poker. So if you fancy doing a bit of rail birding and checking out the action Full Tilt is the place to be. If you’re not familiar with some of the aliases above then I can tell you that Sbrugby is “Brian Townsend” a high stakes player who only started playing poker about 3 years ago. The biggest loser Noataima is “Guy Laliberte” the owner of Cirque du Soleil he has a reported net worth of over 1.4 billion dollars, so I guess 3 million is neither here nor there to him.

Heading off to see the Transformers movie now, so until Monday always remember that there is no such thing as a bad hand in poker. Only a bad flop.