Video Poker Forum 

ShowDown Poker Tour to Launch in Europe

Online Qualifiers Will Soon Take Place Online European poker room Expekt.com is sponsoring the ShowDown Poker Tour, which is a series of seven live poker tournaments held in cities throughout Europe. The ShowDown Poker Tour kicks off Jan. 12 at the Concord Card Casino in Vienna. The buy-in for the event is €5,300. Tournaments will then be held for the next nine months in Estonia, Denmark, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Austria. Buy-in for the no-limit events range from €5,300 to €15,900. The second amount is the cost to enter the grand finale of the ShowDown Poker Tour in September.

MBA Tournament to Take Place

Future Businessmen Will Battle It Out Future suits and ties will descend on Harrah’s Caesars Palace in Las Vegas next month to determine the best poker player at the country’s best business schools. The World Series of Poker MBA Championship will take place January 13-15. More than 500 MBA students are expected to play in the tournament in 2006, the first year the competition will carry the World Series of Poker brand and offer the winner a seat in the 2006 World Series of Poker main event. During the three-day tournament at Caesars Palace, players will compete for thousands of dollars in prize money and a $10,000 seat at the 2006 World Series of Poker. As in past years, a percentage of the prize pool will be donated to charity. Harrah's and other sponsors will be actively recruiting during the event and many players will leave with much more than a cash prize. The tournament was launched in 2003 in Las Vegas for students and alumni from top MBA programs, with proceeds going to charity. The following year, more than 200 students and alumni from schools including Wharton, the University of Chicago, Dartmouth (Tuck), Duke, Harvard, Berkeley, Kellogg, and UCLA participated in the event and raised $25,000 for charity.

Players Go Deep at PokerStars.com

DeepStack Tournaments Proving to Be a Success PokerStars.com has always offered new and fun tournament poker events. A large variety of shootouts, heads-up matches, short-handed tables, and many other different takes on tournament poker helps keep its players coming back. Quickly gaining popularity is one of the site’s most recent offerings, found under the tournament tab, the daily (and sometimes twice a day) DeepStack events, in which players start with more than three times the amount of chips received in sit-and-gos or regular multi-table tourneys. The blind structure is also much more generous. Starting at $5-$10, and increasing every half hour, it gives players much more time to maneuver and play their $5,000 in chips exactly how they like. Lee Jones, PokerStars.com’s roker room manager, has an idea who prefers the DeepStack tournaments. “I think the very serious player, the student of the game, prefers this kind of event. It does make skill a greater factor,” Jones says. “Of course, you pay for that in a longer time commitment.” Longer blind levels, smaller blinds, bigger stacks, and hundreds of participants naturally make for a long tournament. Even if players buy into the $109 DeepStack tourney held every Saturday — the most expensive one offered — they are surely getting their money’s worth in the terms of time at the table (if they last more than a level or two). The time commitment may be a little much for some players, but because PokerStars.com attracts so many players to its site, it doesn’t seem to have a problem filling the DeepStack events with hundreds of players who must have the patience of a saint and the iron butt of a motocross racer. A tournament with 99 players once ran for six hours and players joining tournaments with more than 800 players should expect to be at their computer for around 10 hours. More than 1,000 entrants usually translates into an 11-hour event. The first DeepStack tournament, a $22 event that was held back in August to test the structure of PokerStars.com’s World Championship of Online Poker Championship Event, was capped at 1,100 players and lasted 11 hours and 12 minutes. “This was a test to see how long an event with 30-minute blinds and 5,000 chips would run. This was to be the structure for our WCOOP championship event and we were concerned about how long it would last,” Jones says. The $2,500 championship event, which drew 1,494 entries, lasted 12 hours, 4 minutes. Pokerstars.com’s tournament directors choose the slow blind structure to crown the champion because it resembles the structure of big-time live events. Many people don’t realize how generous the blind structure are in large buy-in events, like World Series of Poker events. For example, in the WSOP’s main event, players start with $10,000 in chips, blinds start at $50 and $100, and the levels last 70 minutes. The DeepStack tournaments do a pretty good imitation of the brick-and-mortar tournaments this way. Jones says many of the DeepStack regulars play to get in practice for live tournaments. PokersStars.com has always prided itself on the large variety of games and tournaments it provides and believe that’s one of the most important components to its success. “We believe it's crucial,” Jones says. “We want to be sure that our players can come to PokerStars every day and have a huge buffet of tournament and cash game items to choose from. And I always enjoy it when a player writes me and says ‘Hey — I just stumbled across this cool tournament. I didn't know you had that.’” Jones credits a great staff, and singled out Henry Estes, the site’s tournament administrator, for praise. “He’s something of an unsung hero. He prefers to work in the shadows, keeping the current events running smoothly and coming up with many of the exciting new tournament formats that PokerStars offers," Jones says. To be sure, Jones, Estes, and the rest of the staff at PokerStars.com are thinking of new ways to play tournament poker. “As to what's next on the horizon,” Jones says, “we definitely have some things we're working on but we can't release details yet.” By Bob Pajich

BetFred.com Gave $10,000 Away Friday

Live Tournament Was Filled With Drawing Winners On Friday night, eight Manchester, England locals got to sit down with each other and two world champions to try to win a piece of the $10,000 prize pool that online gaming site BetFred.com put up. The eight players were chosen randomly through a promotion by the Manchester Evening News, in which even 10th place walked away with $230. First place earned $3,400. Stephen Hendry and Mark Williams have earned their world championship titles playing snooker. But that doesn’t mean the two players don’t know their way around the round felt table. Hendry has played in World Series of Poker events and Williams is a regular in European poker tournaments. The event was held at the Radisson Hotel in Manchester, and was catered and had a full bar. The contest winners didn’t really stand a chance against the pros. At the end of the night, Williams held all the chips and the check for $3,400.

PokerPro: It Just Might Be the Table of the Future

Fully Automatic Table Removes Dealer, Chips, and Cards From Live Equation According to Lou White, there are about 6,000 poker tables used by casinos in this world. All but 21 of them look nearly identical, down to the dealers dressed in a bow ties, using cards and with piles of chips in front of the players. It’s exactly how poker’s been played live for the last 150 years or so. As the chief executive officer at PokerTek, White would like that to change. White’s company makes the PokerPro, the world’s first completely automated poker table. It removes the dealer, chips, and cards from the game. It also removes tipping the dealer and speeds up the game, two things certain grinders may desire. “For the semi-professional and professional player, dealer tips add up to a lot of money over time,” White says. The only thing it doesn’t remove from a live game is the opposition. Into the Game At the Seminole Hard Rock Casino in Hollywood, Florida, which has three of the 21 PokerPro tables in existence, players join the action on the electronic tables by first signing up for the casino's reward card. Once they get the card and charge it with cash, they can get into a game. Instead of getting one of the poker room managers to put their name on a list, players walk over to a kiosk where all the games or tournaments that are being run on the PokerPro tables are listed. The players find the games they want and signs up. When a seat opens up, a player's name, table, and seat number are projected onto a screen. When the player finds the table, he encounters a seat in front of a touchscreen that welcomes the player to the game by name. Although PokerTek builds the tables, the company is mainly a software development company. It employs 30 in Charlotte, North Carolina. It has about 30 patents pending that have to do with the ProPoker table. “The table itself is something we had to design as a platform to deliver our product,” White says. Once the player has a seat, he swipes his casino card in a slot to transfer money from the account to the table. When game play starts, his hole cards are displayed on the screen, and a flop is shown on a 40-inch LCD monitor that’s sunk in the middle of the table. Players bet, raise, call, and fold through the touchscreen. Money is shuffled among the players electronically. When it’s time to leave, the player logs out and the money is credited to his account. It’s kind of like Internet poker, but live. “In a nutshell, what it really does, it takes everything that’s great about Internet poker: it’s fast and it doesn’t make any mistakes,” White says. “But the great thing about playing in a brick and mortar casino is you’re out of the house.” Speedy and Mistake-Free White claims that players will see 50 to 60 percent more hands at a PokerPro table than at a regular table. Hard Rock Casino pit boss Mike Sexton, who shares his name with the famous poker announcer, says play is definitely faster on the PokerPro tables. “Some people swear by them,” Sexton says. “They get more hands out per hour; that’s the bottom line.” The table also doesn’t make dealer mistakes or allow player mistakes. It won’t let people act out of turn and it never misreads the flop or exposes a king on the deal, for example. The three PokerPro tables are getting a lot of use running the casino’s $65 single table tournaments and lower-stakes hold’em. People who play at the higher limits seem to want to play with a dealer, Sexton says. “There’s definitely a curiosity to them,” Sexton says. “Some people really like them, and some people like to play with a dealer.” White, along with Lyle Berman and two other businessmen, founded PokerTek almost three years ago. Poker people might recognize Berman’s name because he’s the executive chairman of World Poker Tour Enterprises (WPTE). He’s been with WPTE since its inception in 2002. “As the World Poker Tour was coming on the air, we saw what was happening with the poker market and we went out and designed and launched this new technology for the poker rooms,” White says. He notes that the poker room is just about the only place in the casino that hasn’t benefited from technology. Except for automatic shufflers, poker has been played the same way since the days of Mississippi riverboats. “We wanted to use technology to make that experience better,” White says. The tables can be found at the Seminole Hard Rock Casino in Tampa Bay. The chain of three Winstar Casinos in Oklahoma also sports the tables. By Bob Pajich

A Royal Flush Worth $100 Million

Prize Pool of $500,000 Is Guaranteed Titanpoker.com and Noblepoker.com are teaming up to give players a chance to win $100 million in a freeroll. Players have a chance to get into the freeroll by playing in satellites at Titanpoker.com. The more players play at Titanpoker.com, the more times they can enter the freeroll satellites. A prize pool of $500,000 is being put up by the sites for the free roll. The tournament, called the “Online Main Event,” takes place April 30, 2006. When the tournament gets down to 10 final players, action will freeze. The final table will continue in a secret location a month later, and it will be there that one player will have the chance to win a $100 million jackpot prize. But someone’s going to have to get very lucky. The huge prize will be awarded to the player who makes a royal flush in spades. The prize is so big that it was insured by National Indemnity Company, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Other jackpot prizes, totaling more than $3 million, will also be offered.

Casino Companies Eyeing Bahama Resort

BAHAMAS – As reported by the Bahamas Journal: "Minister of Tourism Obie Wilchcombe told The Bahama Journal recently that the government is doing all that it can to prevent the Isle of Capri casino at the Our Lucaya Resort from going under, but he said that there are investors interested in stepping in should that happen.

"Isle of Capri General Manager Eddie Llambias reported earlier this year that the company would have to pull out of Grand Bahama if the government does not agree to certain concessions by the end of 2005.

"The company has been facing financial challenges throughout the year and has asked the government for a change in the country's casino taxation structure; and also wants marketing and promotional dollars from the government.

"Isle of Capri is operating in a tough economic environment as Grand Bahama's economy continues to face struggles with tourism arrivals down and unemployment up.

"Minister Wilchcombe said Isle of Capri is likely to soon get some of the concessions it has asked for although he did not give specifics in that regard.

"…The government is trying to keep the casino operational given the unemployment challenges already faced in Grand Bahama.."

Harrah's Fined $50,000

KANSAS CITY, Missouri – As reported by the Kansas City Star: "News Brief: A 10-coin slot jackpot that did not pay off could cost Harrah's North Kansas City Casino and Hotel a $50,000 state fine.

"The Missouri Gaming Commission last week levied the fine in a proposed disciplinary action that alleged Harrah's failed to properly update slot machine software as recommended by the manufacturer and the state's slot machine testing lab.

"In September, a player hit a winning combination of symbols that, according to the game's posted prize list, was worth 10 coins. Because of the older software, however, the player received nothing.

"When the player complained to casino officials, a gaming commission investigation found the software problem…"

Rank Expects Profits Down

LONDON – As reported by Reuters: "Leisure conglomerate Rank said on Tuesday that profit for 2005 would be down slightly and said it had chosen a preferred bidder to buy each of its Deluxe units.

"Rank's (RNK.L) shares fell 1.9 percent to 303 pence and analysts dismissed Rank's assurance of progress in the Deluxe talks.

"…Bingo revenues from its Mecca UK chain are flat so far this year, with a 6 percent drop in the number of customers offset by a 6 percent rise in the amount each one spends.

"…Rank said revenue from its Grosvenor Casinos was up 3 percent in the year-to-date, and it was pushing for four more casino licenses before new government gaming laws come into effect next April, having already won six this year…"

Seneca Nation to Raze Grain Elevator

NEW YORK – As reported by the Buffalo News: "The Seneca Nation of Indians is planning to begin demolition of the historic H-O Oats grain elevator and mill Thursday.

"The Senecas took ownership Saturday of 9 acres in the Cobblestone District to develop a casino.

"…A wrecking ball is scheduled to smash into the building at 10:30 a.m., one day before the Dec. 9 deadline to meet the terms of a gambling compact with the state. Gov. George E. Pataki is expected to be there for the ceremonial groundbreaking. But John Webb, who lives nearby on Perry Street, said he thought removing the grain elevator would be a boon to the area…"