With most of the legal jeopardy and fallout from the Department of Justice indictments waning, there has been an uptick of information coming out regarding the goat rodeo that was Full Tilt Poker operations post-Black Friday....
(alternate headline: It’s Time to Short William Hill Stock) After Federated Sports+Gaming crashed and burned more spectacularly than any company in poker history, many wondered if Jeffrey Pollack, Annie Duke, and others would...
Every year, we do a video on the girls of The Gaming Life Expo (now known as “Pokerpalooza“).
Before video was created, we did photo dumps of the girls (view here and here).
This year, it was a struggle. We didn’t have much to work with. At all.
Fortunately, the Jack Links Beef Jerky girls were hired arrived and saved the day video. And yes, we did have to explain the whole fish sticks joke before asking them if they put beef jerky in their mouth.
Not pretty: having your online poker winnings frozen upon cash out. Pretty: the Vikki Blows photo shoot here.
This story is officially getting big.
Last week, Pokerati first reported that the Feds had frozen funds from Poker Stars, leaving players unable to cash out their winnings. Later that day, we received an email from a high-stakes Full Tilt player saying he tried to cash out a check, which bounced, and was unable to cash out his winnings as well.
Since then, it has come out that Wells Fargo, Citibank, and two smaller institutions received requests to freeze funds in accounts belonging to payment processors Allied Systems and Account Services.
The total take frozen: $33M.
The irony is that the majority of funds were frozen in California, but the request to freeze them came from the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, where it is not illegal to place bets. Speculation abounds that this is a last ditch effort by a staunch Republican U.S. Attorney on the way out to make some noise before he’s replaced by President Barack Obama‘s new nominee for the job, Preet Bharara. Makes sense, but doesn’t make life easier for those trying to cash out winnings for the WSOP Main Event seats.
For now, read more at the NY Timeshere, NYC Rounders here, and Pokerati here.
* Thanks to Kid Dynamite for the link. How’s that KD.
The spectacularly-breasted J.C. Tran (above) was our top pick in the ESPN WSOP Fantasy Draft. View more pics of his ESPN WSOP Fantasy Draft photoshoot here.
Pretty sure this is the fourth time we've participated in the ESPN WSOP Fantasy Draft. This year we went with the WCP All-Stars approach, picking only people who we obsess over, gingers, or women.
Our plans to start the draft with our new Official Pick To Win ItTM, Howard Lederer, was foiled by Mark Seif in Round 1 (clearly he's angling to get a FTP deal), but the rest of the draft stayed on point and we got everyone we wanted.
Our team: the spectacularly-breasted J.C. Tran, David "The Dragon" Pham*, guy with hot porn star girl name Shannon Shorr, Jon "Pearljammer" Turner, James Mackey, Vanessa Selbst, Lee Watkinson-Markholt, and Vanessa Rousso, a woman.
The timing of Barney Frank's bill to oust the UIGEA was well timed. The WSOP is just two weeks away (more on that in a bit), and over 10 million people watched Annie Duke finish second on the Celebrity Apprentice (more on that later today too), so there is way more mainstream attention paid to poker in general now than normal.
After some technical difficulties,* Part I of the Wicked Chops & Gavin podcast is now up. We recorded this one at the Casa de Gavin, so it’s possible that you’ll hear some crying children in the background for the first 15 minutes. In related news, Gavin Smith is a father. In this one, we cover [...]
Here’s Part 2 of the latest Wicked Chops & GavinTM podcast. What happened to Part 1? Some back-end technical difficulties that we’re blaming on Falcon Heene. Little fucker is at it again. Part 1 should be up later today. So Part 2 of the podcast was based on a brilliant Gavin Smith idea: the Awesome [...]
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