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THE YOUR ALARM CLOCK GOES OFF. You groggily roll over and slam your hand down on the snooze button. It goes off again and you struggle out of bed. You gulp down some coffee, hastily shave and shower, take the dog for a quick walk, then bolt out the door to fight traffic. You arrive at your office, park your ass in your cubicle, and count down the hours until you can fight traffic in the other direction.  >>> More

IN 2007, DANIEL CATES COULD OFTEN BE FOUND playing $5 and $10 poker games during his high school’s lunch period. Not $5 and $10 blinds, mind you, but $5 and $10 sit & gos. Just three years later, the player better known online as “jungleman12”—he acquired the nickname because he had long hair and was deemed kind of crazy à la George of the Jungle... >>> More

BY STORMS REBACK

WHEN FOOTAGE OF THE WORLD POKER TOUR’S Borgata Poker Open airs next spring, drop whatever you’re doing and find a comfortable seat because it promises to be one of the more entertaining episodes in the show’s history, thanks to the antics, showmanship, and stellar play of one man: Dwyte Pilgrim. >>> More 

BY VICTOR RAMDIN / TEAM POKERSTARS PRO

DURING THE LATTER STAGES OF TWO OF the most important poker tournaments I’ve played this year, I managed to get all my money in good. Considering the circumstances, however, I don’t believe I played these hands as well as I could have, and these mistakes ultimately led to my demise. >>> More 

IF STEP ASIDE, BERNARD LEE. For the last several years, Lee’s ability to spin a mere 13th-place finish in the 2005 World Series of Poker Main Event into a thriving poker media career has been considered the height of capitalizing on a good week at the tables. But it appears Tony Dunst is taking the art of building off a strong Main Event run to another level. >>> More 

AT THE RISK OF OVERSIMPLIFYING THINGS, there are essentially two ways to become the sort of poker player who attracts television ratings: One is to entertain with your words, and the other is to entertain with your actions. The former is relatively easy, if you have the right personality type. You just wind the little handle on the back of someone like Daniel Negreanu or Phil Hellmuth and let those gums flap. But to keep people glued to the TV set without opening your mouth is a rare quality to find. Phil Ivey can do it. And as we’ve learned over the last couple of years, so can Tom “durrrr” Dwan. >>> More 

DAVID BAKER IS USUALLY QUITE ADEPT at reading people. He won his first World Series of Poker bracelet this summer and also final-tabled the prestigious $50,000 Players Championship. You don’t achieve that level of success at the poker table if you can’t correctly infer meaning from the subtle signals people give off.

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AS INTEGRAL AS POKER IS TO Michael “The Grinder” Mizrachi’s life, family has always been far more important to him. Raised in South Florida in a traditional Jewish household that speaks as much Hebrew as English, Mizrachi, who turns 30 in January, remains extremely close with his parents and siblings.

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Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from materials in the Red Pro Discussion Forum on PokerRoad.com.]

THE WAY POKER PLAYERS ARE, once we believe we are making the correct play, it is hard to convince ourselves that anything other than bad luck is to blame for the times it doesn’t work. And when it does work, we have been given positive reinforcement to keep playing incorrectly.>>> More 

IT’S WINTERTIME IN LIMA, PERU, and fog is rolling in off the Pacific Coast. It drifts over the Larcomar Mall—a collection of chain restaurants and shops—such that the Chili’s and TGI Friday’s look like they are on a foggy London street corner instead of looking out over the cliffs of Miraflores. The winter fog here is hardly a surprise. It’s so common that many Peruvians fashion nets to capture the airborne moisture for clean drinking water.

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IT’S BEEN SAID BEFORE, but it bears repeating: You can’t win the World Series of Poker Main Event on the first day, but you can lose it on the first day. I’ve been fortunate enough to go very deep in the Main Event the last two years in a row, and a big factor in my success was my willingness to be patient and conserve chips during the early stages. >>> More 

FOR MANY TALENTED YOUNG POKER PLAYERS, turning pro is the dream alternative to a life of textbooks, alarm clocks, and commuter trains. Over the past several years, one prodigy after another has dropped out of school or quit a day job in order to play the game full-time. But now a new trend is emerging—a complete reversal of the natural order of things. >>> More 
 

AS MUCH ATTENTION AS POKER RECEIVED over the course of the last decade, the impact it had on the mainstream world compared to other rapidly growing pursuits like, say, auto racing or mixed martial arts, remained quite limited. While many of the best poker players became stars, they were celebrities only within the small, insular world they occupied. >>> More 

LET’S GET THE OBVIOUS OUT OF THE WAY: To win a tournament with thousands of players in the field, you need to run good. Everyone who watched me win the World Series of Poker Main Event last year knows that I got lucky a few times at the final table. But what people might not realize is that I was never all in at any point in the tournament prior to the final table. >>> More 

THE POKER WORLD IS OVERFLOWING with over-the-top characters. But I can assure you that Chris Ferguson is not one of them. To look at him, you might think he’s eccentric or starved for attention, with his long hair, all-black attire, and trademark cowboy hat and shades.  >>> More

LIV BOEREE WAS GETTING SICK OF HEARING all the negative comments. Sick of hearing how she’d learned to play poker on a reality TV show in her native Britain and still played like it. Sick of hearing that the biggest victory of her career had come in a ladies-only event, the Ladbrokes Poker European Ladies Championship, way back in 2008. >>> More 

IS IT REALLY THAT TIME AGAIN? Is the World Series of Poker actually upon us? It feels like it’s only been six months since the 2009 WSOP ended. (Oh, wait. It has been.) It feels like the WSOP-Europe just finished airing a few weeks back. (Oh, wait. It did.) No matter. It’s time again for bracelets and breakthroughs, for the poker series where legacies are established and stars are born. >>> More 

IN EVERY POKER TOURNAMENT THERE COMES A TIME when it begins to seem obvious who the eventual winner is going to be. One such critical moment occurred on the second day of the 2010 NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship (NHUPC) in the featured match between Scotty Nguyen and Phil Ivey. >>> More 

THERE ARE THREE KINDS OF HIGH-STAKES cash games the big-time poker pros will involve themselves in. You have the online games, which have gotten bigger and bigger the last few years. You have games similar to what you see on High Stakes Poker, with top pros competing for hundreds of thousands of dollars in a casino setting. And then you have the kinds of games you never see on TV, the ones that take place in homes or hotel rooms when players are traveling. These games are usually very friendly, informal, and great fun. In this month’s column, I’m going to describe just such a game, providing a window into the real lifestyle of poker’s high rollers, a glimpse that the TV cameras don’t capture. >>> More

IN THIS INSTRUCTIONAL, I’M GOING TO GIVE you some tips that should help you improve your results when playing online tournaments. Most of these tips refer to No-Limit Hold ’Em tournaments, but the advice I give can be used for other types of events as well. >>> More 

THE IDEAL WAY TO PREPARE for the World Series of Poker Main Event is to play tournaments that, to some degree, simulate the Big One. As Jayde Nicole is discovering on her road to the Rio, celebrity/charity tournaments do not succeed on that front.>>> More

FOR JEFF MADSEN’S FANS, 2006 WAS STARTING TO FEEL like ancient history. After making an incredible debut at the World Series of Poker that year—he won two events, finished third in two others, and was named WSOP Player of the Year—some speculated that the then-21-year-old might go on to break Phil Hellmuth’s record of 11 bracelets before he hit 30. At the very least it was assumed that he would win another major title in the very near future. But things just didn’t work out that way.  >>> More 

OVER THE COURSE OF A PROP BET you have no chance of winning, there’s a natural progression of mental states. First comes confidence: I’m going to win this bet. (Otherwise I wouldn’t be making the bet.) Then doubt creeps in. Uh-oh. I might win this, but I’m not so sure anymore. Then realization of impending doom. My opponent seems incredibly confident. That doesn’t bode well for me. And then comes acceptance—and with it, the removal of money from your wallet. >>> More

IF YOU’RE A NO-LIMIT HOLD ’EM PLAYER looking to learn a new game, with the obvious exceptions of learning Limit Hold ’Em or Pot-Limit Hold ’Em, the most natural progression is to try Pot-Limit Omaha next. The basic concept is similar—you’re dealing with flops, turns, and rivers and it’s big-bet poker. Compared to a game like Omaha Hi-Lo or Stud or Badugi, PLO isn’t such a dramatic leap from NLHE.  >>> More 

THE END GOAL OF THE ALL IN Magazine Project is for Jayde Nicole—a pure poker novice when this experiment began on July 29, 2009—to go as deep as she can in the 2010 World Series of Poker Main Event. She has learned from some of the best poker players in the world over the last several months, including world champions Chris Ferguson and Jamie Gold, and honed her skills in various live and online tournaments. But there’s only so much preparation you can achieve for the Main Event without gaining first-hand experience in a major-tournament environment. >>> More

IF THERE’S A BETTER TIME TO BE HAD than spending a week or two at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure in the Bahamas, I can’t imagine it. Whether you’re looking to play poker, rub elbows with celebrities, party, eat amazing meals, spend time on the beach—or do all of the above—the PCA is the ultimate. PokerStars and the Atlantis pull out all the stops, the people are just incredible, and whether you’re winning or losing at the tables, it seems like nobody ever stops smiling.>>> More
 

BY NOW, IT’S BECOME CLEAR THAT YOU needn’t have spent half your life fading the white line in Texas as a road gambler or acquired calluses on your ass grinding out a living in a cardroom to become a professional poker player. Two of the most common training grounds for many of today’s top pros involve games that seem better suited for small children.  >>> More 

THE POKER BOOM IS OVER.
That’s a hard reality to accept, especially with poker still so overwhelmingly popular and healthy on so many fronts, but the absolute peak came and went at the 2006 World Series of Poker Main Event, the largest tournament of all-time. A couple of months later, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was passed. >>> More 

WHEN THE FIRST THING YOUR poker instructor does is ask you to hold a carrot, then proceeds to slice it in half by throwing a playing card straight through it from several feet away, you know it’s not going to be an ordinary poker lesson. >>> More

THEY SAY ALL IS FAIR IN LOVE AND WAR. Well, all is fair in gambling too. Last issue, I wrote about my famous Saltine cracker bet where I managed to put one over on Daniel Negreanu, but I’ve been on both sides of the hustling fence, and this issue, I’m going to tell you about a time when I was the victim.
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IN THE OPENING MOMENTS OF a professional boxing broadcast on Showtime in December, color commentator Steve Farhood was briefing the audience on the fighters competing, and he noted casually that Oklahoma junior middleweight Carson Jones “looks like Phil Ivey.” It was a telling moment in the evolution of Ivey as a mainstream star. >>> More 

POKER HISTORY IS FULL OF STORIES about players who got hot and won a fortune in a very short period of time. In 1992, famed gambler Archie Karas turned $10,000 into $17-million in just six months playing a little pool and a ton of poker. In less than two years, Brian Townsend went from playing $.25/$.50 to $200/$400 and higher online, amassing a multimillion dollar bankroll along the way. As incredible as these stories
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WHEN THE ALL IN MAGAZINE PROJECT was first conceived, some in the poker community struggled to take it seriously. The concept – training 2008 Playboy Playmate of the Year and The Hills star Jayde Nicole to become a legitimate threat at the 2010 World Series of Poker – seemed far-fetched to a lot of people.
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THE MAIN EVENT OF THE WORLD SERIES OF POKER is more than just a poker tournament. ESPN’s decision to delay the final table four months in 2008 turned poker’s world championship into an altogether different animal and something more easily digested by the television-watching masses: reality TV. >>> More


 

AS I WROTE LAST ISSUE IN THE DEBUT of “Kasey’s Korner,” poker pros love to gamble. And every serious gambler always looks for an edge. One of my all-time favorite bets is the “Saltine cracker bet,” where I challenge someone to eat 10 Saltines in a minute.>>> More

 

IN LAST MONTH’S ISSUE, WE INTRODUCED the ALL IN Magazine Project. This month, we take our first look at the progress of our “guinea pig,” Jayde Nicole. (And yes, we’re aware that that’s probably the first and last time you’ll ever see Jayde’s name and the word “pig” in the same sentence.) >>> More

It features one of the most personable poker players on the professional circuit, several other pros from Team PokerStars, one of the best sports commentators on television, a bunch of likeable celebrities, and a slew of interesting contestants. With so much talent on the same stage, it wouldn’t be surprising, considering the cutthroat nature of network television, to see them all pushing and shoving in order to get more face time. >>> More

"Did Kasey win?" Everyone applauded. "Did Phil win?" Dead silence. Each month in “Kasey’s Korner,” Publisher Kasey Thompson is going to share some incredible stories and offer you a window into the world behind the scenes of poker–a world you won’t see on TV.>>> More

Not so very long ago, he was still playing tournaments with buy-ins as low as $300. In 2001, he made just $130,000 in tournament winnings (and that’s before subtracting what his buy-ins cost) and had yet to play a single hand of $1,000/$2,000 Pot-Limit Omaha heads-up on the Internet. He was a good player, but not a great one, so he worked hard to improve his game, and therein lies the secret to his success. >>> More

 

SINCE MOVING TO THE RIO IN 2005, the World Series of Poker has come to more closely resemble a cross between a marathon and a circus than a poker tournament. In its modern reincarnation, the event has grown so big–not just in numbers but also in pomp and circumstance–that it’s hard to follow without Norman Chad and Lon McEachern calling the action for you, and even then you always get the feeling you’re missing out on something. As a fan, how can you get your head around an event that lasts nearly two weeks?
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I remember the first time I met Peter Eastgate like it was yesterday. Wandering the Amazon Room at the Rio All-Suite Hotel just as the Main Event of the 2008 World Series of Poker had reduced itself to 27 players, I watched as the remaining members of the field bagged their respective chips. I moved from one to another, familiarizing myself with as many as I could in preparation for articles to come. Amongst the grown-ups was this kid. Blond, fresh-faced, small-eyed, and uniquely focused on the task at hand. >>> More

For the big name pros, the World Series of Poker is their Christmas, Super Bowl, and Academy Awards all wrapped up into one. It’s also a lot of work. One 15-hour day at the poker table can turn a player’s mind into mush, so you can only imagine what happens after nine such days in a row. That’s what Daniel Negreanu experienced during the first half of this year’s World Series, an epic saga he documented in the following diary. Follow along as he rides his rush straight into the dreaded “wall” of fatigue. >>> More

WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOU JUST WON A MILLION DOLLARS? Buy a fleet of cars? Purchase homes all over the country? Give it to charity? Put it in the bank? Each professional poker player has a different take on how best to utilize his or her poker winnings. Some are pretty big spenders, others call themselves cheap, and some throw money around whether they win or not. To get a better sense for what life as a big-time poker pro is really like, ALL IN spoke to six well-known poker stars to find out where their prize money ends up. >>> More

Larry Flynt owns an empire founded on adult amusement. His publishing company, with Hustler as its flagship, includes over 30 magazine titles. He produces a line of videos. He runs a group of Web sites. He operates a national chain of erotic boutiques.

But what gets Flynt off is poker, a lifetime passion that motivated the infamous provocateur to open the Hustler Casino nine years ago in suburban Los Angeles. >>> More

THINK YOU’D LIKE THE LIFE OF A PROFESSIONAL POKER PLAYER?
Waking up at the crack of noon in glamorous places such as Las Vegas and London, matching wits with the likes of Phil Hellmuth and Doyle Brunson, pulling in huge wads of cash at various tournaments? Sounds like a dream job, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, what you see on television isn’t necessarily an accurate representation of reality. >>> More

Los Angeles is undoubtedly a city full of beautiful people.

Which is why the photo shoot barely registers a ripple, even among the tourists who have flocked to the Santa Monica pier. He’s ruggedly handsome, his brown hair cut short, tousled, and gelled in a style that wouldn’t look out of place on Jude Law. His form-fitting shirt accentuates a linebacker’s body that could probably snap Jude Law in two. >>> More