Looking like a cross between the Addams Family’s Uncle Fester and former Italian football referee Pierluigi Collina, the brooding photograph of Gus Hansen adorning the cover of his latest literary offering might have some readers believe he’s off on some Banksy-related art project or has compiled a book of poker poetry. [That’s surely not a million miles off: Ed]
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Writing in the Houston Chronicle this week, Daniel Negreanu pondered over the forthcoming WSOP* and said that the winner will be the one who uses the competition’s (rather stingy) breaks to their best advantage.
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Are poker enthusiasts beginning to get the upper hand on mainland Europe? Across the continent, several governments are terrified that their state-run gaming organisations will lose their monopoly grip (and billions in what is effectively a leisure time tax) when the inevitable eventually happens. This week, there was a major victory in Denmark for those who abhor the state’s perennial interference in our lives when the Danish Poker Federation won their case at the country’s Supreme Court. The court found that tournament poker in privately-owned Danish clubs is legal.
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Love her or loathe her, you have to admire Hillary Clinton’s tenacity as she’s circumvented the USA a million times (or so it seems) in search of the Democratic presidential nomination. According to several political commentators however, if elected, still something of a long-shot, she’s likely to turn into the worst US President ever.
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News that Britain’s first ‘bricks and mortar’ poker camp is scheduled to open next spring will have many of us reminiscing about Scout camps where we feasted upon cheap sausages almost half-cooked on an open fire, downed with surreptitiously concealed canned lager with an ABV of 2%. More adventurous sorts used such camps as a base from where raids on an adjoining Girl Guide site could be launched, the raison d’etre of which always seemed to nick one of their hats rather than anything more daring.
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In a radical move, the World Series of Poker* has confirmed that the final table of the 2008 Main Event will take place some four months after the rest of the tournament, which kicks off on July 3 in Las Vegas.
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No-one could have thought that Gus Hansen was not going to win his fourth World Poker Tour title at the Five-Star World Poker Classic at Bellagio, Las Vegas, last weekend! But amazingly the ‘Great Dane’ was somehow unable to convert a five to one chip lead heads up and had to settle for second place, with David Chiu completing an amazing comeback to scoop the $3.39 million first prize and claim his first WPT title.
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Ever since they hanged a monkey on suspicion of being a French spy during the Napoleonic Wars, the people of Hartlepool have been on the receiving end of a lot of jokes. This is a little unfair for the town that gave us greats such Sir Edward Mellanby, the man who, in 1916, discovered that a deficiency in vitamin D was the main cause of rickets and proposed cod liver oil as a preventative cure. He was born in Hartlepool in 1884. Reg Smythe, creator of the internationally renowned cartoon character Andy Capp, lived in the town until his death in 1998.
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If a measure of a game’s popularity is the extent to which manufacturers of every conceivable product want to have their wares associated with it, or slap their branding on it, then poker has truly arrived. Towards the end of last year, we reported on the poker-related ‘tat’ (for want of a better word) then flooding the shelves and online stores at an unseemly rate in time for the annual Christmas splurge on rubbish. We contemplated having a ‘Tasteless poker item of the year’ award, but a) there were too many contenders and b) we were pushed for time.
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Even if visitors to bricks and mortar casinos find their chip stack decimated, they generally end up with a dollar or two’s worth of chips in their back pocket which, as many subsequently discover, is of little use when it comes to paying for a taxi fare. Nonetheless, frequent chip ‘collectors’ may be inclined to check whether they trousered anything by mistake when visiting the now defunct Showboat Casino, which operated in Las Vegas between 1954 and 2001.
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