Random Thoughts: Madness Edition

Time for another installment of Random Thoughts, where each paragraph has little to do with the one before it and preceding it! A Google News search for 'Full Tilt Poker' yields virtually no information from the past month regarding the sale of the company to Groupe Bernard Tapie (GBT). How is there a several hundred million dollar deal pending between three parties (the U.S. Department of Justice being the third) that generates no new public information for more than a month? It must be simply maddening to be a player with a meaningful balance stuck on Full Tilt. Is the deal still on? Is it dead? Your guess is as good as any because who knows what's been going on the past several weeks. If I ran GBT I'd be on the roof of the world with a bullhorn every morning informing people that Full Tilt Poker will soon return bigger and badder than ever. Where's the reassurance? Where's the drumming up of excitement for the relaunch of the company you're paying hundreds of millions to acquire? Someone say something! online poker 468x60 If you're reading this and it's still before 20:00 GMT on Sunday, January 22nd, hop on 888 Poker and register for the $1.70 buy-in $225 guaranteed event they are holding exclusively for our readers. It's certain to have a very large overlay. Just five players are registered with about 16 hours to go! The rungood inflicted from doing an interview with PokerTips continues: Faraz Jaka took 3rd in the PCA event last week for $755,000 mere days after speaking with us. Thanks to finding five minutes for us, Joe Cada became poker champion of the world a couple months later. Little known Philip Hilm spoke with us once and was the chipleader going into the final table of the WSOP Main Event a few months later. However, he famously blew that lead to bust out in 9th place and hasn't cashed in a live poker tournament since. Whatever happened to that guy!? Poker player Will Ma, who one could make a good case for being The Best Player You've Never Heard Of?, is teaching over 200 MIT students how to play poker in a course that will earn them three college credits. The first lecture is available on YouTube. Here is the corresponding PowerPoint presentation. Students will compete against one another through play money online poker games over the duration of the three week seminar. Ma said his hope is that students who successfully complete the course will be competent enough to beat $3 SNGs and $10 NL. An article in the New York Times last week suggested that states looking to legalize online gambling shouldn't expect the newfound tax revenue to substantially affect budget problems. Well, no kidding. California, for instance, is operating at a $9.2 billion annual shortfall. Any argument that legal online poker can help shore up these deficits is rooted in delusion. California would be lucky to clear 1% of that amount over the course of a year through legal online poker games. It seems that states are finally starting to make more realistic estimations of how much legal online poker would be worth to them. Sorry Iowa, but it's not a 9-figure score for your annual coffers. So 2010 WSOP Champion Jonathan Duhamel is the victim of a home robbery after a scorned ex-girlfriend tips off the assailants on the score. His WSOP bracelet and $160,000 in cash is stolen. He has to be hospitalized to be treated for minor injuries sustained during the break in. What does he do one week later? Fly to the Bahamas for the PCA and make four final tables for more than $1 million in total cashes. I wish someone would break into my home! Apparently Zygna poker, the large play-money network on Facebook, is looking into launching real-money games. If they were to do so, it would be a "woohoo" moment for online poker players. Zygna boasts a massive customer base most of whom couldn't tell you what a backdoor flush draw is. Think of it like the real-money online poker waters being stocked with a massive school of fish. Hopefully Zygna will consider an approach aimed at keeping them there for a while.