Major online poker site UltimateBet announces launch of 64-player heads-up poker tournament and intention to expand unique one-on-one tournament format.
March Madness might be all but a distant memory, but the intensity of the popular bracket competition is stronger than ever thanks to a new online poker tournament modeled after the college basketball series.
UltimateBet today announced the launch of Heads-Up Smackdown, a 64-player one-on-one tournament that's turning the popular online poker site into a true heads-up headquarters.
"This opening series officially puts UltimateBet in a league of its own," stated UltimateBet spokesperson George MacLean. "With our new heads-up competition and the upcoming expansion of this unique heads-up format, we're separating the contenders from the pretenders."
MacLean expects UltimateBet's heads-up format to be overwhelmingly popular, noting the success of NBC's National Heads-up Poker Championship -- a series that began in 2005 as replacement programming during the NHL lockout and instantly attracted a large following.
A total of 64 players & women poker players will compete in a fierce one-on-one heads-up bracket battle for a first place prize of $11,200, a limited edition Heads-Up Smackdown championship ring and entry into the end-of-year Heads-up Bracket of Champions where the winner gets to play 11-time WSOP bracelet winner Phil Hellmuth for $30,000.
The fact that an end-of-year tournament of champions has already been established speaks volumes about UltimateBet's intention to build a full time schedule around the heads-up concept. Download poker wallpapers.
Would-be Texas Hold'em champions will compete over five weeks as the playing field narrows itself down from 64 players to the final two. The battle begins on Saturday, August 4th. Players can secure their spot in the 64-player tournament for $500+30 or win their spot through daily satellites.
Registration begins on Monday, July 16th. Full details on the Heads-up Smackdown can be found online at UltimateBet.com. Stay tuned to our poker blog for more updates.
About UltimateBet Designed with the assistance of the best poker players in the world -- Phil Hellmuth and Annie Duke -- UltimateBet provides the best poker games available on the Net. Players can download the free poker software, play in free ring games and poker tournaments and get tips from these pros to learn the sport or to enhance their playing strategy. UltimateBet currently has over 2 million registered players.
The Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas was the venue for the 49th leg of the 2007 World Series of Poker and the final $1,500 buy-in No-Limit Hold'em event on this year's schedule. With a turnout of 3,151 players & women poker players, the occasion became the largest, non-main event, tournament in World Series of Poker history.
TNews Imagehe tournament, which ran from June 30th to July 2nd, ranked as the third largest live poker tournament of all time with only the WSOP main events of 2005 and 2006 attracting more players. This was also the busiest day in WSOP history in terms of total number of tournament entries within a 24-hour period. Women poker.
As a consequence, many new names registered themselves on the final leader board. In fact, of the top 324 finishers who made it into the money, only two players had previously won a WSOP gold bracelet and neither of these made it onto the final table. Play $500 match poker bonus.
One of these new names was CelebPoker player Cort Kibler-Melby. After battling through qualifying, he took his seat on the final table ... an outstanding achievement considering the level of competition and quality of poker being played. Kibler-Melby eventually finished in sixth place behind eventual winner Ghandrasekhar Billavara from California, who took home a cheque for a cool $722,914 after five hours of intense play. Download poker wallpapers. Kibler-Melby was delighted with his work, and his cheque for $96,755, and is now aiming to take Europe by storm and continue to fly the flag for CelebPoker.
Poker champion Phil Laak has a good chance of winning when he sits down this week to play 2,000 hands of Texas Hold'em -- against a computer.
It may be the last chance he gets. Computers have gotten a lot better at poker in recent years; they're good enough now to challenge top professionals like Laak, who won the World Poker Tour invitational in 2004.
But it's only a matter of time before the machines take a commanding lead in the war for poker supremacy. Just as they already have in backgammon, checkers and chess, computers are expected to surpass even the best human poker players within a decade. They can already beat virtually any amateur player.
"This match is extremely important, because it's the first time there's going to be a man-machine event where there's going to be a scientific component," said University of Alberta computing science professor Jonathan Schaeffer. Play online poker.
The Canadian university's games research group is considered the best of its kind in the world. After defeating an Alberta-designed program several years ago, Laak was so impressed that he estimated his edge at a mere 5 percent. He figures he would have lost if the researchers hadn't let him examine the programming code and practice against the machine ahead of time.
"This robot is going to do just fine," Laak predicted.
The Alberta researchers have endowed the $50,000 contest with an ingenious design, making this the first man-machine contest to eliminate the luck of the draw as much as possible.
Laak will play with a partner, fellow pro Ali Eslami. The two will be in separate rooms, and their games will be mirror images of one another, with Eslami getting the cards that the computer received in its hands against Laak, and vice versa.
That way, a lousy hand for one human player will result in a correspondingly strong hand for his partner in the other room. At the end of the poker tournament the chips of both humans will be added together and compared to the computer's.
The two-day contest, beginning Monday, takes place not at a casino, but at the annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in Vancouver, British Columbia. Researchers in the field have taken an increasing interest in poker over the past few years because one of the biggest problems they face is how to deal with uncertainty and incomplete information.
"You don't have perfect information about what state the game is in, and particularly what cards your opponent has in his hand," said Dana S. Nau, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland in College Park. "That means when an opponent does something, you can't be sure why."
As a result, it is much harder for computer programmers to teach computers to play poker than other games. In chess, checkers and backgammon, every contest starts the same way, then evolves through an enormous, but finite, number of possible states according to a consistent set of rules. With enough computing power, a computer could simply build a tree with a branch representing every possible future move in the game, then choose the one that leads most directly to victory. Play $500 match poker bonus.
That's essentially the strategy IBM's Deep Blue computer used to defeat chess champion Gary Kasparov in their famous 1997 match. No computer can calculate every single possible move in a chess game, but today's best chess programs can see an astounding 18 moves ahead.
Yet poker involves not just myriad possibilities but uncertainty, both about what cards the opponent is holding and more importantly, how he is going to play them.
"It's mandatory for you to understand how the other guy approaches the game. This is critical information in poker, and it's not true of any of these other games that we've studied in academia," said Darse Billings, a recent Alberta Ph.D. who has worked on the robot for 15 years -- except for a three-year break to play poker professionally.
The game-tree approach doesn't work in poker because in many situations there is no one best move. There isn't even a best strategy. A top-notch player adapts his play over time, exploiting his opponent's behavior. He bluffs against the timid and proceeds cautiously when players & women poker players who only raise on the strongest hands are betting the limit. He learns how to vary his own strategy so others can't take advantage of him.
That kind of insight is very hard to program into a computer. You can't just give the machine some rules to follow, because any reasonably competent human player will quickly intuit what the computer is going to do in various situations.
"What makes poker interesting is that there is not a magic recipe," Schaeffer said.
In fact, the simplest poker-playing programs fail because they are just a recipe, a set of rules telling the computer what to do based on the strength of its hand. A savvy opponent can soon gauge what cards the computer is holding based on how aggressively it is betting.
That's how Laak was able to defeat a program called Poker Probot in a contest two years ago in Las Vegas. As the match progressed Laak correctly intuited that the computer was playing a consistently aggressive game, and capitalized on that observation by adapting his own play.
Programmers can eliminate some of that weakness with game theory, a branch of mathematics pioneered by John von Neumann, who also helped develop the hydrogen bomb. In 1950 mathematician John Nash, whose life inspired the movie "A Beautiful Mind," showed that in certain games there is a set of strategies such that every player's return is maximized and no player would benefit from switching to a different strategy. Play route 66 poker.
In the simple game "Rock, Paper, Scissors," for example, the best strategy is to randomly select each of the options an equal proportion of the time. If any player diverted from that strategy by following a pattern or favoring one option over, the others would soon notice and adapt their own play to take advantage of it.
Texas Hold 'em is a little more complicated than "Rock, Paper, Scissors," but Nash's math still applies. With game theory, computers know to vary their play so an opponent has a hard time figuring out whether they are bluffing or employing some other strategy.
But game theory has inherent limits. In Nash equilibrium terms, success doesn't mean winning -- it means not losing.
"You basically compute a formula that can at least break even in the long run, no matter what your opponent does," Billings said.
That's about where the best poker programs are today. Though the best game theory-based programs can usually hold their own against world-class human poker players, they aren't good enough to win big consistently.
Squeezing that extra bit of performance out of a computer requires combining the sheer mathematical power of game theory with the ability to observe an opponent's play and adapt to it. Many legendary poker players do that by being experts of human nature. They quickly learn the tics, gestures and other "tells" that reveal exactly what another player is up to. Download poker wallpapers.
A computer can't detect those, but it can keep track of how an opponent plays the game. It can observe how often an opponent tries to bluff with a weak hand, and how often she folds. Then the computer can take that information and incorporate it into the calculations that guide its own game.
"The notion of forming some sort of model of what another player is like ... is a really important problem," Nau said.
Computer scientists are only just beginning to incorporate that ability into their programs; days before their contest with Laak and Eslami, the University of Alberta researchers are still trying to tweak their program's adaptive elements. Billings will say only this about what the humans have in store: "They will be guaranteed to be seeing a lot of different styles."
Even so, Laak and Eslami are top-notch players with a deep understanding of poker's mathematical fundamentals. They should be able to keep up with the computer -- this time.
Online poker player "gusive" took down the Bodog Sunday $100,000 Guaranteed online poker tournament yesterday.
With all of the poker world focused on the 2007 World Series of Poker and spurred on by how well Team Bodog has done in Las Vegas this summer, 904 online poker players & women poker players came out to take advantage of Bodog's generous overlay and be part of Bodog Poker. Bodog regular "gusive" emerged victorious from the large field earning $25,000 for his win.
The victory was just a matter of time for "gusive", who has been playing several tourneys of different levels on Bodog.com for the past few months including three top five finishes and five top 20 finishes. Keep an eye out for the name because you should see it again at the top of another leader board. Play route 66 poker.
Here are the full final table placings and payouts:
If you want to be part of Bodog Poker, head over to Bodog.com where you can convert your online poker winnings into an entry to the world's most prestigious land-based tournaments. Win a Player's Choice Package of $12,000 and you decide which major poker events you want to play in - in style, of course. Play $500 match poker bonus.
Phil Ivey may have made two final tables during the 2007 World Series of Poker, but online is where he seems to be picking up better cash these days.
Ivey managed to collect more than $205,000 playing H.O.R.S.E. online at Full Tilt Poker this week, as well as another $512,000 playing Pot-Limit Omaha.
According to HighStakesReport.com, Phil Ivey sat down at a $1,000/$2,000 H.O.R.S.E. table July 11 with Chip Reese, Doyle Brunson, John Juanda, Eli Elezra and David Benyamine. More than 410 hands later, he was up $205,000. Women poker.
Reese also had a successful turn at the table, walking away with $53,000. Of course that meant some of the players walked away a little lighter in the cash department. Play $500 match poker bonus.
Brunson lost $9,000, Juanda $24,000, and Elezra and Beyamine took the brunto of it losing $103,000 and $217,000 respectively.
On Thursday, Ivey took his game to Pot-Limit Hold'em where he saw even more success, according to HighStakesdb.com.
Playing in two different sessions, he accumulated around $512,000 in winnings. Some of which came from Ziigmund, a prominent online poker player.
One pot reached nearly $200,000 as the two butted heads. Ivey held 5s-Ks-4d-5c with the board coming 4s-5d-3c-9h-4c. He got an all-in from Ziigmund who then mucked his cards after Ivey showed the winning hand. Download poker wallpapers.
The World Poker Store, a Nevada corporation with corporate offices in St. Paul, MN, continued its high visibility in the poker industry at the World Series of Poker's Gaming Life Expo. The newly appointed advisory board members, Phil Hellmuth, Johnny Chan, Marcel Luske, woman poker pro Liz Lieu, Hoyt Corkins and Patrik Antonius, had an instant impact with their appearance at the WPKS booth. These appearances helped to secure Bar Poker League licensees, new product additions to the retail, e-commerce and interactive kiosk operations as well as pending partnership agreements throughout the world. Download poker wallpapers.
Chuck Chastain, CEO of The World Poker Store, stated, "Once again, we have enjoyed great success here at the World Series of Poker. With Bar Poker League license agreements secured in several states, we anticipate the BPL membership will double to more than 200,000 members by the end of the year." "We look forward to expansion into several states, opportunities overseas and bringing new cutting-edge poker products to our retail segment of the business," he added. Coupled with the launch of the company's poker community website combining both the e-commerce and the bar league experience under one URL, WPKS expects to not only surpass revenue expectations, but also entice new poker enthusiasts to further expand its data base and exposure opportunities for gaming industry partners.Play online poker.
Hellmuth, Chan, Luske, Lieu, Corkins and Antonius along with Bar Poker League State champions participated in the WSOP Main Event and further promoted the visibility of The World Poker Store through logoed apparel worn during the poker tournament. The Bar Poker League awards WSOP main event seats to its state champion members each year, and with additional states launching the league, the WPKS expects many more members to enjoy the WSOP Main Event next year.
It was a wild week on the Florida poker scene, as a loose interpretation of new gaming laws by the Seminole band lead to five days of unexpected high stakes action.
Here's the crux of a much-anticipated state law regarding betting limits and No-Limit Texas Hold'em that came into effect last Sunday:
As of July 1, the betting cap for limit poker games at pari-mutuel card rooms was upped from $2 to $5. And No-Limit Texas Hold 'em is now allowed, with a maximum $100 buy-in for cash games and $800 for poker tournaments.
Casinos run by the Seminole band in Florida, however - who usually stick to state regulations for simplicity, although essentially not required to because of specific Native-American gaming laws - read the new law a little differently. Online poker.
Their interpretation? No player was "forced" to buy-in for more than $100, but ultimately they could buy-in and re-buy for as much as they liked.
Under that interpretation, things apparently got a little wild. Tales started to leak out from Seminole poker rooms of $100,000 pots and high-rollers the state over pouring in with piles of cash. Download poker wallpapers.
By the time word reached authorities - possibly with the assistance of the pari-mutuels, who were sticking to the new law to the letter - five days had passed. Play $500 match poker bonus.
With a little pressure from said authorities, the Seminole band acknowledged they may have "misinterpreted" the new rules, and agreed to re-set games back to the agreed upon stakes.
''We realized," Gary Bitner, a Hard Rock spokesman told the Miami Herald, "we were reading state law a little differently than the parimutuels were. So we changed our game to bring it into line...'' Stay tuned to our poker blog for more updates.
The PokerStars.com menu of tournaments on Sundays has become even tastier with the addition of two more big-money events to go along with its Sunday Warmup and the Sunday Million. Now players & women poker players can check out the High-Stakes Showdown and the Sunday Hundred Grand as well.
When PokerStars.com says high-stakes, it means high-stakes. The Showdown is a heads-up series that costs $10,000+$300 to buy into. Play online poker.
"I assume that this is the largest weekly buy-in tourney on the planet," said a PokerStars.com spokesperson.
The poker tournament takes place at 4:15 p.m. (EDT) on Sundays and last week was restricted to 16 players and filled up fast.
In contrast to such a large buy-in, the Sunday Hundred Grand offers a $100,000 guaranteed prize pool with only a $10+$1 buy-in. It would take 10,000 participants to make the guarantee, and the poker site is capping the tournament at 15,000 sign-ups. Play $500 match poker bonus.
Sunday isn't the only day for big money at PokerStars.com. The site has also added a $250,000 guarantee to its Super Tuesday poker tournament.
The Super Tuesday has a buy-in of $1,000+$50, and starts at 7:55 p.m. (EDT). Stay tuned to our poker blog for more updates.
"Don't do it; your mom is watching," warns a chatterbox at the end of a table in Friday's $1,000 Deuce-to-Seven Triple-Draw Lowball w/Rebuys tournament. He is speaking to Justin Bonomo, who mulls over a call before mucking his cards.
Bonomo's mom is watching, her chair pulled to the rail to keep an eye on her son's game and lend him some words of encouragement at breaks.
If Mrs. Bonomo stands out, it's likely because she is younger than most of people competing in the event. While other barely legal Internet poker pros are sticking to the No-Limit Hold'em games, her 21-year-old son is quite possibly the youngest entrant in the outmoded event.
The same was true of this year's $50,000 H.O.R.S.E., where Bonomo was among - if not the - youngest entrants in the event. For those critics of Internet start-ups (ahem, Phil Hellmuth) ZeeJustin's results may give them pause. Though he failed to make the money, Bonomo outlasted Doyle Brunson, T.J. Cloutier and woman poker player Jennifer Harman before busting out on Day 3.
But he's not entirely shying from his roots: Bonomo's best finish this Series was fourth in the $2,000 No-Limit Hold'em early in the series.
The Deuce-to-Seven event on Friday is a different story though. Despite sitting second in chips following the dinner break, Bonomo is hugging his mom goodnight barely more than a level later. Download poker wallpapers.
"I don't even know how to play that game," he admits minutes later. As he walks out of Amazon Room before discussing his run so far at his first-ever World Series of Poker, Bonomo reveals that he received just 30 minutes of instruction in Deuce-to-Seven prior to registering for the event.
So what happened there?
Yeah, I played the same hand 10 times. I started off drawing either two or three, caught a good card or two on the first draw so I was drawing one for both the second draw and the third draw and then I was something like one for 18 on that third draw and just never made a hand.
You said you're a newcomer to the game.
It's a pretty intuitive game though. I feel as though I was playing at least reasonably well.
I read on your blog that you like to play mixed games. Is this something you're trying to concentrate on to stay away from the No-Limit Hold'em?
At this point in the World Series most of the good mixed game events are over. But it's definitely something I was looking forward to for the World Series and it's definitely something I'm really going to work towards for next year. Play $500 match poker bonus.
I noticed you played your first live H.O.R.S.E. event in April. How did you have the confidence to play the $50,000 WSOP event?
Well, my first live H.O.R.S.E. tournament was the $3,000 poker tournament at Caesars and I chopped it heads-up. So obviously it's a tournament, so maybe I got lucky, but I feel like I'm a good player and it kind of gave me some confidence, I guess.
I spent some time discussing hands with my friends who are really good mixed game players and I learned a lot from them and I just feel like I'm a pretty good H.O.R.S.E. player.
Do you find many other young players who are so varied in their games?
No. Almost all the young players focus on No-Limit. Basically, all the fish play No-Limit, so if you want to play eight tables online it has to be No-Limit; all the other games, they're just not as popular. So I think it's the one area left where the old guys actually have the advantage. These are games that used to be spread 20 years ago. They used to be the most popular games. But I think it's just a matter of time before there are more Internet players who get good at these games.
Are you seeing more interest from Internet players in mixed games?
A little bit. It's a slow process though. I'd imagine that within a few years they will be a lot more popular. Play route 66 poker.
Are you getting burnt out from all these games?
Yeah, I think today was my 23rd event; I could be off by one or two. Honestly, generally after a day I'm just looking forward to the next day. I really enjoy tournaments.
I heard you called the floor on Hellmuth the other day. What's the story?
Let me think how I want to answer that. (Bonomo pauses for a few seconds.) A lot of it was just for fun, to be honest. But he definitely was out of line. He said, "Fucking amateurs, raising every hand." And the thing that made it really bad was he wasn't in the hand. He didn't want me to steal the blinds. He wanted someone to play back at me. And I think that's wrong. He actually apologized to me later. He's definitely a very nice guy and we made up afterwards.
It was fun. I definitely would have enjoyed tilting him. I would have loved to see him receive a 10 minute penalty. But he's Phil Hellmuth. The floor people love him; he'd never get a penalty.
So you're sponsored by Bodog now. How did that come about?
I went into the final table of the $2,000 No-Limit poker with a third of the chips in play and more than double the guy in second. And my friend Chris Vaughn works for Bluff and he introduced me to some Bodog guys and they hooked me up.
How do you think you fit in with the Bodog image?
I don't know. What is the Bodog image?
The young bachelor, Calvin Ayre party-boy lifestyle, I guess.
I live two completely different lives. When I'm in L.A., I go out and party a lot; I love the nightlife scene there. But when I'm in Vegas or traveling to any tournament I'm super boring. I never drink. I never stay up late. I'm always super focused and I'm kind of a nit when it comes to getting enough sleep. I've got kind of a dual life going on there.
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His more than $700,000 in career tournament winnings suggest the system is working. Given his self-discipline, eagerness to learn, youthful energy and knack with a deck of cards and a stack of chips, Bonomo might be able to teach even the most weathered mixed game player some new tricks.
Major online poker site UltimateBet announces launch of 64-player heads-up poker tournament and intention to expand unique one-on-one tournament format. 
