Will Ireland be the Next Country to Capitalize on Online Gaming?

A government committee in Ireland recommended that the Emerald Isle should reform its outdated gambling laws and benefit from the ban on Internet gambling in the United States.

The committee, established by the Irish government in 2006 to review how that nation might better regulate gaming and casinos, said: "The recent United States prohibition of payment mechanisms for gambling online, presents a window of opportunity for Ireland."

The Irish committee said blocking Internet gaming along the lines of the U.S. ban presented numerous difficulties. Instead, they proposed discussion with Irish Finance Minister Brian Lenihan regarding "possible competitive taxation rates."

Ireland's low corporate tax rate is a key factor in its ability to attract foreign investors. "Should this opportunity be grasped within the appropriate timescale, Ireland, as a gaming friendly centre of excellence, can reasonably expect to attract a reasonable portion of this dynamic industry," the report said.

In other words, while the United States has the weight of UIGEA dragging it down and is leaving billions in revenue uncollected by its failure to license and tax online gaming operators, the Irish government is positioning itself to make hay while we’re asleep at the switch.

High Stakes Poker Back on GSN

I don’t know about you, but I was overjoyed to learn that the Game show network has renewed everyone’s favorite poker show, High Stakes Poker for another season.

It seemed dead. Even announcers Gabe Kaplan (pictured right) and A.J. Benza had no ideas about whether the show would be renewed. But it was. And I can’t wait.

High Stakes Poker has been part of GSN since its conception, and the show’s devotees have helped build viewership through video-sharing sites like You Tube.

Unlike so many of the poker tournament shows with a rotating cast of final table players—many of who are absolute strangers to a viewing audience that has no attachment to a group of stranger sitting around a poker table—there’s familiarity and continuity with the rotating core of semi-regulars on High Stakes Poker. And because of that, we viewers have a rooting interest. Daniel Negreanu has his fans. So does Sammy Farha. And Jennifer Harman does too. Everyone, it seems, wants to see Phil Hellmuth lost a big pot, go into a tizzy, and rant away a few minutes worth of air time wondering why and how, anyone could possibly beat him.

After months of speculation High Stakes Poker will be back on their air, where it belongs. I couldn’t be happier.

Living Large in Online Omaha/8's Land of Opportunity

Wednesday, June 18, I wrote a post entitled, "Is Omaha/8 Poker's Land of Opportunity?" In it, I wrote, “Online poker players have changed Texas hold’em—particularly no-limit and tournament hold’em—dramatically in recent years, and if you don’t keep up with the game, you won’t recognize it. Newish concepts, such as “floating” and the use of Independent Chip Modeling are attributes of Texas hold’em that weren’t commonplace as recently as three or four years ago.

But Omaha/8 seems to have been stuck in a time warp. The game is not innovating as rapidly as hold’em has, and the players don’t seem to be improving either. I’ve been playing $10-$20 and $15-$30 online and I see errors I wouldn’t expect raw beginners to make, never mind supposedly skilled mid-limit players.

They raise way too often before the flop, call raises with hands that look to be one-way only, play draws in the face of bets and raises that are not draws to the nuts, and that sort of thing. It seems to me that Omaha/8 is the Land of Opportunity in online poker right now.”

Yesterday I confirmed my suspicions. I played two tables of Omaha/8 simultaneously and they might as well have been the same game. While the majority of the players were different at the two tables, the level of play, and the kind of mistakes the players made were so similar you would have thought that they were all following a recipe in a cookbook.

Then I had to get up and run a few errands. When I got back, no Omaha seats were available so I played hold’em. What a difference. The skill levels were so much better that there really was no comparison. Far fewer players saw the flop, and the majority of players brought it in for a raise instead of coming in with a call, and there was very little—if any—dead money at my table. A quick check of other tables told a similar story. Few players saw each flop, and those who did, played aggressively.

I quickly put myself on the waiting list for all the Omaha/8 games, treaded water playing hold’em, and felt like a kid in the candy store when a seat finally became available in Omaha/8.

The message is clear to me: Online Omaha/8 is right now much more beatable than limit hold’em. So do yourself a favor. Take it easy, and take it.

BARGE ... the most fun you can have in a poker room

BARGE organizer Mick Patterson will be my guest this Thursday night, July 17, on Keep Flopping Aces, my Internet poker radio show that's webcast at 6 p.m. Pacific Time (9 p.m. ET) every Thursday night on www.roundersradio.com.

The show can be heard live, in real time, and listeners are welcome call in to chat with us. The show also rebroadcasts Friday afternoon, and can be downloaded as a podcast a few days after its origination date.

Mick and I will spend the entire hour talking about BARGE, telling BARGE stories, spreading the BARGE gospel, and hoping to induce listeners to sign up while there’s still time.

Listen in if you can, and if you do, be sure to call in with your favorite BARGE story or memory.

I’m hoping for a wonderful and wacky hour, in keeping with the best BARGE tradition, and hoping you can listen in if you can.

Betting on the Future

The past year has seen a spate of stories in The Financial Times, CNN, and Bloomberg, among other publications, about how prediction markets offer a more accurate view of the future than either experts and or opinion polls.

A Dublin-based trading platform called Intrade allows users to bet on whether a future event will occur. This works through the buying and selling of contracts that include things as diverse as whether California’s same-sex marriage ban will pass and whether the average global temperature in 2008 will be among the five warmest years on record.

Trading volumes have grown steadily, according to John Delaney, Intrade’s chief executive (pictured left), who says that the media’s growing interest in prediction markets as a workable alternative to experts or opinion polls is well founded.

Academic research supports Delaney too, and studies at George Mason University and the University of Pennsylvania found that prediction markets were correct 54 percent more than opinion polls.

Delaney believes that prediction markets are the best aggregators of opinion because the financial incentive eliminates competing sentiments that might otherwise cloud a person’s judgment. In other words, when you have to put your money where your mouth is, you tend to take a more accurate view of things—a view unclouded by how you’d like things to be.

Intrade’s 82,000 members are drawn from 162 different countries, and are typically college educated, between 25 and 35, and male. However, he added that the number of female traders and also as a proportion of the entire membership base is rising.

So … is gambling good for you? We can’t answer that, but gambling on the future now seems like the best way to predict it.

Phil Hellmuth's Wacky Appearance at the Poker Table

I’d already left town, so I missed it, but Phil Hellmuth showed up to play his opening day of the WSOP’s main event dressed like General Patton—or rather like the late George C. Scott portraying General Patton. Attired in military dress khakis, Phil actually managed to do General Patton one better. Hellmuth’s helmet had 11 stars on it, one for each of the championship bracelets he’s won in World Series events. He also carried a riding crop—only one, thank you—and was accompanied by 11 models who were also ragged out in military gear.

Last year Hellmuth arrived in a race car driving suit, and most of us wondered whether he actually changed clothes from his escapade the day before, when he drove a race car and managed to put it into a piece of concrete K-rail.

Lucky for all of us that Hellmuth decided not to drive one of Patton’s WWII-era tanks into the Amazon Room at the Rio, although after a few trips walking back and forth from the parking lot to the WSOP tournament area, any form of transportation is a welcome relief. If a WWII tank is all you have, well have at it. After all, the tank will make it up the steps and through the doors of the Rio whether they are open or not, and would be fully capable of driving through any of the interior walls to deposit Hellmuth/Patton at his table.

“I’m glad he didn’t crash this year,” World Series of Poker commissioner Jeffrey Pollack told USA Today. “If Phil was able to make an entrance that is bigger than anyone else’s entrance and do it without injuring himself or any of his colleagues, I think that’s a good thing.”

Five Dozen Hot Dogs and the World Series of Poker

Happy Fourth of July. I’m here in Las Vegas, but today’s big news comes from Coney Island, in the heart of Brooklyn, where I grew up, and the site of Nathan’s annual hot dog eating contest. Earlier today Joey Chestnut (pictured right) defeated six-time former champion Takeru Kobayashi. Both consumed 59 hot dogs during the ten-minute regulation time period, but Chestnut prevailed in an overtime eat-off.

I’m not sure why this is important to me. Maybe it’s because I used to think I was really scarfing down the dogs when I ate three or four Nathan’s hot dogs at one sitting. But 59 in ten minutes? How does he do it? Quien sabe? But it's comforting to know that on America's birthday, an American proved he can eat more hot dogs than anyone else with a cast iron stomach.

Here in Las Vegas the main event at the World Series of Poker is in full swing. Today is the second Day One, with more Day Ones to come in an event that won’t be fully decided until November. The Gaming Life Expo is also in full swing for the next few days, right across from the tournament area at the Rio. It’s a lot better than last year’s show, which was pathetically embarrassing. With it’s sleazy strippers and fortunetellers, the 2007 expo looked more like a mitt-camp at a midway sideshow than something that brands itself based on the putatively glamorous life style of poker players. Kudos to Harrah's for upping the quality of the expo for 2008.

I’m not playing at the WSOP this year. But I am playing in some of the very lucrative side games. It’s really hard to believe that some of the players are really as bad as they are. I played in a $20-$40 hold’em game that had at least four players who did not have a clue.

And some of the players were beyond weird too. A guy to my right, who was a good player, said to me, “You look familiar. Do you write for one of the magazines?”

“I did,” I said, “and my name is Lou Krieger.”

After the inevitable, “Oh, yeah … I read some of your books,” a guy two seats to my left who had been listening in to the conversation stands up and says, “Ehhhhh, we got Lou Krieger at the table. He writes books … lotsa books, yeah … lots of books.” The tone of his voice was a cross between a poor imitation of the Fonz, and a good imitation of a complete moron.

He kept repeating that mantra for the next half hour. He also had no clue about playing. Once he called my preflop raise, then called my raise on the flop when the A-K I was holding was rewarded with a flop if A-K-3 of mixed suits. He called the turn and the river too, finally showing down a pocket pair of queens that he was unable to get away from, even with two overcards on board. He stayed to the bitter end hoping for a two-outer.

When I finally got up to leave, he looked up form the sort of mumbling stupor he seemed to have lapsed into and said, “Yeah, that’s Lou Krieger … the guy that writes books. Books … he writes books!”

I smiled at him and said, "I wrote 11 of them, and you can go to my web site at http://www.loukrieger.com/ and check them out, or go to the Gamblers Book Shop right here in Las Vegas and buy an autographed copy." He looked up at me incomprehensibly as I walked toward the cashier’s cage.

For me the WSOP is more like a business convention than it is about poker. After all, the WSOP is a chance to meet anyone you want to in the poker business, and it’s always been an opportunity for me to renew friendships and talk to people I’d been emailing during the year, who have some sort of business deal in mind that they want me to be involved in.

The majority of these deals are never going to get off the ground, and many of them are just ideas floated on air, with no substance behind them. But some of them have panned out into real opportunities for me over the years, and I would not have had a chance to make them a reality unless I was at the WSOP where I could separate the bullshit from reality, and made the best of the good opportunities.

I’m also working here. The job as editor of Poker Player Newspaper doesn’t vanish when I leave home, so I’ve been getting up early to work on the paper, then playing poker and meeting people in the afternoon and evening.

I’m off to the Gaming Life Expo this afternoon to sign books at the Gamblers Book Shop exhibit at 3 p.m. Then at 4 p.m. I’m off to the Rounders Radio Booth to hang out with the guys who provide me with an hour of airtime every week and produce the show. After that it’ll be time for some more poker, and hopefully a few more players as ridiculously inept as the one who couldn’t get over the fact that he was seated at a poker table with someone who wrote books.