University Students can now be a part of the fastest growing poker community on the Internet. Play for fun and learn the game, or play for real and win some fantastic tournaments!
Private Tables for You and Your Mates
Ladbrokes’ Private Tables feature enables you to create your own poker games. Now you can choose who you play with, the type of game and the stakes you want to play for! Setting up a Private Table is easy, whether it is an MTT, STT, Cash Game, or Freeroll! For more information, click here
Calling all Poker Societies…
How would you like to make a large amount of money for your society with absolutely zero risk? Well now you can, with Ladbrokes’ Poker Affiliate scheme! And what’s more, you can use your earnings however you wish! You may want to run monthly poker tournaments specifically for your society and use the money for prize pools*, or perhaps use your earnings to buy professional poker tables and chips for you own tournaments – the choice is yours!* Always check legalities with the venue first before hosting a real-money tournament!
And the best thing about it is that it’ll cost you absolutely nothing to set up and run, and there are NO signed duration contracts, so you can leave the affiliation deal at any point if you feel it is not right for your club. This means you have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain!
To give you an idea of exactly how good this offer is, by making your University Poker Society a Ladbrokes Affiliate you can earn up to 35% net revenue share of referred customer rakes for life!!! That’s right, for every new active customer that signs up to Ladbrokespoker.com through your club, you will earn up to 35% of their rake for the lifetime of that player!
Every day for 14 days from the 7th December till the 20th December Virgin will be giving away great prizes ranging from digital cameras to iphones. The star prize is a LCD Flatscreen TV. Click here for full details of the prizes.
Every V*Point a player generates in a day will equal one entry into the prize draw for that day. So the more you play the more chance you have of scooping one of the juicy prizes! Everybody who has earned a V*Point between 7th Dec and 20th Dec will be added into the Grand Prize Draw for the star prize of an LCD Flatscreen TV. The winners list will be regularly updated on this page.
Party Poker have got a treat in store for fans of Sit & Go tournaments: The PartyPoker.com Steps Challenge.
The idea is simple. Buy in to any of the six levels and place first, second, or even third in some levels, to move up to the next step. Place further down and you can still win a chance to try either the same level or a lower level step again.
You don’t even have to win to do well in the Steps Challenge.
There are six levels, each one consisting of a 10-handed no-limit Sit & Go tournament. All levels are available 24/7 and will start once 10 players are seated.
Back at the beginning of November, we covered a small story on Charles Nesson, a Harvard Law School professor who has decided to campaign to make poker an honest past time in America and worldwide.
The professor and his Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society have been working to emphasise poker can be an education and learning tool, and have established chapters at college campuses and primary schools nationwide.
Charles Nesson became famous after a film with Julia Roberts was made out of his real life assistance to a young woman suing chemical companies for the damage they were doing to her community. He has taken on many controversial causes over his 40 years at Harvard including speaking openly against the government, and advocating less stringent laws on marijuana, which he openly admits to smoking.
The society believe that Poker, which is probability-based and requires risk assessment, situational analysis and a gift for reading people, can be an effective teaching tool, whether for middle school math or in business and law classes.
Dr Nesson wants to catch kids at an early age, when they start to find mathematics too hard and lead them into a gaming environment that has real intellectual depth to it to feed their curiosity.
Andrew Woods a third year Law student; is the society’s executive director and gained his firm belief in the educational benefits of poker when he realised all his successful classmates in Harvard, all were serious poker players.
“I see poker as one tool to develop the kind of cognitive abilities that a lot of people don’t seem to be developing on their own, whether because those skills aren’t taught effectively in school or because they’re not learning it from their parents,”
Professor Nesson decided to form the group this spring, when faculty administrators at Harvard said local laws prohibited them from running a charity poker tournament to raise money for a pro bono program at the law school.
The society has formed a number of chapters at colleges across America, including UCLA and Stanford Law School with plans to found a further 10, with a goal to promote the “higher minded element” of the Poker game. The chapters will also function as poker clubs, but with strictly no gambling involved.
Arnold Barnett is a teacher at MIT and has attended a lecture by the society in November, while not a poker player himself, he admitted he was intrigued by their ideas. While he in now way believes poker should replace any current teaching method for mathematics, he believes:
“.. [students] have problems to solve in poker, and for students to see how mathematics can help them in real-life situations seems a whole lot smarter than having them determine the volume of some strangely shaped object.”
He remarked that poker would also have educational merit at graduate level, as poker requires statistical analysis of other players cards as well as ones own, and requires a player to read body language and judge character; skills that would be of use in law, business or real estate.
The creation of multiple accounts, and account flipping; where one sells his account for cash while deep into a huge poker tournament, have came to light more in the press recently.
Multiple accounts are when players create additional accounts from different computers and have numerous account names at any one site. Why? The +EV (expected value) is a huge advantage, especially in MTT’s (multi-table tournaments).
In one case, a player known as JJProdigy was playing the Party Poker $500K Sunday Tournament this year in February. The tournament had decreased to three tables when a post was made on a popular poker forum that JJ was in the race for the $140K first prize. This was a schoolboy error for JJProdigy, as the attention he gained making the post, led other forum members to first cheer, then investigate his claim; they found JJ had already been knocked out of the tournament hours before. How could he be posting so triumphantly that he was about to win?
The $140K Winner turned out to be someone with the call sign “ABlackCar”, it was later discovered by Party Poker that the account was owned by the same player that used the call sign “JJProdigy”. The players account was frozen by Party Poker, and the player was banned.
The player was Josh Field, a young and very talented Poker player already making himself known in the professional game, and his youthful enthusiasm pushed him to cheat to gain an edge over competitors.
Unfortunately it is often the case that the pressure to cheat, comes from young poker stars wanting to gain an edge:
Chris Vaughn is a young poker star and also Managing Editor for Bluff Magazine (a poker magazine). On the 21st he entered the $1 Million Guaranteed tournament at Full Tilt Poker, and very soon he was down to the last three tables and playing for big money.
According to Chris, he was playing at home and had started experiencing a lag in his internet connection; from the chat room he had found other players were also experiencing this lag, and while the connection was not timing out, he initially thought is would be best to continue playing from his workplaces high speed connection, only five minutes drive away.
Of course, even five minutes would be too long to leave the poker game, so he contacted Sorrel Mizzi, a trusted friend, who also happened to be a world poker champion he had met through various live poker tournaments.
Originally the idea was that he would ask Mizzi to take over for him until he reached work, then he would continue the game from there. Through instant messenger though, the conversation turned from Sorrel taking over for five minutes, into him buying the account from Chris and taking over the game.
Full Tilt Poker however, are aware of account flipping and within minutes had noticed that Chris Vaughan’s account was being played from a different IP.
Soren Kongsgaard, the runner up received an email from Full Tilt explaining that Vaughn’s account had been disqualified. The letter confirmed that Kongsgaard would now gain the winner’s spot, with all other runners up in the event to be moved up one spot as well.
Sorell and Chris have publicly apologised for their discretion, and although banned from certain Poker Sites including Full Tilt they hope to redeem their image as Poker Champions, and will currently focus on live tournaments.
On Saturday afternoon at 3pm Man Utd play Derby at home and Chelsea play Sunderland at home. Two title contenders play against two relegation threatened teams, the question is how many goals will the big two score against the relegation fighters combined?Derby have been beaten by more than four goals on four occasions this season whilst Sunderland have been relatively tight until they leaked seven against Everton a couple of weeks back.
On Saturday there will be two MTT’s in the lobby both starting at 12:30pm. One named 7 OR LESS GOALS and one named 8 OR MORE GOALS. All you need to decide is how many goals will be scored by the big two combined (CHELSEA and MAN UTD) against the relegation threatened teams (DERBY and SUNDERLAND) and enter the appropriate tournament.
The top 5 of the winning tournament will receive $100 each on top of their tournament winnings.
The tournament structures are as below:
7 OR LESS- 5 minute blinds, 1500 starting chips
8 OR MORE- 5 minute blinds, 1500 starting chips
Why not play in both MTT’s and give yourself a better chance of winning the added money?
(No free bet token will be visible in your account and the winnings will be automatically credited by the Ladbrokes Poker team. Please allow an hour after the completion of the event for the bonus to be paid. Poker manager’s decision is final.)
For further Sports Betting opportunities visit Click here for full details and good luck in the Sports Day Saturday MTT!
In December, William Hill will be introducing rebuys and add-ons in many of our multi-table tournaments and satellite qualifiers.
A rebuy is a tournament where you can buy more chips for a fee. In some tournaments, you may need to reach zero chips to be eligible for a rebuy. In others, you may rebuy any time your stack is below a certain chip level. Rebuy tournaments will allow a single rebuy, multiple rebuys, or unlimited rebuys. The rebuy period will take place prior to the first break in a tournament.
During the first break, players will be able to perform an add-on for more chips. An add-on allows a player to purchase even more chips for a fee, but without the same restrictions as a rebuy. Some tournaments will offer double and triple addons for double and triple the chips!
You will know if a tournament is a rebuy tournament when the name includes “rebuy”. The main lobby will display the number of rebuys and add-ons allowed in the summary area, and a full description will appear in the tournament lobby.
Online poker can be great fun, and with a little expertise, it can bring in big money, and lead to trips to Vegas, Poker Cruises and Championships with fame and celebrity attached.
With poker championships now broadcast worldwide on TV, poker is becoming a hugely recognised game of skill and chance, and unlike snooker or many other financially lucrative games, with Poker, you can start at home in your bedroom on your own computer. The stakes have never been so high!
Unfortunately, when there is so much money to be made, some people will always try to find loopholes in the system, and naturally the underworld takes notice. Thus the online poker industry fights a daily battle against cheaters, hackers and con men.
Many hardcore players simply play several games at one time, which is completely acceptable, but others fall into temptation of multiple accounts, ghosting and account flipping.
First and Foremost, online security takes precedence for all major online poker sites, and cash wise, transactions are secured with 128 bit encryption provided by the major credit companies worldwide. While the accounts are secure, the games themselves need to be secure too; while some poker sites use real dealers online within a place of employment, others use secure artificial intelligence, that is accredited and tested by the appropriate regulating bodies to ensure that performance is truly random.
Pacific Poker uses the trusted MD5 RNG, which provides absolutely random results. The system has been rigorously tested by running millions of rounds and examining results. The system is also systematically tested and accredited by regulating government bodies in each country the games are played.
However, certain loopholes have been exploited by completely legal and credible companies, offering “Software Companions” or “Poker Buddies” which can offer statistical analysis of a poker game, some even reading your cards, offering advice and detailed analysis of the opponent’s actions.
The poker industry is aware of this; many poker sites have been cracking down on these programs that try to read cards, using programs to detect this software, and henceforth, not paying the customers who won money using them. They also change there online poker software frequently which can cause the programs to crash.
Ghosting however, is similar in a way where in a game of online poker, a player has other experienced players sitting in the same room with him, or has contact with other online players via MSN Messenger, or Team speak. In this way a player has a wealth of experience at his disposal, and will inevitably be a formidable force to recon with. In the same way, using software that does not directly interact with the Poker Software used in the game could be used to get a statistical analysis of the game, this could even be run on a separate computer to avoid detection.
Tomorrow we will look at multiple accounts, account “flipping” and see what motivates people to take such dangerous and nefarious risks.
Pacific Poker have been listening to your feedback and have worked hard to create a variety of tournaments and buy-ins to suit your needs and poker speeds.
You can now enjoy their exciting new $20,000 Guaranteed, from Tuesday through to Saturday at 15:30 PPT. There are new guaranteed and fast tournaments and bigger payouts in existing guaranteed tournaments.
Stay in longer and win the game by trying one of Pacific Poker’s rebuy tournaments they have a wide range of buy-ins to suit all bankrolls and games for all levels of experience!
These new tournaments and changes mean that you have more tournament choice, more often, more cash to win and the best poker experience online! Find out more about the new tournaments that Pacific Poker have added to their showcase, and remember, be sure to tell them what you want and keep on winning with Pacific Poker!
