Casino Games

Two Interesting Articles On Online Poker
For those of you craving some poker content; feast away: I ran across two interesting articles the other day I thought I would share. First comes from The Sentinel and profiles a young Josh Froment who buried himself in debt to go to college. He had loans, credit card debt, the whole lot. [...] For those of you craving some poker content; feast away: I ran across two interesting articles the other day I thought I would share. First comes from The Sentinel and profiles a young Josh Froment who buried himself in debt to go to college. He had loans, credit card debt, the whole lot. He had good grades, had served in the Marine Corp and was a pretty good kid who was having a hard time making ends meet. He had to drop out of college and take a job at Walmart and the prospects of him being able to get his head enough above water to get back into school looked pretty bleak. But things turned around for Josh when he entered a $30K guarantee on an online site for $60 and took down third place for $3,150 which was just the kind of help he needed to pull himself up out of his current situation. He’s back in school now and currently scheduled for an Iraq deployment but he’s happy he’s getting in another semester at college. Oh, and the $60 he spent on the tourney buy-in; he won that too. He started playing freerolls and won $9. He built that up to a $700 bankroll playing $2 tournaments before taking a $500 whacking at the virtual tables. But all in all he’s way up on the game and he’s done it all without a dime out of his own pocket. Bravo Josh! The second article is an opinion piece by Radley Balko over at . . . FOX News! For those who may not remember Mr. Balko was one of the more impressive speakers at the Barney Frank’s hearings on online gambling. I’ve included the video of his testimony below. But his take on the government’s payoff to avoid WTO sanctions is just brilliant. I can’t say it any better than him so I’ll just quote one of his more intelligent arguments. Had the U.S. not settled with the world’s economic powerhouses, we might have seen a massive battle unfold between the U.S. entertainment industry and the moral majority types behind the gambling ban. That doesn’t mean the settlement is something to be proud of. On the contrary, it’s pretty despicable. It’s bad enough that the federal government feels it’s proper and appropriate to tell American citizens what they’re permitted to do on their own time in their own homes with their own money. But it’s also willing to spend tens of billions of dollars of money paid to the government by those same citizens in the form of taxes to ensure it retains that power, and that it’s jurisdiction to enforce that power covers the entire globe. Ah, but it gets worse. The U.S. could have actually resolved all of this and preserved its precious gambling prohibition by simply making the prohibition uniform. But that wouldn’t do. Just as important as the ban on Internet gambling itself were the carve-outs for politically-protected special interest groups—lotteries and horse racing. So the tens of billions the U.S. government is paying to settle the trade dispute is not only to preserve the gambling ban, it’s to preserve the congressionally-granted monopoly on online wagering for interests with more political clout than poker players. Advertisement: Fool-Proof SNG Poker System Earn Over $1200.00 Per Night Effortlessly at Online Poker Sit and Go’s

Illegal Pike Gambling Operation Broken Up By Police (Williamson Daily News)
By The Daily News Staff Tuesday, January 8, 2008 9:06 AM CST SHELBIANA, Ky. - The aroused suspicions of two Kentucky State Police Troopers recently led to the breakup of an illegal Pike County, Ky. gambling operation and the arrest of its leader.

UCLA Defeats USC At The Poker Table
UCLA’s Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society poker team beat USC's poker team in front of about 35 spectators last week. It's not quite Rose Bowl crowd on New Year's day, but it's a start.Five players from each team played a best-of-three series of heads-up matches, and Igor Gampel, John Kennelly, and Michael Shinzaki of UCLA were victorious to guarantee victory over the Trojans.This was the second intercollegiate poker event since the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society was founded (see blog entries dated August 14 and October 10, 2007). In the first, Harvard beat Yale, also by a score of three matches to two.The GPSTS plans to involve more schools in a national tournament. We’ll let you know as this story develops. In the meantime, a Bruin victory is some slight consolation for having USC kick their ass all over the football field this year.

Sean Sheikan Dealt Better Hand In Deportation Hearing
As I reported on September 25, Poker player Shahram “Sean� Sheikhan, a regular on High Stakes Poker, was facing deportation to Iran because of a 1995 conviction for misdemeanor sexual battery charges that involved a 17-year-old girl. Sheikhan was in his early 20s at the time and served nine months for his offense. Sheikhan, now 38, came to the United States when he was nine years old. He is married to an American-born woman and the couple has a young child.Pushing this case were the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE), which seeks out foreign nationals convicted of sexual crimes against children and works to get them deported.According to Sheikhan’s lawyer, David Chesnoff, “It’s not allegations involving a child in the actual meaning of the word; it’s a legal definition,� adding, “There’s a lot of work to be done on his behalf that’s going to be done. He’s a good husband and a good father, and a lot of people have problems when they’re young that shouldn’t follow them for the rest of their lives.�Last week Harry Gastley, a U.S. Immigrations Court Judge, ruled that the Department of Homeland Security did not provide enough proof to decide if Sheikhan committed a deportable offense. This decision halted all deportation proceedings against the Nevada poker pro, although he is not completely safe from deportation as of yet. The Department of Homeland Security has until December 17 to appeal Gastley’s decision. Here's my take on this: While I’m no friend of Sean Sheikhan, ICE’s efforts to deport him amounted to piling on. After all, he served time for his offense. If deportation was deemed to be the thing to do, it should have been part of his original sentence. Sheikhan is no threat to repeat this kind of behavior.He’s married, a family man, and has not repeated this kind of behavior in the nearly 20 years since his arrest and conviction.