The Poker Mag

It is always great to see our heroes of the game being successful at the WSOP, with this year as well as last year, providing lots of these moments.

To play poker online click the link!

With all the coverage these wins seem to get, it would be easy to forget the unknown guys who achieve near impossible feats, and should be mentioned, and commended on their achievements. This year has seen two such poker players who I feel deserve a special mention. The first of these is Brock Parker. Much has been made of Phil Iveys two bracelets this year, and rightly so, as it is an incredibly difficult task to even win one, but Brock Parker has matched this.

He picked up his first poker bracelet in Event 14, the $2,500, Six handed, Limit Holdem. He fought his way through a starting field of 367 players to win $223,688 eliminating crowd favourite Daniel Negreanu, in 2nd place, in the process. His second win came in Event 19, the $2,500 buy in, six handed, No Limit Holdem event. He beat 1068 players to take down his second bracelet of the year and complete a stunning achievement.

The second poker player who deserves a special mention is Thang Luu. In 2007 he managed 2nd place in Event 3, which was an excellent effort by anyones standards. But in 2008, he came back and won the same tournament, Event 3, the $1,500 Omaha hi/lo, beating hundreds of players in the process.

If that isn’t impressive enough, in this years WSOP, we had a huge Omaha starting field of 918 players in Event 3. After three days of play, the man who emerges victorious, is none other than Thang Luu.  Incredibly, he has beaten hundreds of opponents to complete top 2 finishes, including two bracelets, in the same event three years running.

In recent years, changes to U.S laws have meant that many poker sites are no longer accepting U.S players. With the recent change in administration, many have hoped that these laws making it difficult for people to deposit onto online gaming sites, will be changed. This has not been this case so far, but of course it is still early days.

To play poker online click here!

Despite these existing laws about gambling online, there is no complete and unequivocal ban as such, and so there are still sites online that do accept U.S players. There are several big name sites, so you will have plenty of choice in terms of which sites you play on.

I am not sure of the exact legalities of the laws in place, but it seems some sites will accept players who are from the U.S as long as they are not based in Washington or Missouri. The following are a few poker rooms that to my knowledge, accept all U.S players.

Carbon Poker accept U.S players, and offer a very reasonable 100% deposit bonus to new players. Also accepting players from the states is Pokerstars, one of the best recognised names in the online poker industry. With the biggest player traffic flow around, and some outstanding promotions and bonuses, this is certainly one of the best sites out there accepting U.S players. Ultimate Bet and Bodog are two other easily recognisable names still accepting U.S players, and so as you can see, there is still thankfully a fair amount of choice there for these poker players.

Arranging a poker home game is quite easy, provided you have some like minded friends who enjoy to play poker.

To play poker online click the link!

I would ensure that all poker players who decide to attend are friends, rather than peope you may have only met once or twice. The reason being, that you know your friends will not become troublesome if they start losing, but others might.
Generally speaking, home games should be an enjoyable evening, and so music, food, and drinks are of course optional additions. If you are playing for relatively large amounts of money then perhaps players might want to concentrate very carefully on their cards though, so it depends entirely on the nature of the game.

You need some equipment to play poker at a home game of course, with a deck of cards being the essential item. With a deck of cards and some cash, you can play a basic game of cards anywhere. Tables and chairs are always helpful in a home game too, and you should count up the number of players you are expecting and first ensure you have the space and seating for them.

If you are deciding to make the home game a tournament, you will also need a set of poker chips. High quality chips are always nice, but a simply set will do the same job, as long as there are enough chips in the set to give each person a decent starting stack. As long as everybody enjoys themselves at a home game, that is the main aim, regardless of who wins the money.