Pete tells you why live poker is slowly rotting out your insides and why you need to stop playing live poker before you die!

Holy crap, it's a new article!

Here are the results of the recent 2007 British Columbia Poker Championships. Congratulations goes out to Daniel Idema for winning the Main Event and $402.000! Brian Joslin took $148,000 for his win in the NL Hold 'Em Event, Scott Craig won $63,500 for prevailing in the Pot Limit Hold'Em Event! A special congrats goes out to the winner of the first ever Ladies Only NL Hold'Em event, Paula Stregger, who has a new $30,000 to spend!

• $2,700 No Limit Hold'Em Main Event
• $550 Ladies No Limit Hold 'Em Event
• $1,100 Pot Limit Hold 'Em Event
• $1,100 No Limit Hold 'Em Event

A two part video of Pete playing the Sunday Poker Stars $215 multi-table tournament. Part 1 consists of the very first hour of the tournament. Pete discusses beginning tournament strategy, developing reads from scratch, and general tourney play.

• Multi-table Tournament Video #1 Part #1

In Part 2 Pete elaborates more on strategy when the blinds get higher relative to stack sizes.

• Multi-table Tournament Video #1 Part #2

Please click the Read More link below to get to the link to the forum thread about these videos.

For the last two days, the "First Man-Machine Poker Championship" has been taking place in Vancouver, with Phil Laak and Ali Eslami (a high-stakes heads-up limit pro from the Commerce Casino) representing humanity, and the Polaris program written by a team from the University of Alberta representing Skynet. The University of Alberta has been the major force in poker ai for years now, and has been running fairly high profile matches against human pros since 2003, when they played against thecount, who was at the time one of the most successful players in the Poker Stars 100/200 game (at the time pretty much the biggest regular game on the internet).

Here are the results for the May 6-13, 2007 Johnny Chan Poker Classic Events:

• May 6 $550 No Limit Texas Hold em
• May 7 $1,100 No Limit 6 Handed Hold em
• May 8 $1,100 Pot Limit Hold em
• May 9 $1,100 Pot Limit Omahaha
• May 13 $2,700 No Limit Hold em MAIN EVENT

Hey dudes, it's Pete just checking in with an update. 604 member SLy and I are on the Cali-Vegas road trip I've talked about in the forums here. This time I managed to remember my passport, not like the whole Ultimatebet.com Aruba Classic fiasco.

Anyway, we're in Cali to watch the Canucks on their road trip to Anaheim and LA this week, and to play poker at Commerce, the mecca of poker. The LA Poker Classic is going on right now too there.

SLy beat me to the Vancouver airport, and he ran into Kevin Bieksa and Brendan Morrison... apparently they were on a flight to LAX departing 10 minutes after ours. So we tried to hunt down the Canucks, but they hid in the stupid "Air Canada Luxury Lounge" wtf. I was so going to hit Roberto Luongo up with some poker talk - the guy's a big poker fanatic. But that plan's on the backburner.

Anyway, so after the flight we roll into Commerce to play some poker. If you haven't been to Commerce, imagine a filthy casino in a ghetto suburb of LA. The poker room is one huge room, almost warehouse-like, filled from wall to wall with poker tables. And it's loud. And filthy. They serve food right to at the tables, so there's a ton of little portable mini-tables on wheels all around every table, covered with old food dishes and empty drink bottles.

SLy and I got on two different 10/20 NL tables. We went up to sign up board, and it was weird... they had 10/20 NL $600 tables. I was like 30bb max buy-in? It turned out that $600 was the minimum buy-in and the games were uncapped. Definitely different from the 100BB max buy-in games I'm used to online and in Vancouver.

Man, it's funny how uncomfortable you feel when in a new environment. I sat down, and bought in, and it immediately felt like I was the "new guy" playing against 9 others... like it was me vs. them. What really got me though was the chips -- I sat down, and checked out everyone's stacks and I didnt recognize any of the chips -- they were all weird colours. And SIZES too! I'm sitting here at a 10/20 games, used to red $5, green $25 and black $100 chips, and instead I'm seeing piles of mustard yellow, lime green, bright yellow, and oversized white chips. And one dude had a couple bright pinks. And some other dude had cash. And a third dude had purple and blue chips.

I got dealt my first hand, and I didnt even know what colour chips were what values. And the chips were dirty, jeez I can't even go on enough about the chips. I'm no germophobe, hell I push it and say "10-second rule" for food dropped on the ground is fine, but after handling the chips for an orbit my hands were coated with this like sticky film, like if you spill some pop on your kitchen counter and let it dry for a couple days. And there's a ton of people playing poker and eating finger foods. Mmmmm mmmm mmm, finger-licking good!

But I digress. Onto the poker! Well, I sucked on day 1, not going to get into it. :)

We're shutting it down for the night... tomorrow we're heading out to Anaheim to watch the Canucks play. We have wicked seats 8 rows behind the Ducks bench, look for me in my vintage blue Luongo jersey, celebrating profusely when the Canucks score. I may get involved in a brouhaha with some Ducks fans too. You young broadcasters out there, if you ever get a chance to use the word, "brouhaha" you take it!!

Pete

Here are the results of the recent 2006 British Columbia Poker Championships. Congratulations goes out to Dave White for winning the Main Event and $600,000! Jody Trainer took $130,200 for his win in the PL Hold 'Em Event, and Aaron Duczak won $58,800 for prevailing in the Pot Limit Omaha Event!

• $1,100 Pot Limit Omaha Event
• $1,100 Pot Limit Hold 'Em Event
• $2,700 No Limit Hold 'Em Main Event

Update: 3:00pm

SLy is at 24,000, from a high of 32,000, at the dinner break. Less than 300 players remain. The blinds are going up to 300/600/75 a half hour after the break ends.

Update: 2:30pm.

Just a quick update. I busted about 4 and a half hours into the event. A combination of awful play, cold cards, and being sick really put a damper on the event for me. I just couldn't focus. The table was fairly soft too with a wide variety in skill levels.

However, SLy is motoring along well at 25,000 as of about 1:30 Pacific time. He actually busted Freedy Deeb! Deeb was short-stacked and pushed 1200 UTG with KJ with blinds 100/200, and SLy called with the good ol' pocket rockets. Amazingly the aces held up. :)

At least 512 players entered the event and first place is $744,000.

More to come soon.

DanielK

Maxxscam

DanielK finished 75th for $65,973 and Maxxscam (Chris) placed 123rd for $51,129! Two top 150 finishes out of a HUGE field of 8,773!

For Mike and I, and all of us at 604, we just want to say it was amazing watching the updates online the last few days, and all of us here were pulling hard for you guys!

Congrats should also go out to 604poker.com Member JasonA, as he blazed a path for Daniel and Chris by finishing 55th out of 2,050 players in the $2,000 NL WSOP Event #31 for $3,770!

Congrats again boys, you did us all proud. Now teach the rest of us how to wreak havoc at the tournament tables! :)

The tourney is now at 11:00pm (2;00am PokerStars time!), sign up!

A lot of us will be playing in next week's Pacific Poker Shootout at Cascades Casino in Langley. We at 604poker.com have set up a single-table limit SNG on Poker Stars as a practice session for Monday night.

That's TONIGHT, Monday, May 15th at 11:00PM PACIFIC on POKER STARS.. To get to the tournament click Tourney then the Private Tab on the right. Scroll down to May 16 2:00 EST and find 604Poker.com's Limit SNG. It costs $10+1 to enter. NOTE: Email us or PM Pete in the forums for the password as this is a RESTRICTED tournament available for people either playing in the Pacific Poker Shootout or friends willing to help out! Also, this tourney is 10 players MAXIMUM.

Note although the tourney is tonight Monday at 11:00pm Pacific, it is listed under May 16th at 2:00AM on Stars as it goes by Eastern time.

WTF, Mike wrote an article?

In this article I cover the most common postflop scenario in shorthanded play: a blind stealer against a single defender. Playing correctly in this situation from both sides is essential to being a winning player.

RESULTS FOR THE MARCH TOURNEY ARE NOW UP!

Coming up is 604poker.com's MARCH tourney! This month will be a NO LIMIT TOURNEY! It's going to be great fun as we raise and bluff each other, and trash talk like only we can! Even if you are a lurker, sign up, play and introduce yourself to us - we'd be glad to meet you.

March's tournament will be held this Sunday March 19th at 8pm Pacific on Poker Stars. To get to the tournament click Tourney then the Private Tab on the right. Scroll down to March 19 23:00 EST and find "*******604Poker.com's Monthly MTT******". Tourney ID#21353038. It costs $10+1 to enter. NOTE: Email us or PM Pete in the forums for the password!. Check out our Tournament Money List and Leaderboard for 2006's tournies! You can also access the Tournament Money List and Leaderboard through the "604 Tourney Leaderboard" link in the left sidebar under the "Online" heading.

WTF, Mike wrote an article?

In this article I cover the most common postflop scenario in shorthanded play: a blind stealer against a single defender. Playing correctly in this situation from both sides is essential to being a winning player.