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The process of choosing a poker player to enter the Poker Hall of Fame is close to completion as we now have the votes of the public. For 2 months the public has voted for their favourite players.

The chosen players will then be analysed by a 16 member committee which will take the final decision as to whom is the most ‘virtuous’ of them. Besides the player nominated for 2010, the committee will also choose a player that will automatically enter in the next year’s selection process.

The criteria for entering the Poker Hall of Fame is:

• The player had to play against acknowledged top competition

• To play for high stakes

• To play consistently well

• To prove his/her abilities for a long period of time

• Or, for non-players, to have contributed to the development of the poker game in the long term

The 2010 nominations are now closed and the 10 players chosen by the public are:

• CHRIS FERGUSON

• BARRY GREENSTEIN

• JENNIFER HARMAN-TRANIELLO

• DAN HARRINGTON

• PHIL IVEY

• LINDA JOHNSON

• TOM McEVOY

• DANIEL NEGREANU

• SCOTTY NGUYEN

• ERIK SEIDEL

There is a category of life situations where life just seems inspired from a movie scenario. In this category falls what has happened recently to Samuel McMaster, a 59 year old stockbroker and professional poker player.

As a stockbroker he swindled over 20 of his clients and has stolen from them the beautiful sum of over $400,000. Nothing so special so far. The best part of this situation, the one that seems taken out of a movie, is the fact that the judges have given him a sentence never heard of before. He has to repay the stolen sum by playing poker!

He is now free to leave his home state New Mexico and travel to tournaments and cash games in the attempt to make $7,500 monthly as decided by the court. If the first 2 payments are not done, then he will face immediate sentence of up to 12 years. The reason why judges have agreed to this unusual conclusion is that poker is McMaster’s only chance of raising the money he owes.

According to prosecutor Phylis H. Bowman: “There’s nothing to indicate that he’s a violent threat to society. So based upon those factors, that’s what determines conditions of release. It has nothing to do with profession.”

We will see if he comes back victorious from his tournaments or if he will come back at all. To be continued!

Online casinos can advertise on Youtube from now on.

Google has taken the decision to allow advertisements for the online gaming industry on Youtube because the company thinks it can block youth access. A system of verification will be put in place so that every user that wants to see the adds will have to confirm they are over 18. Regulators of online advertising were assured that the software for age verification is efficient in monitoring the ad campaigns and allowing access only to mature audiences to the gambling spots.

Ladbrokes is the first casino to have taken advantage of this positive development and others are expected to follow the trend.

Google’s spokesperson James Cashmore has stated that his company has been discussing with “ brands and agencies about this for more than two years” and that he is sure the spots won’t be displayed to underage Youtube visitors.

After years of banning advertisements for online casinos and gaming operators, Youtube announced in 2008 that it would remove its restrictions in the UK if the companies are based in the European Economic Area or are registered with the Gambling Commission.

The opening of the French online gaming market has had an extraordinarily positive impact on the online sport betting operators, said Nicolas Béraud the boss of Betclic.

“The level of taxation is too high for a new market (which has just opened)” said he. “What is visible on the French market today is a boom of new clients who have not played until now because it was considered illegal to play on the Internet. Now, that this activity is ‘legal’, we have beaten all our records in the last few days”. He gives credit to the World Cup that had a positive effect by bringing new clients to open an account and start betting on Betclic.

According to Beraud, the high level of taxation on the French market can determine clients to search illegal operators which offer cheaper services. He also stated that it is still difficult to trace these operators and stop them from activating on the online betting market and blocking the websites is not a 100% efficient measure as it was seen on the Italian market.

Besides issues concerning the illegal operators and the high taxation rates, another problem is that “the new legislation leaves out the online casino games which are very important because they create margin and without them it is difficult to be profitable.” This is not the first time that Beraud points out the importance of an equilibrium between the taxation and the array of authorised  games. He predicts that following France, the next countries that will regulate their online gaming markets are Danmark, Germany and Spain.

As far as the French market is concerned, Beraud hopes that operators such as Betclic will be allowed to extend their offer of online games in the next year and a half. He also told the audience that the French market would not be so profitable in this period due to very tax quotas on egaming revenue.

Ladbrokes Casino, the winner of the ‘online casino operator of the year’ award at the 2010 Gaming Awards, has launched the June summer slots offers.

You can find below a summary of their summer offers:

Hat Trick Hero – if you play UK Pub slots you can win one of the Hat-trick Hero games daily and a prize of £200. To qualify for the Hat-Trick Hero game the player must deposit and purchase £25 and have a turnover of £100 at a UK Pub slot or make a combination of 3 UK Pub slots every day.

£30K Prize Draw – the sum of £30,000 is up for grabs as you can win £50 daily if you comply with the following conditions: play on the selected slots - Mega Moolah, Burning Desire and Thunderstruck, deposit £20 and turnover £20 every day. There will be 20 randomly selected players rewarded daily with £50 each.

Summer Holiday Free Spins - Ladbrokes Casino offers 25 free spins daily to 20 randomly selected players at the Summer Holidays slot which you can find in the Download Casino. You can also play Summertime and Beach Babes besides Summer Holidays. To qualify for the spins, the deposit should be £25 and the turnover £150 on any of the slots mentioned earlier.

At the 2010 Gaming Awards Ladbrokescasino was voted “the top dog” in the industry of online casinos. The judging panel was formed of 25 specialists from the gaming industry. The judging criteria ranged from quality and variety of games offered, customer services, to innovation on the casino market and the use of modern technologies.

“We’re really proud to receive this award. We have a fantastic team at Ladbrokes and this is great recognition of all the hard work they have done. 2009 was a great year for us and we believe 2010 will be better, it has certainly started the right way” said Natalie Coles, Head of Ladbrokescasino.com.

Besides the rules of the game itself, poker implies a few other formalities that every player has to know and comply with.

The first set of rules refers to players’ talk. They are not allowed to make useless, repetitive and excessively negative remarks about the style of their opponents as this kind of behaviour is sanctioned. Any unwanted remark from the public that can effect the course of the game can also lead to sanctions. Therefore, in poker it is good to have a respectful conduct!

Another set of rules applies to the language of the poker tour. Only the language of the language of the country and English are allowed to be used between participants at a professional poker event.

The practice of ‘rabbit hunt’ is forbidden because players usually frown upon it. It is done in a situation where one player wins a pot without a showdown and another player asks the dealer to show cards would have come up in case the hand had been played till the end. Usually, these players who ‘hunt the rabbit” want to see if they would have hit a straight, a flash or some other gaining hand.

Gestures, noises, words, postures, objects that may disturb the other participants are also sanctioned and players are not allowed to use the mobile phone at the poker table.

The last but not least of these rules of conduct is to not underperfom. Underperforming means playing poorly in order to support another player which is penalised and his bets are withdrawn.

An MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) students team, called Black Jack (Blackjack), became famous in the early 90’s for having won millions of dollars at blackjack by using a technique called “counting the cards”.Does it sound exceptional? Still..
    This group of young students was formed in Cambridge, on the desks of the most famous University of Science USA. They focused on casino games and more specifically on the Blackjack game, and realized that this game was the only weapon they had to defeat the casino.
    Statistically, Blackjack offers a small advantage at the beginning in comparison with other casino games. In addition to the basic strategy which consists of knowing when to shoot or when to stay, players can use a strategy of placing the bet, counting the cards and monitoring the cards shuffle in order to improve their probabilities.
    Counting the cards is a very difficult method, but over the years, 60 techniques have been published in order to facilitate this method. Mathematician students have been attracted by the substantial amounts of money they could win by using this method.
    The MIT group has therefore combined the advantages of playing individually and those of team playing, for the counting of cards, in order to maximize their incomes and dissimulate their behavior.
    The team leader, Johnny Chang, said that in addition to the counting techniques, the group used also methods of monitoring the cards shuffle and tracking the aces. While the counting of the cards gave them an advantage of 2%,, the techniques used by the group gave them an extra 4% advantage over the casino.
    The team recruited their members through leaflets distributed throughout the campus. Interested students have given some tests and if they succeeded, they were trained with the rest of the team.
    The plan was clever and sophisticated. Indeed, while it is very easy to detect an isolated cards counter, it is much more difficult to spot a team of counters who have no connection one to another at first sight.
    The most impressive is that they all had false identities to help them escape the surveillance of casinos, and that the players were continually changed in order to renew the familiar faces at the game tables.
    The division of the group was simple: there were the detectors (spotters), gorillas and the big players. The detectors were players who did not earn and who played at a table yet counting cards but betting only the minimum sums. When the count became positive, therefore advantageous because the number of high cards in stake was important, the detector signaled the gorillas or the big players. The gorillas did not count and were pleased to play big bets. The major players themselves were nothing but more experienced gorillas who counted the cards together with the detectors and managed to dissimulate the casinos by varying their bets.
    The trick was well planned because the casinos could not accuse the players of counting the cards because the gorillas or the big players were not present at the table in the “burning” moment.
    Supervisors and casino managers were therefore abused for a period of time, not even imagining that an organization of cards counting could exist. But the deception did not last long. A company named “Strategic Investments” discovered the team. Those students who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars have become suspects as the sums they have spent were not normal for young students.
    After a few loosing sessions, the group was dismantled by itself. The story said that many students were banned from casinos,surveillance teams were provided with scholar year books (books found in universities, identifying students with their photos) in order to recognize them easily.
    Today, these techniques are outdated- croupiers shuffle the cards very quickly, have several card games and sometimes use several clogs.
    As to speak about on line blackjack, it is pointless to try any counting technique, as the games are continuously mixed. The movie by Kevin Spacey “Las Vegas 21″ traces the history of these students. A movie as exciting as the extraordinary story it tells…