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Jason Alexander To Shill For PokerStars
January 25, 2009Jason Alexander Joins PokerStars Stable
Jason Alexander, the comic actor famed for his portrayal of George Costanza in "Seinfeld" and a veteran of several recent high-profile poker events, has joined PokerStars' lineup of celebrity endorsers. Alexander will play online under the screen name "J. Alexander" and will don Stars gear for appearances at major events, including the 2009 World Series of Poker.
Actor Jason Alexander - best known as the not-so-lovable loser George Costanza on the award-winning sitcom Seinfeld - recently signed an exclusive sponsorship agreement with PokerStars.
The agreement means Alexander now represents PokerStars as a brand ambassador and will play for the online poker company in a variety of online and live poker tournaments, including the 2009 World Series of Poker.
"Poker Stars has very graciously asked me to sign on as one of their official players," says Alexander. "I am very flattered and happy to be playing for a real quality site and with the kind of professionals that remind me every day how truly mediocre I am at this game. But I'm learning. And now I can learn from some of the best."
Alexander joins National Hockey League (NHL) player Mats Sundin, former Wimbledon champion Boris Becker and Cy Young Award winner Orel Hershiser on the roster of PokerStars celebrities.
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Lone Rhino Snatches Defeat From The Jaws Of Victory in PokerStars WBCOOP 2008
December 17, 2008Had a great run during yesterday’s WBCOOP 2008 NLHE Qualifier, but due to a sudden and unexpected case of the Dumb Ass, I busted out in 84th place – 12 spots from a qualifying ticket to the finals. (The top 72 made the cut.)
The tournament started with 559 total players. At my first table assignment, I had Bryan “The Icon” Micon seated to my left. Micon, 30, from Las Vegas, Nevada, is best known for a deep run in the 2006 WSOP Main Event where he entertained ESPN and the international viewing audience with an impromptu Michael Jackson “Thriller” dance after winning a large pot. He’s since gone on to earn over $250,000 in tournament play, and is one of the founders of NeverWinPoker.com a poker news and uncensored poker forum, complete with downloadable podcasts for your listening pleasure.
During the ninth hand (Level 1 – 10/20 blinds) Bryan woke up to find pocket aces (Ah Ac) and raised from middle position to 100. Three players called and the flop came Qs 6h 3h. The first two players checked and Micon bet 333. The bet of 333 causes one fold, one call and then a raise from the fourth player to 740. Micon calls the raise and the player next to him (holding 3d 3c) shoves for his remaining 1660. The player next to act shoves his remaining 1650 (he’s got Ad Qc) and Micon pushes in his stack of 1660. The Turn is a 2h and the River shows a Ts. Micon and the other guy lose to the set of threes and finish the tournament in 542nd and 543rd place respectively.
The Tao of Poker’s Dr. Pauly finished in 545th place and two of our own PokerNews bloggers, Davega and mguerrera finished in 327th and 364th position.
I played ABC poker for the first two hours, ending the first break in 65th place. With 265 left to go I was holding onto 30th place and from 172 players remaining until 123 were left I hovered between 30-40th place. At one point I luckboxed my way to 16th out of 120.
With over 19,000 in chips and the blinds and antes rising fast, the steals, re-steals and positional play began to dominate the action. At this point I could have folded my way into the top 72, but I stupidly dropped that idea.
And that’s when things started to go bad for Lone Rhino.
Stay tuned for more…
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Read more: PokerStars, World Blogger Championship of Online Poker, Blogo controversy, NLHE, I'm a donk, Breathmints
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Bloggers Set To Battle
December 14, 2008
This week begins the annual PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker. Bloggers from all over the world will gather online to compete for awesome prizes and bragging rights as the best poker playing blogger on the Interwebs.
If I run good, catch some lucky breaks, and hand out a few bad beats I might make it to the Final Table and have a chance to luckbox my way to a PokerStars Caribbean Adventure prize package worth $14,300 or European Poker Tour event packages worth $7,500.
They'll also be giving away free entries into other online tournaments and Steps satellite tickets.
I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker!
This PokerStars tournament is a No Limit Texas Hold’em event exclusive to Bloggers.
Registration code: 493398
Wish me luck!
LR
408 views, 1 comments
Read more: PokerStars, World Blogger Championship of Online Poker, Blogo controversy, Oprah is 200 lbs, Lions lose again, Plaxico, O.J. Simpson, levels, bad beats, horses
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Normal Citizen Enters WSOP Main Event – Does Well – Returns Home Undamaged
September 18, 2008ESPN’s Day 2 coverage of the 2008 World Series Of Poker Main Event continued the other night and we were once again treated to a parade of unique and volatile world championship hopefuls. For the past few years, as the number of entries grows, the age of the players has gotten younger and younger and watching the latest hotshot young gun sitting at a table with unkempt hair shooting wildly from underneath a crooked ball cap has become so commonplace that it rarely notes mention. So it was surprising for me to see in the midst of this year’s madness a true one-off, an unassuming baby-face who’s got game, and also has his feet firmly planted on the ground. This rare breed is 22-year old, Brian Schaedlich from Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Schaedlich, a recent college grad, makes his living teaching elementary PE and Special Ed at a school in Shaker Heights, a tony suburb just outside of Cleveland. Brian’s love for poker and fascination with the spectacle of the WSOP Main Event inspired him to enter this year’s big game. A few months earlier, Schaedlich and a good friend drove to Mountaineer Racetrack Casino in Chester, West Virginia to play in a WSOP qualifying satellite tournament. Young Schaedlich won a seat for this year’s Main Event via one of the $135 satellites held there.
Fast-forward to July and his first trip to Las Vegas; Brian was now sitting with nearly 7,000 other poker players from across this country and around the world to battle for the biggest cash prize in sports. Needless to say, he was a little awestruck as he nervously squirmed in his chair looking down at a starting stack of 20,000 chips and waiting for Wayne Newton to say, “Shuffle up and deal,” as the UNLV Marching Band played, “Viva Las Vegas” and the Jubilee girls kicked on by. His “through the rabbit-hole” moment was about to begin, and little did he know would substantially exceed his expectations. At the end of the day he was more than a Day 1 Survivor; he played well, caught some cards and ended the evening with a little over 160,000.
ESPN’s latest broadcast introduced Brian Schaedlich to a nation of viewers who watched as he accumulated chips and showed none of the swagger often seen from your garden-variety assclown yearning for the glare of the 441 production lights. At the completion of Day 2A, Schaedlich bagged up 801,000 chips and was going into Day 3 in first place with double the chips of second place Hunter Frey.
It looked like he had a great chance of winning the coveted Main Event bracelet and the top prize of over $9 million dollars. The media took notice as did the online poker sites, and soon Brian hooked up with PokerStars and was swimming in PS apparel and accessories. I’m sure he was asking himself over and over how this incredible moment could be happening to him. Despite the craziness swirling about he maintained an innocence that seemed out of place amongst the degenerates, the scammers, the beggars, the perverts, stakers, stars, and action junkies. While the opportunists and douche bags hovered nearby, Schaedlich continued to smile and watch everything through the clear eyes of a virtuous youngster.
SPOILER ALERT: Read no further if you do not want to know how Brian Schaedlich ended up, but obviously you must know by now that he’s not one of the November 9.
Day 3 went badly for Brian, and even though it has not yet been telecast on ESPN I’ll recap his quick descent from chip leader to railbird. He akwardly lost a monster pot to Jeff Kimber putting him at just under 400,000 when he limped in with Pocket Rockets. Kimber raised from the dealer button with pocket queens. Brian smooth called. The flop came out queen high and both players’ chips went in the middle. The turn and river contained no ace and Kimber came out on top. Later Schaedlich lost over 100,000 when he called an opponent’s All In on a 9-7-6-3 board with pocket 5's. His pair of fives lost to the villain’s pocket aces. At this point Brian was down to only 300,000 chips and fading fast. He finished the evening with a pair of jacks, but lost to Jens Klaning who flipped two pair. At the end of a long Day Three, with 474 players remaining, Brian was barely alive with only 22,000 chips.
Schaedlich started Day 4 as one of the soon-to-be-extinct short stacks. With little help on the horizon, he shoved with ace-nine against Darren Grant's queen-four. His 60/40 advantage was short lived when a queen hit on 4th Street and ended his incredible run in 456th place. In addition to life-long memories, Brian Schaedlich grabbed $27,020 in prize money.
Even if he had won the Main Event, Schaedlich insisted he would return to Ohio to continue teaching. “I love the kids too much, I couldn’t do that to them. I don't think my kids would really understand Mr. Schaedlich winning $9.1 million and not showing up the next day. As far as quitting the job to do the poker life, I think I’d miss teaching too much.”
The world needs more young men like Brian Schaedlich and the WSOP ME was lucky to have him for the short time he was onboard. Good luck next year Brian, and keep up the good work at home.
1002 views, 1 comments
Read more: Brian Schaedlich, WSOP, Main Event, PokerStars, teaching, Chagrin Falls, Ohio, Cleveland, Shaker Heights, poker, poker young gun, ESPN
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Anyone Who Considers Arithmetic Methods of Producing Random Digits is in a State of Sin
August 27, 2008"Shuffle up and deal!"
Had a chance to play online at PokerStars today. Entered a $5.50 No Limit Texas Hold 'Em Turbo. 2,800 players signed up. No re-buys - no add-ons.
I lasted for less than an hour. In fact I was only dealt 41 hands until I busted out. Of those 41 hands I took the Flop on 19% of them.
The reason I'm even mentioning this is not to further illustrate my exceptionally low-level donkness, but to share an observation about the "random" shuffles and the results therein. During those first 41 hands of the tournament I saw Pocket Rockets dealt 9 times. Once to me, but as my recent luck would have it, they were also dealt to an opponent two seats away. We split the pot after getting all of our chips in the middle.
Not only did Aces come out 9 times on 41 hands, but pocket Jacks and pocket Queens were also dealt 4 times each.
Okay, at this point you'd be right to expect this blog entry to dissolve into a major rant over online poker software, how their decks are "randomly" shuffled and more nonsense about the theory behind Random Number Generators.
I will resist the temptation to do so and just say a few more words and leave you with an explanation of all of the above taken directly from the PokerStars WWW page.
Last time I checked, you can expect to be dealt pocket aces once in about every 220 hands. Holy crap, the folks at today's $5.50 tourney were all apparently overdue for their pocket aces, because those things were shooting out faster than lame props at a Carrot Top show.
Veteran poker players vow that online deck shuffles are on the up-and-up and the only reason you witness more anomalies is due to the increased number of hands that can be dealt per hour compared to the number of hands being dealt at a brick and mortar casino.
That's all well and good and I respect that logic, but I can't stop that feeling deep in my heart of hearts that something about online poker doesn't add up.
So here's how my favorite poker site sums up all of this, and I have to tell you it does not make a whole lotta sense to me. Especially the references to "mouse movements, thermal noise, and the required amount of entropy" which I find to be very strange and hard to understand.
Enjoy:
"Anyone who considers arithmetic methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin." - John von Neumann, 1951
We understand that a use of a fair and unpredictable shuffle algorithm is critical to our software. To ensure this and avoid major problems we are using two independent sources of truly random data:
user input, including summary of mouse movements and events timing, collected from client software
true hardware random number generator developed by Intel, which uses thermal noise as an entropy source
Each of these sources itself generates enough entropy to ensure a fair and unpredictable shuffle.Shuffle Highlights:
A deck of 52 cards can be shuffled in 52! ways. 52! is about 2^225 (to be precise, 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660 ,636,856,404,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000 ways). We use 249 random bits from both entropy sources (user input and thermal noise) to achieve an even and unpredictable statistical distribution.Furthermore, we apply conservative rules to enforce the required degree of randomness; for instance, if user input does not generate required amount of entropy, we do not start the next hand until we obtain the required amount of entropy from Intel RNG.
We use the SHA-1 cryptographic hash algorithm to mix the entropy gathered from both sources to provide an extra level of security.
We also maintain a SHA-1-based pseudo-random generator to provide even more security and protection from user data attacks.
To convert random bit stream to random numbers within a required range without bias, we use a simple and reliable algorithm. For example, if we need a random number in the range 0-25: we take 5 random bits and convert them to a random number 0-31, if this number is greater than 25 we just discard all 5 bits and repeat the process.
This method is not affected by biases related to modulus operation for generation of random numbers that are not 2n, n = 1,2,..To perform an actual shuffle, we use another simple and reliable algorithm:
first we draw a random card from the original deck (1 of 52) and place it in a new deck - now original deck contains 51 cards and the new deck contains 1 card then we draw another random card from the original deck (1 of 51) and place it on top of the new deck - now original deck contains 50 cards and the new deck contains 2 cards. We repeat the process until all cards have moved from the original deck to the new deck. This algorithm does not suffer from "Bad Distribution Of Shuffles."PokerStars shuffle verified by Cigital and BMM International.
PokerStars submitted extensive information about the PokerStars random number generator (RNG) to two independent organizations. We asked these two trusted resources to perform an in-depth analysis of the randomness of the output of the RNG, and its implementation in the shuffling of the cards on PokerStars. Both independent companies were given full access to the source code and confirmed the randomness and security of our shuffle.
End of PokerStars Explanation
Perhaps the best hand of those wonderful 41 I witnessed today was hand 34. Three players saw a flop of 7h, 7d, 7c. The first two players checked and the third bet 300. Both checkers folded and the winner raked the pot and showed:
Pocket Aces.
Isn't online poker great?!?
1558 views, 5 comments
Read more: online poker blows, math makes my head hurt, PokerStars, smarter people than me, random number generators, low-level donkey, John von Neumann
