DAILY BUZZ: Ivey Interviews, Thai Poker, OKC Poker Robbery

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DAILY BUZZ: Ivey Interviews, Thai Poker, OKC Poker Robbery

Jason Kirk | October 6, 2009

Welcome to the BLUFF Daily Buzz, where we scour the entire internet for all the latest news in and around the world of poker. If it involves chips and cards, or people known to associate with chips and cards, we’re there.

New episode of ESPN Inside Deal with another November Niner…or two

ESPN’s weekly poker show is back, and once again they’ve pulled out all the stops to draw a November Niner up to their Bristol, Conn., studios. This time around the man in the hotseat is former Bear Stearns head of corporate strategy Steven Begleiter, who will return to the felt next month with the third-largest chip stack of the nine remaining players. Begleiter talks about his run through the 2009 Main Event, how his experience in finance helps with poker, and his November Nine counterparts. ESPN contributor Phil Gordon also catches up with Phil Ivey in London for a brief interview that’s included in this week’s webcast, which you can catch right here.

Just like their players at the poker table, Scandis one-up US poker media

Not to knock our friends at ESPN, but there’s an even better Ivey interview that’s starting to generate some views over on YouTube. Conducted by the Swedish website Poker.se, this one is about four times as long as the clip we got on Inside Deal and sheds some light on Ivey’s early background. Ivey is known for being a pretty private guy; maybe the overseas media have a certain touch that those of us in North America don’t have? It’s certainly possible.

One way or another, this is the best Ivey interview I’ve seen in some time. The world’s greatest poker player also talks a bit about the Main Event, and it’s clear that he still sees it as just another poker game even though he really wants to win it. The other players might be feeling pressure because of the delay, but Phil Ivey is as cool as ever. Money quote:

“At the end of the day it’s still a tournament, and at the end of the day we’re still playing poker. So, people put a lot into it that it’s the Main Event, but you still have to play poker. But I’m pretty good at that so I think I’ll be all right.”

(Phil Ivey WSOPE London 2009 - Poker.se on Youtube)

Note to Thai poker players: don’t advertise your games online!

Bill Rini, a longtime poker blogger and online poker industry insider, today posted an entertaining tale of a private poker game gone wrong in the southeast Asian nation of Thailand.

As Rini notes in his post, gambling, “except the government-run lottery or buying a drink for a woman with an unnaturally deep voice,” is illegal in Thailand, but the police generally tend to leave Westerners alone when it comes to this matter. So when his friend Khun saw an English-language online posting advertising a private game he didn’t expect that the police, who Rini says “tend to be pretty behind the times in technology,” to either be aware of or make an effort to break up the game. As you can guess, this wouldn’t be a very entertaining story if Khun’s assumption had been correct.

I don’t want to give too much away, but the story features arrests, Thai jails, and threats of deportation. Head over to Bill’s blog via the link below to learn why even the worst legal consequences for underground poker in America pale in comparison to Thailand.

(An Arresting Development in Bangkok - Bill’s Poker Blog)

Poker robbery bug hits Oklahoma

You might not find yourself deported for playing in private poker games in American locales where the game is a little, um, less-than-legal, but robbery is a very real possibility. A group of 22 players in Oklahoma City found that out last night when two men burst into the strip mall location rented for a private game and made off with $12,000 in cash. Luckily nobody was injured or killed, as was the case in Houston last month during a similar incident at a strip mall location there.

Aside from the no-injuries part, the good news for the players is the prosecutors in OKC are apparently handling the situation with a measure of common sense not always present in other jurisdictions:

The poker party may have been illegal, a prosecutor said Monday, but no gambling charges are being pursued.

Scott Rowland, first assistant district attorney for Oklahoma County, said if no third party was involved in the poker party to make a profit from gambling, the players would only be facing misdemeanor charges if that could be proven. But prosecutors would rather pursue the felony armed robbery complaints, Rowland said.

“If the DA could prove illegal gambling then you would end up with uncooperative victims in a much more serious case of armed robbery,” Rowland said.

(22 robbed at private Oklahoma City poker party - NewsOK.com)

And I’m stuck here in the States…

Finally, Anthrax guitarist and UltimateBet sponsored poker player Scott Ian has been kind enough to post some video from the Aruba Poker Classic on his BLUFF blog. If you’re ever wanted to watch Lacey Jones and Liv Boeree party in the pool - or if you’re more into the weirder side of poker and want to see Phil Hellmuth fully clothed in said pool - you’re going to want to go check out Ian’s BLUFF video blog here. It’s enough to make you wish they ran last-minute satellites online for the APC.

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