A-List actor Ben Affleck is in talks to star in a poker movie titled “Runner, Runner” written by none other than the team of Brian Koppelman and David Levien, who wrote “Rounders” back in 1998. Justin Timberlake has also signed on to play the protégé to Affleck playing the founder of a online gambling site.

Director Brad Furman (“The Take”, “The Lincoln Lawyer”) will direct and big name Leonardo DiCaprio will be one of the co-producers in the production.

It will be interesting to see the updated poker world written by the duo that wrote “Rounders.” The movie is still in it’s early production phase and is tentatively slated to be released in 2014.

The back Asian card game area at the Bicycle Casino is now closed, including the restaurant that used to be located in that area. Apparently, the main card area was becoming so sparse that the management decided that it would move the Asian games into the main card area to make it look busier. This obviously means there are less smaller stakes poker tables in the main area.

The food that used to be served at the Jade restaurant can mostly be ordered at the deli type restaurant located in what used to be the Sushi restaurant near the new tournament room. Even most of the Asian foods can now be ordered at the deli.

The popular TV show “Poker After Dark” will be returning to NBC Sports Network starting on March 5, 2012. They will air the episodes that were taped in December 2010 and will continue for 5 weeks.  The DOJ crackdown on the online poker sites have had a big affect on many of the TV shows that were sponsored by many of these poker sites. The same production company also produces the NBC National Heads-Up Championship, which will also not return this year.

The Epic Poker League, which was started as a exclusionary professional poker league similar to the PGA tour for professional golfers, has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in order to hold off its creditors and to try to re-organize to have a chance at re-booting.

The rest of the season may have to be canceled but a final decision apparently has not been made and might depend on if a larger company or organization will come in to rescue the money strapped league.

The Feds have seized yet another gambling and poker site, this time Bodog.com and have indicted Calvin Ayre and others for running illegal gambling online and money laundering. Strangely, the actual domain Bodog.com has not been used for gambling for a while but apparently, that didn’t stop the Maryland ICE to take over the domain name.

This charge is somewhat different from the domain name seizures of other poker sites since Bodog also has sports betting and not just poker. Bodog CEO Ayre has released a statement that his non-US businesses will continue to operate as well as his charities.

Commerce is celebrating 20 years of LAPC with a great trophy, watch and of course, cash. They’re also giving away free caps and t-shirts with hoods.

They seem to change things around every year and this year is no exception. Many of the tournaments are 30 minutes levels at the start, then switch over to 40 minutes later in the tournament. I guess this is to make things go faster so you’re not there all night. Almost all the events start at 1pm. The 2 day events go down to 5% of the field that will return the next day. Top 10% cash.

Good luck everyone. Hope to see you at the final table.

The U.S. Attorney of Manhattan has called Full Tilt Poker a massive Ponze scheme against it’s own players. Civil money laundering complaints were filed against Full Tilt and it’s board of directors, alleging that the site improperly used funds of online poker players to pay members of its board of directors, including famous poker players Howard Lederer and Christopher Ferguson, $440 million since April 2007.

This is yet another bad blow to on-line poker, after the bad beat it got back in April from the DOJ. Back in June, there was a lot of talk about Full Tilt when professional poker player Phil Ivey sued Full Tilt and refused to play in the 2011 WSOP until Full Tilt paid all of the players.

At this point, it’s not clear if players can get their money out of Full Tilt but according to the charges, Full Tilt does not have enough money to pay all of it’s players.

At this point, it’s clear that there needs to be governmental regulations to control online poker. It would be safer for players, and with taxes, more money for the government. It would be a no-brainer win-win situation. But of course, this is the government we are talking about so it may take a few decades.

Finally, because of a busted Ponzi scheme by a man named Bradley Ruderman, the trustee in the bankruptcy case have filed a lawsuit in an attempt at recovering some of the stolen money. The lawsuit claims that some of the stolen money were lost to some Hollywood big-wigs at these secret, invite-only poker games from 2003-2009.

Some of those listed in the lawsuit are Tobey Maguire of Spider-Man fame for $311k, director Nick Cassavetes for $73k, and Gabe “Welcome Back Kotter” Kaplan for $62. The last two have been on the TV show “High Stakes Poker,” so it’s not surprising that they were at these private games.

There are several interesting points that this lawsuit brings up. The first point is that the lawsuit alleges that although it is not illegal to have private games in California, these games were organized by a company run by Molly Bloom (sister of Philadelphia Eagles player Jeremy Bloom according to Radaronline.com).

Ms. Bloom is also being sued for $475k, the amount that was allegedly paid to her by Ruderman. However, if any of the 20+ defendants to the lawsuit wanted to fight this case, they would probably claim that Ms. Bloom only organized the “party” and was not taking a “rake” from the game or profiting from it. That might be hard to do since she apparently provided the tables and professional dealers but a smart lawyer might be able to pull this off.

How many times have you given a few bucks to the host of the game to cover alcohol and food? Does this make the game illegal? If the host made money, it might. So next time, make sure to pay only the actual cost of the items to keep the game legal.

Secondly, according to people.com, money was transferred directly from Ruderman to the defendants in the case. This implies that there were “playing behind” IOUs being used at the table. If everything was done in cash at the table, there would be no need for wire transfring of money after the game.

This is horrible on many levels. Ask any poker player and they will tell you that IOUs are not a good idea in any game, especially in home games. How many times have we heard “I have $1,000 behind. I’ll get it later.” I always object to this for good reason. I’ll add this lawsuit to the list of reasons not to allow this type of behavior. If they had used cash, nobody would know how much money was won or lost at these “secret” games.

Lastly, regardless of if this was a legal or illegal game, can a player be sued if the money won in a poker game turns out to be stolen? I’m not a lawyer and don’t understand all the legal ramifications of if the game was legal or not, but I don’t want to worry that somebody might sue me years later, for money that I won in a poker game.

Don’t even get me started on what could happen if the IRS decided to get involved in this case. What a mess.

It’s a lot like what happened to the pirate websites recently where the Department of Justice took over the domain name and put their own message up on their servers.

The FBI has indicted 11 defendants who are the founders or owners of PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet, and seized over 70 bank accounts.

Pokerstars has moved their website to pokerstars.eu and for non-US players, it’s business as usual. However, US players are not allowed to play although their website states that all your deposited money is safe.

At this point, I have to believe that most players would be scared to deposit any new money and there is probably a rush to withdraw money from the sites. This obviously has to hurt the bottom line for those big poker sites.

What will this all mean for online poker? For now, it’s wait and see but it’s not good for business, except perhaps at live casinos.