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.

Liv Boeree

In case you’re not familiar with Ms. Boeree, take a look at her website.

Liv won the EPT San Remo €5,000 Main Event and pocketed the $1,698,300 first prize money in April 2010. After this great win, she was asked to join Team Pokerstars.

According to her bio, she studied at the University of Manchester, and received a first-class degree in Astrophysics. She’s also a model and TV personality in England, not to mention likes to rock out on her electric guitar. Those are some really unusual combinations of talent.

Many states have had false starts for many years regarding legalizing online poker, including Florida, Hawaii, and New Jersey to name a few.  Perhaps because of all the red ink and many government bank accounts being empty, D.C. has been given the green light in the 2011 budget to allow online poker to their 600k residents.

Interestingly, the word “poker” is not mentioned in the bill. However, it allows “both games of skill and games of chance,” and to offer games on the Internet. It’s obvious that this would include online poker. The game would most likely be provided by Intralot Interactive, which has an existing relationship with the D.C. Lottery.

Officials expect that the online poker site will not be ready until the end of 2011 and proceeds to not come until 2012. Things move slowly in government.

It’s not clear if Intralot will have the experience needed to create a good online poker environment but that may become mute if this causes a domino effect and forces states to legalize online poker.

It will still take years for things to move forward but this is definitely the first step to legalizing online poker in the United States.

Last week, an IBM research computer named Watson took on 2 expert Jeopardy! players and beat them at their own game.

An article on Slate.com ponders how Watson could take on Poker as the next project for the IBM researchers. If they did, perhaps Watson would be able to play on NBC’s Heads-Up poker event.

Of course, this is the first step in computers and robots becoming our overlords.

Besides the trophy and money, each LAPC winner takes home this Baume & Mercier watch that’s supposedly worth about $3,000. I don’t know anything about watches so I’m not sure if that’s really how much it costs but a lot of the players seem to want it more than the trophy.

As for me, I’m still trying to win my first one.

Well, it’s time once again for the LA Poker Classic at Commerce. In case you don’t know what it is, it’s 54 tournaments in 44 days, sort of like a smaller version of the WSOP in Vegas. Most of the tournaments start at 1pm and are 2 day events if you make the final table or play 13 hours. There is a 1 hour dinner break around 7pm or so.

Event #1 is their $1,000,000 guarantee 5 day event with a buy-in for $335. They have 4 day ones, then one day 2. This one brings in the big crazy crowds. Last year, I made the mistake of trying to register on the day of the event and literally had to get a refund because my alternate number was so large, I figured it would take about 3 hours before I would sit down.

This year, I registered a week before the tournament so I wouldn’t have that problem. As I played, I watched the line going so far back, I didn’t even know where it ended.

You start this event with only 5,000 in chips so there are a lot of people doing some crazy all-ins to try to accumulate chips. So if you can get a hand early on, you can collect the chips of these fast players.

On my last hand, I flopped a lower flush against a higher flush and thought I was slow playing, but in reality, I was being trapped. Coincidentally, the person that knocked me out was the person I knocked out last year (in 4th place) with flush over flush. I guess we’re now even.

In another tournament, I made it to day 2 with only about 10 times the big blind, saw an ace on the very first deal, went all-in and got called by pocket Jacks and got knocked out. That was quick. While I was getting paid, the guy told me I had about 5 minutes to get into that days tournament before the break was over. I had taken the day off from work so I figured, why not?

This tournament was also starting with 5,000 in chips and since I came in 2 hours late, some people already had some big stacks. I slowly managed to accumulate some chips and noticed people going all-in when they got down to 2,000 or so. After a while, I managed to get up to almost 30,000. Then on one hand, the chip leader raised, there were 2 callers and I called with pocket 3s.

The flop was Ace, Queen, 3 with 2 spades. I’m hoping the raiser has AK, and sure enough he comes out betting. If he has a big ace, I know he probably won’t be able to get away from the hand so I make a big raise to try to get him all-in on the turn. Instead, he goes into the tank, then goes all-in and I snap call.

He shows King, Jack for a gut-shot with no flush draw. WTF? Wow, Now, I see how he accumulated his chips. Nothing comes and I double up. Now, I have some chips to really play with.

The table breaks and I move to a table where the chip leader is on my left and I basically just wait it out. I managed to get up to about 140,000 during this waiting period.

Next, we move again to what would be the final table if I were to make it that long. At this table, everybody pretty much has the same amount of chips, from about 80k to 160k or so.

Once, when everybody folded to me in the small blind, I looked down and saw 2, 3 off suit and remarked to the big blind that I would give him a walk this time, but that would be the last time that would happen.

I just say these things to mess with people’s heads.

The next time everybody folded to my small blind, I raised and he folded. I tried again after that, and he folded again reluctantly. I could tell that he wasn’t happy about it and might not take it much longer.

About an hour later, everybody folded to my small blind again. But this time, I looked down to see pocket rockets. Nice. The blinds were 2,500 – 5,000 so I raised to 12,500. I had been raising to 13,000 previously, but I didn’t have the correct change so it was a little less, making it look a little weaker, hopefully.

Sure enough, the big blind 3 bets me another 20,500. I pretend to go into the tank for a while, doing my best acting performance, then finally announce all-in, another 60k plus on top, putting him all-in.

Now he goes into the tank. I figured he was just trying to make a move so he would eventually fold after pretending to think so that I would think he had a real hand. However, after some time, he says, “I call.” This surprised me and now I put him on Queens.

I show my aces and he shows pocket 5s. Holy smokes. Pocket 5s!? WTF? He tells me he thought I was making a move with no pair. I guess he wanted to gamble because 5s are at best a coin flip against 2 over cards, which I would have even if I had 2 random cards.

But this was a great situation for me. I’m a 4 to 1 favorite and would almost double up to over 200k, which would put me in a great position to make it to day 2.

All that sounds great. Unfortunately, the window card is a 5 and I get nothing and basically I’m out of the tournament.

Ouch.

Well, that’s poker. That’s what people who got bad beats always say anyway.

I have a few more events that I want to try so maybe you’ll see another post about a bad beat.