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Double Quads, Live at the Bicycle.

The Bicycle Casino is the scene for this incredible round of poker, with both the winner and the loser holding four of a kind. Either one of the players could have reasonably expected to win – and in this case, both of them did! The presence of “double quads” kicked in the Bad Beat Super Jackpot. With $100,000 total at stake, the “winner” (who had four Queens) took home $25,000, while the “loser” (with four Threes) raked in $50,000. The remaining $25,000 gets divided up between all the other players who were dealt into the hand initially.

Danny Nguyen Gets His.

Before the final card was dealt, legendary pro Danny Nguyen was looking at two pair (Fives and Sevens), while his opponent was staring at those same Fives and a pair of Kings. The chances of of the last card being turned coming up a 7, given the cards that were already on the table, were one in 274. It popped up, and Nguyen became about half a million dollars richer. With his nerves of steel, Nguyen looked like he expected it the whole time.

Daniel Negreanu Takes a Bath.

Veteran gambler Gus Hansen found himself squared off with Daniel Negreanu – the Bobby Fischer of poker – in a classic poker-face bluff fest, televised on High Stakes Poker no less, with hundreds of thousands of dollars in the pot: Negreanu gives a big sigh, Hansen digs crumbs of out of his tear duct, they both bet their banks and then… Negreanu turned over a full house. Hansen had been sitting on Quad Fives ever since the Turn and was just soaking the over-confident Negreanu the entire time.

Phil Hellmuth Goes Off.

Phil Hellmuth, a former World Series of Poker champion, is running his mouth as usual in this classic poker beat-down. From the Flop on, he keeps trying to run his opponent off the table with brash attitude and big bets. Brian Brandon, preternaturally sure that Hellmuth is sitting on “a middle pair” and is bluffing, holds on until the end. The River gives him a third Seven to go with the one he’s been sitting on and the first card in the Flop. When he calls the big-shot bluff master, he wins big, but the best part by far is watching Hellmuth lose his composure at the end.

Phil Ivey Hits the Jackpot.

Ice-man Phil Ivey wound up on the winning end of a huge payday when he played high-stakes betting machine Patrik Antonius, an equally stoic card-sharp. Ivey’s River bet elevated the pot to over $550,000 – and no wonder, since he was looking at a Full House with Jacks over Aces. Antonius, knowing he only had three Aces to his name (two of which were in the Flop), called anyway. When they both showed their cards, Ivey’s total single-hand winnings cleared $800,000. A record at the time, it cemented Ivey’s standing in the world of professional high-stakes poker.

Million Dollar Shootout.

The diminutive but intrepid Tom Dwan wound up playing in one of the most exciting poker hands anybody’s ever seen. Post-Flop, he was sitting on the King and Queen of Spades, with the professorial Barry Greenstein holding a pair of Aces. On the table sat the flop, an enticing Queen, a Four and Deuce – both Spades. Before the Turn, Greenstein bets Dwan “all-in”. With the pot sitting at $919,600, the 22-year old Dwan declined to pull back $200,000 of his wager, and up came the cards. The Queen at the turn made the River’s Seven irrelevant, and Tom Dwan won the biggest pot in the history of televised poker (at the time), with three Queens beating Greenstein’s winsome pair of Aces.

Get the Money on the Table.

In this Full Tilt classic, even before the Flop, there are two things the viewers notice about Phil Ivey. One, he’s so emotionless as to make a Vulcan look like a cheerleader. Two, he wants to jack up the pot on this hand early, because he’s been dealt an Ace-Deuce and he knows that his opponent, Tom Dwan, likes to bite on the big bets (unaware that Dwan has the Six and Seven of Hearts in his pocket). The Flop helped each of them a little, but the Turn came of the Four of Hearts, giving both of them a five-card Straight before even seeing the River. Ivey coolly pushed $90,000 into the kitty; Dwan saw that and then raised him another $142,000. Without so much as a facial tic, Ivey went all-in. With $1.1 million on the table, the River turned an irrelevant Jack, and Tom Dwan once again became the richest single-hand poker player in televised history. Ivey’s typical goldfish-esque reaction: “Wow, good hand.” He had just lost half a million dollars.

Diesel’s Race One Films company is producing the television series, and it has already been picked up by FX. Other than the fact that FX has purchased the show’s contract, little is know about Raising Blind – besides that it’ll be heavily based on the world of underground gambling. Considering the fact that several Hollywood celebrities like Tobey Maguire, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were caught up in an underground celebrity poker ring, there definitely figures to be some interest in such a concept.

As for Diesel, don’t expect him to be jumping into any underground poker games for Raising Blind as CinemaBlend wrote, “Diesel will not star in the project since he’ll be busy acting in (and producing) the upcoming Fast and Furious sequels as well as the next in the Riddick series.” But they are still holding out for the possibility that Diesel will be seen on camera at some point after writing, “However, I could definitely see him showing up for a cameo or two down the line.”

Something very exciting about this show is the fact that Rounders director John Dahl has begun doing early work on the series. Seeing as how Rounders is basically the only good cinematic poker piece ever done, Diesel is on the right track by including Dahl in the mix.

Surprisingly, the segment with Duke was kind of funny, and she looked comfortable on the show – even getting a few laughs out of the audience. Of course, Ferguson played the part of the clueless-about-poker-moron perfectly with some of the jokes he made regarding bluffing and betting.

Some of the highlights of the show included the following:

- Duke said that she doesn’t play poker with her kids, nor do her kids know how to play.
- Both Ferguson and Duke played a “mouth organ” to close out the segment.
- Duke explained some signs to look for from bluffers such as pursed lips and the tendency to lick their lips.
- She mentioned the Epic Poker League at various points, although it seemed as if Ferguson wanted to talk about anything other than the Epic Poker League….much like poker players themselves.

Here is a look at the Late Late Show segment in its entirety:

To expand on this last line, Jorgensen appeared on PokerRadio.dk to talk about a funny story involving his and Hansen’s trip to Poland. During the excursion, they stopped at an Indian restaurant in Warsaw where the owner recognized Hansen and freaked out, spouting off lines like “Gus Hansen in my restuarant” and “Gus Hansen, I’ve seen you, and I cannot believe it.”

Later on, Hansen moseyed on over to the bar so he could hit on the female bartenders. Perhaps these women knew about the fact that Hansen was once down over $5.4 million in online poker because they weren’t having any of his weak game. Fortunately, the Indiana restaurant owner proved to be the ultimate wingman as he yelled, “Stupid, stupid Polish girls, this is Gus Hansen!”

One final part worth discussing about the story is how 2009 WSOP Main Event champion Peter Eastgate came to the restaurant the following day with Hansen and Jorgensen. Interestingly enough, he was much less recognizable to the Indian owner, who only had eyes for Gus. In fact, the poker pros had to tell the restaurant owner who Eastgate was before he had any clue.

If you’re interested in hearing Jorgensen tell the whole story, you can see it below in this Pokernyhederne video:

Most of the information continues to flow from poker pro/narc Dan Bilzerian, who’s been gossiping about these games like a 14-year-old schoolgirl. This time Bilzerian described an incident involving Cody “c-note” Leibel (I have no idea who he is), poker hostess extraordinaire Molly Bloom and an anonymous coked-out player.  Bilzerian told RadarOnline, “Molly ran one game at Cody’s mansion. (One player) got all coked up. Everyone had to chase Cody down for the money, and he later paid me a sum and gave me a watch, but stiffed me for $100,000.”

Another person helped Bilzerian out with the gossip by adding, “He just shook his head, not knowing what the hell happened. He didn’t want to deal with it at all. He was like, ‘OK, whatever. It’s your game.’ I would estimate A-Rod lost, like, a few thousand dollars that night. After everything that happened, he paid-up and left.”

Basically, it sounds like Rodriguez got freaked out by all of the Hollywood weirdos he was sharing a table with and took off. Even still, it looks like Major League Baseball will be investigating Rodriguez’s poker playing activities, which is about as big of a waste of resources as any because, unless A-Rod was the coked-out player Bilzerian was referring to, there’s not really much wrong with playing a little high stakes poker.

Unbeknownst to everybody outside of a few Beth Shak stalkers, she has over 1,200 pairs of shoes. And as the video states, some of these are expensive designer pairs that cost $4,000 or more! In all, the shoes are said to be worth over $500,000.

This being said, some people might wonder how Shak would acquire a shoe collection that’s worth more than her combined live poker tournament winnings ($479,698). Well it can’t hurt that Shak was once married to poker pro/big-time hedge fund manager Dan Shak.

Following her divorce to Dan, Beth is supposedly worth over $30 million. Of course, it also doesn’t hurt her cause that she’s a successful fashion entrepreneur. Moving past the whole ‘where did she get the money for 1,200 pairs of shoes’ issue, here is one of Shak’s favorite songs for you to check out:

In any case, most people are stuck in their ways, and it’s difficult explaining how online poker offers an advantage to skilled players over the long-run. The following video, which was made on xtranormal, highlights the difficulties that players have in explaining the game to the masses.

But whether you like Hellmuth or hate him, you have to respect the run he’s had in the 2011 WSOP. With three second place finishes in the $10k Seven Card Stud Championship, 2-7 Draw Championship and $50k Players Championship, Helmuth not only showed that he can play something other than Hold’em, but also that he’s still one of the best tournament players in the world.

Sure people will argue that none of the tournaments he played featured a field over 168 players; however, it’s also worth mentioning that these championship fields aren’t your average mashup of prize package winners, semi-pros and online grinders transitioning to live poker. Instead, these tournaments feature some of the most experienced live tournament players in the game.

In addition to all of this, Hellmuth has put himself in the lead in the 2011 WSOP Player of the Year race. Assuming neither Brian Rast (beat Hellmuth in the $50k Players Championship) or Ben Lamb don’t make miraculous runs in any of the three remaining WSOP tournaments, the Poker Brat is practically a shoe-in for POY. And it’s hard to hate on that!

Of course, this doesn’t in any way make up for some of the things Hellmuth has done in the past, including the online poker strategy video below. Note his near-Elvis at a Las Vegas wedding chapel appearance.

In any case, one of the big side stories from all of this is that Ben Affleck lost hundreds of thousands of dollars and refuses to pay up. AMNY.com was one of the first sites to report on this story as they wrote:

The 35-year-old actor lost $400,000 on a single poker hand and didn’t pay up to the movie mogul who won the pot, Star magazine reported.

“Ben busted big,” one player told Star. “He drummed up a giant tab, and then all of a sudden he disappeared from the game. He wasn’t seen for months.”

The big winner was Universal Pictures president Ron Meyer, the man behind the “Bourne” series starring Matt Damon, Star reported.

Star Magazine also reported on the matter, and an anonymous source told them:

“At the time, Ben wasn’t the most skillful player, it was almost like he was someone who felt they did not deserve the money they had.”

However, Affleck adamantly denies being one of the biggest fish in this high stakes poker ring, as well as the type of person who would skip out on money owed to others. He was quoted as saying, “Complete garbage. Made up and lacking any real sources.”

It’s hard to get any real details out of this high stakes Hollywood matter. At one point, Star Magazine reported that Tobey Maguire won $1 million a month for over 3 years. After doing the math, this is well over $30 million in live winnings, which is a little hard to swallow.

Suddenly, stories surfaced about Tekintamgac having hand signals relayed to him from fake photographers and bloggers about opponents’ hole cards. Apparently, Tekintamgac even got kicked out of the Partouche Poker Tour Cannes event after tournament officials reviewed tapes, and deemed that the media pretenders were helping the German with opponents’ hand strengths. In fact, you can judge for yourself whether or not Tekintamgac is cheating in the following video.

Alright, I know that this is a small sample size to judge from, but let’s go through all of the points:

1. Tekintamgac is wearing dark wrap sunglasses that make him look like an old lady out on a Sunday drive. Either he has absolutely zero fashion sense, or Tekintamgac doesn’t want anybody to know that he is staring at the media members for a sign.

2. Note the long pause in between this hand where he doesn’t check his cards until after the camera man has done something with his hand.

3. Expanding upon the camera man, notice how close he is to the opponent. Honestly, even some 2-bit tournament at a VFW hall wouldn’t let a photographer stand this close to the players, so where are the tourney officials? Going further, look how intently he stares at the player’s hole cards before doing something funny with his right hand while looking in Tekintamgac’s direction.

4. Tekintamgac calls the all-in move with Q-5 suited against 8-9 unsuited, which puts him as a 57.5% favorite in the hand. Now even if he was being helped, it’s not like signals can give him the exact hand. However, it’s likely that the signals at least gave Tekintamgac enough of an idea to make the call.

Perhaps the most telling evidence of all in Tekintamgac’s cheating is that he was also kicked out of a Czech Republic casino for hoarding and/or stealing chips from cash games and small tournaments, so he could use reintroduce them in bigger events. Plus there are other rumored instances where Tekintamgac was getting help from his traveling band of goons, who were later exposed as having no media credentials at all.

What’s sad is that Tekintamgac was still allowed to play in the WPT Championship because he had qualified by winning the Spanish Championship. Plus the WPT took a passive stance to his participation because Tekintamgac had already reared his legal fangs by suing the Partouche Poker Tour for taking away prize money. Fortunately, Daniel Negreanu made it his mission to make the German feel as unwelcome as possible by confronting him and sending a barrage of twitter messages (a rare moment where I rooted for Negreanu). Here is a look at some of the tweets that Negreanu sent:

Bellagio/WPT should absolutely not allow this person in the event. He was caught red handed cheating and should be banned. This is absurd.

The cheater just threatened Scott Siever the floor was alerted and won’t do anything about it. Physical threat, he should call the cops.

I’m going to talk to the people at the WSOP in the hopes that we can ensure that this cheater is not welcome at the WSOP.