Danish poker pro Gus Hansen recently made news for his pursuit of a little-known sport called racketlon. The game involves playing one set of tennis, badminton, squash and table tennis in a match.

Apparently, Hansen has gotten very serious about the game too since he’s training around 5 hours a day, and hopes to win the racketlon World Cup next year. We’ll get to see if the 37-year-old is successful in his pursuit of the title on December 2nd, 2012 when the World Cup event takes place.

Gus Hansen spoke about his love of racketlon by saying, “Racketlon is a very fun sport, and I want to see how far I can go with it. And unlike athletic decathlons, it has a fair point system.” He also added, “You have to be an addict to succeed and that’s me. I have a good chance to be a contender, but then I have to improve considerably – especially in table tennis and badminton.”

Expanding on Hansen’s comments, he is a much better tennis and squash player than he is at table tennis and badmitton. However, he hopes to change this by attending various camps and training facilities in Sweden over the next few months.

Assuming he can succeed in his goal of winning the World Cup of racketlon, he’ll receive a modest prize worth around $4,700. Obviously this is nothing compared to what the Great Dane is used to competing for on the poker tables. He has made well over $9.3 million in live poker tournament play, which includes three WPT titles and a 2007 Aussie Millions win.

It doesn’t look like we’ll see Gus Hansen adding to his poker accomplishments for a while though since he’s training so much for racketlon.

The poker world used to be full of interesting prop bets that saw players doing everything from running a marathon in 100-plus-degree heat, to playing golf for $20k a hole. But nowadays, there’s more of a trend for players to make up prop bets or poker challenges, only to never follow through. For a while, the kickboxing match prop bet between Lex Veldhuis and Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier was going down this route since they had planned to fight before the 2011 WSOP.

When they made the original plans, both poker pros probably never thought that there would still be no fight after the WSOP Main Event. However, it looks like we’re making some headway towards the fight now as Lex Veldhuis announced on his blog that the two will battle on November 22nd.

Veldhuis announced the fight through a blog post entitled Kickboxing Match vs ElkY, and he spoke about the match’s location by writing:

We looked at different venues in Europe, but then the perfect solution came up. There is a TV Show for poker being recorded in Marbella, Spain. They said they would love to host the fight and they would film it. This sounded really good and I’m at a point where I just want to get it over with. So we set the date on 22nd of November, a week from now.

The rules of this fight are rather interesting because there will be no judge’s decision: the winner has to be victorious by knockout. The fight is planned to be pretty long too at five 3-minute rounds, so hopefully Velhuis and Grospellier will still be standing in the later rounds (assuming there are any).

In regards to fighting experience, Lex did some boxing training for a little over a year, while Grospellier trained in 2009 when he was supposed to fight Sorrel Mizzi. However, neither player has any extensive experience in the ring, so this kickboxing match could look pretty ugly. Even still, it will definitely be pretty entertaining, and better than any poker pro bet I’ve seen in a while.

Family feuds always make for great stories, and the current feud between pro poker player Mike Matusow and his brother Scott Matusow is already shaping up to be a good one. Things kicked off when Scott Matusow used Mike’s twitter account to promote a blog post he’d written called “Phil Ivey not paying divorce settlement payments.”

As you can deduce from the title, the article covers Ivey’s recent inability to pay his wife, Luciaetta Ivey, her alimony payments. After implying that Ivey is broke and possibly owes an unnamed casino $6-$10 million, Scott proceeds with this gem:

This is in no way to suggest Ivey is a rotten person.. I just believe he is a total degenerate and not what poker players who are serious about becoming real grinders and really profitable should be looking up to. I respect REAL GRINDERS. online, live, or both.

Not sure what Scott Matusow knows about being a “real grinder” since he has little discernible poker background to speak of. Apparently, Mike Matusow has no idea either since he tweeted, “sorry about the article my crazy brother put out there on ivey its not what i think @ScottMatusow is no longer allowed near my twitter.”

Things only spiraled downward from here as Scott Matusow jumped on his blog and hammered out a post called “An open letter to Mike Matusow.” He began his bi***fest by typing, “I see you getting worse and worse with your gambling issues. We went out for our parents anniversary 2 weeks ago.. The entire time, all you could talk about was yourself, your bets, checking the scores on games. You do not consider how you hurt Mom and Dad with your behavior.”

He continued the nasty rant by writing, “It is not my fault or anyone else’s that you hate yourself and you are a miserable because of, in my opinion, a severe gambling addiction on top of your addiction to legal drugs.”

Honestly, it’s hard to tell who looks worse in the battle of the Matusow brothers. On one hand, Mike just got his dirty laundry aired once again; on the other side, you also have Scott biting the hand of the guy whose coattails he’s been riding all along. I can only see this feud escalating further in the future.

Most people in the poker world merely know Norman Chad as the funny guy who does WSOP commentating alongside Lon McEachern. However, he also writes a weekly column for the Washington Post called “Couch Slouch,” which takes a look at different aspects of sports. This week, Chad tackled an issue that has often plagued me in the past – sports betting.

By Chad’s accounts, virtually everybody who bets on sports loses in the end because it is so difficult to accurately predict which way a point spread will go. As he wrote, “In my misspent lifetime, I have known hundreds of misguided souls who have bet on sports. And virtually every single one of them loses. Betting against the point spread is an illusion. On paper, you should be right every other time. But, alas, you’re not.”

He also recounts the story of his friend, who bet $1,000 on the underdog USC Trojans to cover a minus 7-1/2-point spread against the Stanford Cardinals in college football. With USC leading almost the entire game, it looked like his friend would easily beat the spread. But as luck would have it, Stanford came back to force overtime, which turned into triple overtime, which turned into a 56-48 victory for Stanford, which meant Chad’s buddy narrowly lost $1k.

In the end, Chad summarized his point spread thoughts by saying, “Thus, the bettor must be right 53 percent of the time just to break even. And, best I can tell, nobody is right 53 percent of the time, other than Stephen Hawking and actuaries.” You can read Chad’s entire article here.

Of course, I didn’t bring up Chad’s article to bash sports betting, and convince you that all of your money should be put towards online poker instead. After all, sports games are always more fun when you’ve got a little money riding on the outcome. But his article is definitely worth checking out if you can’t resist the temptation to let several hundred dollars ride on sports games every week.

Not too long ago, we reported how James Bord made the boast that no American would win the 2011 WSOPE Main Event because European players had advanced past their US counterparts in terms of poker skill. Bord even put himself at risk by adding, “I’m prepared to put my money where my mouth is and refund any losing bets up to $500 if an American wins.”

The bets that Bord was backing were at the MatchBook sports betting site, and it appears as if his comments were a PR stunt for MatchBook. Even still, Bord did make the original comments, and now somebody is going to have to pay losing bets made on European players since American Elio Fox won the WSOPE Main Event. The 2010 WSOPE Main Event champion tweeted Ben Lamb about the whole ordeal by typing:

Looking for new employment @BenbaLamb can I be the waterboy for you’re Nov9 final table!

Bord also proved to be a good sport about having to eat his word by sending this tweet to Fox:

Congrats @Smokrokflock Please don’t visit Matchbook head office anytime soon 

The Brit further explained why he made comments about Americans being inferior players as he said, “World Series of Poker Europe is special to Europeans, maybe the same way that the WSOP in Las Vegas is special to Americans. We’d like to build this event into what we all know it can be because poker’s massive in Europe.”

To hear James Bord dive a little deeper into his statements does make sense because it can’t feel good having US players come across the pond and win the WSOPE Main Event three out of five years. So far, John Juanda won in 2008, Barry Shulman won in 2009, and now Fox has won in 2010. The only non-US winners are Norwegian Annette Obrestad in 2007, and Bord in 2010.

Prior to the 2010 WSOPE Main Event, the only people who knew James Bord existed were his mother and Sam Trickett – who taught him how to play poker. But ever since he won the WSOPE Main Event last year along with $1,281,048, Bord has become a very recognizable face in the poker world. Apparently, he’s taking this to heart, and getting a bit cocky with some recent statements.

The Englishman was recently quoted as saying, “I don’t think an American can win the bracelet, Europeans are now far superior.” He continued by adding, “We used to look up to the U.S. players back in the day, but those days are now long gone. I’m prepared to put my money where my mouth is and refund any losing bets up to $500 if an American wins.”

Maybe Bord spoke too soon since a couple of Americans have already won two out of the first four bracelets in the 2011 WSOPE. And if this streak continues, we could see a US player taking down the 2011 WSOPE Main Event title as well. Furthermore, two out of the first four Main Event champions have been Americans – John Juanda and Barry Shulman – so it’s hard to see where Bord is coming from here.

Maybe he is desperate for more attention or his 2010 Main Event star is beginning to fade? Whatever the case may be, American poker player Kevin Iacofano defended US poker by saying, “Serious arrogance and comments from a guy who, barring one miracle championship, has a very pedestrian record in poker.”

Bord is supposedly a good mixed games cash player, so maybe this is where the cockiness comes from?