The age of the super poker child is here and Dwan is a perfect example. He flashed onto the scene about 4 years ago. He is a very good representation of the typical internet players that are taking the poker world by storm. He recently issued a heads up challenge that had other pros lining up for a shot at his bankroll.
While there are plenty of pros that have open challenges available to anyone in online poker, pro or amateur, that wants to put up an amount and play until the money is gone, nobody has been willing to throw out 3:1 odds for $500,000 buy in until now. When Dwan first made the challenge, he could pick and choose from a list of candidates and unfortunately for him, he chose Antonius.
His choice is perfectly understandable. Antonius is fairly new to the scene and has nowhere near the reputation of some of the other people that wanted in, such as Phil Ivey. However, Antonius has an unorthodox game and an uncanny ability to read people. Dwan found this out the hard way.
As of May 4th, they had played about one quarter of the agreed upon 50,000 hands and Antonius is already up almost a half a million dollars. While it is unlikely he can continue to win at that pace, he still stands to make a couple of million off of Dwan. Remember, Dwan has to put up $1.5 million to Patrik’s $500,000 if he loses!
Can the momentum change? Absolutely, but Antonius is a very strong player and I don’t see him giving up this edge without a huge battle. Dwan is going to have to catch him with a monster hand and you can be assured that Antonius will think twice about throwing that kind of money into the pot without being absolutely sure about the outcome.
You can watch the match anytime they are playing on Full Tilt. Watching the head up action is amazing and it will be thrilling to see how this plays out. You can only hope that Dwan’s bravado does not remove him from the poker spotlight that he currently enjoys.
The disturbing news that a young student was killing girls by contacting them through CraigsList was quite disturbing. To think that someone would do this is almost unimaginable. Then the bombshell dropped that shook the movement for legalizing online gaming, specifically poker. He was robbing and killing these girls to pay off gambling debts.
By no means is this meant to belittle the suffering of these girls and their families. It is just to bring to light the difficulties that now face the Poker Players Alliance (PPA) in their quest to get support behind their movement of legalizing gambling in the United States on the Internet.
The PPA has reportedly earmarked about $3,000,000 for lobbying efforts to gain support for their bill. Now you have to honestly ask yourself what politician would associate themselves with such a bill that will surely be twisted into condoning this type of behavior. The argument will be made that if this young man was not able to gamble, these murders may have never have happened.
Issues like this will continue to plague the movement to legalize poker and gambling online. The odd thing is that things like this happen that are related to alcohol and TV violence, yet neither of those is ever even thought about being distinguished. It is a shame that these horrible murders will be turned into some other than what they are, the horrible acts of an individual who lacks self control.
The results from the first ever epidemiological analysis of the actual gaming behavior evidenced by a large sample of 3,445 online poker players over the span of 2 years are about to be published. The study was conducted by the Division on Addictions, Cambridge Health Alliance, a Harvard Medical School teaching affiliate. This collaboration reflects the longstanding partnership with bwin, the world’s leading online gaming provider.
The partnership between bwin and the Division on Addictions was established in 2005 to provide a scientific basis for the assessment of conspicuous gaming behavior and its consequences for responsible gaming. Two key findings beginning to emerge from the research initiative are:
1) The myth of online gaming as a powerful seductive force has been empirically refuted. Online gaming has no greater problem potential than offline gaming.
2) Responsible gaming measures show effect.
The current research, which analyzes the behavior of Poker players over the course of two years, is the world’s largest longitudinal and the first ever epidemiological study of its kind.
Individuals exhibit rational behavior
“In this research we provide additional evidence in support of our previous research showing that most subscribers who gamble on the Internet do so moderately. In fact, correlation analyses indicated that as Percent Lost increased, Duration, Total Gambling Sessions, and Total Amount Wagered all decreased, suggesting that individuals moderated their behavior based on their wins and their losses – exhibiting “rational” betting behavior.” says Howard Shaffer, PH.D., Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School, Director, Division on Addictions, The Cambridge Health Alliance, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School.
The average age of the cohort (sample) was 27.9 years and almost 95% were male. The typical Poker player was an active poker player for a median duration of six and a half months and participated in a median of one poker session every three days. The median Euros per session gambled was €13 and the median cost of playing poker was €1.80 per session.
The gaming behaviors of the most involved poker players show that this group, representing 5% of all players, was active for a duration of 18.5 months and participated in ten sessions per week.
This 5% subgroup had a smaller percentage lost than the sample majority, suggesting that skill is a factor in poker play and that players are able to improve their performance compared with chance.
When examining the most involved poker players who devoted more time and money to this activity, the study found that like the rest of the sample, they reduced Euros per session and reduced Total Wagered as Percent Loss increased.
“In our intention to replace speculation with scientific evidence, this study takes us a big step closer towards understanding the behavior of online poker players. Ultimately we are interested in developing algorithms capable of identifying behavioral patterns or identifying risk patterns associated with disordered gaming.” says Manfred Bodner, Co-CEO of bwin.
