The April 2011 issue of Poker Europa will be its grand finale after 12 years of an earnest attempt to unite the European poker industry and grab it some attention from the big boys on the other side of the pond.

The Old World’s first poker media source was always published in both English and German. It was always free and ran under the slogan, “Uniting Europe,” or, “Europa Rückt Näher Zusammenthe,”. It was launched on 1^st January 1999 with the primary objective of uniting Europe’s poker scene. It has been well respected for providing information, news and events listings as well as providing results and tournament coverage.

As a free publication it relied on advertising revenue to survive, the global financial crisis has hit us all and now the rise in production and distribution costs for print publications have become the major culprit for a founding poker source’s demise.

Founding editor of Poker Europa, Nic Szeremeta, recent winner of a Lifetime Achievement Award at the European Poker Awards, explained the reasons for his magazine’s closure: “We have always depended on advertising for our revenue and since the recession this has declined by over 60 per cent.

Even though the magazine has been successful in its field, it cannot compete with the online world: “Mergers, acquisitions and closure of online card rooms have weakened our potential market and the bright young things who now promote and market poker prefer to use the Internet rather than print media. Operators of bricks and mortar poker rooms are also cutting their budgets. The situation is not helped by the fact that some operators seem to think they can get away with not paying their bills.”

According to Szeremeta, and its readers, Poker Europa did succeed in uniting European poker, “However, the increase of such information on the Internet, supplied as it happens, now makes print publications almost irrelevant.”

In the style of a great player, and rightly so,  Szeremeta concluded: “One thing I know about poker is when to quit the game and this is it.”

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.

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 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.