Most players are rightfully skeptical of this plan fearing it may invite some cheating or collusion but the planners behind the worlds biggest poker tournament are betting it will leave for a nice cliff-hanger and further increase the popularity of the WSOP.

I will personally be headed down to watch the carnage, and I might still freeroll my way into my own WSOP seat (there is still time).

Daniel and several well known internet poker professionals, along with a math professor will offer teaching through training videos and ask the expert poker questions submitted by users for a monthly subscription fee.

Online poker scene followers will recognize poker coach BoostedJ as a regular high stakes player Kid Poker has recruited to be a poker coach, who is well known for consistently crushing the nose bleed high stakes games on Full Tilt and Poker Stars.

For the tournament fanatics, Daniel has signed the online poker hero and world series of poker europe champion Annette Obrestad, better known as Annette_15 who legend has it once won a 180 man poker tournament without looking at her cards.

The verdict is still out on the quality of the poker training site, and how well kid poker will do with it, but I think Daniel will come out just fine with a quality product that will benefit poker players of all skill levels alike.

The news is rather grey, but does admit that the “superuser” accounts were in fact used by former employees at Ultimate Bet, across six different player accounts.

The stolen money amounted to millions, and as of today refunds of several hundred thousand dollars were being issued to players who were frauded by these players.  It’s a step in the right direction at least, but only time will tell how the online poker community judges the veteran poker site on a whole.

Details on the poker room deal itself are still forthcoming, but Doyles Room has long had a tradition of trying to “sex up” it’s poker room by inviting celebrities like Pamela Anderson and Paris Hilton to play alongside the well known professional players Mike Caro, Hoyt Corkins, Todd Brunson, and Doyle Brunson himself.
Most notably you can see these stars playing in the famous Bounty tournament Doyles Room poker hosts every week where players can make tens of thousands of dollars just for knocking  out Doyles Room pros and invited celebrities.
Shannon isn’t well known for being an internet player, it will be interesting to see where this heads.

JohnnyBax is known as one of only a few poker players who have cashed for over a million dollars lifetime both live and online.  Cliff is also a WSOP bracelet holder in 5 Card Stud, and is heavily involved with the online poker school Poker X Factor.
Online players are wondering about the timing of this after the well publicized cheating scandals at both UltimateBet and AbosultePoker (owned by the same company as UB), but Johnnybas has assured his fans that he has been assured that the security problems at UltimateBet have been resolved.

PokerStars is the world’s largest online poker room and one of the most famous. Traffic at PokerStars can be seen over 110,000 at peak hours and there are poker games for every player. Ring games and tournaments include many types of poker such as Texas Hold’em, Omaha, Omaha Hi-Lo, Razz, 5 Card Draw, 7 Card Stud, and 7 Card Stud Hi-Lo. Cash Game blinds at PokerStars start as low as $0.01/$0.02 and go as high as a few hundred dollars. PokerStars is the best online poker room for tournaments with thousands run daily. Whether you are playing at lower stakes or a high roller you will find tournaments of your likings at PokerStars. If you are looking for a big payout check out the Sunday Million held every Sunday at PokerStars for either a $215 buy-in or won through qualifiers. If you don’t have a real money account at PokerStars players can receive a bonus up to $50 on their first deposit. Players must use the “PokerStars Marketing Code” PAWSUB406 during the registration process to ensure they receive the bonus. Players must also use the bonus code ‘First2008’ when it asks you for the bonus code. The bonus will be in a pending account until you have reached a set amount of Frequent Players Points. Get started today at “PokerStars.com”

In a nutshell, both sites will offer an event for small stakes poker players that equal the WSOP event played that day but at only 1% of the buy-in of the land based WSOP event. So, if there is a $1,000 dollar Hold’em bracelet event at the Rio in Las Vegas the Full Tilt and Bodog respective events will be just $10. Great idea huh? Should be fun for all players, and both sites offer some sort of guaranteed prize pools on this new poker tournament series.

Each site has their unique features to this series, but I think Full Tilt takes the cake. Full Tilt will offer every single event, even including the $50,000 HORSE championship ($500 on FT MSOP), but Bodog will only offer the hold em events.

The great thing about Full Tilt is they are awarding a custom limited edition watch to all tournament winners, to take place of the bracelet.

Win your way to the 2009 WSOP

Both Full Tilt and Bodog will have a leaderboard for their mini series of poker awarding actual seats to the 2009 WSOP main event for the overall series points winners. Promotions like this is what make online poker so exciting in this day and age, and I for one invite you to join me on my quest for a bracelet - I mean, watch! See you at the tables!

But, surviving the early stages of a poker freeroll can be like tip toeing through a minefield. Because it is free to enter, freerolls will draw a lot of people that are just fooling around. Most of these players will go all in with just about any two cards preflop, figuring they want to get in or get out early of the poker tournament.

With sometimes several thousand players and around 50 players that earn a prize for playing poker, these tournaments go really fast and you will need to accumulate a lot of chips to survive. Scared of playing them yet? Don’t fret just yet: accumulating chips in poker freerolls is easy if you follow just a couple of tips.

Tip #1: Play post flop poker, and overbet everytime you have a made hand. These players are willing to gamble with just about anything, so even pushing all-in with your pocket aces preflop means that you will probably get 5 callers with random cards and will lose more often than you will win. By playing post flop poker, you get to wait patiently to flop a big hand and then take players whole stacks.

Tip #2: Overbet made hands, when you flop two pair or better in these freerolls, don’t check raise. Overbet the flop or even push all in, you will be amazed at how many times you will double or even triple up this way.

Do these two things and you are likely to make it deep in a freeroll, after that just hope for a little luck and you might find yourself a winner!

Freeroll players or freeroll “whores” as some people call them are usually the easiest online poker players to take advantage of, they are usually very bad at poker and just goofing off. Sit back and be patient for a half hour or so, let these players donk each other off and when you get a big hand overbet it in a major way because they will call you very light.

A good poker freeroll strategy is to play post flop poker. because freeroll players will often go all in with any two cards because they really don’t care.