Cards will be in the air in a couple of hours for the $10,000 event at the Mirage Poker Showdown. It should be an exciting tournament for a number of reasons: It's the first stop on the World Poker Tour's fourth season, and later in the week, we'll get to meet Shana Hiatt's replacement. It's also the last major before the World Series of Poker gets underway on June 3, but it's close enough to the big dance for a lot of European players to already be in Vegas. Hopefully, that will add up to a large, colorful field. We'll be on the scene from Day Two until the final table on Thursday, so stay tuned for updates.

Via Wil Wheaton's blog, I just read about the Hellmuth charity poker event being shut down, and like Wil, I'm saddened by the fact that the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation is losing out. Obviously, anti-gambling activists have their opinions and they're rightfully entitled to them, but I certainly hope the problems with this event don't prevent the money from finding its way to the right hands. So please, anyone who was going to play in that tournament, listen up: Donate the money to the Foundation. You weren't going to win. Trust me. That's no jopke.

The market is about to be flooded with instructional poker DVDs, which should make for some humorous ad copy if nothing else. Phil Gordon's latest project, Final Table Poker, certainly doesn't disappoint on that count. Not only do they use the unfortunate phrase, "You'll go inside Phil's mind" (emphasis theirs), but they also provide bios of the fictional players at Phil's final table. My favorite, of course, has to be "Butch Dude" (that's his real name) who is "part of the 'Cool Guy Crew,' an exclusive poker club for the young and unemployed." Ouch. I guess not everyone's crew can be made up of Stanford grads and captains of industry, Phil. All kidding aside, the actual video itself does sound interesting. The production values appear to be very solid, as you'd expect from Gordon and Furst and their young Hollywood talent. Plus you've got Chris Ferguson and Matt Savage, hopefully each playing himself. Pre-ordering will get you a 20% discount. If anyone cares to comment after going inside Phil's mind, I'd love to hear a trip report.

I played in a 20-player home tournament this past weekend. It was my first time in a home game that big and it was a lot of fun. You gotta enjoy flopping quads with the money looming. My buddy Joe did a great job running it, particularlay since it was his first time managing multiple tables. The main takeaway was the usefulness of a good tournament clock. Without the monitor indicating time left and the blinds and antes for each level, I think the task of balancing tables, coloring up chips, and keeping the players informed would've become pretty overwhelming. Luckily, before the tourney Joe had downloaded Poker Clock, which performed admirably. It's not freeware, but if you are in the habit of hosting multitable tournaments, the $40 price tag seems pretty reasonable. It has everything you could want from tournament software: real-time stats, audio prompts, a flexible display, payout calculators, templates your can modify and save, and a bunch of other features. It's definitely worth a look, considering the 14-day trial version isn't crippled -- usually a good sign of a solid piece of software.

Via press-release carrier pigeon comes the news that Crave Entertainment is going to put some famous faces on their player avatars for the upcoming World Championship Poker 2: Featuring Howard Lederer, perhaps feeling the heat from Stacked before that competitor even hits the shelves. The pros who have inked deals with Crave for the console title are: Howard Lederer, obviously, as well as Greg Raymer, Clonie Gowen, Robert Williamson III, Amir Vahedi, Paul Darden, and Howard's li'l sister, Annie. Interestingly, Crave also captured the services of tournament director Matt Savage, which should make for some interesting possibilities. I wonder if Savage's voice will be used to narrate the action. In any case, it looks like the poker gaming wars are heating up on multiple fronts, with WCP and Stacked set to go heads-up for the lucrative title of poker console game champion.

It may be a slight tangent for the average poker player, but I found this article about extortion and denial-of-service attacks on gambling web sites completely fascinating. There was a time in 2004 when slow-downs and freeze-ups were completely routine at most large online poker rooms. The average user might have suspected that the sites were simply victims of their own popularity and hadn't adequately prepared for the huge number of new users. However, the word on most poker message boards was that the sites were under near constant attack from extortionists who were targeting high-profit Internet businesses where down-time equals lost profits.

In any case, those times seem to be behind us, since most sites run fairly smoothly and uninterruptedly. However, reading this piece will make you aware of the lengths that some sites have to go to just to keep the doors open and the tables running.

Listening to Card Club this past week, I got wind of a new poker podcast, Poker Diagram, which is presented by pair of "blokes" from "England." Normally, I would do this entire post in Cockney rhyming slang to honor their fine country, but unfortunately I barely speak American, so that's beyond my feeble skills. The podcast itself, which isn't yet hooked up to the requisite RSS feed, is actually very different from Card Club's topical and interview-centered approach. Your hosts, Henry and Zog, actually play a $10 No-Limit Hold 'Em sit-and-go on PokerRoom.com (turn off the game sounds next time, guys) -- Zog making the decisions and Henry looking over his shoulder and doing play-by-play. Not a bad way to kill an hour. There's enough insight and humor to keep me coming back. Hopefully, they'll mix it up a bit in the future. Play some different types of games. Perhaps mock the other players a bit more. Still, for a first show, Poker Diagram is promising, to say the least.

I've got a lot of holes in my poker game, but none as glaring as my lack of chip-handling skills. I can scoop them, stack them, and count them. But a one-handed chip shuffle? Hopeless. The drop spin? The anti-gravity chip? I wouldn't even dream of attempting these advanced moves. In any case, I'm going to make a concerted effort to improve this part of my play. A lot of my friends have said they taught themselves through constant practice, but I'm either too impatient or too klutzy, so I'm going to need some help. Here are the resources that I'm going to tap:

• Poker Chip Tricks - instructions, photos, and videos, broken down by level of difficulty
• 21Ace.com Chip Tricks - instructions and photos for the most popular tricks
• Rich Ferguson - dude's got a chip-trick DVD out
• About.com Casing Gambling - Bill Burton offers a couple of illustrated tricks for beginners

Does anyone have any other sites or sources I can check out?

Tonight's World Poker Tour offers the television debut of Player of the Year candidate Michael "The Grinder" Mizrachi, who has been tearing up the tournament circuit for the past few months. You'll also meet #5 on the P.o.t.Y. list, John Stolzmann. Both young players have been turning heads this year and it should be a great game to watch. And, oh yeah, there were some other decent players at the final table of the World Poker Open, which was played in Tunica, Mississippi this past January -- some guys named Daniel, Scotty, and Chau. I think they have a couple of tournament wins under their belts, too. I'll have to look them up online...

I know Jen Leo will be all over this book, so I'll leave the reviewing to her. Still, Tales from the Tiltboys, the new tome from Phil Gordon, Rafe Furst, and their posse of merry pranksters is notable for several of its innovative publishing features:

First off, half of the proceeds from the book go to charity. The other half goes to sending a needy Tiltboy to the WSOP. That's my kind of altruism.

Second, you can place a free wager on how many copies the Tilters will sell in 2005. And then you can affect the outcome by buying a copy! Or 40. This is marketing genius.

Third, you can sign up for Full Tilt Poker and get the book for free. Of course, previous customers of Full Tilt are S.O.L., but that's the way the cookie crumbles. I'm not sure how the free copies factor into the sales figures above, but I'm sure some enterprising bonus whore will figure a way to sign up for Full Tilt, get a free copy, win the bet, be the recipient of the Tiltboys' charity, and then use the cash to play in the WSOP. Details to follow...

NPR's Day to Day has the obligatory segment on online poker, visiting with a Los Angeles couple who've taken to playing online as a transition career. Writer Kevin Arnovitz plants the hook by claiming that $187 million is wagered online every 24 hours, then talks to two refugees from the entertainment industry who are making their $2500 rent by playing online (PokerRoom, I'll wager). The best part is when a business call comes in during the husband's $100 sit-and-go. Ah, who hasn't had that terse "I know I shouldn't be impolite to you, but I'm in a game!" tone of voice... Priceless.

Scott Fischman's new poker room, The Fish Tank, is officially open for bidness. It's part of the same network as Doyle's Room. I heard about it on fellow Crew-member Dutch Boyd's blog, and, strangely, there's no mention on Fisch's own site. Perhaps the online-poker fanatic in Scott is still working out the kinks before sending out the press release. In any case, the download is ready and waiting for those of you who want to play against San Diego's finest young guns. Dorf. Lazer. Biff. 'Nardo. The whole gang in online and ready to take your real or play money. Just remember not to tap the glass. They hate that.

There seems to be a lot of advice about analyzing your hands and calculating your odds before the hand. Has anyone given any advice with examples about how to analyze what you did incorrectly?

--Sharon

You've definitely hit upon a key element of improving your game. Calculating outs is one thing, but going over each decision point within a hand is crucial to finding weak spots. Besides going over your own hand histories, which can be downloaded and saved from most online poker sites, you can find someone who's opinion you trust to discuss your hands with. I'll often email a copy of a particularly tough hand to a friend and ask what he would've done in the same circumstance. You can even modify the hand history to hide the opponent's cards, so your poker adviser has the same information you had at the time you played the hand.

With NBC's Heads-Up Championship debuting this past weekend, you now have a choice for your serialized poker needs. If short-handed play isn't your bag, on Fox's Poker Superstars II, you've got a full six-handed, TV-sized table with Doyle Brunson, Freddy Deeb. Ted Forrest, Antonio Esfandiari, David Grey, and Mike Sexton. Most of these players are in good shape as far as the points standings are concerned, which promises some exciting loosey-goosey play. Check your cable listings for times throughout the week.

I'm no rocket scientist. Not even a Ph.D. in math. So maybe that's why my head is spinnning when I try to make sense of Full Tilt's Main Event Mania Road Map. Yes, I understand that there's a 10-million dollar bonus for winning the whole thing. Awesome. But where and when do I sign up for the lowly $10 and $4 sit-and-gos that get the whole thing rolling? Some navigational help would be welcome. I generally like Full Tilt, but  methinks they are making things unduly complexicated....