Local poker whiz wins at team game

We haven't written much about poker lately but a couple of items of interest have come up this week that are worth passing along.

For starters, local poker celebrity Steve Dannenmann was involved in another winning effort at the tables but in an odd format -- team poker. Something called the PokerBowl just finished up at the Palms casino in Las Vegas yesterday and Dannenmann, an accountant from Anne Arundel who won $4.25 million in 2005 as the runner-up in the World Series of Poker Main Event, was on the winning Cincinnati team.

Now before people start going all Kevin Millar on me, understand that there wasn't a Baltimore team among the 25-team field and if there had been one, Dannenmann would have been playing for it. In fact, he has made an inquiry about what it would take to get a poker franchise for Charm City. I hear ownership fees are a mere $20,000, if anyone's interested.

Anyway, first-place in PokerBowl was worth $600,000 to the winning six-player team but Dannemann said he made about $30,000 after everyone's share was sorted out.

* The other thing worth mentioning is that during ESPN's current broadcasts of the World Series of Poker, advertisements are running for a Web site called AbsolutePoker.net. As the concept applies to poker Internet sites, the dot-nets are free-play Web site. And supposedly that keeps them within the law. But everyone realizes that the dot-nets are closely associated with their dot-com counterparts where computer users can play for money.

The issue is that AbsolutePoker, an off-shore company, is currently caught up in allegations that someone associated with the Web site may have used insider technology to see other players' hole cards to win hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to stories by the Associated Press and MSNBC.

I called ESPN to ask, considering the brewing scandal, whether they thought it was a good idea to be running ads for AbsolutePoker.net during its marquee poker telecasts. After making the point that the dot-net site was the free site and not a gambling site, an ESPN spokesman said that it was the network's understanding that problems at AbsolutePoker had been addressed and that, yes, ESPN would continue running the commercials.

In a case of some odd timing, high-profile poker professionals were in Washington this week lobbying to loosen regulations on online poker that were passed last year. Depending on how you look at it, the AbsolutePoker problems can either undermine those efforts as an illustration of how such sites can be manipulated or bolster the poker lobby's arguments that online sites need to be regulated and taxed by the federal government.

The Baltimore Sun's Bill Ordine

News Added: 25 October, 2007

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