Tue, 03/29/2011 – 00:58 – PokerPages Staff

Team PokerStars Pro Vanessa Selbst featured in the latest episode the High Stakes Poker game show which aired on GSN on Saturday.

Selbst was joined by  Doyle Brunson, Antonio Esfandiari, Andrew Robl, Bill Klein, David Peat and Johnny Chan for the final session from the first group of Season 7.

Selbst, who has been increasingly active during recent episodes, forced Esfandiari to fold the nut straight during the early exchanges.

Selbst had turned the nut flush and a three bet to $43,000 was enough for ‘The Magician’ to muck his made hand.

Poker Hall of Famer Doyle Brunson then locked horns with Selbst after meeting the 26 year-old Yale student’s re-raise to $14,000.

Brunson checked middle pair and a flush draw on an 8-K-2 board and Selbst resisted the urge to fire with top pair top kicker.

Another check from Brunson on the Jc turn prompted Selbst to fire a $17,400 bullet. Brunson responded by moving all of his chips into the middle and Selbst called him down.

Both players agreed to run the river twice and Brunson failed to find any salvation on either as Selbst snared the huge pot.

Brunson, who bought back in for $200,000, was also involved in the final notable hand of the evening.

Esfandiari opened for $2,500 pre-flop with A-K and Peat (Q-9) and Brunson (9-9) came along for the ride.

All three players checked the 4-5-6 flop. Esfandiari hit top pair on the turn and led out for $5,600. Brunson check raised to $22,600 and Esfandiari completed.

Brunson fired another $40,000 barrel on the river as a three hit the felt. Esfandiari went into the tank before folding in fear of the four card straight.

2010 World Series of Poker Main Event champion Jonathan Duhamel and Team PokerStars Pro Jason Mercier will feature in the new line up of pros on the next episode of High Stakes Poker this weekend.

Tue, 03/29/2011 – 01:04 – PokerPages Staff

The devastation wreaked by the awesome power of nature has once again touched the world, as millions watched helplessly while Japan suffered a massive earthquake and tsunami. Contrary to some portrayals by moral zealots that gamblers are all purely concerned with their own self-enrichment, however, the disaster provoked generosity and compassion from the poker-playing community.

The earthquake struck during the final table of the Main Event of the poker TV show, ‘The Big Game’. When the news broke, the whole table came to a stop as players spontaneously ceased their cardplay to watch the unfolding events on TV. Victor Ramdin and Joe Hachem, who were playing heads-up at the time, considered halting the tournament for the night, so shocking was the scale of the devastation descending on Japan.

Poker players from across the planet who had been watching the show began to send in a deluge of tweets.  After early expressions of compassion for and solidarity with the Japanese casualties, poker players began to get more actively involved in helping out. Today’s players are children of the Internet and used the World Wide Web brilliantly to organize their support.

Pros like Shane Schleger and Chino Rheem helped raise awareness of how other players could get involved by posting the Red Cross text number, 90999. This is an emergency number which makes donating money fast and easy. In comments which anti-gambling zealots could barely believe, Schleger immediately called for the world’s poker community to spend money on an issue which was bigger than themselves and donate at least $10 each to the Red Cross. In another generous gesture, Full Tilt Poker’s Justin “BoostedJ” Smith offered to donate $1 for every re-tweet of the 90999 number – and that applied to everyone, not just the poker community.

Maria Ho from UB donated a seat to her weekly $300 buy-in $50,000 guaranteed prize-pool tournament to the first person sending her a tweeted picture of their $10 donation text to the Red Cross. She confessed to having been heartbroken by the coverage of the destruction in Japan, and said that she believed it was “important to take action.” She, too, urged people to text the word “REDCROSS” to 90999 and make a $10 donation “instead of spending it on your Starbucks run in the morning.” She also suggested volunteering to help put together disaster relief kits at local Red Cross centers, or going out to collect items for the kits from donors in the neighborhood. Help did not necessarily have to be monetary, she said.

This isn’t the first time that the poker playing community has stepped up to the plate when it comes to helping out in disaster relief. They were prominent in assisting the victims of the appalling earthquake in Haiti, and consistently take part in charity tournaments all over the world. Many successful players remain loyal to causes dear to their own hearts and donate generously on a regular basis.

Gamblers, it would seem, don’t match the description routinely offered by militant prohibitionists as self-obsessed, out of control narcissists who think only of themselves. As the Japan crisis amply demonstrates, they’re usually good and generous human beings who will rally to the support of those afflicted by natural catastrophes in the time it takes to make a tweet or send a text donation.