If you didn’t know any better, you would think that you were attending some kind of lavish awards ceremony. The media came in droves. The red carped was rolled out. Those who walked it came in dapper suits, posing for photographers as if they were attending the Oscars. It had all the elements of a gathering of the stars. The only notable exception was there were only two stars on this warm Los Angeles afternoon, the same two men who will finally share a boxing ring together on May 2.

The Mayweather – Pacquiao Press Conference held at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles on Wednesday, March 11, officially announcing the mega fight. The live press conference will be the first and only time we see the both Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao in the same room together until fight week.

That’s probably a big reason why both camps pulled out all the stamps to give the press conference an awards-show feel to it. It worked, too.

Over 700 media credentialed media members were in attendance. Even for the hyperbolic standards of Hollywood, that turnout represents a gigantic number, emblematic of the anticipation surrounding the only boxing fight the world wants to see.

ADRIANO MORAES AND RIKU SHIBUYA MAKE WEIGHT AHEAD OF

ONE FLYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP SHOWDOWN

CATCH ALL THE ACTION LIVE ON TV9 AND ON PAY-PER-VIEW AT WWW.ONEFC.COM/LIVESTREAM

12 March 2015 – Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: ONE Championship™ (ONE) announced today that all mixed martial artists competing have made weight and are ready for ONE: AGE OF CHAMPIONS. The event takes place on Friday evening, 13 March at Stadium Putra in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The card is headlined by Adriano Moraes who puts his ONE Flyweight World Championship on the line when he takes on Japan’s Riku Shibuya.

A coalition of influential California Indian tribes has given state legislators a simple message: keep PokerStars out.

The six-tribe coalition – led by the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians and the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians – issued a letter to Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer stating their opposition to his “fatally flawed” AB 167 online poker legislation. The coalition tribes were already understood to have thrown their support behind Assemblyman Mike Gatto’s AB 9 legislation.

The bulk of the coalition’s letter focuses on ‘bad actors’ aka companies that took wagers from Americans post-UIGEA. The letter goes into detail on the Black Friday indictments, in particular the three online poker companies’ mismanagement and occasional grifting. Such “unscrupulous entities and brands … defrauded poker players of over $300 million.”

The letter basically lumps in the financial shenanigans at Absolute Poker and Full Tilt Poker with the comparatively squeaky clean PokerStars, without whom Full Tilt’s defrauded players would never have been made whole. Without mentioning Stars by name, the letter describes Stars writing that $731m check solely to avoid “the looming possibility of criminal convictions – which certainly would have prevented those firms from obtaining gaming licenses in U.S. jurisdictions.”

In this weeks confessions series Lee Davy talks about authenticity and how it has reared its beautiful head in poker this week.

Mukul Pahuja called Phil Hellmuth a cheeseburger salesman. The World Poker Tour Player of the Year knows he will one day sit opposite him. There will be an uncomfortable silence broken by a gesture of some kind. He doesn’t care. I love it. It was a glimpse of authenticity.

Mike Sexton called out the World Series of Poker. He believes they have devalued the prestige of winning a bracelet, have put their bottom line before their customers, and have spread their brand too thin. He will play at the event. He will mix and talk with the powers to be at the WSOP. I love it. I saw another glimpse of authenticity.

Jason Somerville attracted over 9,500 viewers during his Sunday Grind live stream on Twitch. Do PokerStars keep their sponsored pros on a leash? From the outside in, I can see how people may formulate the opinion that they do. I have never believed that. I believe the pro has put that leash on. They have chosen to be inauthentic. Somerville is proof of that. Stars have let him loose on the world. The man, who had to be inauthentic for so many years of his life, is currently flying on a cloud of Monkey Magic proportions.

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before, but legislators in Japan think they’ve come up with a way to push through their long-delayed casino bill.

Casino supporters among Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) plan to utilize some procedural sleight-of-hand to ensure the casino study bill has a shot of passing in the current legislative session, which ends June 24.

The legislators hope to resubmit last year’s aborted legislation to the Land and Transport Committee, a minor legislative body that traditionally deals with mundane issues like utility pole management.

The idea is to bypass the casino bill’s traditional path through the Cabinet Committee, which is up to its neck in higher priority legislation – including national defense issues stemming from the recent beheading of a Japanese citizen by ISIS fanatics – and likely wouldn’t choose to waste its time on comparatively minor and highly divisive issues like authorizing casino development.

A man is arrested in Illinois after stealing $420,000 poker chips from a LA apartment, and another is behind bars after losing his entire life roll playing cards, and then deciding to rob a bank to fill it back up.

Poker continues to attract the world dumbest criminals.

This time it’s Illinois man Dustin Campbell, 32, who has looking at some serious porridge after being charged with grand theft.

WGEM.com told the tale of Campbell’s woe.

Chris Csik has taken down the first World Series of Poker Circuit event, to be held in the state of Maryland, after defeating Faisal Sidiqui, in heads-up action, to take the first prize of over $200,000.

It was the first time the World Series of Poker (WSOP) had visited the state of Maryland.

It won’t be forgotten.

In only the second event of the series, a $365 re-entry event, they broke the Maryland record for a live tournament, after 2,403 players turned up to party. Jesse Mills walked away with $106,305 for first.

Oscar Alache Orrego has won his second Latin American Poker Tour Main Event, after defeating Renata Teixeira de Paulo, in heads up action, to take the first prize of $131,962.

[Image Credit: PokerNews]

Chilean, Oscar Alache Orrego, became only the third player to win two Latin American Poker Tour (LAPT) Main Event titles, after victory in front of his home crowd at the Casino Enjoy in Vina del Mar. In 2014, he defeated 692 players to capture the first prize of $135,488 in the Peruvian leg of the PokerStars.net sponsored event.

The Chilean didn’t have to wade through quite as many players to capture his second crown, but 410 is impressive enough. The buy-in was also a grand higher, leading to a much larger prize pool. PokerStars collected $904,460 and $131,960 now belongs to Alache, after a four way deal.