Lorri Broda won the Seniors Event at the Harrah’s Southern California stop on the WSOP Circuit in December 2014.

The 2015-16 World Series of Poker Circuit kicked off Aug. 6 at Foxwoods Resort and Casino in Connecticut. The tour features 19 stops, with four casinos hosting two events each – Harrah’s Cherokee, the Palm Beach Kennel Club, Horseshoe Baltimore and the Bicycle Casino in Los Angeles.

It is the second straight year that both the number of events and the number of casinos hosting events has dropped. After setting a record with 22 stops at 22 different casinos in 2013-14, the tour dropped to 20 stops at 17 different casinos last season. In 2015-16, there will be 19 stops at 15 different casinos. Bally’s Las Vegas becomes the newest stop to be added to the tour, with a scheduled 2016 stop occurring Feb. 25 to March 7, 2016. The IP Casino in Biloxi, Miss., Harrah’s California (San Diego) and Lumiere Place (St. Louis) do not return for the 2015-16 season.

“We know not everyone can make it out to Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker, and this is our way of bringing the flavor and feel of the WSOP to regional markets,” said WSOP Executive Director Ty Stewart. “The WSOP Circuit continues to be a great success, both at getting new players to the game and creating tomorrow’s stars.”

If you can’t learn to handle a bad beat, you will wind up losing more than just your chips.

Judging by the threads on the CardsChat.com General Poker forum, lots of players have a hard time handling a bad beat. At any given time, there are two or three threads asking for advice on how to avoid going on tilt after a perceived “bad beat.”

If you are going to lose control every time someone hits a two-outer on the river to win a hand, you are not going to have a fun, profitable, poker career. Learning to control your emotions is a key to your ultimate success (or failure) as a poker player, especially in multi-table tournaments.

There is nothing worse than investing several hours in a tournament, getting close to the final table and losing 70-80% of your stack to some idiot who risked his entire tournament life by chasing a flush or a straight, despite the fact that you were betting aggressively after the flop and turn. So many times I have seen players lose a hand like that and just shove the next hand out of anger.

With over 100,000 followers, Jason Somerville is the most popular poker player on Twitch.

After many recommendations and much consideration, I have finally decided to broadcast some of my poker sessions on Twitch. It’s not something that I am 100% sold on, but I now believe that the pros outweigh the cons.

Twitch Pros

This year at the World Series of Poker, I meet a ton of people who have followed my poker career over the past couple of years. Someone asked me if I was “The” Carlos Welch. Still haven’t completely wrapped my head around that one. Another guy stopped as he was walking past me to say “Are you Carlos? I thought I recognized that voice from the Thinking Poker Podcast.” There was one young guy from England who said he was so inspired by my life nittiness that he walked the two miles from Circus Circus to the Rio because he didn’t want to pay for a cab.

Where do I begin to explain my hatred for cash games?

I’m just going to say it right away: I hate cash games.  And not a colloquial, casual, not really hate in a literal sense hate, I’m actively repulsed by the thought of playing in a cash session for more than around twenty minutes.  I admit it shamelessly, comparing tournament poker to cash games is just about as unoriginal an article topic that I could possibly think of, but it’s important that I talk about this, because it’s the only way to establish another essential building block in the structure of what people should expect from me.

Cash vs. Tournaments: The Basics of the Basics

For those of you who somehow found this blog and know almost nothing about poker, first of all congratulations and I’m very happy that you’re taking an interest!  Second, the most basic difference between tournaments and cash games is that…hmm, how to explain it?

It’s simple mathematics!

The word “donk” has long been the number one go-to appellation for a certain kind of poker player: the bad kind.  No one wants to be one, many aren’t actually aware they are one.  Some throw around the term in the manner of an internet troll in online table chat, indiscriminately or perhaps using the term more to insult good players than actual bad ones, the bad ones often including said troll.

In recent days, some concerns have been raised that with the amount of information available about how to properly play this game and how easy it is to access, it has become prohibitively more difficult for anyone to make a real profit at poker.  For cash games, I really don’t see what they’re getting worked up about.  If you make plays with positive expected value, you’ll make a profit right?

The Fish Are Out There

No matter how well you’re paid, it’s tough to leave well enough alone.

I don’t remember when I started living for the weekend.

The feeling grew slowly, such that I wasn’t sure exactly what it was until it was too late – the habit was in full swing. I’m paid well, have great benefits, and have a fair bit of autonomy day-to-day in my job, but sometimes that’s not enough. I need to want to get up and go to work each day, is that too much to ask?

I’ve been living in Madison, WI for the past 13 months, grinding out a decent living working for a software company that has been rapidly outgrowing itself for the past decade. But my true passion has been trailing me far longer than my paychecks from “The Man,” filing into the IRS’ and my bank accounts, respectively.

New laws get passed every day, but who reads them all?

Twin bills in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate are currently being reviewed, which if passed, would spell the end of online poker playing in America.

The Restoration of America’s Wire Act seeks to reinstate a previous interpretation of the Interstate Wire Act of 1961, making any and all gambling through interstate or foreign communications using technological means illegal.

As it is written, it seems that it will not only make online poker illegal for the poker rooms or sites to host, but also make it illegal for the players to patronize any online poker rooms that would be operating illegally.

Wait, what do you mean no Wi-Fi?

Poker as a Hobby

Let me get this straight for the record: I am not a poker professional. I am many things, but that is not one of them. Of course I have daydreams about running deep into a WSOP event, who among us doesn’t?

I am, however, very realistic about how remote the chances are that I could ever live that dream. I am a father of seven children and I stay at home to raise them, educate them, and hopefully prepare them for the unpredictable world of the future. Poker doesn’t really fit into that picture easily, except as a casual hobby.