Posts Tagged ‘florida’
Las Vegas-Style Casinos Could Come to Florida
January 12th, 2011
Can you imagine a casino on this beach? One Florida state senator can.
The state of Florida has experienced a poker renaissance since changing its laws on the game last summer. Now there’s a good chance that the state could be become the next Nevada as legislators prepare to consider a bill that would bring full-on casinos to Florida.
State Senate President Mike Haridopolos authorized a report last year on the possible revenues that could be collected if Florida were to legalize full Las Vegas-style casinos. Yesterday that report was presented to the Regulated Industries Committee chaired by Sen. Dennis Jones, who is currently drafting legislation that would allow the state to build “destination casinos.” The committee heard about the results in 13 other states that approved expanded gambling options, such as the $1 billion generated in Pennsylvania and the $500 million collected by Louisiana each year. It also heard from lobbyists for the Las Vegas Sands Corporation and Wynn Resort Casinos, each of which is interested in building casinos with attached convention and retail properties. Vegas-style casinos would create some 5,000 to 7,000 jobs at each location, for a ceiling of 35,000 new jobs in the state.
Jones’ legislation, which would allow Florida to build four or five casino resorts offering a full range of Las Vegas-style casino games including slot machines, blackjack, baccarat and craps in addition to poker, is expected to be ready in about two weeks. Currently only some of those games are permitted in the state, and even then the locations where they can be offered are highly regulated. Casino companies would have to pay $50 million just to bid for the right to build a casino in the state; in return the winning bidder would receive an exclusive contract to operate casino games in a 75-mile radius.
Earlier this week Haridopolos said he thinks the chances of the legislature approving expanded gambling this year are about even money. However, some fellow legislators think that the state’s compact with the Seminole tribe would prevent non-Indian casinos from being built, while others are convinced the state would have to pass a constitutional amendment to allow to construction of the casinos. The uncertainty means there will be plenty of debate on the bill, but the possibility is an exciting one for those who hate taking a long flight to Las Vegas to get their gamble on.
Poker Replacing Jai-Alai, Racing in Florida
December 29th, 2010
Jai-alai is on its way out in Florida as poker grows in popularity.
Thanks to a few changes to state law that lifted limits on the stakes and hours of its poker rooms, 2010 was a fantastic year all around for poker in Florida. As our favorite card game takes off for new heights that have Time Magazine calling Florida “Vegas By The Sea,” though, sports that once held the betting public’s attention are dying off. The Miami Herald has published a number of features by journalist Linda Robertson lately looking at the impact expanded gambling in general has had on three formerly popular pastimes: dog racing, horse racing and jai-alai.
Jai-alai was imported to the United States from the villages of northern Spain some 80 years ago and became popular enough to draw famous people like Babe Ruth and Eleanor Roosevelt to games. The fronton at Dania once grossed $50 million in bets over the course of a four-month season; today it draws about 25% of that total, and games that once packed 10,000 fans into the seats rarely draw more than a few hundred these days. Meanwhile Dania’s poker room draws more than $105 million in bets each year.
Dog tracks and horse racing operations, also once popular betting options in Florida, aren’t faring much better than jai-alai these days. The state’s 16 dog tracks draw less than half the wagers today that they did 10 years ago and owners would rather upgrade their new poker rooms and casinos than sink money into a dying operation. Horse racing is in similar decline, with revenues down 30 percent over the last decade while the attached “racinos” – casino operations allowed by state law only as long as the racetracks stay open – continue to boom.
Robertson quotes Nova University law professor Bob Jarvis, who says that dog racing and horse racing, like jai-alai, only existed to give people something to gamble on. Now that other, less labor-intensive gambling options are available in Florida – namely casinos and poker – the once-popular sports are on the road to extinction. Until the final day, though, operations continue at the state’s frontons and racetracks.
Florida Police Searching for Thanksgiving Poker Killer
December 1st, 2010
Juan and Sergio Guitron will be laid to rest today in Ruskin, Fla.
After a shooting that played out like a scene from a modern crime drama, police in Florida say that their search for a man who killed two brothers on Thanksgiving morning is a “top priority.”
Juan and Sergio Guitron were playing poker with four friends on the front porch of a house in Ruskin, south of Tampa, early on Thanksgiving, when a man wearing a black t-shirt with the word “Sheriff” on the front pulled up in a late model green minivan and identified himself as a law enforcement officer. He ordered five of the men to lie down on the ground; when a sixth poker player, Daniel Beltran, came around the corner, the man began firing shots.
Beltran was struck, as were the Guitron brothers, cousins Ramon Galan and Richard Cantu, and friend Gonzalo Guevara , who were all lying prone facing the house. The Guitron brothers both died on the scene from execution-style gunshot wounds, while the other men were hospitalized. Beltran and Guevara are both reported to be in stable condition, though Cantu is in critical condition with a gunshot wound to the head. The owner of the house, Romero Lucas, told police that the shooter was a white man with short, bushy hair between the ages of 30 and 40.
The funeral for Juan and Segio Guitron is scheduled for later today. The Hillsborough County (Florida) Sheriff’s Office, meanwhile, says it is following several promising leads as it continues to search for their killer. Anyone with information on the incident is urged to call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-873-TIPS.
Online Poker Player Wins Florida WPT Event
November 24th, 2010
He can’t legally buy a drink, but he could buy a couple of Ferraris if he wanted to. (Photo: Michael Laster)
Florida is one of the only places in the United States where you don’t have to be 21 years old to play live poker, so it’s no big surprise that a 20-year-old Floridian won the state’s first live tournament with a $5,000-buy-in.
Harrison Gimbel, known to his fellow online poker players as “gibler321,” conquered the Fall Poker Open at the Seminole Hard Rock casino and took home $330,000 for his efforts. Gimbel, who lives in Jupiter, Fla., had to overcome a field of more than 300 players, including a number of experienced poker pros, on his way to the win. Shannon Shorr and Shawn Cunix were among those who made the money, while Gimbel had to fend off Allie Prescott (9th), Raj “BadCardsAA” Vohra (4th), and Fred Goldberg (3rd) at the final table. Gimbel’s even-numbered payout came as the result of a deal with Anthony Ruberto, the second-place finisher who took home an extra $42,000 over what first place was scheduled to pay.
The win is actually the second major victory of 2010 for Gimbel. Back in January he won the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, an event noted for its enormous fields packed with tough online poker players, and claimed $2.2 million in the process. Not bad for a guy who won’t be eligible to play in the World Series of Poker until 2012.
The Fall Poker Open was the first WPT Regional Event, a series of tournaments recently announced by the World Poker Tour that will sport the WPT brand but not feature any television coverage. They also apparently won’t feature much in the way of online coverage, so a tip of the hat here goes to Nick Sortal at the Action South Florida Gambling blog, who put in a marathon reporting session to get the info out where the WPT didn’t.
WSOP Circuit Crowns Another Champion in Biloxi
November 10th, 2010
Travis Lutes: not bad for a second career cash. (Photo: PokerNews)
While the WSOP Main Event was finishing up in Las Vegas, the main event of the latest WSOP Circuit stop was just getting started in Biloxi, Miss. Now, after three days of play, it has its champion.
Travis Lutes became the latest player to earn an automatic bid to the WSOP Circuit National Championship by outlasting the competition at the final table of the WSOP Circuit stop at the Imperial Palace in Biloxi. The finale was very much a regional affair, with seven of the nine players coming from Georgia, Mississippi, Florida and Alabama. The only players who weren’t from the American South were Jerry Monroe of Columbus, Ohio, who finished in seventh place, and champion Lutes, who lives in Crawfordville, Ind.
The $1,600 main event at the IP drew a total field of 270 players, building a prize pool worth $392,850. The size of the field was pretty close to the other non-Regional-Championship main events on the WSOPC this year – smaller than the 289 at Horseshoe Southern Indiana, but larger than the 251 at Horseshoe Council Bluffs. Lutes’ take for winning the tournament – just his second live tournament cash after a sixth-place finish in a $100 tournament at the Pot of Gold festival in Reno last month – was $95,253. He also earned his first gold WSOP Circuit champion’s ring.
The next stop for the WSOP Circuit is Harvey’s Lake Tahoe in northern Nevada, where the tournament action gets started tomorrow with a mega-satellite to the $1,600 Main Event. The first of nine gold ring events there, a two-day $345 no-limit hold’em tournament, gets started on Friday.
Jonathan Duhamel Wins WSOP Main Event
November 8th, 2010
After months of waiting, poker finally has its 2010 World Champion.
As tonight’s heads-up match began at 8 p.m. PT, Jonathan Duhamel held a massive chip lead. With the blinds at 600,000/1,200,000 and antes of 200,000, the young Canadian pro’s stack was worth 188,950,000. In contrast, John Racener held just 30,650,000, leaving a lot of work ahead of him to pull off one of the biggest comebacks in Main Event history. Oddly enough, the Florida pro’s path to heads-up play was nearly stopped by Duhamel on Saturday, but Racener’s A-Q beat his foe’s A-K to keep him in the running with five players left.
Racener’s patient approach from the rest of the final table carried over to the heads-up match, as he alternated between limping most of his buttons with the occasional fold. Duhamel, on the other hand, tended to raise most buttons, mixing in a limp here and there. The first significant action went against Racener when he elected to raise a Duhamel bet on the river with the board reading Jc-9s-3s-4d-Ts. Duhamel called with J-4 for two pair and Racener mucked to take himself down to 18 million, less than two-thirds of his starting stack.
After that hand, the blinds rose to 800,000/1,600,000 with antes staying at 200,000, and Duhamel shoved on the button on the very next hand with K-4. Racener snap-called with pocket queens, and the board came down J-8-6-2-7 to put Racener back at 36 million. Both players seemed committed to playing small-ball, and by the first 10-minute break Racener was down to just 22 million.
Once the two returned from the break, Duhamel applied maximum pressure at every opportunity and whittled Racener’s stack down to just nine big blinds before Racener finally called his stack off against a Duhamel shove. Duhamel held As-Jh to Racener’s Kd-8h. The 9s-4c-4d-6c-5c board brought no help to Racener, and this year’s WSOP Main Event came to a close.
Congratulations are due to both players. For his second-place finish, Racener takes home $5,545,955. Duhamel, meanwhile, earns $8,944,310 and enshrinement into poker history as the 35th player to win poker’s world championship. He also becomes the first Canadian to win the WSOP Main Event.
Michael Mizrachi Gets Front Page Treatment in South Florida
October 28th, 2010
Mainstream press love for Grinder and family. (Photo: Mike Stocker, Sun-Sentinel)
November Niner Michael Mizrachi has attracted mainstream press attention several times this year already, but with the focus on his tax problems and lawsuits against him, the attention has rarely been positive. Now The Grinder is finally getting his due in his home region of South Florida with a profile of him and his family in the Sun-Sentinel.
The front-page feature, authored by the Sun-Sentinel’s gambling reporter Nick Sortal (who also writes the excellent Action gambling blog), tells about the Mizrachi brothers’ youth, when they used to play cards and keep track of their debts to each other on pieces of paper. Mother Susan Laufer Mizrachi – known to the Twitter and online poker worlds as “MommaGrinder” – says she didn’t mind when that penchant grew into a passion for poker, because “they made good grades and they had good character.”
MommaGrinder continues to be her sons’ biggest fan after all these years, as anyone who’s watched this year’s coverage of the WSOP Main Event (or older footage of Grinder’s multiple WPT final tables) already knows. “She cheers like most people would at an NFL game,” brother Eric Mizrachi told Sortal. “Only it’s much more intense because it’s family.”
The article also touches on Mizrachi’s run-in with the IRS (“when the news got out, it kind of helped me,” says Grinder), and what he and his four brothers have been up to since the Main Event went on hiatus (traveling the world). Anyone who already dislikes Michael Mizrachi probably won’t be won over, but there are likely to be plenty of new converts among the undecided throughout South Florida. It remains to be seen whether all the love, new and old, will help to push Grinder to a better finish than his seventh-place chip stack, but if he falls short it certainly won’t be for lack of support.
Annette Obrestad Leads WPT Festa al Lago With 13 Left
October 18th, 2010
Can Annette put together her first WPT title run at Bellagio?
Another day of poker at Bellagio is in the books, this time taking the field at the WPT Festa al Lago from 41 players down to just 13. The overnight chip leader is none other than online poker legend and former WSOP Europe Main Event winner Annette Obrestad. Fresh off a heads-up tourney win at EPT London, the diminutive Norwegian bagged up 2,009,000 in chips at the end of the night to put her name in everyone’s overnight headlines.
Right behind Obrestad is Andy Frankenberger, the equity derivatives trader who won the WPT Legends of Poker main event in Los Angeles back in August. He finished the day with 1,820,000 chips. Close behind are Jeff Madsen (1,500,000), Allen Kessler (1,275,000), and John Monnette (1,271,000), with November Nine bubble boy Brandon Steven (977,000) a little further back. Other notables among the 13 remaining players include Florida poker pro Noah Schwartz, former WPT Southern Championship runner-up Bobby Suer and WPT Spanish Championship winner Randal Flowers.
Steve O’Dwyer came into the day with the chip lead, but after finding himself short-stacked he busted in 25th place when his queens fell to Brandon Steven’s 4-4. Also among the fallen on the day were Barry Greenstein (38th place), Tom Marchese (35th), Daniel Alaei (31st), Erik Cajelais (26th), Matt Affleck (22nd), Matt Stout (18th), McLean Karr (17th), Chad Batista (16th), Mark Newhouse (15th) and Lauren Kling (14th).
The plan for Day 5 is to play down to the TV table, which theoretically shouldn’t take long since the field only has to drop from 13 players to six and the uberaggressive Annette Obrestad is the chip leader. But this is tournament poker we’re talking about, and with a guaranteed $80,000 pay jump over 13th place money for everyone who makes the final table there could be plenty of incentive to slow things down, depending on who makes it close to that bubble. Action gets going at noon PT and as usual the WPT is covering the whole enchilada.
November Nine’s John Racener Leads WSOP Europe PLO Event
September 17th, 2010
John Racener’s good fortune in 2010 continued in London today. (Photo: WSOP)
Just 15 players remain after two days of play in WSOP Europe Event #2, £5,250 Pot-Limit Omaha, and the vast majority of them are highly accomplished poker pros. Two former WSOP Players of the Year (2006′s Jeff Madsen and 2009′s Jeffrey Lisandro) survived the day, as did two of Event #1′s final tablists (Chris Bjorin and Willie Tann) and Day 1 chip leader Sam Stein. And the local poker community was well represented, too – English players, including 2010 WSOP bracelet winner Steve Jelinek, fill six of the last 15 seats in the tournament.
Tops among the field at the end of the day was John Racener, the Florida poker pro who will have the fourth-largest stack when this year’s WSOP Main Event final table reconvenes in November. Racener reprised his Main Event bubble run and finished the day in London with 276,000 in chips thanks to a bit of luck and relentless aggression. As the bubble loomed he was toward the bottom of the leaderboard, but the Floridian ran his chip stack up over roughly the next four hours of hand-for-hand play. He then busted 2009 WSOP Pot Limit Hold’em World Champion John Kabbaj, cracking the British pro’s aces to give everyone else in the room a guaranteed £8,514 payday.
The remaining players in this event will return to the felt tomorrow at 3 p.m. local time and play down until we have our second WSOP Europe bracelet winner of 2010 – however long that might take.
Florida Dog Racing Park Wants to Focus on Poker
August 18th, 2010
At least one Florida greyhound racetrack would prefer to focus on poker.
The relationship between dog racing and poker in Florida is an interesting one to say the least. Most of the racetracks in the state that also offer poker make the majority of their money by taking a rake from the poker games, rather than making it off the money that people bet on the dogs. But the racetracks can’t get rid of dog racing, even if they lose money from it, because state law requires them to have a minimum number of dog races each year in order to continue offering poker to their customers.
The Melbourne Greyhound Park is one of the racetracks that took advantage of the change in poker laws a few years back to begin offering poker, which has proved to be a big hit with the locals. Revenue at the poker room for the year so far is $4.4 million, compared to the $213,247 in total revenue from dog racing during this year’s racing season, which ended in March. But the law won’t let the park can’t get rid of its racing operations without shutting down the poker room, too.
This has led to the unique situation of the Melbourne Greyhound Park supporting an anti-dog-racing organization. Grey2K USA is dedicated to protecting greyhounds and shutting down racetracks, and one of the ways it wants to do that in Florida is to change the law that links poker with dog racing. That would leave businesses like Melbourne Greyhound Park free to close down their racing operations and focus on things that actually make money for them, like poker.
The big racetracks oppose any attempt to change the law, so things are going to stay the way they are for the time being. But poker has been a big mover in the Florida legislature over the last few years, so it would be no big surprise to see the link between card games and dog racing severed in the near future.
