Some people are destined to find success, whether it’s at the poker table or in life. One of those lucky few has worked her magic once again and has solidified her place in the modern landscape of the game.

Jennifer Tilly came out of nowhere when she won her World Series of Poker bracelet. Sure, she is well known for her Academy Award nomination (Bullets Over Broadway) and her television and film roles, but few would have considered her an odds on favorite to win the woman’s title, let alone become the first woman to win both a WSOP title and a World Poker Tour (WPT) Ladies Night championship.

Tilly once again shocked the poker community by dominating her competitors at the WPT event held at the Bicycle Casino in California, taking the title and making it known that she is more than just a fluke.

“I felt like I was suffering from ‘impostor syndrome.’ I had these niggling self-doubts. But now I know I can really play. These women were extremely tough pros with blood lust at the poker table. My goal has always been to win a WPT event and now I’ve done it,” Tilly said after her victory.

WPT founder and CEO Steven Lipscomb had nothing but praise for Tilly after her victory and believes that she is a perfect representative of the tour. “Jennifer Tilly embodies the new breed of player on the WPT. Regardless of gender, age, education, or economic background you can become a champion if you work hard and learn the game. We have always said on the WPT, “Anyone can play, anyone can win.” When an actress that has only been playing for 12 months can best some of the best poker players in the game, you witness the democracy of the game,” Lipscomb said in a recent press release.

In addition to winning a $25,000 seat at the WPT Championships in November, Tilly won a specially-designed pink poker set with the WPT logo and Breast Cancer Ribbon. Both the Bicycle Casino and WPT donated $10,000 to Breast Cancer Research in honor of Tilly and the other players at the final table.

The victory was no surprise to her poker pro boyfriend, Phil ‘Unabomber’ Laak and he believes her preparation played a crucial role. “I’m so proud of her. I directed her to read poker books and gave her maybe one piece of advice each week. We’d watch the WPT DVDs and I’d pause them, asking her what she would do and how many “outs” that player had (chances to win). I knew she was finally ready to play tournament poker when it only took her about 14 seconds to come back with the right answer,” Laak said.

Without a doubt, Tilly has cemented her place in today’s game and is no longer a player that can be taken lightly by other pros. Players beware, there is a new queen trying to take the throne in the world of women’s poker.

Team Full Tilt continues to be one of the true forces on the tournament poker and online poker scenes. Already boasting a contingent of the finest players in the world (including former World Champion Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, Howard Lederer, Phil Ivey and Jennifer Harman, among others), Tuesday brought the announcement of their official thirteenth member in the form of one of the best young players in the world in Allen Cunningham.

Allen has been competing at the professional level for almost a quarter of his twenty nine years. Since starting out seven years ago, Cunningham has won tournaments around the world and competed on both the World Poker Tour and World Series of Poker stages. In total, Allen stands among the Top Ten in money earnings over his career with well over $8 million in winnings.

His greatest stage has been that at the World Series, however. Cunningham has racked up four bracelet wins, including one each in the past two years of the tournament. His performance at the 2005 World Series (where he won one event, final tabled at three others and cashed in another event) earned him the 2005 World Series of Poker Player of the Year award. His finest moment, though, definitely came this summer, when Allen was able to take another bracelet and also was able to outlast almost the entirety of the Main Event field of 8,773 before succumbing to the onslaught of eventual champion Jamie Gold and finishing fourth.

“Allen Cunningham has simply been the best all-around player at the WSOP over the last two years. Team Full Tilt is honored to welcome such an accomplished player to its ranks,” said Howard Lederer, fellow Team Full Tilt member. With Cunningham now on the roster, the “official” members of Team Full Tilt now total thirteen and another three dozen professionals have a loose association with the online site. Of the fifty men and women on the roles of Full Tilt, 67 WSOP bracelets are represented.

Full Tilt is also one of the online sites that those associated with the team can actually be found playing at. They can be playing in the free rooms, the micro and low limit games and the upper echelons of the cash games and always are around for the tournament action that the site offers. With the addition of Allen Cunningham to their roster, those online tables just got a whole lot more difficult.

An early-morning robbery attempt on a Toronto social-club poker game recently went awry, when police responded to a call-in about the heist in time to locate and chase the robbers’ fleeing van.

About eighteen players where participating in the overnight game at Toronto’s Thornhill Club when two masked, armed robbers burst in at about 4:00 a.m. Wednesday morning, a third waiting in the getaway van behind the club. The two reportedly ‘roughed up’ the players while relieving the game of its cash and valuables, but someone, likely one of the players, managed to alert police, who responded in time to see the van leaving the area.

Having identified the van, trailing officers signaled it to pull over. The van slowed momentarily, seeming to comply, before speeding away. A high-speed chase ensued and moved onto a local freeway, the 401. Here, one of the van’s passengers rolled down a window and fired on the pursuing offices, who then broke off the chase; neither officers nor vehicles were hit.

However, the police had already identified one or more of the likely robbers, with two of them being arrested shortly thereafter and the third picked up around noon on Wednesday in Toronto’s London suburb. The three robbers, Omar Jermaine Betty, 25, Ryan Shields, 26, and Ezra Lottery, 21, face a total of 130 charges between them, including attempted murder, armed robbery and forcible confinement. The three were denied bail in their initial hearings, and will return to court next week.

There could be a problem on the horizon for major online poker rooms. It comes in the form of a poker bot. A piece of software programmed to play online poker, against humans.

The recent influx of online pokers has hit new limits, with millions being poured into television advertising deals thousands are joining each day. This boom has almost mirrored the levels involved in the dot com boom of the late nineties. With the online poker industry estimated to be worth in the region of $160 billion.

But there could be a problem on the horizon for major online poker rooms. It comes in the form of a poker bot. A piece of software programmed to play online poker, against humans.

“It is pretty much a certainty that bots are playing online,� said Gautam Rao, a 43-year-old Canadian poker pro who regularly plays three high-stakes Internet games simultaneously. “… What we don’t know is how strong they are.�

That was until now…

Just this week a new site was launched. It sells a poker bot, dubbed “Poker Bobby” by the creators. This poker bot is a new breed, unlike other bots until now which generally lost. Poker Bobby has ransacked online casino’s causing thousands of genuine players to leave.

This new bot was programmed differently. It doesn’t just make decisions based on the cards in front of it. Every play made by players on the table is logged to form a ‘table image’. Which helps the bot to make incredibly informed decisions.

The problem facing the CEO of partypoker.com, Vikrant Bhargava, is that: The use of bots is not illegal, it can’t even be classed as cheating.

Ever since the aptly named accountant Chris Moneymaker parlayed a $40 Internet tournament buy-in into a $2.5 million championship at the World Series of Poker in 2003, card shark wannabes have been chasing their fantasies onto the Net. Some even quit their day jobs and try to make a living at online poker. And why not? This shadowy world is driven by no less a force than the great American dream. As the tournament’s motto goes, “Anyone can win.” There’s one problem, though, as Poker_legend is about to demonstrate: The rules of the game are different online.

An extract from an article in a poker magazine, Inside Edge, about Poker Bobby:

“It’s late one Wednesday afternoon, and Poker_legend is logged on to PartyPoker.com and ready to play. Onscreen, this player exudes a certain brash charisma — broad shoulders, immaculate brown hair, restless animatronic eyes. He looks like he should be playing synth in Kraftwerk. Instead, he is seated at a virtual table with nine other avatars, wagering on limit Texas hold ‘em.

Poker_legend is a robot. Unlike the other icons at the table, there is no human placing his bets and playing his cards. He is controlled by Poker Bobby, the first commercially available auto playing poker software. Seat him at the table and he will apply strategy gleaned from decades of research. While carbon-based players munch Ding Dongs, yawn, guzzle beer, reply to email, take phone calls, and chat on IM, Poker_legend (a pseudonym) is running the numbers so it will know, statistically, when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.”

But worse for sites like PartyPoker is that Bobby was developed by the same programmer who created their bot detecting software. Bobby’s play is so lifelike, he could never be detected.

Bots are subject to the same cold streaks as real players. But, unlike humans, the machines play with relentless cunning and tireless discipline, raking in small pots from low-limit tables where less-experienced opponents hang out.

The world of poker continues to grow as people recognize the popularity of the game. One of those areas that have seen tremendous growth is in Russia, as witnessed by Mansion Poker’s recent tournament event in the nation. Not only was it well received by all involved, it also introduced a couple of new elements to poker’s world.

The Mansion.com Russian Poker Championship was played in October at the Korona Casino in Moscow and 130 players came to the felt for the tournament, which was eventually won by Vladimir Polishuk. While Mansion’s sponsorship of the event wasn’t different from other tournaments, it was interesting to see the length that Mansion went to for the event. Mansion trained a tournament staff that, from all appearances, was a high quality group that presented an excellent tournament. Led by Keith ‘Bendigo’ Sloan (the inventor of Speed Poker), the team was a first for the online poker room as they handled all aspects of the operation of the tournament, which was a first in that an online poker site hosted a live tournament in totality.

In what was, as far as this writer knows, another first for poker, there were dual tournament directors and both of them were women. Irina Fomkina and Natalya Kravtsova, two Muscovites, were in charge of the activities during the Russian Poker Championships and performed their duties with a professional zeal. The two twenty-something women are not rookies to the casino industry as they have a combined eight years of experience between them. From the start of the tournament, they demonstrated knowledge of the rules and commanded the respect of the tournament participants. They also showed that they as well have a passion for the game and want to see it continue on its highly successful path.

Finally, the implementation of an innovative penalization procedure was introduced which, quite honestly, would be interesting to see implemented in the rest of the tournament world. Instead of issuing verbal warnings (which can be sometimes forgotten or ignored), the Mansion Poker team used a two card warning system along the lines of soccer’s penalization system. There were “yellow” and “red” cards that were used, with the yellow card serving as a warning and the red card resulting in a twenty minute penalty for infractions on the rules of poker. A popular Russian player, Valery Ilikan (who won two tournaments during the eleven day run of the events at the Korona Casino), was the only player to receive the red card, but he accepted his twenty minute penalty fairly well, according to reports.

With a highly competent tournament staff and two tournament directors that are respected for their work, perhaps we will see poker’s appeal extended their appeal over the rest of the European continent in live events and potentially sweep the rest of the poker world as well.

As the Player of the Year race moves into its final two months of 2006, there seems to be only one question that remains to be answered (and it’s the question that has been posed since Day One of the race this year): can anyone stop Michael Mizrachi from running away with the title?

If “The Grinder” has his way, the answer to that question will be a definitive “no”. Mizrachi, whose early season success in World Poker Tour events in January and February launched him into the lead almost from the start, has continued to be a dominant force at the tables for the entirety of 2006. In October, he added a strong performance at the Bellagio’s Festa al Lago WPT tournament (13th place) to a tremendous string of cashes and championships from the rest of the year and is also off to a good start at the Foxwoods World Poker Finals, where he added another cash on Halloween. It will be very difficult for someone to catch Michael, as he not only has a dominant lead but it also looks as though he will be playing many tournaments to keep people from catching him.

One of the players who isn’t quite ready to concede the POY title to Mizrachi is second place Shannon Shorr. He also was able to cash at the Festa al Lago tournaments and has actually cut “The Grinder’s” lead to less than 1,500 points for the first time in several months. Shorr has not been the only person who has been rising up to become a threat, but so far he is the only one who has been able to cut into Mizrachi’s lead in consecutive months.

Poker professional Nam Le solidified his third place position with a final table finish at a preliminary tournament at the Festa al Lago and was the only member of the Top Ten who reached the points positions during the WPT North American Poker Championships in Canada. Le currently sits 251 points back of Shorr for the second place spot and continues to drive up the Top Ten list. Since his victory at the WPT Bay 101 Shooting Star tournament in March, Nam has cashed in fourteen tournaments and made the final table at seven of those events.

John Hoang was able to bypass Phil Hellmuth for the fourth place position on the POY list with a simply stunning October performance. During the month, the Fountain Valley, CA resident cashed in five events and made the final table in three of those tournaments. Hoang has racked up fourteen final tables in 2006 (far and away the leader in that category) and positions himself to be a considerable threat during the end of season tournaments that populate the remainder of 2006.

Hellmuth continues to stay in the Top Ten in fifth place after his play at this year’s World Series of Poker, but another mover in the POY race is David Daneshgar. Daneshgar followed up his EPT Barcelona performance by cashing twice at the Festa al Lago (a final table preliminary tournament and a strong 21st place finish in the $10000 WPT event) and has moved past World Series wunderkind Jeff Madsen for sixth place on the POY list (up from seventh last month). Daneshgar seems to be getting hot in the last quarter of 2006 and, with more performances like September and October, we could be seeing him make a run at the upper echelons of the POY race.

Madsen continues to hold on to seventh place as there is a newcomer who gets into the Top Ten after the October tournaments. Parkland, FL’s Alex Jacob enters the Top Ten in eighth place and demonstrates that, once you get a big win, excellent performances tend to follow. After taking the title at the U. S. Poker Championship in Atlantic City, he moved on to Las Vegas and cashed during the WPT Festa al Lago event as well. These top notch tournament performances shouldn’t come as a shock, however; he made two final tables at the WSOP this year and racked up four cashes during the time at the Rio as well. If it wasn’t for the stunning summertime moves from Madsen, Jacob could well be the man that everyone would talking about for Rookie of the Year.

Rounding out the Top Ten are professionals Allen Cunningham (ninth) and Erick Lindgren (tenth) while the Second Ten presents some new names and dangerous players. WPT 2006 Legends of Poker champion Joe Pelton has pulled an almost identical feat to Mizrachi’s early 2006 performance by finishing in third place during the Festa al Lago and is in the eleventh place slot. This should put him in the early lead for WPT Season Five Player of the Year honors as that tour’s season continues into 2007. David Williams, J. C. Tran, Joe Sebok and Can Kim Hua also are lurking in the Second Ten and looking to move to the top of the POY list.

Over the next two months, there are several tournaments that will have a sizeable impact on the POY race. The World Poker Finals are currently going on at Foxwoods in Connecticut, which will be followed by the Five Diamond World Poker Classic in December. There is one more World Series of Poker Circuit event on the schedule as well as the Trump Classic in Atlantic City and other smaller events that could swing the standings one way or the other. While Mizrachi seems to have the POY sewn up at this point, strong performances from any of the Top Ten could make for significant changes before the Player of the Year race is decided.