Game Show Network (GSN) has 2 early presents for poker players: the Ultimatebet.net Aruba Classic on Friday, December 8 at 10 PM ET and new footage from its popular poker series in the Best of High Stakes Poker Monday, December 11 at 8 PM ET.

December 8 TV: Over 500 poker players paid their $5,000 + $200 buy-in during September to play in the no-limit Texas hold’em tournament at the Radisson Aruba Resort & Casino, and for their share of the $2.6 million in prize money. Six players made the final table: Jason Atwood (Tualatin, OR), Jared Brintz (Tampa, FL), Terry Eischens (Shakopee, MN), Cliff Josephy (Syosset, NY), Devon Miller (Los Angeles, CA) and Joe Sebok (San Francisco, CA).

Calling the action from the final table is one of the top tournament players of all-time, Phil Hellmuth. Hellmuth will be joined by one of the top female poker players in the world, Annie Duke, as well as the best selling author and poker expert John Vorhaus on the telecast.

December 11 TV: High Stakes Poker has become the favorite show for poker fans with players risking their own cash and huge pots. The first two seasons have featured pots of over $300,000 and over a half million dollars. Unlike tournament poker shows, High Stakes Poker is the only “Cash Game” on television.

The “BEST OF” show on December 11 will feature the most memorable moments and never before seen footage from the first two seasons. It will also include interviews with the players as they talk about their play on the show and the plays of their opponents. AJ Benza and Gabe Kaplan reprise their regular roles for this special.

Senator Bill Frist (R.-TN), doesn’t want to be President - he wants to be Dictator.

Frist, the majority leader of the U.S. Senate, used his position of power to ram through the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006. He didn’t even give the members of Congress a chance to read the bill. They were told about it late Friday night, mere minutes before they recessed to campaign for reelection.

Frist cynically attached his pet anti-Internet gaming bill to a completely unrelated bill dealing with port security, so no one would dare vote against it.

No matter how you feel about Internet gaming, this is not the way laws should be made in this country.

The only good thing to come out of this fiasco is we now know what type of hypocrite Bill Frist is.

Frist is one of the most active advocates of American values.

Well, one American value is that people get to know what they are voting for.

Even giving him the benefit of the doubt, that he really cared about Internet gambling, he appointed himself the decider of how America should handle the issue.

But, in fact, Frist never showed any interest in Internet gaming until he decided to run for President.

Having run political campaigns, I can tell you he first conducted polls and focus groups and hired campaign consultants. They told him that he could score a few points with his right-wing religious base by coming out against online gambling.

So Frist threw the idea of outlawing Internet gaming into a speech in Iowa, where the first presidential caucuses will be held in 2008. The post-speech polls and focus group must have been positive, because he next announced it as a legislative priority, even though almost no one else in Congress, or America, cares much about the issue.

The bill immediately spooked the entire industry.

Giants like PartyPoker announced that they would no longer take bets from the U.S. Frist actually managed to cause as much economic damage as an Islamist terrorist attack: billions of dollars were wiped out overnight, when online stocks fell more than 50%.

This was probably an overreaction, since the new law will not actually do much. The only new crime created is accepting funds for unlawful Internet gambling, defined as violating some other federal, state or tribal law. It doesn’t make operators much more guilty than they already were.

For example, David Carruthers, Chief Executive of BetOnSports, was arrested changing planes in Dallas, and served with a 27-page long indictment. Now the indictment would be 28 pages.

On the other hand, Internet poker operators have claimed that they are not violating any federal or state law. If that is true, they are still not guilty of a crime.

This law is supposedly designed to stop money transfers. Bizarrely, banks and payment processors cannot be charged with this new crime.

The federal regulators have 270 days to come up with new regulations for these money transferors.

But the biggest player, Neteller, will take the position that it is not subject to U.S. regulations, since it is not an U.S. financial institution. The only danger is that banks might be told they can’t send money to Neteller.

Prosecutors can get injunctions to prevent Internet Service Providers from hosting gambling sites and affiliates, but these already are, or will be, on foreign servers.

Can anything be done about this new law?

Unfortunately, no. Using its police powers, Congress can do just about anything to any form of gambling.

It just would have been nice if they had read the bill before they voted

Joe Navarro has a skill all poker players wish they possess, a talent that is so powerful the Federal Government has had him on its payroll for more than a quarter-decade. Navarro knows how to look at someone and figure out if he’s lying or not. He’s able to spot what most of us would interpret as a tiny hand motion, and understand what it means with an accuracy not even rivaled by machines.

Last Sunday, more than 100 people packed into a conference room at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas to hear what the expert in nonverbal communication had to say about poker tells.

Navarro is now retired from the FBI and knew so little about poker only a few years ago that when Phil Hellmuth called him to give a presentation at one of his Camp Hellmuths, Navarro apologized, told him he didn’t know who he was, and hung up the phone. Navarro was first introduced to the poker world by Annie Duke, with whom he first met during the taping of a show trying to determine if people can beat machines at detecting lies. Both Duke and Navarro did better than the mechanical detectors. Hellmuth’s persistence is nothing short of fantastic, for players who know that playing people, and not the cards, is perhaps the largest component of the game.

To understand people, Navarro believes you first have to understand the brain. Or more precisely, the different parts of the brain that control the instinctive reactions that helped get humans through the adolescence of the species thousands of years ago, before people communicated verbally.

“Foundationally, if you understand the brain, at the table you will not have any problem interpreting behavior,� Navarro told the packed house that included pros Bobby Huff, Mark Seif, and World Series of Poker ladies champion Mary Jones.

The study of poker tells — or any kind of “tell� that people transmit and interpret throughout the day — is rooted in many different academic disciplines. It’s the study of anthropology, neurology, sociology, anatomy, and a lot other words that end in y, and this is one of the reasons that people can’t study what Navarro has learned through years of training and working in the field at a university.

Each person who attended his seminar received a copy of his book, Read’em and Reap A Career FBI Agent’s Guide to Decoding Poker Tells, a copy of the Power Point presentation Navarro hangs his seminar on, and enough information to fill several class days (a seminar Navarro gives to FBI students covering generally the same concepts takes three days). He calls his book a contribution to poker literature. It’s not meant to replace Mike Caro’s book on tells; it’s just another way to look at the subject, he says.

Navarro starts his seminar from the very beginning, and in this case, it’s when humans had a much smaller brain called the limbic system. It’s also known as the reptilian brain because of its evolutionary age and basic functions. This is the part of the brain that told our ancestors to be still when a bear was near, to run in danger, to scratch when itchy.

“It’s this brain that reacts to the world around you,� Navarro said. “The limbic brain does not think.�

The limbic brain is where the actions that can tell us so much about a person in certain situations originate. The limbic brain is the transmitter of tells, but translating what those motions mean is the difficult part. Navarro, who considers himself a teacher above everything else, is the translator.

Navarro’s skill set translates from the world of crime fighting to the poker table because, he says, poker conjures up so many raw and primitive emotions. It’s a game of aggression, thought and interaction, which are some of the components that helped human beings make it this far down the evolutionary chain, and some of the things that champion-caliber poker players utilize.

And that’s why his book and appearances have attracted such an interested audience, some of whom have seen Navarro more than once to hear — and learn — what he has to say.

In Caesars poker room, his students put to work some of the things Navarro went over in the “classroom� three stories above them an hour before. As Navarro observes and listens to the poker players, the players seem like they want to please him and most sit exactly how he told them to (the way Hellmuth sits now, with his hands folded under his chin, a hat pulled down low). When a player reads a player perfectly, Navarro smiles. His students are getting it.

Thanksgiving Day turned out to be Phil Gordon’s lucky day as he collected $600,000 for finishing first in the FullTilt.Net Championship at the Red Rock Casino in Las Vegas. With a packed audience that was filled with professional players like Patrik Antonius and Perry Friedman, it was Gordon’s aggressive play that helped him beat out six other contenders during the four-hour live broadcast on FSN. With this win, Gordon has once again proved that he is possibly one of the most underrated professional on the Team Full Tilt roster of players.

The first player to exit for the day was four-time World Series of Poker bracelet winner and main event fourth-place finisher, Allen Cunningham. Well-known for making it deep into numerous tournaments, Cunningham had no such luck when his ace-king ran into John Juanda’s pocket aces.

In a theme that would hold strong throughout the competition, recent European Poker Tour winner and World Poker Tour title holder Roland De Wolfe and former Celebrity Poker host Phil Gordon battled early for chip lead and continued to attack one another throughout the day.

The only amateur at the table was next to go, Full Tilt’s online qualifier from Sweden, Stefan Rehn. He was sent on his way when his ace-queen ran into Phil Gordon’s pocket kings. The flop came 4,9,2 with a 5 turn and a 5 on the river. Having won a final table on Wednesday to earn his spot into Thursday’s live final, Rehn didn’t walk away empty-handed as third place through seventh earned $25,000.

Although primarily quiet throughout early play, Toto Leonidas was forced into action when his chip stack dwindled. All in with ace-jack, he was called by De Wolfe, who was holding pocket eights. The flop came 10-8-7, giving Leonidas a straight draw and De Wolfe a set of eights. The turn brought a 9 and the river a 5, giving Leonidas the straight and doubling him up. He then went on to end John Juanda’s night soon after, by beating him on the river when he hit his ace.

Down to three-handed play with Leonidas, De Wolfe, and Gordon, action resumed with deep stacks and rapid-fire play with the blinds escalating dramatically in the made-for-television-style tournament format. Leonidas continued to play the role of antagonist, giving the other players headaches as he built his stack back. In the end though, it wasn’t meant to be, as he tried to bluff Gordon with 10 9. Gordon, holding K 2, hit a pair of kings when the flop came K J 8. With only eight outs, Leonidas’s hand failed to improve and he was out in third place.

As play continued heads up, Gordon started with a small chip lead and kept increasing the pressure on European superstar De Wolfe. By winning several small pots, Gordon developed a slight edge, only to see De Wolfe make a quick run, taking down several pots and the chip lead.

In the end, however, both players went all in and Gordon’s A-7 offsuit proved to be too much for De Wolfe’s 9-6 suited. Neither player’s hand improved, giving Gordon the win and the $600,000 first-place prize. De Wolfe earned $250,000 for finishing second.

Poker champion Phil Hellmuth will be the host of a tournament in December that not only will demonstrate the ability of poker to be used as a fundraiser but will also serve to aide the heroes of the law enforcement world as well.

On Saturday, December 9th, Hellmuth will join up with the TASER Foundation For Fallen Officers when the Second Annual “Playin’ The Hand” Charity Poker Tournament For Fallen Officers takes place at the Fort McDowell Casino outside of Phoenix, AZ. The TASER Foundation is an organization that looks after the families of police officers from the United States and Canada after their loved one is injured or perishes in the line of duty. Each year, over 150 law enforcement men and women are killed while performing their very difficult job and, from the support of such an organization as the TASER Foundation, their families are able to carry on without their loved one.

There will be a series of tournaments that will take place during the day with great prizes for participating in the event. The first tournament, which is a $200 buy in event (with $200 rebuys before the first break and an optional $100 add on) will start off at 3PM. Phil will work this tournament as the emcee for the event, letting the fans and players in on the action as it goes along. A second tournament will start later in the day, the “High Roller” tournament, which will be a $1000 buy in tournament with rebuys (and an optional $500 add on at the break) and players in this event will actually be able to square off on the felt against Hellmuth himself and another former World Champion, Jim Bechtel. This will all lead up to the exciting conclusion of the day of poker with Phil.

Wrapping up the “Playin’ The Hand” Charity Poker Tournament For Fallen Officers will be the “Tournament of Champions”. Taking the final three players from the $200 tournament and the top three players from the $1000 event, they will play down to a champion who will walk away with the biggest prize of the day; a seat at the Main Event for the 2007 World Series of Poker.

Hellmuth is one of the professionals in the poker world who has attempted to use poker as a charitable outlet. In 2005, a charitable tournament he wanted to hold in Texas to benefit breast cancer research was shut down by local authorities, but this hasn’t dampened his desire to help people in all walks of life. He has held other charitable events (both live and online) and is ready to help out the TASER Foundation as well. “Since 9/11, the work of the TASER Foundation has touched my heart. Thus, I am waiving any fees I would normally ask for and am looking forward to attending the event and helping in any way I can,” Phil stated on his blog.

Seats are limited for the event, so players wanting to participate in the tournament are encouraged to pre-register for the event. It will be an excellent opportunity to pay tribute to those men and women who defend us on the streets of America and enjoy some poker as well. To learn more about the tournament, and to learn more about the excellent work of the TASER Foundation for Fallen Officers, be sure to look up the tournament’s website at taserfoundation.org/playinthehand/main.html.