I think I’ve taken it into a somewhat fresh direction. Instead of just doing hand replays or videos that people would pay (hopefully) a recurring monthly subscription, I decided to do something a little different. At Poker Clinic, I’m offering visitors the chance to get personal lessons from me over video skype calls. So right now, these are 1-on-1 private poker lessons where we talk face to face and I try to help you improve your poker game. I’m keeping them very affordable for the beta-launch… only $20 for a half-hour poker lesson. I’m not sure if I’ll be keeping the price that low for long. In the past, I’ve been able to snag as much as $500/hr to sit down face to face for a poker lesson. I honestly think $20 is a real bargain for what I’m doing… when I was writing the copy for the website, I kind of wanted to sign up for one myself.

The site took a few all-nighters before I was ready to take it live, but it’s up and running now. If you’re interested in taking a poker lesson from me, definitely check it out. Hell, even if you’re not interested, check it out anyway. There’s already some free content up there and I’ve been recording my end of the poker lessons I’ve given so far and hope to edit up some great new original poker content for the free sections of the site. I’m also planning on giving some poker classes on some specific topics in the future… these would be quite a bit more structured and more presentation-style lectures. Been working on trying to adapt Moodle.org’s open-source LMS for the classes. For now, I’m keeping it pretty simple though. So check out my poker clinic website when you get a chance!

Check out my poker clinic and get personal, 1-on-1 poker lessons... for less than a cost of a pizza!

I knocked out a single player, Tom Dwan, on my way to the final table and my 8th place finish.

I made a hero call against Alec Torelli.

@AlecTorelli : Dutch Boyd just made one of the sickest call downs ever v. me. AA754 3 hearts board he calls with KJ a n wins. Wp sir. 200k. Steamed

I got Allen Bari to bluff off most of his stack to me when we were on the bubble.

@Allenbari : Contemplating jumping off the top of the palms so everyone who is about to say that they’re happy I bubbled has to live with my death.

And then I made the final table and went with the wrong hand against Erik Seidel. Pocket Jacks on a 433 board to run smack into Seidel’s aces. Finished 8th. Good game.

The whole thing is going to be aired on CBS… I’m not sure the exact air dates. I think the first episode is going to be on September 30, but I think that will be the first event that my buddy Chino took down. I’m proud to have made it to the final table. It’s always bittersweet cashing in a tournament. Going out 8th place left a lot of money on the table, but I took home a $37k profit which is a pretty nice score and puts me in the running to make the EPL’s $1mil freeroll championship next year.

I’m a big fan of what the league represents and hope it succeeds. A lot of players have been hating on Epic and I feel like it’s such a lame thing to sabotage the efforts of Annie Duke, Jeff Pollack and the rest of the Epic Poker team. They are obviously working very hard to change poker into something that it currently is not: a +EV game.

If you’ve never played around with WordPress, basically it’s what is known as a CMS… or content management software.  It’s what allows me to write this blog without having to get down and dirty with html code.  Wordpress is by far my favorite CMS because it the most used CMS on the Internet.  I think the statistic is that roughly 10% of websites online use WordPress.  It’s open-source, free, and relatively easy to modify.  I’m confident that any website you could think about doing on the Internet could be done using WordPress as your CMS.  In fact, I’ll give you some free advice when it comes to hiring a web developer… if you are ever talking to a web designer and they try to talk you into using Drupal or Joomla for your website, fire them immediately and move on to someone else.

There are issues with WordPress, though… especially when it comes to using free wordpress templates.  A lot of the theme designers encode links on the bottom of their themes for SEO purposes.  That’s why a lot of the times when you visit a blog, you’ll see some weird links at the bottom.  For example… I’m currently playing around with TuxedoAlley.com, trying to set it up and using a free wordpress theme called Terbiumable by Padd Solutions.  It’s an elegant little theme and I really like how it’s coming along.  The only problem is that at the bottom there are four undesirable links to some pretty eclectic sites : top tattoo parlors, Canadian dog boarding, over 40 dating, and amputee dating.  That’s right… amputee dating.

So how this usually works is that the developer of a WordPress theme will go on some forums and sell sponsor links at the bottom of the theme.  Websites, like the amputee dating one, will pay for the links to be on the bottom of the theme because the more inbound links they are able to get to their website, the higher they will rank in Google and Bing searches.  And it works… the amputee dating site that linked on the bottom of my theme is on the first search page when you type in that term.  So is the dog boarding website for the term they are fighting for.  And so is the over 40 singles club website.

These themes are usually free to modify as you want.  So I decided it wouldn’t do to link out to these weird sites on my new tuxedo website.  Usually stripping these outgoing sponsor links just involves opening up the footer.php file in your WordPress editor, selecting a few <a href=”"></a> links and hitting the delete key.  Sometimes, though, they get a little trickier.  I couldn’t find what was going on in the footer.php file and so I started looking at every single .php file included in the theme.  Once I got to a file called prelude.php, I saw that PADD Solutions got a little trickier than most of the theme developers.  When I opened the file, it looked like this :

If you’re thinking that this doesn’t look like php, you’re right. It’s actually base64 encoded. And to read exactly what’s going on here, first you have to copy the code after the $_F=__FILE__;$_X=’ and before the ;eval( and then run it through a Base64 decoder. There’s a good free one that I found at http://base64decode.org/.

But once I ran that through, it came out still looking kind of gibberishy… like this :

So I base64 decoded the eval statement and saw that the following string was what was being “eval”ed :
What this does is changes all of the 1s into As, 2s into Os, etc. So basically, the theme developers were FURTHER obfuscating this code by turning all of the letters into vowels.

So after a lot of decoding and then using the “find, replace” option on Notepad++, I finally get a look at what the developers were doing with this code. It looked like this :

So what’s going on here? I can speak PHP about as well as a two-year old can speak english… but following the code, it looks like the footer isn’t actually hardcoded into the theme at all. Instead, the theme connects to the theme designers website and pulls the sponsor links out, then posts them to the site. It also looks like the theme automatically checks to see if the theme has been updated, and if it has been, it looks like it updates it automatically. That’s actually pretty scary, because what that means is that PADD solutions could change my code in an instant and make it so that the website was doing all sorts of malicious things… sending spam emails or participating in a denial of service attack are just two things I can think of.

At the end, they have a snippet of code that checks to see if the sponsor links were spit out… if they weren’t, then a it calls for a “wp_die” function with the message “Something wrong.”

Quick and dirty solution to remove the links at the bottom of Terbiumable wordpress theme follow these steps :
First, load up your dashboard. Click on Appearance. Then click on Editor right under “Terbiumable options”.
Second, click on prelude.php on the right hand side. Select everything and hit delete. Then hit update file.
Third, click on footer.php on the right hand side. Count down to the 20th line. Delete that line.

So what’s the point of all this? Well, mainly that you need to be careful when using wordpress themes… particularly free wordpress themes. If the designer has base64 encoded strings in their theme files, it’s probably best to just walk away and use a different theme. This has really been a headache so far and I might have to take my own advice if I can’t figure out how to reverse engineer this and hack it up so I don’t have to link to amputee dating sites.

Anyway, I’ve found flickr.com to be an amazing resource for photos to use in these sites.  An advanced search lets you browse only the photos that are under a creative commons license to use commercially.  It’s really been a cost saver for these projects.

While browsing for tuxedo photos, I came across this picture that was just awesome and figured I’d share it with you.  Hope you get a smile out of it like I did.

I’ve gotta say, though… this whole FTP situation has left me in a pretty sour mood. Every day that goes on without a word from Full Tilt just eats at me. I’ve been short with my girlfriend, stressed about cash, and just generally miserable. The other night Michele said something that hit home, though.

“You know… you’re not the only one who has been affected by all this. You’re not the only one who had money on there or was relying on affiliate payments.”

I guess it’s human nature to be selfish and only focus on how things affect you personally. When she said those words and I started thinking about it, it really set in just how many people must be going through hell right now because of this Full Tilt screw up. I think there must be a ton of poker players who are just in bad shape struggling to make rent, pay for gas, buy groceries, whatever. God forbid you were an online grinder in the Midwest with kids. I went on craigslist jobs and typed in “poker”. I saw numerous posts trying to get a stake for cash games… reaching out to the abyss and linking to OPR stats that don’t mean anything now. It’s really sad.

I really hope that this Full Tilt screw up doesn’t turn into a Full Tilt scandal. If the players don’t eventually get paid (and soon) there are going to be some big repercussions. Families are going to be torn apart and at least a few people will probably suicide. Pretty much anyone who ever owned a piece of Full Tilt would have to always be worried about their safety.

Anyway, hopefully by this time next week we’ll have some good news. In the meantime, just remind yourself that other people are hurting worse than you.

Here’s a cool video I found while looking on the Internet for some free wordpress themes for video sites. Thought it was such a cool idea that I had to post about it.

So what am I up to after the series? Well, not back to playing yet. I decided to take a week or two break away from the tables and focus on setting up some more websites and working on existing ones. I’m going to try to give this blog a nice redesign soon. But today I’ve been working on a new site… www.LocalVegas.com. I started working on the local vegas site at around 4am. Got it somewhat presentable around 8am. You can take a look at what it looks like :

LocalVegas.com - Get local Vegas discounts and reviews by Las Vegas locals.

I won’t lie to you… the content so far is pretty light. One welcome article, a post about the top 10 hotels in vegas, another post about the top poker rooms in vegas, and a last one about the current weather in vegas. None of them have a lot of meat to them, yet. But I think the website has some potential. Enough that I’ll probably put in a few more days trying to make it stronger… building up the content, establishing some backlinks, etc. I already setup a twitter and facebook account for the website. In a few days, I’ll probably make this one into a case study and show step-by-step what was done.

Anyway, check out www.LocalVegas.com and let me know what you think of it.