Thank you all for entering. I plan to have more giveaways in the coming weeks, including a giveaway for some free copies of my upcoming book How To Read Hands At No-Limit Hold’em before the preordering period starts.

The next time you come to Las Vegas, consider getting an hour or two of personal coaching from me. A little bit can go a long way, and at $200/hour, one significant breakthrough can have you paying for the lessons relatively quickly with improved results at the tables. Email me at edmiller@notedpokerauthority.com to inquire about availability.

With some of the announcements will come random drawings for FREE stuff. The catch is, I’m going to select the winners from those who Like me on Facebook. As of today, I have only 353 likes on Facebook, which is kind of sad given that I’ve sold nearly 300,000 books. All you have to do to get a chance for free new stuff is Like my profile. The more likes I get by the end of the month, the more free stuff I’m going to give out.

My goal is to get to 10,000 likes by the end of May. If I get there, I’ll give away 100 free copies of my new ebook. So like me today, spread the word around to all your poker-playing friends, and enjoy a freeroll on my latest and greatest.

We’re in the home stretch on the book. Unfortunately, every time it feels like a book is almost done, it always takes a few more months from that point before it’s actually ready to go to print. That’s basically the situation we’re in right now… I can see the end, but there’s still a frustrating few months of work to do until the book is out the door.

I’ve also been thinking about and working on the next installments of the Playing Deceptively series that I started a few of days ago. Part 2 should be ready to go sometime soon.

Also be sure to check out Stoxpoker these days. I’m presently in the middle of producing a mega-part series on blind stealing and defense. The series talks about how and when to try to steal the blinds, how to deal with getting 3-bet (especially by light 3-bettors), how to defend your blinds, and so forth. Part 6 is coming out in about a week… that’s about six hours of video on playing in no-limit hold’em blind stealing situations. As you can imagine, it’s pretty thorough. Joining Stoxpoker is super-cheap these days with no signup fee (just the monthly rate), so really I think it’s well, well more than worth it to sign up and check out my blind stealing and defense series (not to mention the 700+ other great videos).

Update

Holy cow. It snowed like crazy today in Las Vegas. Never seen it like this. It was a full-on snowstorm like you get in the regular parts of the country. Check out our front porch.

We probably have about 5-6 inches of accumulation by now. The kids in the neighborhood went crazy making snowmen. Teenagers around here have never seen snow like this before in their lives. It’s cool.

Our new dog, Bella, loved it too. She just ran around and around in big circles, flopping sometimes in a big pile of snow. Here’s a picture of Bella.

Our older dog Floyd, who lived in New York with us for two years, wasn’t nearly so excited.

New articles are available free to read on the site for 30 days, and then they become premium archive articles. So over time your archive subscription will grant you access to more and more articles.

The payment system is new code and some people have bought subscriptions already and run into a bug. We’re working on tracking the bug down, but in the meantime if you sign up for a subscription but don’t get access to the articles immediately, please send an email to edmiller@notedpokerauthority.com and I will add your access manually within 24 hours. Sorry about the slight delay, but you’ll definitely get your money’s worth.

Also, I’d really appreciate any feedback you have about the process in general. In particular, if you find any additional problems or bugs besides the instant access bug, please let me know in the comments.

UPDATE 7/16 1pm: I believe we’ve found and squashed the instant access bug. So you should now have immediate access once you sign up for a subscription.

One of the main attractions at the Stoxpoker booth this year is the Man Vs. Machine Poker Championship where Bryce Paradis, Stoxpoker lead instructor and probably the world’s best heads-up limit hold’em player, will head a contingent of coaches who are challenging Polaris, the world’s most advanced heads-up limit hold’em bot, to a grudge match. I’m definitely looking forward to the match. Polaris is supposed to be one very mean machine.

I hope to get some playing in while I’m at the World Series also, so if you see me in a cardroom somewhere, definitely drop by and say hi.

The membership system software for the site is almost finished, so we’re almost ready to get the archive articles back online. I’m shooting to try to make that happen within the next week or two. Thanks for being patient everyone. I know some people have been missing them, but you shouldn’t have to wait too much longer.

For about the last nine months, behind the scenes, I’ve been receiving pressure and threats aimed at forcing me either to shut down Noted Poker Authority or to make the vast majority of its content available for pay only (sounds ridiculous, I know). Up until now I’ve refused. But it’s become unpleasant and disruptive enough to me that I’m giving in. I’m not proud of it, but when I weighed my options this one made the most sense for me personally.

Effective yesterday, all articles on the site older than 30 days are unavailable. We’re going to develop a system to allow the content to be accessed for a fee, and when it’s ready the archive articles will be available again at some cost per article. I’m not happy with this solution, but to me it was basically either this or take the site down completely, so I’m going with this.

EDIT: There seems to be some confusion. The archive posts older than 30 days are the ones that are unavailable now and will eventually be available for a fee. Posts newer than 30 days will be readable for free as usual. So if you just read the site regularly or subscribe via RSS or email, very little will change for you.

Stoxpoker has rolled out a couple of new features that I wanted to tell you guys about.

First, they have unveiled this amazing whiz-bang new widget that lets you watch Stoxpoker videos directly from Noted Poker Authority. If you’re already a Stoxpoker member and NPA reader, you can just cruise over to the Stoxpoker at NPA page and watch all the new videos.

If you’ve just tuned in to NPA and are wondering what all this Stoxpoker stuff is about, then definitely go check out the Stoxpoker at NPA page right now.

Second, Stoxpoker has a new hand history converter that will reformat all your hand histories into an easy to read format for posting on forums and blogs. I’ve been looking for a dependable hand history converter for a while, and I’m finally happy with this one from Stoxpoker.

So if you want to post a hand on the message board, you can now use the Stoxpoker hand converter to post it. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to get the forum software to recognize any tags or codes, so for now just use the Plain Text option in the converter.

In practical terms, in addition to the free content at NPA — the articles and Q&As, the message board, the poker tools, and the poker coach directory — we will add paid content to the site. This could be more articles (including more advanced and technical ones) written by me and by other authors, audio, video, more tools, and perhaps other things I haven’t thought of yet. Since NPA will be partnered with StoxPoker, subscribing to the paid content at one site will grant you benefits or discounts at the other site.

You won’t begin to see changes to the site for another few months. When we do start to add premium content, you will still be able to participate at NPA as a free member if you want. We’ll still have free articles, free forums, and so forth. The premium content will offer you some more NPA bang for your buck, so to speak.

I’m excited about this partnership. I’ve been wanting to make this site bigger and better, and I think a partnership with StoxPoker will be a great way to do it. So get excited with me, and I’ll bring you updates as things come along.

Your page is blocked due to a security policy that prohibits access to category
Gambling.

Really? I tried some other poker-related sites. A couple of them were blocked too. Then I wondered if the word “poker” in the URL was triggering it. Nope, found some sites with poker in the URL that weren’t blocked.

Apparently someone at some net nanny operation saw fit to add my site specifically to their list of objectionable content. I’m somewhat dismayed. I find it hard to believe that any thinking person would pursue my admittedly wonky articles about pot control or preflop play and conclude that coffee shop owners worldwide would want to protect their customers from me.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t really think that a thinking person did this. Or, at least, that whoever did this was thinking too hard at the time they did it. Which is, ultimately, what irks me. Unthinking censorship is a dangerous thing… far more dangerous, in my opinion, than a few articles about controlling your monkey tilt. I had a whole rant planned, but I imagine I’d largely be preaching to a choir, so I’ll leave most of it unsaid.

I will say that I’m concerned about how habituated we’ve become, especially in the past decade, to being “protected” from things. We’re now regularly searched not just at airports, but at bus stations, concerts, clubs, and tourist attractions. I went to see the Statue of Liberty with my nephew last year, and we were searched not once, but twice before we were allowed on the ferry. Searched to see the Statue of Liberty. Oh the irony.

It’s now “standard practice” to get drug tested before getting a new job, and sometimes randomly while we have the job as well. And our internet usage is monitored, directed, and blocked by our employers, our government, and now apparently our coffee shops. Color me dubious.

So, please, if you run a coffee shop, please please resist the urge to net nanny up your internet. Don’t be part of the problem, be part of the solution.

If your favorite internet connection has blocked Noted Poker Authority, don’t despair! You can still read the site freely by subscribing to the full feed RSS in a feedreader such as Bloglines. You can subscribe to the comments feed also, as well as various feeds on the message board. So you can read almost the entire site without ever hitting the server. Nanny will never know.

And if you don’t want to use a feedreader, you can always subscribe by email as well.