On board with PokerStars

I'm delighted to say I've taken up a new position with PokerStars, the place where I started my poker journey several years ago.

I will be Head of Blogging, running an ever-growing estate of brilliant blogs around the world. The main one will remain the .com version at pokerstarsblog.com.

We've got an outstanding team of writers, and our tournament coverage is second to none. Please do go and check it out.

Needless to say the Stars software is far superior to anything else, so please ignore the post below!

New PartyPoker table revealed

OK you lucky lot. As you may know I work at PartyPoker Towers, and so am close to the latest developments.

So here, reproduced faithfully, is the picture of our new table that I've just posted on our official blog.

Visit the PartyPoker Blog for more details of this exciting new table.

Anything to declare, Mr Glitter?

What if poker became an Olympic sport?

With the Olympics in full swing, I got to thinking that it would be fun if poker became a showpiece Olympic event. Mrs Punch laughed at me (not for the first time), saying all we do is sit on our @rses and as there is no physical or eye-to-ball activity, poker could not be defined as a sport.

Naturally I disagree. I used to be quite a good sportsman - I played cricket for my county at school (I appreciate it was only Suffolk), was once a decent football goalkeeper, and was pretty handy on the squash court - but as middle age has crept in, the closest I get to sporting action now is the occasional thrash around the golf course. There's lots of rabbits on my local course, and when I'm on the tee they all sit in the middle of the fairway where they know they are safe.

So I'm all for defining poker as a sport as it's something I'm good at (sort of) and it would be nice to be recognised as a decent sportsman again!

Imagine, then, that poker was introduced as a sport in time for the 2012 Olympics in London. What format should the event take? Who should represent your country? All questions that deserve some debate.

My feeling is there should be a series of MTTs covering different disciplines with the same players in each one. There should be a points scoring system, with all results added together to identify the winning country Team for Gold, Silver and Bronze, while individuals would be scored in the same way to identify their medal positions.

Team GB? I'd like to have Neil Channing, Roland de Wolfe, Julian Thew, Julian Gardner and Praz Bansi if I could select a team of five, with Keith Hawkins, Joe Beevers, John Gale and Marc Goodwin as reserves. I'd volunteer as team "coach", which would involve little more than getting the beers in and ensuring they all turned up in time.

So there you have it: 100 metres sprints, marathons, bikes, sailing and... poker. The perfect package for 2012.

Hairy gymnasts at the Olympics

It's been a while since I mentioned hairy gymnasts. Regular readers will know what I'm on about - for the unaware please read up on my hairy gymnast history - but the number of people who have stumbled upon this blog after putting hairy gymnast in their search engine has turned from a trickle into a torrent in recent weeks.

The reason? I can only presume some folks with twisted minds have been watching the gymnastics at the The Olympics in China, and then decided their fetish for a hairy gymnast must be fulfilled immediately via the internet.

They must be very disappointed when they end up here!

If you want to support my quest for hairy gymnast Google domination, please mention and link me in a post.