[Please sign up for my Relay For Life charity tournament on Full Tilt. It starts just a few hours from when I posted this, at 18:00 ET, Sunday, November 22. It's in the Private Tournament listings, $5 + $5 NLHE, 10 red pros already signed up to play, all rake going to the American Cancer Society. The password is "relay".]

As I mentioned in my previous post, my third rule concerns not letting people use me or my Blog or my contacts for their commercial purposes. Naturally, I make exceptions in many circumstances, but I’ve found my presumptively helpful nature is just an invitation to be abused. The Blog program initially didn’t have any spam filter, so I was inundated with advertisements posing as comments. It didn’t take any great artistry or discretion to delete these, just time. A lot of time.

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[Please sign up for my Relay For Life charity tournament on Full Tilt. It starts just a few hours from when I posted this, at 18:00 ET, Sunday, November 22. It's in the Private Tournament listings, $5 + $5 NLHE, 10 red pros already signed up to play, all rake going to the American Cancer Society. The password is "relay".]

I have a couple of hard-and-fast rules governing my cyber-behavior. The first is not to lend or give out money to strangers. The second is not to respond when they ask. A third, vaguely related, rule is to be very careful about letting people use me or Full Tilt or my contacts or my good nature – okay, my “naive nature” – for commercial purposes. Even though these rules seem pretty simple, I don’t take them for granted. And now I’m thinking about the benefits of becoming a complete sucker and abandoning them altogether.

But before you plead with me to give you money to play an online tournament in ten minutes or to invest in your vitamin cult or share Andy Beal’s personal e-mail address because you have to give him vital information, read on.

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At 18:00 ET on Sunday, November 22, I’ll be holding my Relay For Life charity tournament on Full Tilt, a $5 + $5 NLHE event with the entire $5 rake from each player going to the Scottsdale, AZ Relay, for the benefit of the American Cancer Society. You can find the tournament on the Private tournament menu. The password, which appears in the tournament lobby, is “relay.”

To win the match Joe Cada had to let Darvin Moon back in. His best way of closing out Moon was to let Darvin over-extend himself on a bluff or a marginal hand.  But because Moon was betting so often, this also put Cada on the path to having to make some expensive lay downs. Maybe Joe made some mistakes on these hands but he had a plan – I think a very smart plan and he was doing his best to execute it.

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The final table looked a lot different on TV than when I watched it live. For that matter, Joe Cada looked much different playing heads-up compared with how I saw him on ESPN on Tuesday night. Heads-up, he dominated Moon and seemed like a very savvy player. He was much less a focus of my attention on Saturday, especially because of the time he spent short-stacked. I didn’t see, didn’t notice, or didn’t keep track of all the times on Saturday when he got his chips in bad – but it seemed like always. On Monday he played like a stud. On Saturday more often than not, he looked like a dud.

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Tom Dwan has hit the ground running as the newest member of Team Full Tilt. He has started a new blog and his initial post shares some fun details from the life of one of the world’s highest-stakes, most successful, and youngest poker players. Tom also promises some juicy details about his game. I recommend you keep up with his blog, but these were the highlights from his first entry:

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Bless their hearts; Darvin Moon’s friends did their best to keep up with the Joe Cada cheering section. They did a fine job, but like their representative at the final table they were overwhelmed by the prospect of Michigan actually being first in something.

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Harrah’s better watch what it wishes for. It tried to make the Final Table of the 2009 World Series of Poker into a spectator sport and tournament director Jack Effel encouraged the audience to behave like spectators. Unfortunately, they did exactly that.

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What is the highest goal TV poker can attain? To me, the best TV poker makes you want to PLAY POKER. For the most part, the way poker is televised fails to do this. I don’t necessarily blame TV for that. Their goal is to get people to watch, not to get them to play. Even though showing the players’ hole cards was a great innovation that made certain aspects of televised poker more exciting, few people realize how it pushed aside other means of presenting poker, including some means that may occasionally be more exciting and better.

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Shortly before final-table heads-up play began last night between Joe Cada and Darvin Moon, there was considerable speculation in press row about how long the heads-up match would last. Sorry, but by the end of a poker tournament, the media almost always wants it to end fast. Even though the players had 60-135 big blinds, I did not think we were looking at a long heads-up match.

When I said that, I was talking about 25-80 hands. (It actually went 87 hands, according to PokerNews.com, to which I always refer to when looking for hand-by-hand information. In fact, because I may have numbered the hands incorrectly, I’ll refer to their hand numbers, ##277-364.) I was correct that it went fast – it almost ended in one hand.

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