Tuesday, April 11, 2006

(TENTATIVE) "Keep Flopping Aces" to Premier with "ZeeJustin" (Justin Bonomo) as Lead Guest

(Due to recent scheduling difficulties, the ZeeJustin webcast appearance is --- as of today, 04/15/2006 --- back in the "tentative" category. It may still occur as originally planned, and Lou has other quality guests on standby in case the ZeeJustin plan falls through. Thought you'd all like the update --- hh)

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Tired of hearing about "ZeeJustin" (a.k.a. Justin Bonomo), the online-poker whiz kid who was caught multi-account cheating on Party Poker and other major sites? Or would you like to hear more detail regarding the inside details behind Bonomo's actions, his online outing on a poker forum, and the thoughts behind his subsequent posted apologies?

If it's the latter, you're in luck. Your Kick Ass Poker blogger now confirms that ZeeJustin is slated to be the premiere guest on poker author Lou Krieger's new online poker "radio" show, set to debut on Thursday, April 20th at Hold'Em Radio. The weekly show, to be titled "Keep Flopping Aces," will be webcast at 9:00pm EDT (or 8p-CDT, 7p-MDT, and 6p PDT, respectively.) Replays will be available.

Both Bonomo/"ZeeJustin" and Krieger have been frequent topics in this blog in recent weeks, but the newsworthiness of this show's premiere broadcast begs a return for both to the KAP blog. This is believed to the be the first ZeeJustin appearance, other than the notes of apology on his site that were also crossposted to a couple of poker forums. (Bonomo added a few follow-up comments as well.) Live listeners will also have the chance to login in to Hold'em Radio's interactive chat session, and type in their own questions for Bonomo.

We've been hard on Bonomo in this blog, but we're always welcome to give people their say, and Bonomo's actions remain unsatisfactorily explained in the eyes of many. While the extent of online cheating remains unclear, the more we learn about from the inside, the better off the system will be.

One thing that we hope receives further exploration --- the seeming "disconnectivity" between Bonomo's own actions and the consequences of what those actions mean in an online poker world that's more than just a giant electronic game. Too often we see that certain players --- often stereotyped as very young and very male (!) --- think that an online "cheat" is as legitimate in poker as in a game of Urban Chaos, Myst or Grand Theft Auto. Many young online poker stars have cut their gaming teeth on Magic the Gathering, and it'd be interesting to know how deep the "It's just a game" attitude runs in today's new breed of poker kiddies.

Bonomo's neither the first nor the last cheat, just the biggest online one to date. It'll be interesting to see what he has to say.

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One note: Due to a blogspot tech problem this evening, the links above are showing an extra piece of data --- the kickasspoker.blogspot.com tag as part of the URL. While we love when you visit --- and recommend that you do often! --- until we can get this corrected you may need to manually edit the link in your browser window. (Or, it may be fixed.) In the meantime, it should be easy to see what the proper URL needs to be.

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