There have been a couple of high-profile incidents of online poker cheating. One of online poker’s best players, Sorel Mizzi “Imper1um”, was caught last year buying an account from the former managing editor of Bluff Magazine, Chris Vaughn. Vaughn had made the final table of a tournament, and sold the account to Mizzi, who went on to win the event and almost $200,000. They were caught and Mizzi was banned from playing online.

But now BetFair.com has not only allowed Mizzi to play there, but they have made him a member of team BetFair. Why is a company hiring a known cheater when there is plenty of young online talent out there? Especially a company called ‘BetFair’. Are you kidding me? Mizzi is the exact opposite of someone that bets fair – he cheats. And cheaters never prosper.

Washington State Democratic candidate Dino Rossi went on-air Tuesday to express his strong opposition to that state’s felony law banning online poker. Although the majority of the on-air interview between talk radio host Dori Monson and the politician dealt with questions concerning the budget, the first question up was about online poker. When asked what he thought about Governor Christine Gregoire’s decision to make playing online poker in the state of Washington a felony, here’s what Rossi had to say:

“I never would have signed that bill. Because actually, they made it a crime for someone playing poker online on their computer. They made it a crime that’s equal with child pornography. Now, a felony will mess up your life for a very long time. You have some college kid that’s playing poker online and you’re giving him a felony for that? It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t fit the crime.”

Later on in the interview Rossi was asked if he would support a measure reversing the ban and he said that he “would sign legislation that would overturn it, certainly.”

Every poker room runs some kind of freeroll action. Action changes by the day, and if you’d like a complete list of freeroll action go to http://www.freerolls.net/

PokerStars is currently running a promotion called the Million Dollar WSOP Giveaway. There are daily free qualifiers that will get you to the next step, towards winning one of the many all-inclusive WSOP main event packages.

Party Poker runs many sizable freerolls every day. They have multiple $1250, $2500, $250, $200,000 qualifiers, and $500 freerolls for their players.

Carbon Poker runs a $50 freeroll every two hours, plus a daily $2000, $1000 and $500 tournament.

Poker Time has a bunch of daily freerolls too, with multiple prize pools of $1000, $200 and $250.

Check the individual poker rooms for times, or check the freeroll monitor I mentioned earlier. You’ll have to be a member of each site to play in their freeroll events.

There are seven online poker rooms that offer multilingual software. There are seven trustworthy sites that are multilingual, plus there are a few more but I wouldn’t play on them. Most have been around quite awhile, but new ones are starting to pop up. RedKings.com has only been a round a short time, since 2006, and they offer software in 17 different languages.

EverestPoker.com has been around since 2005 and they offer poker in 12 different languages. Languages that the software supports are French, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, German, Japanese, Czech, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Icelandic and Finnish.

Most multilingual sites won’t offer action to Americans. PokerStars.com does, but that’s about it. Not that multilingual rooms are desired in the States anyway, it’s mainly a European feature that hadn’t really been important to players until the game became so popular over there. Multilingual software will become the norm for most sites in the future.

Online poker is okay in the U.K. but not in the U.S. because of a difference in political structure. In the U.S., politicians are funded by private companies and organizations who donate large sums of money to empower the candidates that they want in power. The current politicians in power in the U.S. have friends that donate money to them who control the horse racing industry. These people feel that online poker is cutting into their gaming profits.

This, combined with the current government thinking that their lottery profits were also in jeopardy, prompted the decision to outlaw the game. This is supposed to force bettors to gamble on the horses and lotteries instead.

In the U.K., the government is a parliamentary system with representatives from different areas. The governments don’t make choices based on what their benefactors would want. Instead, they have recognized the potential of regulating and taxing the industry.

The British newspaper Metro, which has readership in 13 U.K. cities, has launched a new poker and online bingo site. The paper has over 2.8 million readers online and in distribution, and hopes to tap into this following in the online poker market. The paper has signed a deal with St. Minver for online bingo and poker facilities, and the poker software will be Boss Media’s. The site will join the International Poker Network of sites along with Liberty Poker, bet-at-home.com, Casino Club Poker and PokerHour.com.

The popularity of poker in the U.K. has big media players all competing for the gaming dollar. Now that the game is regulated in the U.K., different types of companies are putting resources into profiting from the game. Metro is the fourth largest paper in the U.K. and should make a splash in the U.K. gaming market, if their marketing approach properly reaches the public.

Drew Carey has become poker’s newest crusader. He is speaking out because the U.S. recently raided a Veterans of Foreign Wars Post in Dallas because of a poker game. The Post was forced to shut down shortly after from lack of funding.

On his video blog on reason.tv, the new Price is Right host said, “Poker is about as American as baseball and apple pie. It was born here in America. Mark Twain loved it. He’s a great American.

“Until recently, Supreme Court justices had a monthly game,” continued Carey. “They’re great Americans. You’d think playing poker in the VFW hall would be about as American as anything you can do.”

Carey also stated that the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act is “misguided”. He will not be the last celebrity to bring this issue to the forefront before next year’s election, as Hollywood rallies behind a new Democratic government in America.

Word has come out that the WSOP brand may be making its debut online. The most powerful brand in poker apparently has aimed its ambitions towards the online market, excluding American players of course, for now. This follows the brand’s successful step into the tournament tour market with the WSOP Circuit Events.

The brand that made poker huge will surely make a splash on the online market. The potential in WSOP satellite entries will drive large numbers of players to the site. If Harrah’s does it right, it could become one of the leading sites in a few months.

This news also points to a bright future for online poker. Harrah’s wouldn’t be looking to expand online if they didn’t feel the political stance on the industry wasn’t going to change. The U.S. will eventually be forced to regulate the game, and Harrah’s wants to be there when it does.

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Poker bots are becoming more popular as people try and gain an edge on the game. The bots have been around for years but haven’t really been taken seriously until recently. Most of what’s out there is still garbage and require you do a ton of your own programming to get them up and running. But they have been improving since they first showed up on the scene, and some observers were beginning to think that they were better than live players.

That theory was put to the test last July when pro poker players Phil Laak and Ali Eslami took on the bot in a battle of abilities. After 500 hands, the players beat the bot by $570. That result was similar to tests done earlier, showing that the bot is not quite up to human ability yet. If it can’t beat Phil Laak, it’s not gonna make you a lot of money.

The Bodog Poker room will be celebrating its One Billionth Hand some time this month. In only three years the room has achieved this milestone occasion, and they are planning on celebrating it in a big way. Every day from Nov 5 to 26 Bodog Poker will be giving away $50 to ten players a day. The remaining $12,000 will be given to the player who wins the billionth hand, in the form of $1000 per month for a year.

Players at the table of the big hand will split $10,000, and there will be increasing giveaways after the 980,000,000th hand has been played. The prizes will be given away every five million hands until the billionth. Players involved in those hands will get $109 worth of tournament credits, which include the weekly $100,000 Guaranteed and Player’s Choice qualifiers. Those events can get you into a WPT or EPT event in the future.