Tag Archives: big
HBO Documentary 'Lucky' Explores the Lives of Lotto Winners
HBO Documentary ‘Lucky’ Explores the Lives of Lotto Winners
Despite the odds of winning the lottery (Approximately 1 in 195 million) many lucky lottery players have found themselves instant millionaires. All lottery players dream of that big win and wonder what it would be like to become instantly rich. A new documentary on HBO titled ‘Lucky’ takes a look at some lottery winners and their world. The documentary is the product of director Jeffrey Blitz who interviews several lo9tto winners whose world has been transformed by instant riches. Some winners were adept at handling money and others were not. One winner squandered all his winnings in a relatively short time. The 90 minute documentary explores what happens to several lottery winners.
Vietnamese immigrant Quang Dao who won one of the biggest jackpots in lottery history along with seven coworkers at a Lincoln Nebraska meat packing plant shows off the four McMansions he is building son that his children and grandchildren can be near him. After the fall of South Viet Nam in the 1970’s Quang Dao and his family escaped from the war torn country by boat and came to this country with nothing. In their custom made fireplace hearth Quang and his wife have an etched drawing of the refugee boat they escaped in. The story of the Dao family is heartwarming and the Dao family is truly grateful for their good fortune.
The dark side of lotteries is also covered. A Delaware working mother named Verna is also a gambling addict who spends $70 to $100 dollars a day buying lottery tickets in hopes of a big win. Verna picks her lottery numbers on ‘magical’ thought and various superstitious beliefs. There is also the happy story of Kristine and Steven White who lived in New Jersey and won $110 million in 2004 playing the Pennsylvania lottery. Initially the couple lived in the same house and their teenage son still worked at a fast food restaurant. The Whites used part of their winnings to offer financial aid to sick children. When director Blitz interviews the couple a year later they have moved into a private compound in Florida and Steve maintains a sports car collection.
The cautionary tale of Buddy, a former firefighter who squandered all his winnings is sobering. Buddy is now penniless and dependent on an oxygen tent and the kindness of friends. The documentary presents both sides of big lottery wins and the positive or negative experience a huge lottery payout can bring.
Four Good Reasons to Play in Poker Tournaments
There are many reasons to play to play in poker tournaments probably as many as there are tournament poker players. Poker tournaments are rewarding, exciting, lucrative and very useful for gaining experience, which is so important to become a good poker player. Poker tournaments have shown a massive increase in popularity in the recent years and are now not the playground for the pros and stars but a way for all players to have fun and win a good payout.
First of all poker tournaments are real fun, full of competition and thrill. Of course it is nice to play in a cash ring game and leave the table with more cash at the end but it cant be compared with the feeling of joining a tourney together with many other players and waking away the winner over them all. Tournaments offer fantastic pay outs to the players who make into the money which are rarely met by the cash games. These days poker tournaments usually have prize pools in the thousands of dollars and huge earning opportunities.
When you take part in a poker tournament you also have a chance to learn the game inexpensively. If you enter a low buy-in tourney you get plenty of action for your money, if you are good or get lucky the tournaments can give you good two or three hours of poker game. It is also an excellent chance to learn a new variety of poker such as Razz, Omaha Hi-lo and the others for limited amounts of money without the risks of mounting losses to worry about.
Playing in tournaments players can concentrate their efforts becoming more skilful and knowledgeable in the game on the budget that suits them. Not only your costs are set by the tournament buy-in when players enter the tourneys they find that the game tends to be more pure than at the ring tables. The opponents know that they can only last in the game until they run out of chips and can not rely on unlimited amounts of extra buy-ins and top up their losses at any time. That is why players tend to play more by the book and follow the rules. So this is an ideal opportunity to see how poker theory works in practice. Too often in cash games, especially on low limits, players act “crazy” against all rules and logic relying too much on the bankroll to support them and gamble unnecessarily.
Tournaments are also a great chance to compare your skills against some of the top players. Of course you will not find the pros at $20 buy-in level in a small casino but in a large poker room with $200 buy-in players of top calibre are certainly present and give every one a chance to measure up their game against the strong competition. Nothing builds up the confidence of a player than sitting at the same table with a pro and sending him to the rail.
There is a huge number of online poker tournaments offered by all online poker rooms with different levels of buy-in to suit every budget including freerolls where beginners can test their skills for free and without risking a cent of their own. There are multi-table tournaments, where a big number of players compete for the top prize, sit and go tournament that run throughout the day and begin as soon as the required number of players register, heads-up tournaments where two players compete against each other. Online poker tournaments can have different structure. Some allow re-buys and add-ons, where players can add more chips during set period of time, some tournaments are freeze out, where no extra funds can be added.
Online poker rooms often offer their players a chance to qualify to big live poker events such as WSOP, WPT and many other prestigious poker tournaments through the series of satellites. Players who enter big live tourneys mostly do not buy themselves in directly but go through the stages in online poker tournaments. Such satellites often begin from a small buy-in amount, which can be less than $1, and give ordinary players a chance to work their way up into the final and then into the Main Event. History knows many examples when amateurs entered the big events and won over world champions. With growing popularity of online poker satellites such success story have become more frequent and opened the door to the elite tourneys to millions of players around the world.