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Imperial take it down at UK student poker championship
Published: 2005-04-28
 Published on Thursday, 28 April 2005
Imperial ‘take it down’ at UK student poker championship
Our universe is governed by laws of chance. Sub-atomic particles, the very stuff of reality, can only be measured in terms of probabilities. Albert Einstein famously found this idea hard to accept. He could not bring himself to accept that events such as spontaneous radioactive decays were truly random. He believed that “God does not play dice with the universe”; his metaphysical conviction was that there were certain hidden variables at play.
If God doesn’t play dice with the universe then surely he plays poker, where there is an element of design and chance. It is against this cultural backdrop, perhaps, that poker has gone from being a fad in this country to something resembling an organised religion. And if you were there at last month’s UK Student Poker Championship, you would be forgiven for conflating poker with religion.
The inaugural championship was highly organised and involved 259 students from around 35 different university poker societies. The game was No Limit Texas Hold ‘Em, as featured on TV series such as Channel 4’s Late Night Poker. Tickets to the event were worth £30 each, making a total prize pool of £7,770.
The organisers, St Andrews University Poker Society and Betfred (who are soon to launch an online poker website) claimed that this was the biggest ever tournament poker event in the UK. Rumour had it that it was the biggest ever in Europe.
It wasn’t hard to see why, especially with the top prize being a prestigious $10,000 seat at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, where there will be $50m of prize money at stake.
A team from Imperial’s Poker Society travelled up to St Andrews in Scotland to take part in the event. Adam Latimer, Saurabh Pandya, Robert Glasspool, Karan Lohia and Felix science editor Darius Nikbin had qualified via an Imperial satellite tournament.
The first day was a ten hour marathon, during which the 260 players were reduced to 30. These 30 would go on to play for a place at the final table on the second day. Two out of the five Imperial players, Robert and Darius, made it to day two – in itself an excellent result.
Eventually, after an gruelling two days of playing poker, Rob finished in a superb 20th position. Darius fought his way through to the final table, where he finished the tournament in third place overall. To the delight of the home fans, the eventual winner was Calum MacNicol of St Andrews University.
Third and 20th places were excellent results for Imperial PokerSoc, and with more tournaments this term and next year, it looks like tournament poker at Imperial is going from strength to strength.
For more information about poker at Imperial, visit the poker society’s website, www.icups.co.uk.
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Milken conference offers global view of media Greg Heffernan India Post News Service
Published: 2005-04-28
 Published: 2005-04-28
Milken conference offers global view of media
Greg Heffernan
India Post News Service
BEVERLY HILLS: It was during the seminar on Intellectual Property and the Media that that Fox News Corp’s Chairman, Peter Chernin, turned to Sony Picture’s Chairman, Michael Lynton, and asked him: “Do you think theatrical will survive?” Chernin’s question was in response to the fact the theatrical distribution of a motion picture America now only represents 25 percent of the industry’s revenues.
Lynton responded by saying that he felt theatrical would survive and that it still is a popular cultural activity in America to go to movies, despite the fact that more and more Americans are bypassing a theatrical release of a film and just waiting for it to come out on DVD.
“Fifty percent of the purchasers of a motion picture DVD have never seen the film,” added Lynton. “And we’re seeing what in the book publishing business we used to refer to the ‘paperback effect’ where people would not buy hard copies of books and rather wait for the paperback edition.” With a window as narrow as 90 days from theatrical release to DVD issue the motion picture industry’s current take on theatrical released movies is over 9 billion dollars whereas DVD sales are currently at over 21 billion dollars. However, theatrical release of a motion picture often dictates the value of later ancillary markets for those films.
Robert Kotick, president of Activision, who make video games based on many successful motion pictures said that the myth that video games are for kids was false when he pointed out that the average age of video game users in America was 30 years old. “The average age for users of one of the most popular websites on the Internet, Party Poker.com, is also much older than we expected: 40 year old women,” he said. Jonathan Miller of CEO of AOL said Internet advertising is definitely improving after a dismal bubble burst in the 90s. “AOL Europe took a 600 million loss two years ago,” said Miller thoughtfully. “Then they broke even last year. We made 100 million profit this year so things have improved,” he said. With a 100 million subscribers in the US currently AOL Time Warner is one of the few Internet media conglomerates already bridged with a major studio for film distribution on a broadband venue.
The Milken Global Conference is a yearly event in Beverly Hills with workshops that cover economics, markets, politics and policies of nations led by leaders of the world. News Corp owner and CEO Rupert Murdock and General Wesley Clark headed a Monday luncheon discussion that emphasized among other things better education for American children. “India and China are certainly doing quite well emphasizing math and science and so should we here in the US,” said Murdoch who criticized public school courses that offer “soft academics” like learning to use a digital camera.
At another seminar called Creators of Media: Where is the Balance of Power? Sony Pictures Digital President Yair Landau said that as the studios become more global and connected to a vast web of cable, network, and now broad band distribution venues then the content part of media based on good solid stories is going to become more and more important. Lions Gate Entertainment CEO, Jon Feltheimer, whose company’s stock has gone up 400 percent over the last few years, echoed Landau’s emphasis on content: “We own 8000 titles in our library composed of Trimark, Artisan and Lions Gate Films, and we are producing 18 films right now. As a former guitar player I’m cued to the importance of content as part of making films.” Chase Carey, CEO of Direct TV agreed: “We want to be the best television distributor in the world. It’s all about content. For example the NFL has great content and it pulls in millions of viewers because of that,” he said.
On the subject of piracy the panelists on Intellectual Property and Media agreed that heavier penalties and serious prosecution by law enforcement was what the industry favored. News Corp’s Peter Chernin mentioned that when kids at colleges start hearing that some student was fined, prosecuted and even thrown out of his or her college for piracy, he felt it would have an effect on a student downloading illegally or opting to pay for a DVD, film or even a song. Warner Brothers’ CEO Barry Meyer added that even with rampant piracy in Asia he felt the theatrical platform of a film still had a sturdy life of its own. “We co-financed a multiplex with Mann Theaters in China and at the premier of the film Harry Potter we saw pirates selling the very film right outside the theater,” said Meyer laconically. “In spite of the fact that everyone was buying a pirated copy of the film outside the theater and carrying it with them inside the theater the film still completely sold out!” he said.
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