The new recruits follow the appointment of Dusty ‘leatherass’ Schmidt from the US at the end of March.

American George jorj95 Lind and Denys diatty Shcherbakov from Ukraine are the latest players to join an impressive group that includes Thomas boku87 Boekhoff, Grayson spacegravy Physioc, Randy nanonoko Lew and Steve stevesbets Jacobs.

The Pokerstars announcement records that Shcherbakov started out on the video games circuit before making the switch to poker in 2005 by opening an account on PokerStars. After starting at five-dollar s and g games, he earned SuperNova status and is ranked as one of the top players from his country.

Lind is a former computer science student who started playing poker at land casinos, developing his skills sufficiently to make two final tables at the World Championship Of Online Poker and achieve SuperNova Elite status with three million points amassed in 2008 alone.

It is an honour to be recognised as one of the elite in poker alongside so many other great names who are on PokerStars Team Online, said Lind.

The leading online casino revealed that over 8,000 participants battled it out live between October 23 and November 2 on the Lara Croft Tomb Raider slot for their share of a prize pool totalling €1.3 million.

However, it was a South London player known as ‘Stefan’ that took the highest honour after qualifying for the tournament on July 18 by placing a small bet of two Euros. To top it off, he posted his top score in the final on his birthday to put himself in pole position for the mega jackpot.

“This tournament was always going to be exciting with one million Euros up for grabs and it is a great honour to be involved in creating the first online slot tournament millionaire,” said Charlie Goodenough, Head Of Marketing for LadbrokesCasino.com.

“The Lara Croft Tomb Raider game is one of our most popular games because it is simple yet fun to play. It is part of a portfolio of over 450 thrilling games including numerous variants of roulette, blackjack and slots.”

The Grand Slam Of Slots tournament saw 482 players walk away in the money while LadbrokesCasino.com managed to rank a further 83 players in these paid places for a total payout reaching €1,039,400. Players at LadbrokesCasino.com using the pseudonyms ‘Embalu’ and ‘Gundam00’ also walked away with sizeable cheques after picking up a healthy €5,000 each.

In July, the Illinois General Assembly passed the Video Gaming Act, which legalized video gaming as a method to help pay for Illinois’ $31 billion capital improvement bill for road, school and infrastructure projects. County and local governments can pass laws banning the machines from their jurisdictions. The City Council will consider this issue at its Sept. 1 meeting.

The most recent complaint, filed in the Las Vegas division of the District of Nevada, alleges infringement of U.S. Patent numbers 5,688,174, 6,921,337, 7,201,661 and 7,575,512, which protect the proprietary electronic devices and system architecture used in the TableMAX multiplayer games. The suit alleges that Shuffle Master’s Table Master multiplayer gaming device and system infringes on each of the patents. The suit seeks injunctive relief along with unspecified damages and fees.

ABOUT TABLEMAX CORPORATION

TableMAX is a developer of electronic table games and designs, engineers, and distributes patented electronic table games worldwide. TableMAX owns global rights to popular table game content, including Progressive Blackjack, Caribbean Stud Poker, Caribbean Draw(R) Poker, Texas Hold ‘Em Bonus(R) Poker and Bonus Blackjack(R).

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This release contains certain “forward-looking statements” relating to the business of the TableMAX Corporation (the “Company”) and its principal subsidiary, TableMAX Gaming, Inc., which can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as “believes”, “expects”, or similar expressions. Such forward looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, including all business uncertainties relating to product development, marketing, market acceptance, future capital requirements, and competition in general and other factors that may cause actual results to be materially different from those described herein as anticipated, believed, estimated, or expected. The Company is under no obligation to (and expressly disclaims any such obligation to) update or alter its forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

In 2006, Congress, cloaking cunning with moralizing, effectively outlawed Internet gambling by making it illegal for banks or credit-card companies to process payments to online gambling operations. This was more than moral pork for social conservatives. It also blocked online competitors from poaching gamblers from the nation’s most aggressive promoters of gambling — state governments. They are increasingly addicted to revenues raised by lotteries — the 42 states, including Michigan, that have lotteries spent $520 million in 2007 promoting them — and from taxation of other legal gambling. The law exempted Internet state lotteries and two powerful and vocal interests — online betting on horse racing and some fantasy sports betting online.

Having turned gambling, which once was treated as a sin, into a social policy, government looks unusually silly criminalizing online forms of it. Granted, some people gamble excessively (although not nearly as many people as eat excessively). Granted, gambling becomes addictive to a small minority (although it is not nearly as addictive as smoking and drinking). Granted, gambling is morally dubious when it is only the unproductive pursuit of wealth without work (although gambling is productive of pleasure for tens of millions of Americans for whom it is a frequent pastime). But never mind whether government should try to tightly circumscribe a ubiquitous human activity that generally harms nobody.

That is beside the point Lederer and the Poker Players Alliance are toiling to make, which is that by sweeping online poker into its proscription of online gambling, Congress committed a category mistake. Congress, Lederer thinks, should revisit the work of John von Neumann (1903-57), the Hungarian-born mathematician who, after working for the Manhattan Project on implosion design for the atomic bomb, became a defense intellectual specializing in the relevance of game theory to strategic thinking. Chess involves logic; roulette involves probability theory. Poker involves logic, probability and something pertinent to military and diplomatic strategy — bluffing.

A poker player — unlike someone playing roulette, a lottery or “video poker” (which Lederer says is a misnomer; it is a game of chance governed by a machine) — is trying to apply skill, acquired by experience, to increase the probability of winning each hand.

Lederer started at Columbia University but left, reasoning that he had found his vocation. He has won about $5 million.

But what is his stake in decriminalizing online poker? After all, he plays much more on green felt-covered tables than online. His interest is threefold. First, his libertarian temperament — he lives in Las Vegas, where almost anything goes — is offended by mother-hen government. Second, he wants as many people as possible to have access to poker’s delights. Third, the more poker players there are, the larger will be the ranks of competitors, and the television audiences, for professional poker competitions. Hence the larger will be the potential winnings. This year, Lederer says, there were 6,494 competitors in the World Series of Poker Main Event, down about 1,000 from 2006, largely because more players used to win their $10,000 entry fee in online tournaments.

It is a poker skill to know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em. Congress probably should fold its interference with Internet gambling and certainly should get its 10 thumbs off Americans’ freedom to exercise their poker skills online.

George Will writes for the Washington Post. His column is distributed by the Washington Post Writers Group.