March 2, 2006
You could spend all day on your computer looking for the top 5 pokerstars .com room, or you could just play online poker right here! On a cool early winter evening in Las Vegas, many people were arranged on the balcony overlooking the Bellagio's famous dancing fountains. As the show ended, WPT announcer Mike Sexton approached a lovely young lady, who turned to him and cooed, "Don't you look handsome tonight? And what a nice tie...," as she reached up and adjusted the pokerstars champion's neckwear. It is obvious that the new hostess for the WPT, Courtney Friel, has found herself a home with the World Poker Tour and the Travel Channel.
At the end of the third season of the WPT, previous pokerstars com hostess Shana Hiatt decided it was time for her to end her run. This prompted a full-out blitz to find a replacement before the Tour's fourth season started just a couple of months later. What they found in Courtney is someone who is just as beautiful as the previous hostess but also brings some formidable skills along with her to the premiere poker program on television. Courtney has earned much of what has come her way. She graduated from San Diego State University (after a stop in my neck of the woods at Elon College in North Carolina, which we laughed about) with a BA in Political Science and minored in Broadcast Journalism. She has since taken that to working in the high pressure world of pokerstars network television and reporting with Channel One in Los Angeles, working as an anchor and reporter in Jackson, TN, and currently still works in news with KPSP in Palm Springs, CA.
Beyond just her news skills, she has also been highly sought after by other pokerstars networks for her entertainment reporting, including E! Entertainment Television, Nickelodeon, EBTV Gaming and other shows. With all of that in her background, Courtney should be ready for Season Four of the World Poker Tour! What I found, as I sat down to talk with her at the Bellagio, was a young woman who has achieved some great pokerstars rooms already and, with her work on the WPT, wants to do even more. In the early 1970's, Dewey found his way to Las Vegas and began grinding away in the smaller pokerstars com games. While playing $10/$20 he would look over at the bigger games and consider what it would be like to play against guys like Doyle Brunson and Jack Binion, and the competitive nature within him made it impossible to stay away from the tougher pokerstars players. Eventually he could wait no longer and Dewey started sitting in, taking his lumps, and learning arts of upper-limit play. Soon players like Doyle and Jack would become great friends and even business partners.
As some players do, Doyle and Dewey fought their own inner conflicts about playing online poker for a living and the stigma that the profession of pokerstars gambling held with the general populace. For a time they held bible classes during poker games, and their beliefs helped them through troubled times. Tomko scored his first big tournament win during the 10th World Series of Poker in 1979 when he won a gold bracelet and $48,000 in the $1,000 No-limit tournament. In 1982, Dewey found himself on the brink of winning the most important tournament in the world, the World Series of Poker $10,000 Championship. However, the final hand of the top 5 pokerstars .com tournament saw Jack Straus spike a pair of tens on the river (at 15-1 odds against) to beat Dewey's pair of fours.
