With all the hubub about last year’s attempts by House rep Barney Frank et al to push some bill or other through Congress to make online poker legal in the U.S., you’d think at least one of them would still be on the floor. Well if you did, you’d be wrong. Because now there’s a new online poker bill that’s just been introduced which may supercede all previous efforts.

The new U.S. online poker bill is called the Tax Fairness and Simplification Act and it was put together in a bipartisan efforts by two Senators, Judd Gregg and Ron Wyden. Obviously, if the name didn’t give it away, the bill isn’t solely about legal U.S. online poker, but it does include legislation for that. It also includes legislation for replacing the Alternative Minimum Tax and making it so that most Americans can file their taxes using a simple one-page form.

Superceding all previous bills aiming to legalize U.S. online poker is fine. Let’s just hope S3108 can succeed in the one area the others failed—getting passed into law.

Party Poker is running a Hit Or Run promotion every day in February. To participate, you need do nothing other than what you’re already doing – play in as many cash games as you can at PartyPoker cash tables.

Because that’s how you earn PartyPoints, and every time you earn 20 PartyPoints, you get to play a special bonus game called Hit Or Run, a single heads-up hand of all-in NL Hold’em. You against the dealer. Double or nothing. Your bet: the $1 ticket you get each time you earn 20 PartyPoints in 1 day at PartyPoker.

If you win the Hit Or Run game you can then choose whether to Hit, wagering your $2 on another Hit Or Run hand, double or nothing, or take your winnings and Run. If successful, you can do this 10 times in a single Hit Or Run game, making your maximum winnings from one game over $1,000. And PartyPoker lets you play 10 of these games in a single day. Just earn 200 PartyPoints in 1 day and you could win $10,000.

Last week, in an early Christmas gift to its players, Party Poker introduced $25/$50 Pot Limit Omaha tables.

Party Poker is well known for its high-stakes Limit Holdem offerings, but hasn’t had much in the way of high-stakes No Limit and Pot Limit cash games. But with the increasing popularity of Omaha among major leaguers (like Phil Ivey), and Pot Limit Omaha (aka PLO) in particular, it seems the PartyPoker team finally feels the time is right to branch out to the high-rolling PLO players.

And not a moment too soon. Just as point (or two) of comparison, Full Tilt Poker has high-stakes PLO cash tables ranging from $50/$100 to $500/$1,000 (a popular fave with Ivey); and Poker Stars has them at $100/$200 and $200/$400 levels.

Of course one of the biggest differences between FullTilt, PokerStars, and PartyPoker is that the first two serve U.S. customers (and have a huge U.S. showing at their nosebleed PLO tables), but Party Poker does not. So that might mean players from the rest of the world can enjoy some heavy hitting Pot Limit Omaha action without all the U.S. sharks bloodying up their waters.

Party Poker has released its latest software upgrade and it comes with some changes that players might warm to nicely.

One of them is a new option in the selection of console views from which to play in multi-table tournaments. Now, along with Tiling and Cascading will be a Stacked console. With the Table Stack view, players will indicate their position at each table and the console will stack the tables accordingly, with an alarm sounding to notify you that it’s time to act at a certain table. You don’t even have to go to the table itself to take your action, you can do it right from the Stacked console view, as you can also view hand histories, players’ chip stacks, and other pertinent information to each table without having to switch to each respective table to view that information.

Also coming as part of the new PartyPoker software will be synchronized breaks, a feature becoming more and more common at poker sites, giving tournament players a 5 minute rest break every hour at 5 minutes to the hour (with certain exceptions, such as tournaments still in level 1 or that still have late registration open). They’ve also extended late registration at some tournaments to level 6, and they now included a deadline posted in the Party Poker lobby of when a player can no longer un-register from a tournament and get their buy-in back.

Titan Poker is getting this new year off to a great start with a $2010 promotion for 2010. Every day for the months of December 2009 and January 2010, Titan Poker will be running a slew of promotional opportunities to win a share of $2,010 bonus.

There are $2,010 nightly tournaments every night at 8:10 pm ET for just a $2.10 buy-in, with the 10 top players in each night’s tournament moving on to a monthly $2,010 freeroll. $2010 events will be offered to cash ring game players and Sit ‘n Go tournament players as well.

And there are also $2,010 new player freerolls restricted to new Titan Poker players only – each of whom receives four free entries into these bonus new player freeroll.

In all Titan Poker will be giving away at least $120,000 in bonus cash prizes throughout the months of December and January in their New Year 2010 Promotion.

Another Full Tilt Online Poker Series is at an end, with FTOPS XIV finishing up yesterday, Sunday, November 15, crowning a new FTOPS Main Event Champion in zhivago2, winner of the largest share of the $2.5 million prize pool. The other top winner at this running of the now coveted semi-annual event is obiedman who won the $2500 2-day event, that finished up on Saturday, November 14, just one day before, and which boasted a guaranteed prize pool of $2 million.

The series kicked off, as it’s been doing lately, with one of the $1 million guaranteed events, this being the $216 6-max event which was held on Day 1 of FTOPS XIV, Wednesday November 4, and which was won by a player going by the username of s00tedj0kers89 (suited jokers – get it?).

Next up is the Mini-FTOPS XIV, coming up December 6 – 20 and boasting a total guaranteed prize pool of $4 million.

It’s almost time for the 2009 World Series of Poker Main Event winner to be determined. ESPN has been running taped broadcasts of the main event leading up to the final table – exciting for sure, but we’ve already known the identity of the November Nine for several months now. What we want to see is them sit down at the felt and play it out. And that is coming up this coming Tuesday night, 9-11 pm ET.

To recap, those chosen few up for the $10 million grand prize and poker immortality are:

• * Davin Moon
  * Steven Begleiter
  * Joe Cada
  * Eric Buchman
  * Antoine Saout
  * James Akenhead
  * Kevin Schaffel
  * Jeff Shulman
  * Phil Ivey

Jeff and Phil are the pros at the table, but amateur Davin has 1/3 of the chips at the table. If recent year’s Chris Moneymaker through Peter Eastgate are any indication, then it may go to the youth, like Eric, the online qualifiers, like Antoine, or both, like Joe.

For the upcoming month of November, PartyPoker has revived its popular Gladiator promotion with The Gladiator Returns. In it, players stand to earn $5,000 and $10,000 freeroll entries, cash prizes from $10 to $3,000, and free seats at next year’s Aussie Millions.

The way to play is simply…well, to play at real money games at PartyPoker – any tables or tourneys where you earn PartyPoints. Earn at least 10 points a day for at least 5 days of the month and you win a prize (in this case a $5,000 freeroll entry); earn 10 PartyPoints a day for at least 10 days and win a $10,000 freeroll entry (which you can also win with 25 PartyPoints a day for 5 days). Cash awards start at $10 for earning 10 PartyPoints a day for 15 days and go all the way up to $3,000 for earning 1,000 PartyPoints a day for 25 days. Earn 1,000 PartyPoints a day for all 30 days of November and win a $10,500 AUD ticket to the Aussie Millions, with $2 million guaranteed to the winner.

As three-dimensional “virtual reality” poker site PKR wraps up its PKR Heads-Up Grand Slam with Russian poker pro Vladimir Geshkenbein taking down the $120,000 top prize, it opens its doors wide to new members with one of the largest welcome bonuses on the online poker circuit.

While Poker Stars and Full Tilt Poker court new members with 100% match bonuses up to $600 and $650, respectively, PKR has jacked its matching bonus max to $800.

New players can sit in at PKR’s unique 3-D poker tables for as little as a $10 first deposit. And whether you get a 100% match on $10 or $800 you also get a bevy of other welcome bonuses as well, namely 1,500 PKR Points (the currency of PKR’s player rewards program) and 6 tickets into Premium Freerolls at the site, including one for $1,000. This makes it a perfect time to add PKR to your list of preferred online poker rooms.

Full Tilt Poker is introducing an amazing opportunity to turn Full Tilt Points (otherwise known as FTPs) into cold, hard cash. The site plans to give away $250,000 guaranteed in this FTP $250K Guaranteed promotion.

The big game takes place on Sunday, October 18 at 2:15 pm ET. You can either buy your way in with 5,000 FTPs or you can satellite your way in, starting now, with 9-player, 27-player, and 135-player Sit & Gos running now for buy-ins as low as 40 FTPs. There will also be two special satellites on September 28: one at 9:18 pm ET for a buy-in of 1,000 FTPs and one at 9:48 pm ET for a buy-in of 400 FTPs. All of these events will be Turbo satellites.

One fun feature of this promotion is that players cannot use cash to participate in the FTP $250K Guarantee. It’s strictly a points-based event. One in which the first place winner stands to gain at least $20,000 guaranteed.