Ante Up Magazine Announces 2012 Ante Awards

The guys at Ante Up magazine are marking their seventh anniversary of covering poker soon. June 15 will mark the occasion. Once again I’m shaking my head to discover another reminder I’ve been doing this here poker thing for a long time.

Long time readers here remember I used to write about the Ante Up podcast fairly frequently back in the day. Along with Card Club on Lord Admiral Radio and Rounders, the Poker Show (later to become the Two Plus Two Pokercast), Ante Up was one of the few poker podcasts around during those early days. And it would often happen that listening to those old shows would inspire various musings here.

Like the Lord Admirals, Scott Long and Chris Cosenza catered their show to the amateur/recreational player. I loved tuning in every week and eventually becoming part of the community of listeners chatting to each other about the show and other poker-related matters on the podcast’s message board, as well as playing online in the Ante Up Intercontinental Poker Series (AIPS).

For the first three years the podcast was run in association with the St. Petersburg Times, then in the summer of 2008 the pair broke out on their own to continue the podcast while also starting a monthly poker magazine. I believe at the outset they kind of narrowed their focus to Florida poker, primarily. However, after nearly four years they’ve expanded their coverage and reach nationally, with the magazine now turning up in card rooms all over the U.S.

I got to meet Scott and Chris at the WSOP a few times over the years, and continue to stay in touch. Not long ago Chris and I exchanged some messages about poker on the television show M*A*S*H after I’d written a “Pop Poker” piece on the topic for Poker Listings. As it happens, Chris had been mentioning M*A*S*H on the show, but as I’d fallen behind on the podcast I’d missed those references.

In association with the upcoming anniversary, Ante Up is conducting a poll -- what they are calling the “2012 Ante Awards” -- in which among the several questions being asked is “What is your favorite poker blog?” The guys have included Hard-Boiled Poker among the possible answers to the question, along with Shaniac’s great blog, the one Daniel Negreanu regularly keeps over at Full Contact Poker, Phil Galfond’s smart blog (which I was writing about just a couple of weeks ago), and the always-worth-reading one kept by our friend Bob, the Poker Grump.

Some pretty decent company, blog-wise. Click here to get to the survey.

Voting requires entering an email address. Having been on the mailing list for Ante Up for a good while now, I imagine this will mean receiving a monthly update from the guys when a new issue of the magazine comes out. You can win some prizes, too, by taking the survey, including various poker gear, a copy of All In: The Poker Movie, or lunch and a poker lesson with Chris Moneymaker.

Even if you don’t take the survey, check out the magazine (which you can read online) and/or the podcast, both of which continue to entertain and inform. Was just checking out the latest few shows, including one not long ago in which the pair talked about the best poker scenes in non-poker movies (5/17/12). Then the last couple of shows saw Scott taking a hiatus, but the always hilarious Mike Fasso stepped in as co-host for one (5/24/12), and friend of the show/magazine (and myself) Lee Childs was on for the other (5/31/12).

Big thanks to the fellas for including HBP in the poll.