Players in the Lehigh Valley area of the northeast and down in Tampa, Florida alike have a new place to go face to face when you're tired of looking at a monitor and playing online poker.

The Sands Casino in Bethlehem, PA added eleven new poker tables at nine in the morning on Friday and by 11, more than a hundred players were going face to face. The poker room now has a total of 23 tables, which may not sound like a lot, but considering that the casino just added table games in July, it's a huge success considering the region and the economy.

A big reason for the casino's poker table success is that they are right in the middle of the Sands, unlike a lot of regional poker rooms, where they're tucked away. "It's right in the center of the action — they seem to like it," Sands president DeSalvio told a local newspaper. "We give poker a real prominence in our company."

Meanwhile, the Seminole Hard Rock Tampa has opened a new poker room and if you're down visiting aged relatives for the holiday, it's a great place to kill a few hours and take on the local competition, which includes names like John Racener and the Mizrachi brothers They're running special events around the week, including freebies like t-shirts and a freeroll tournament with a $100,000 guarantee.

The information being sent to the outside companies is one of the basic building blocks on the site, a player's "Facebook ID" number. This number is a public part of every user profile and anyone can use that number to look up information about the user, even if they've set their preferences so that their information is supposed to be private. For users that aren't as careful, these outside companies can get complete access to their lives.

While the companies argue that this sort of surveillance is conducted anonymously and is benign, at least one firm involved has been using the numbers to build a database of users that they've been selling to interested parties.

"This is an even more complicated technical challenge than a similar issue we successfully addressed last spring on Facebook.com," a Facebook spokesman told the Journal, "but one that we are committed to addressing."

“We are very excited to present coverage of the World Series of Poker Circuit tour to a national audience of more than 75 million U.S. homes," said Jeff Goldberg, Vice President of Programming for VERSUS in a press release. "The WSOP tour is one of the most successful in the business and we knew it was a great opportunity for our first venture into poker tournament coverage."

This ties into the WSOP's strategy involving their 2010-2011 circuit, which features a heavily revamped buy-in schedule and a points system that is going to results in the National Championship tournament being played prior to the 2011 WSOP in Las Vegas. The winner of the national Championship will receive a WSOP bracelet.

“This is a big milestone for the industry,” said WSOP Vice President Ty Stewart. ”We’re thrilled that one of the premier all-sports networks has recognized the brand power of the WSOP and decided to take the plunge into broadcasting our game.”

"The logical extension of the data we have on dementia is that a person who is still capable of working, who is mentally stimulated with a strong sense of purpose. is better off from the cognitive point of view continuing to engage in that position."

In his work, Cummings points out a French study from 2009 in which they took a look at 5,000 people. It showed that, across the board, activities like playing cards, even just twice a week, led to a risk reduction of 50% for all forms of dementia, including Alzheimers.

This is good news for more than just the people who are affected by the tragic disease and their families. Overall, if more people were mentally active in their golden years, we could be looking at a massive savings to the economy. If present markers continue to trend upward, Alzheimers will cost American taxpayers over $20,000,000,000,000 over the next 40 years.