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Hellmuth’s Home Game episode 30 centered on Jennifer Tilly. By the end of the session, she had tangled with Jungleman, Phil Hellmuth, Shaun Deeb, Xuan Liu and Erick Lindgren in a series of high-stakes pots, and she finished as the game’s biggest winner by a wide margin.

According to PokerNews, the episode aired as part of Hellmuth’s Home Game on CBS Sports Monday nights. The show is presented by Poker Night in America, sponsored by BetRivers, filmed at the Grand Sierra Resort in Reno, Nevada, and built around table talk rather than commentary, with Hellmuth and the guests carrying the action in a relaxed cash-game setting.

The first big pot started with Dan “Jungleman” Cates raising to $150 from the cutoff with A♠K♦. Tilly three-bet to $500 from the big blind with A♥Q♦, Cates made it $1,500, and Tilly called after saying, “I don’t want to go crazy.” On a flop of 9♦A♣J♥ and a turn of 10♦, she check-called $1,300 and then another $3,000 before Cates fired $12,500 on the 6♥ river. Cates won the $36,675 pot with top pair and top kicker after Tilly called.

A later hand tagged as “Tilly Kicks Deeb” had Phil Hellmuth open to $300 with 10♠9♠, Tilly call from the cutoff with K♠J♣, and Deeb three-bet to $1,200 with K♣10♣. After a flop of 7♦5♣K♥ and a Q♦ turn, Tilly raised to $10,000 over Deeb’s $3,000 bet, Deeb moved all-in, and she called off her last $6,700 to build a $39,000 pot. The hand ran once, and the 9♦ river was a brick for Deeb.

The final big hand was even bigger. Erick Lindgren raised to $1,200 with J♥J♣, Deeb three-bet to $4,000 with 10♥10♦, and Tilly four-bet to $10,000 from the straddle with A♠A♦. After Deeb checked, Tilly bet $10,000, Deeb check-jammed for $23,400, and Tilly snap-called to create a $68,400 pot. Deeb wanted to run it just once, but the turn came 4♦ and the river 5♠. By the end of the hand, her stack had climbed into six-figure territory, and she was the game’s biggest winner by a large margin.

PokerCoaching has added Justin Young to its coaching team and paired the move with a new course on live cash games. The addition gives the training site another coach with a heavy live-game background and a public profile built around the Table 1 Vegas Podcast.

According to pokerfuse, Young is probably best known to the wider poker community as the host of that podcast. The announcement also tied his value to years spent playing live cash games against some of the best players around, along with the relationships he built with many of those opponents.

The new course is already live on PokerCoaching and is titled “How to Crush Live Cash Games with Loose Aggressive Strategies.” It is aimed mainly at intermediate No Limit Hold’em cash players up to $2/$5, and it runs as a six-part series with six videos of about 30 minutes each, for just over three hours of lessons.

The course leans into exploiting common mistakes rather than relying entirely on solver output. It focuses on using aggression and pressure to force uncomfortable decisions, how to respond when a passive player suddenly shows strength, and how to adjust properly against unknown opponents.

Pokerfuse described the course as built for players looking for specific places to make money by taking advantage of general tendencies. It framed Young’s approach as one that leans on recognizing repeated errors in low-stakes games, where many players do not follow what solvers would suggest.

A 2012 Ante Up Magazine profile gives some of Young’s longer poker background. It described him as a former military mechanical engineer from Moorhead City, N.C., who turned professional after working at Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station, and said he lived just outside Las Vegas in Henderson.

That profile also noted his runner-up finish in the 2008 $15K WPT Doyle Brunson Five Diamond World Poker Classic for $936,760 and said he had almost $3 million in live earnings at the time. Young said he preferred live poker because of the personal interaction, and that cash games were still his main game even as he spent time in tournaments.

Sevag Shirinian will take the lead into Day 2 of the $1,100 NorCal Poker Championship Main Event at Graton Casino Resort in Rohnert Park, California. The final 74 players return from a 582-entry field that built a $567,450 prize pool, and Shirinian is the only player carrying a seven-figure stack at 1,032,000.

According to PokerNews, Shirinian earned that top spot after his Day 1b performance and entered Day 2 as the chip leader overall after two flights of play. Ryan Tuttle is next with 862,000, and Antonio Ma follows with 792,000 after leading Day 1c. As covered in our Day 1c report, Ma had already topped that flight with 792,000 after 194 entries, and 25 players moved on.

The return list also includes Henri Perez Lopez on 495,000 and Jaime Haletky on 470,000. Michael Persky comes back with 296,000, while Victor Paredes is listed at 277,000, Julie Cornelius at 236,000, Zachary Smyth at 226,000, Daniel Hughes at 212,000, Phillip Hellmuth at 192,000 and Charles Himes at 162,000. The outlet’s Day 1c recap had Hellmuth advancing with 211,000, so that stack figure changed between updates.

The event used four starting flights on Friday and Saturday, with 40,000-chip starting stacks, 30-minute levels, unlimited reentries and registration closing at the start of Level 9 after the break. Day 2 uses 40-minute levels and was set to restart at noon local time Sunday, with play continuing until a winner is crowned.

Chess.com has launched Gambit as a free poker companion site built around learning rather than wagering. The company says the platform has no real-money gambling and no rake.

Chess.com said it chose poker for the first companion site because, like chess, it has learning and social elements in addition to play. Gambit borrows Chess.com’s design style and includes bot matches, games with friends, tournaments, a review mode and a learning mode.

The site also uses Chess.com bot characters, including Martin, plus an Elo-style rating system. The company says that rating system is meant to give players something to chase even without cash stakes, and it is the backbone of Gambit’s paid subscription for premium learning features. Cheng said Chess.com’s main business model is subscription, while most people play for free.

Chess.com said Gambit now has close to 75,000 members, nearly 20 million hands played and more than 100,000 beginner lessons completed together. In a separate company update, the beta had passed 12 million hands after three months, with more than 45,000 accounts and close to 200,000 hands played each day.

That same update said the Gambit Cup was already running every day at noon ET and had grown to over 400 players. Chess.com now says a special edition of the Gambit Cup will be broadcast live for the first time on Aug. 31 at 12 p.m. ET on Twitch and YouTube, with Danny Rensch and Alexandra Botez on commentary. The event will use a five-minute delay to help prevent stream sniping and will show hole cards, live win percentages, standings and chip counts.

In a Verge interview, chief growth officer Albert Cheng said AI helped get Gambit off the ground with just a two-person team. He said the biggest benefit was being able to read Chess.com’s existing codebase and design system and apply consistent patterns quickly, though AI was less helpful for brand and feature design. He also said the live version now has “zero or close to zero” AI-created assets after early prototypes used some.

Cheng also said Chess.com is building Elo-style rating systems for other classic games, including go, backgammon and mahjong. He said that work is moving “quite rapidly,” but did not give launch dates.

The Tournament Directors Association has changed how blind levels start in live poker: once the clock moves, dealers can immediately begin dealing at the new level, even if the tournament director has not formally announced it.

According to PokerOrg, PokerAtlas Live Events Director Justin Hammer described that as a recent TDA-approved operational change discussed at the 25th annual TDA Summit in Las Vegas. He said the old procedure required the director to officially announce the blind change before play could continue at the new level.

Hammer framed the rule as part of the TDA’s wider job of standardizing tournament rules so players know what to expect wherever they play. He said the organization was co-founded in 2001 by Matt Savage, Linda Johnson, Jan Fisher and David Lamb, and has since grown to more than 2,500 members in 63 countries.

The summit is where the association reviews whether existing rules should change and how they should be interpreted and enforced. Hammer said those discussions also covered other operational topics, including random table breaks and a clarification on how the big blind ante should be handled when two players bust in the same hand.

For the blind-level issue, the practical takeaway is simple. Under the updated approach, the clock is now the trigger for the new level, not the floor announcement.