Poker After Dark Host and More (photo courtesy of ModelVolume.com)

Everybody's favorite poker TV personality Leeann Tweeden is appearing on Hannity, on Fox News tonight. It airs at 6:30 PM and then again at 9:30 PM tonight, Jan. 20th. And this is actually Tweeden's second appearance on his Great American Panel segment.

The good part of all this is that you'll get to see and hear that she's more than just a pretty face. The bad news is you'll also have to listen to a bunch of guys, including Sean Hannity himself, arguing with her.

Tweeden is busy right now. Besides the guest appearance on Hannity, she has, as you probably know by now, returned as host to add her considerable charms to season 6 of Poker After Dark. And we can hope that having to share a stage, and a microphone, with guys like Phil Helmuth and Antonio Esfandiari will more than have prepared her to put up with Hannity on tonight's show.

If you're a reader of BLUFF Magazine, there's some news you might be interested in. No, they haven't decided to start doing a swimsuit issue (which, given the average physique of us poker players, isn't such a bad thing) but they did just release the nominees for their annual Readers Choice Awards. Besides the usual categories, they've added a couple new ones that are kinda fun.

Favorite player of 2009 nominees include: Phil Ivey, Jason Mercier, Daniel Negreanu and Bertrand Grospellier. You can also vote for your favorite TV poker show, Vegas poker room, poker twitterer and 2009 Favorite Poker Villain. Nominees for that esteemed category include Phil Helmuth, Mike Matusow, Mark Vos and Luke "__FullFlush1__" Schwartz.

And yes, there's a category for Favorite Online Poker Site, and yes, Cake Poker is a nominee. Interestingly, Joe Cada doesn't appear as a nominee in any category. I guess they didn't have room for the category "Favorite Guy Who Won $8.5 million at an Age When I Was Making $6.50 an Hour as a Bus Boy".

Voting is open right now, and you can take part by clicking here. The polls close on Friday, January 8th at midnight. Winners will be announced on BluffMagazine.com on January 28th and in the February issue of the print magazine.

The next session of Poker After Dark boasts some familiar faces (photo courtesy of NBC)

So you're sitting at home late at night playing some online poker, and you suddenly think to yourself: "self, this is fun, but it would be even more fun if I could watch Phil Helmuth lose a hundred grand of his own money." If that's your dream, you're in luck - the cards are about to be dealt on a new session of NBC's Poker After Dark starting Monday. And while I can't guarantee Helmuth will actually lose all that money, just the possibility that it could happen makes it worth tuning in.

The late night favorite returns with some familiar faces, and a couple new ones. Besides Helmuth, some of the players who will battle it out over the next couple weeks include: Phil Ivey, Tom Dwan, Gus Hansen and Daniel Negreanu. Oh, and Patrik Antonius will take a break from his multi-million dollar poker ping-pong matches with Isuldur1 to sit in on a few games.

The minimum buy-in for this week's session, which is being called "Railbird Heaven" is $100,000, with a max of $250,000. Sources from the show are saying that viewers will be in for a week of huge pots, lots of the usual trash-talking, and even more prop bets and side action.

Episodes will air on NBC each week-night, starting at 2:05 am on Monday, with the "Director's Cut" episode airing after Saturday Night Live. I'm not sure what exactly "Director's Cut" means in this context, but given the list of players this time around, I'm really, really hoping there's no suggestive scenes or explicit nudity.

Brandon Cantu, one of the top poker players in the world, apparently ain't quite as good at prop bets. Last year he attended the TASER Foundation Tournament and lost a prop bet to one Clonie Gowen. The tournament, by the way, raises money for a foundation that honors law enforcement officers lost in the line of duty. So the name kind of makes sense. But it got a lot more literal this year, when Cantu and Gowen met again, to settle the stakes of the prop bet.

By losing the bet, Cantu agreed to get tased. And luckily for all of us, Phil Helmuth happened to record the whole thing on video, for us all to enjoy. Watch Cantu get tased right here.

It's about three minutes long and the build-up is a little lengthy, especially since it's Helmuth narrating. But it's worth it to see whether a millionaire pro player can maintain his poker face when he's got 50,000 volts running through his body.

If you've ever watched Mike Matusow play poker on TV, you know how much some players like the sound of their own voice. So it's not surprising that lots of them will take advantage of a forum where they can say whatever they want, as often as they want, and random strangers will go out of their way to listen.

That forum is Twitter. And there are lots of top (and not quite so top) players who regularly post their 140 characters of wisdom:

Phil Helmuth: As you would expect, the mouthiest player this side of Matusow has a rather well-used account. His 27,000 or so followers get to hear a steady stream of updates from the life and mind of Phil. The only odd thing about it is that he always sounds really enthusiastic and happy, and he uses a lot of exclamation points!!! The optimist will point to the fact that his table manner is not indicative of his real personality (after all, the man gives oodles of money to charity every year, so he must be alright) and so what's suspicious about him sounding nice and happy when he tweets? The cynic would say that he's probably hired some over-enthusiastic college kid to keep the tweets coming.

Erik Seidel: When he's not showing up on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Erik can be found huddled over his computer sending out surprisingly amusing messages, like his recent tweet: "My kids think the website and book "Stuff White People Like" is my unauthorized biography.

Barry Greenstein: He's a poker lover's poker player, and he has the tweets to match. This is bare-bones poker-nerd stuff, and there ain't nothing wrong with that.

Joe Sebok: He is the big Kahuna of poker tweeters. His updates on life, the universe and everything have earned him over a million followers. His rabid following has him in the top 200 for numbers of followers of anyone in the Twitter-verse.

Mike Matusow: He's not a great speller, he's kind of pissed off a lot of the time, and he forgets to tweet for months at a time, but you can't help love the guy.

And, as if that's not enough, your very own Cake Poker has an account. Keep an eye on it for timely poker news and frequent announcements about people winning free underwear.

Is it just me, or is poker pro Vanessa Rousso quickly becoming as ubiquitous on TV as the Sham-Wow guy? Every time I turn on the tube, her smiling face is beaming out from either a final table or an ad for whatever it is that GoDaddy's trying to sell me. Of course, one shouldn't really complain. When it comes to watching poker players, it's much better to have to look at her than Phil Helmuth or the guy who played Gabe Kotter.

And we'll be seeing even more of her, since she just got a role as a panelist on the new E! show "Bank of Hollywood". E! Entertainment Television just announced the new show, which features a panel of celebrity types doling out money to deserving contestants. Each would-be money recipient can ask for any amount of cash, for any reason. And its up to panelists like Rousso to decide if they're worthy enough to receive some money.

Other panelists on the show will include Candy Spelling and a singer from the Pussycat Dolls, but of course it'll be Rousso that poker fans will be tuning in to see (assuming they tune in at all). After all, it's hard to get enough of a women who's both hot, and capable of kicking just about anyone's ass at the table. Rousso has over $2.3 million in tournament earnings, and already ranks in the top 5 for career money earners among women. Not bad for a twenty six year old.

If you're looking to watch Bank of Hollywood, you can check out the first episode on December 14th at 10pm on E!.