Poker News

A technical issue at PokerStars caused the $215 Sunday Warm-Up tournament on 6 April to run with only 1,204 players. Consequently, the prize pool accumulated from the buy-ins was nowhere near the guaranteed $500,000.

As a result of an unusual technical issue, the PokerStars $200+$15 Sunday Warm-Up of 6 April ran with a gargantuan overlay of about $260,000. By default, in the first three hours of the tournament, late registration is open and a lot of players indeed tend to skip the first couple of blind levels. This time, however, late registration was disabled and the field was closed when they shuffled up and dealt. A relatively small player pool of 1,204 participants could therefore play for the $500,000 in prize money.

Effective 1 May 2014, no more updates will be released and no technical support available for Holdem Manager 1.

Holdem Manager has notified players in an e-mail that, as of 30 April 2014, they no longer support HM1. This effectively means that players will be able to log in, use the software including the HUD but need to expect that no more updates will be released and bugs and crashes will not be fixed. The company ceases to support the first version of the popular poker tool from this May.

IPN, shutting down in May, has recently withdrawn its Bad Beat Jackpot promotion. The €145,000 left in the prize pool is given away in freerolls for players who have played at least one raked hand in the past 365 days.

International Poker Network parent company GTECH announced last December that it would focus on the regulated markets in the future. As a result, IPN, or the former Boss Media, operating on the .com market as one of the five networks managed by GTECH online gaming branch SPIELO G2, is to shut down soon. The remaining four networks, Canadian Poker Network, Poker Club Italia, Spain Poker Network and Svenska Spel are active on the regulated markets.

Following a three-way deal, Oleksii Khoroshenin won €578,392 for his victory in the EPT Vienna 2014 Main Event. High Roller tournament winner Fabrice Soulier earned €392,000.

Last weekend saw the eight-handed finale of the European Poker Tour Main Event with Anthony Ghamrawi in the chiplead (stack: 5,150,000). Favourites of the final nine, however, were SCOOP champion and $1,000 NLHE Hyper-Turbo HU regular Frei ‘deamon10’ Dilling, WSOP 2013 $1,500 NLHE Shootout winner Simeon Naydenov and PokerStars Sunday 500 winner online MTT pro Marko ‘BriDge2PaiN’ Neumann, whose short stack was still sufficient for him to come back.

888 has recently published the annual results for 2013 and the numbers are more than impressive: with a 7% grow in revenues and 21% more players than in the previous year, 888Poker is now the undoubted runner-up in the online traffic list on the .com market.

In 2013, 888 showed off an incredible increase both in revenues and active player numbers: the figures have increased by 7% and 21% over the previous year, respectively, which is even more stunning if you consider the general decline of the industry and shrinking numbers all across rival operators. As a result, 888Poker has reached the second position in the online cash game rankings by the end of the year.

Russian internet providers started to ban online gambling sites but to no avail.

While online gambling is illegal in Russia, internet providers had previously taken no steps to block similar content. The issue took legal course in 2012, when prosecution tried to make Rostelecom ban illegal gambling sites.

William Hill has announced that it is withdrawing from a total of 55 countries, including almost all the African markets as well as other regions.

Effective tomorrow, 26 March, William Hill is pulling out of 55 countries, citing regulatory reasons. Affiliates have been notified via e-mail that the countries where the major provider ceases its operations include most African countries, in addition to Middle Eastern, Asian and South American states. Even after 26 March, players from the listed markets will be able to withdraw their money but neither to make deposits nor to play real money games.

While originally planned for winter 2014, it appears Nevada and Delaware players will be able to play against each other as early as this summer.

Back in February, Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval and Delaware Governor Jack Markell signed an agreement that made poker history: the Multi State Internet Gaming allows for the pooling of player liquidity for online poker operators licensed in both regulated states. Additionally, other states are allowed to join, which is an excellent opportunity for a newly regulated market to achieve proper liquidity as quickly as possible. For smaller state, the cooperation may prove essential to survive.

Among other players, title holder Antonio Esfandiari, Phily Ivey, Phil Galfond, Jason Mercier and Sam Trickett will all enter the WSOP Big One for One Drop event to compete for the $20 million first prize.

Despite the fact that there is still over three months to go until the kick-off of the WSOP $1,000,000 Big One for One Drop tournament, seats are beginning to get occupied. The cap for the event is 56 and almost half of that, 23 places have already been taken.

In the first hand of a Flipout tournament, all players automatically go all-in and then survivors play on in a standard freezout, already in the money. But how does this help non-recreational players?

Ever since its re-launch in November 2012, Full Tilt Poker has been performing under expectations in the competition against other online poker rooms and networks on the .com market. In addition to PokerStars, 888Poker, iPoker and PartyPoker have all been showing off better results; consequently, FTP has resorted to a range of innovations to reclaim its glory. Most recently, the room plans to improve multi-table tournament traffic with the Flipout events, launching 19 March.

After a calm, almost dull February, the online high stakes cash game tables are starting to see some major action this month. Viktor ‘Isildur1’ Blom won $1.6 million over the weekend and Gus Hansen has been up $900,000 in the last 24 hours.

Online high stakes cash games have been gaining momentum this month after barely any action in February. Right after the Green Friday, as most US pros got back their bankrolls stuck on their Full Tilt Poker accounts, action resumed with players aiming to profit from the newly regained funds, including online highs takes money list 2010 leader Daniel ‘jungleman12’ Cates. The former NLHE specialist had been working hard on his deuce game and owned the 2-7 Triple Draw tables in his recent session as a result, winning $1,369,799 in the month so far in 10,939 hands.

Multi-table tournament specialist Mike ‘goleafsgoeh’ Leah has reached a remarkable achievement, winning the $580 NLHE and $365 NLHE Turbo events of the WSOPC on the same day.

Between 6 and 17 March, the WSOPC Bicycle Casino stop was running with 12 golden ring events and Mike ‘goleafsgoeh’ Leah emerged as casino champion by winning two of them on the very same day. On 14 March, 121 players registered for Event #9 $580 NLHE and accumulated a prize pool of $60,500. The top 15 finishes were in the money and nine players qualified for the final table, including WCOOP and FTOPS champion Leah, by far the most recognized face in the field. Eventually, he bested his opponents, defeating Lucas Fridriksson heads-up for $16,945.

While it would be way too early to draw conclusions, it appears that Gus Hansen may have a chance of starting to come back from his ridiculous losses after all. In the recent nosebleed 2-7 Triple Draw games, he has emerged a confident winner.

Recently, the hot games on the highest stakes are the $2,000/$4,000 2-7 Triple Draw sessions among the very elite of the online scene. Arguably, most intense has been the action between ‘taktloss47’ and Gus Hansen: the two of them had been playing for 12 hours straight yesterday before booking the largest total winnings of the day.

888Poker has announced the launch of the World Series of Poker 2014 Main Event qualifiers. Players can compete for packages worth $15,000 each.

Players who wish to participate in the WSOP 2014 $10,000 Main Event but cannot or do not want to pay the full fee now have the opportunity to qualify through online satellites. On 13 March, 888Poker launches its qualifier tournaments for the ultimate live tournament of the year.

Even players with the smallest bankrolls get a chance to qualify: Step 1 satellites are available from as little as $0.01. Step 2 qualifiers are available for $0.10 but the chance of winning a seat at the Main Event is likely to be even worth a Step 3 or Step 4 entry for most players at $1 and $5, respectively. The last step, a direct qualifier to the Main Event itself is the Step 7 tournament for a buy-in of $1,050.

After Ladbrokes and Unibet Poker left MPN, the liquidity of the network has dropped significantly. Nevertheless, Microgaming is still operating among the Top 10 of the .com market.

Microgaming started to implement their new concept for their poker network about a year ago, changing its name to MPN and introducing a number of improvements that favour recreational players, including a reformed Bad Beat Jackpot structure with lowered requirements of hitting the jackpot.

In June, all regular heads-up tables got closed and replaced by Heads Up 8-Man Blaze tables as an anti-bumhunting feature; as a result, only fast-fold HU cash games remained available in the network. The Heads Up 8-Man Blaze games are played in pools of eight, so that regulars intending to play against specific recreational players have to join a pool, rendering it impossible for them to avoid each other.