Poker News

PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker parent company Rational Group has confirmed its interest in expanding to the online sports betting market.

For years, PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker have exclusively been offering online poker but now, parent company Rational Group decides to change that. Last July, the group announced the development of its casino games offering, which has recently kicked off at Full Tilt Poker in the form of blackjack and roulette. In accordance with the agreement between Rational and Leander Games, Full Tilt will use the LeGa platform to launch an expanded portfolio of online casino entertainment products.

Isaac Haxton, Douglas Polk, Tom Dwan, Phil Ivey and Patrik Antonius all participated in the $1,000/$2,000 NLHE action, among others.

Douglas 'WCGRider' Polk

The Super High Roller, won by Phil Ivey, marked the end of the Aussie Millions 2014 festival. However, a couple of players stayed at the Crown casino, engaging in high profile NLHE cash game action on the $1,000/$2,000 limits with a minimum buy-in of $250,000. Among others, the likes of Haxton, Polk, Dwan, Ivey, Antonius, Richard Yong and Paul Newey participated.

Ultimate Poker has introduced their latest unorthodox promotion: the room returns the full fee to players in every guaranteed prize pool tournament where there is no overlay.

The first legal online poker room of the United States, Ultimate Poker has built a reputation of preferring to go off the beaten track since its launch in April 2013. For instance, it has discarded the all popular weighted contributed rake system, where rake is calculated in proportion to players’ contribution to the pot and has introduced the winner takes all concept; that is, only the player winning the pot pays rake, therefore users are only eligible for rakeback after hands they have won.

A total of 65 bracelet events take place in this year’s World Series of Poker festival and the winner of the Main Event is guaranteed to take home at least $10 million.

WSOP Main Event 2013 Champion Ryan Riess

For a short period of time, the WSOP 2014 schedule has recently become available; whether out of mistake or as a marketing pull remains unknown. While the company was quick to remove the unofficial schedule from the site, it had already made it to most forums by the time and stirred up the community most notably by hinting at a guaranteed $10 million first prize in the Main Event. Only one champion booked a larger sum in the history of WSOP Main Events: Jamie Gold won $12 million in 2006.

After his victory in 2012, Phil Ivey took down the Aussie Millions A$250,000 Challenge once again, for A$4 million. He defeated Isaac Haxton heads-up.

On 9 February, the Aussie Millions LK Boutique A$250,000 Challenge, or the super high roller event of the festival kicked off. On Day 1, 37 buy-ins were paid out by the players with some of them re-entering the event, like Daniel Negreanu, Philipp Gruissem and Mike ‘Timex’ McDonald. Eventually, 18 of them qualified, a field worthy of a super high roller tournament. The top 5 was as follows:

Erik Seidel – 944,000
Tom Dwan – 815,000
Isaac Haxton – 800,000
Jason Mercier – 767,000
Yevgeniy Timoshenko – 705,000

In the course of the past week, poker rooms have provided the community with a large number of topics: William Hill launched the Poker Coach feature, 888Poker booked a record income and PokerStars keeps dominating the market.

2013, the year of 888Poker

By far, the performance of 888Poker has been the most acclaimed news of late: in Q4 2013, the room yet again showed off an increase in revenues. 888 Holdings plc booked $107 million in income in the fourth quarter of the year, a record in its history, $25 million of which coming from poker. The total annual income from poker was $94 million, $12 million more than the year before. Active player number has also risen: 16% more players were grinding in the room than in 2012.

This week, a short interview with WSOP 2005 Main Event champion Joe Hachem stirred up the poker community. As usual, Daniel Negreanu could not help but contribute to the debate.

Earlier this week, Bluff published a short interview with Joe Hachem, recorded during the Aussie Millions. The Australian won the WSOP 2005 Main Event for $7,500,000 and has booked quite a number of impressive results ever since, including a victory in the WPT Five Diamond World Poker Classic 2006 for $2,207,575 and a 3rd finish in the Aussie Millions 2012 $100,000 Challenge for $339,726. His lifetime live tournament winnings total at $11,828,080.

Due to a technical issue – or as a well executed marketing pull – the first draft of the official schedule of WSOP 2014 was released for a short period of time.

The unofficial tournament schedule of this year’s WSOP was released by Caesars Entertainment in December 2013. The summer festival is running from 27 May to 14 July at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA and the Main Event kicks off on 5 July. While the released document revealed some key information, it was still a bit sketchy on the detail and the first official draft was promised to be published early this year.

Shawn ‘buck21’ Buchanan is the first player ever to win a WCOOP, a SCOOP as well as a TCOOP title. The question still remains: who takes down the Grand Slam first?

Shawn ‘buck21’ Buchanan is one of the most successful multi-table tournament players around. He is the holder of a WPT title, finale qualifier of multiple WSOP events and boasts lifetime tournament winnings of $5.6 million. He is also a successful online player, as demonstrates his triple PokerStars COOP title.

Full Tilt Poker Pros saw both the top and the bottom of the high stakes action in January: Viktor ‘Isildur1’ Blom finished as the biggest winner and Gus Hansen lost the most in the first month of the year.

Few high stakes players have grinded a lot in January; by far, ‘Isildur1’ played the most hands: 48,517 to be precise. He also managed to win the most, profiting $2,154,113. The Swede would take part in any action he could get; he earned the most in 8-Game, $1,373,677 in 8,528 hands. In Omaha Hi/Lo, he won $796,852 (7,046 hands), $532,389 in draw (4,827 hands) and 117,602 in NLHE (6,762). Only in PLO did he lose, $665,407 in 21,354 hands.

The weekend saw the conclusion of both the Main and the High Roller events of the European Poker Tour (EPT) Deauville 2014 stop. Victories went to Sotirios Koutoupas and Dominik Panka, respectively.

Dominik Panka

The eight-handed Final Table of the €10,300 High Roller event took place on Saturday. Albert Daher had a major lead but EPT Barcelona title holders Martin Schleich and Kent Lundmark, EPT Berlin champion Davidi Kitai, WSOPE 2013 Main Event winner Adrian Mateos Diaz, 2011 Player of the Year Ondrej Vinklarek and PCA Main Event champion Panka were also sitting at the table.

After two event days, the Final Table is formed in the EPT Deauville 2014 High Roller tournament. In the lead is Albert Daher but the likes of Davidi Kitai and Dominik Panka are in pursuit.

Albert Daher

On 30 January, the EPT Deauville €10,300 High Roller event kicked off with 95 entrants (and 18 re-entries). Eventually, 53 players survived the day with Marton Czuczor in the lead; he built his stack by eliminating players like David Vamplew and Lauri Pesonen. At the end of the day, Czuczor was accompanied by Konstantin Puchkov, Panka, Toby Lewis, Martin Staszko, Kitai, Steve O'Dwyer, Dominik Nitsche, Artem Litvinov and Stephen Chidwick, just to highlight a few of the illustrious field.

In the latest client update, PokerStars added an indicator to reveal mobile and tablet users. This surprised the community and many try to exploit the feature to find recreational players.

Recently, PokerStars has updated its client software and added the feature to signal smartphone and tablet users at the tables. The move caused a stir in the poker community, as it is considered a good way to reveal recreational players; this stems from the notion that fish are more likely to use such a device to play than regulars, who prefer desktop solutions, where they can play on multiple tables and use their utility software.

Christian Lusardi tried to get rid of the fake chips in one of the Harrah’s restrooms but failed.

As previously reported, World Poker Tour Borgata Winter Open $560 Big Stack NLHE Re-entry event got paused and subsequently cancelled when a large number of counterfeit 5,000 denomination chips were found in players’ stacks. Of the 4,814 entrants, only 27 were in play at that point; following the investigation that revealed the scam, the remaining prize pool was withheld.

The official tournament schedule of the EPT Vienna festival has been released and it reveals a number of extraordinary events, including the Deuces Wild, Reverse Mix Max, Double Board and the Mozart MegaStack tourneys.

In May 2013, at the time of the kick-off of the EPT Monte Carlo Grand Final, the festival calendar of the 10th season of the greatest poker series of the old continent, the European Poker Tour, was released. On 28 August, the season launched in Barcelona and it is followed by another seven stops. EPT London took place in October, Prague hosted the Tour in December, the PCA has just recently ended and the Deauville stop is already underway, running through 1 February.