Poker News

US Deparment of Homeland Security shuts down Mt. Gox transactions on Dwolla, regulation of Bitcoin is planned.

Many US players would consider Bitcoin the tool to bypass US federal law. Considering it is an anonymous and not “real” currency, even though maintaining real value, it could provide a shortcut for online poker in the US market, at least for global sites that accept it as a deposit currency. Most recently, iPoker’s WinPoker skin made it available as a payment method.

Two renowned professional poker pros left LockPro Elite, the sponsored pro team of Lock Poker. Those who part ways with the room are Chris ‘moorman1’ Moorman and Paul ‘paulgees81’ Volpe.

Both players turned to the social media to announce their decision to leave their sponsoring room, Lock Poker.

A new application for Android devices offers the opportunity to users to define odds in live poker games.

A new app for Android smartphones and tablets has been released to calculate odds at live poker games: this is the Poker Odds Camera. All it takes with the software to take a picture of the cards on the table and the app calculates your odds.

The application handles two as well as multi-way all-in situations and we can calculate odds for every individual street; even in the case of a river shove, we can see where we stood on the flop or the turn.

After two years’ break, Tom ‘durrrr’ Dwan and Daniel ‘jungleman12’ Cates resumed their 50,000 hands heads-up duel.

‘Durrrr’ and ‘jungleman12’ started their duel, dubbed the Durrrr Challenge 2, in August, 2010. The last hand they played was the 19,335th, where Cates stood at $1,251,059 in profits. Dwan was apparently unable to counter the NLHE heads-up specialist, at his prime at the time, which might be the main reason he began to postpone further hands and chose the highly plus EV games in Macau instead.

Ashton Griffin has recently tweeted that he was going to participate in a $100,000 PLO heads-up championship in April.

Ashton Griffin

The Alls Star Showdown is an online heads-up championship, the NLHE variant of which was held in November, 2012. A total of eight players paid the $100,000 buy-in: Tobias 'KTPOKP' Kuder, Ben 'Sauce123' Sulsky, Isaac 'Ike Haxton' Haxton, Alex 'Kanu7' Millar, Alexander 'Sussie Smith' Roumeliotis, Dan 'w00ki3z.' Cates, Phil 'mrsweets28' Galfond and Ben 'ben86' Tollerene.

There is always something keeping you from achieving the great breakthrough? Are you unable to beat your stake? Some useful tips and solutions follow from the history of winning online poker strategies.

 
Click to enlarge

Rigged RNGs, or Play Bad, Get Rewarded
One of the basic rules of winning online poker strategies is that despite making correct decisions, the RNG is rigged and the fish will get his backdoor nut straight. The only solution is to double-cross the RNG, betting big in situations where you are more than likely beaten. In the worst case, you are still saving yourself a bad beat and can tilt a lot of players by winning hands from behind.

Tomorrow, on 10 March, the heads-up matches of the Negreanu Challenge will be played. Let us inspect the teams in comparison to determine the favourite!

Daniel Negreanu has recently challenged FTP Pros Gus Hansen, Viktor ‘Isildur1’ Blom and Tom ‘durrrr’ Dwan to heads-up SNG matches. Three duels will be played among the teams of three: Negreanu picked four times WSOP champion Isaac ‘luvtheWNBA’ Haxton and Betrand ‘ElkY’ Grospellier as his teammates.

Ryan ‘MouldyOnions’ Bell reached the SuperNova Elite VIP level in only 53 days, breaking Andrew ‘azntracker’ Li’s SNE speed record.

Already as of 15 February, British high stakes SNG player Ryan ‘MouldyOnions’ Bell was within arm’s reach of becoming the first SuperNova Elite (SNE) of 2013, as well as to break Andrew ‘azntracker’ Li’s “SNE speed record.” In 2011, ‘azntracker’ needed less than two months to collect the 1,000,000 VPPs required for the SNE status.

IveyPoker.com, the poker training site soon to be launched by legendary poker pro Phil Ivey, is now joined by Dan Shak in its pro team that already boasts the membership of Patrik Antonius, Greg Merson, Jackie Glazier, Jennifer Harman and Cole South.

Dan Shak

The IveyPoker.com website, a coaching enterprise with the promise of teaching everyone how to win, is still being developed and is currently in “the final stages of developing an innovative social poker game that also provides poker training content from some of the world's top pros.” The aforementioned, respectful list of players is now joined by Dan Shak.

Patrik Antonius and Rui Cao are to enter a million dollar challenge. The online duel will take place on PLO, NLHE and 27TD tables, probably during next week.

High stakes pros Patrik Antonius and Rui Cao agreed in a chatbox conversation to enter a heads-up challenge, betting $1 million each. The session will be in PLO, NLHE and 27TD games: the bets are $350,000 in PLO, $350,000 in NLHE and $300,000 in 2-7.

The GPI European Poker Awards ceremony was held on 22 January at the Elysee Biarritz in Paris, France. Titles were awarded in a total of nine categories.

Marvin Rettenmaier

The most prestigious award, European Player of the Year, went to Marvin Rettenmaier. This was no surprise: this year Epic Poker League’s Global poker Index (GPI) was used to determine the winner. As of 31 December, 2012, Rettenmaier held the top position, which predestined him for the coveted title.

In addition to his major MTT successes, Johan Van Til wins dozens of WSOP packages each year. One will easily find periods when there are literally no Step 6 tournaments that kick off without him.

Johan ‘busto_soon’ Van Til

Dutch Johan ‘busto_soon’ Van Til gained fame around 2007 and 2008, when he was already able to show off a number of major results, after only 2 years into his professional poker career. He took down a number of $109 re-buy events and had tens of thousands of dollars in total winnings.

His biggest prize was $81,326 for the Full Tilt Poker Mini FTOPS Event #40 in 2011. His balanced performance can be easily followed in the charts below.

In 39 hours and 25 minutes, Alex ‘AWice’ Wice collected the 100,000 VPPs necessary for the PokerStars SuperNova status, becoming the first one to reach the level in 2013. Ryan ‘MouldyOnions’ Bell almost beat him to it but a software error crossed his calculations.

Alex Wice

To reach SuperNova status, a player needs to collect 100,000 VPPs, while 1,000,000 points are needed for the SuperNova Elite level in a calendar year. This is not an easy task, even for multi tabling pros: cash game ace Randy ‘nanonoko’ Lew reached the status as late as December last year.

In our end-of-the-year retrospective we take a look at the highlights of the past year. Let us review the most important moment of each month in 2012.

January

PokerStars pro Randy 'nanonoko' Lew set a new Guinness World Record at the PCA 2012, playing 23,493 hands in 8 hours with realizing profit.

Read more on the insane record here

The epic online poker documentary “BOOM: The Incredible True Story of Online Poker” can be out within weeks.

High stakes pro Jay ‘pr1nnyraid’ Rosenkrantz announced in October 2010 the start of the shooting of a feature length poker documentary, in cooperation with Taylor Caby and Ryan Firpo.

"Our goal: to use key events to chronicle the evolution of online poker and examine its impact on the lives of a handful of online poker players from around the world. We are not simply looking to recount the memes that we all know and love and make photoshops of.