Poker News

The second stop of the EPT Season 7 was Vilamoura, Portugal. A total of 384 players have entered the tournament, including Daniel Negreanu, Kevin MacPhee, Arnaud Mattern, Antonio Esfandiari, Chris Moorman and JP Kelly, who even hosted the prize ceremony of the ’Fairways and Felts’ event during the tourney.

The EPT7 Vilamoura Final Table

The finale yesterday eventually saw some British dominance both at the table and on the rail; the top three stacks were Toby Lewis, Sam Trickett and former soccer player Teddy Sheringham. The final table was as seen below.

It's commonly known between poker players that Italian players are quite weak at the game. Now it's your time to decide,  you can register to the AK Poker Club, which is swarming with Italian players.

The AK Poker Club was founded in Italy when some local brick and mortar poker clubs decided to gather in an online network, so their players can play from their homes. I think the above information is enough for you to run and register to rob them of their cash.

According to Seiska, a Finnish yellow press-style magzine, Ilari ‘Ziigmund’ Sahamies and Miss Finland 2010, Viivi Pumpanen are dating.

If I had to describe Ziigmund, I would say the following: a millionaire, one of the best PLO players in the world, and an infamous womanizer. Seiska says he has strengthened his fame for being a striker by dating Viivi Pumpanen, Finland’s latest beauty queen.

ziigmund has always known how to party

The 22 year-old lady has won the title this year, and immediately became a tabloid target. She broke up with her bridegroom, Pezhman Ahmadi (successful entrepreneur) just a few months ago, and can now often be seen on the side of Ziggy, and their relationship seems quite intimate.
Although Pumpanen denies that there is anything more than friendship between them, the local media already handles them as a couple.

As I have mentioned in a previous post, the 2010 Nominees of the Poker Hall of Fame have been chosen by public voting. The ten-name list did not bring real surprises.
This is the second time that the nominees have been chosen by public voting. The list was made official yesterday.

Below you can view Mike Sexton’s induction into the Poker Hall of Fame from last year.

The 2010 Nominees are as follows:

Chris Ferguson
Barry Greenstein
Jennifer Harman
Dan Harrington
Phil Ivey
Linda Johnson
Tom McEvoy
Daniel Negreanu
Scotty Nguyen
Erik Seidel

As I have mentioned in previous posts, Victory Poker officially became part of the Cake Network on the 1st September. Players can already enjoy the benefits of the brand new Victory Poker platform. Victory Poker’s website, however, has not yet been available yesterday, as they have been refurbishing it. Upon viewing the site yesterday, players saw the following message:

If we have a look at the Victory Poker website today, we can see that the software client has already been made available for downloading, and the site is promised to be back up in a few hours.

Fox Sports Net came to an agreement with WPT, so for the next three years FSN will televise the popular poker tour from the 9th to the 11th season. The new episodes will air on Sunday nights at 8 and 11PM starting with the 179th episode in January 2011. The show's commentators will be Mike Sexton, 2009 WSOP bracelet winner and Vince Van Patten actor along with Kimberly Lansing, reporter.

The Earl hurricane caused major power outages on the island of Antigua, where many well-known off-shore gambling firms reside.

"Islands hit particularly hard were Antigua, Barbuda, Anguilla and St. Martin, where there are reports of roofs torn off, trees downed and numerous power outages," CBC meteorologist Johanna Wagstaffe said.

A Rancho Cordova, CA couple was arrested in April after a security guard found a seven-week-old baby in a parked vehicle outside the Thunder Valley casino. It turned out the Northern California couple went gambling into the casino, leaving the baby unattended for about 2 1/2 hours.

A Placer County Superior Court judge now sentenced the 27 year old parents, Thuan huy Nguyen and Panfila Phu Phan to 60 days. He also ordered them to attend parenting class and with a 4-year probation, they could get the baby back.

 

The biggest match was fought at the Elevado table ($100/$300/$600 PLO 6-Max) on Saturday, with many poker celebrities such as Phil Ivey, Tom 'durrrr' Dwan, Patrik Antonius, Di 'Urindanger'' Dang, Scott 'URnotINdanger2' Palmer, and a newcomer by the name of 'cadillac1944'.

This years' 5th biggest pot was on the table this day, $528.618.

According to RakeRace.com, an unusually grim debate seems to evolve between the Poker Players Alliance and top California-based card rooms. The dispute revolves around the Congressional testimony from Commerce Casino board member Tom Malkasian on HR 2267.

In July, Malkasian testified against the bill before the House Financial Services Committee. First, he questioned the revenue estimations that forecast about $42 billion tax income in 10 years: “The problem with these estimates is that they are all built on false assumptions and conflicting representations,” he stated. He added that with the states being allowed to opt out, the revenues were even less guaranteed. This would also mean that “supporters of HR 2267 are straddling two conflicting claims” as they could either have the estimated incomes or the option for opt-out.

As it was big news for a few days now, on August 5th  the San Jose mine collapsed in Chile, trapping 33 Chilean miners half a mile inside the earth. All the miners are safe and sound thankfully, though their rescue might take very long, approximately 4 months.

Through the 6 inch (15cm) wide tube that leads to the survivors, where they get food and air supplies, the miners requested a deck of poker cards, and they have been playing poker to pass the time ever since.

To my greatest pleasure (and many other’s, I’m sure), durrrr and jungleman12 have started their 50k hand battle, and the first round ended with durrrr being $130k ahead.

A couple of hours ago, Tom ‘durrrr’ Dwan (1st place on Full Tilt’s yearly high stakes profit leaderboard) and Daniel ‘jungleman12’ Cates (third place on the same leaderboard) started the famous heads-up challenge called the ‘durrrr challenge’.   Durrrr is leading after having played a session of 1,651 hands.

The biggest pot during the match was $86,387. Jungleman, sitting on the button, raised to $1,200, durrrr called, the flop came T 2 2. Durrrr checked, jungleman made a cbet to $2,000 and durrrr called. The turn was a 9. Durrrr checked, jungleman fired out with $5,600, durrrr called. The river was a 6. Once again, durrrr checked, then went all-in to jungleman’s raise $13,400 raise. Jungleman only had $20,994 left in front of him, which he instantly pushed in the middle.Jungleman showed a flush with K 8 and took the pot. Durrrr had Q J.

According to an official announcement made yesterday, Blanca Games have purchased the Cereus Network for a buying price that yet remains unknown to the public.

Stuart Gordon, the owner of Blanca Games has also confirmed that they have bought Cereus from Tokwiro Enterprises.

 “The acquisition of CEREUS is a significant opportunity for us. CEREUS is a major platform of well-managed assets. Over the past few years, it has created new brands, like UB.com, that are extremely well-positioned in the most desirable demographic in our market: players in the 20s and 30s age brackets…From our perspective, we have acquired a large, sophisticated online gaming operation with state-of-the art capabilities, ranging from compliance to business intelligence to online marketing to customer service. We see a tremendous growth opportunity in this deal and beyond, as Blanca seeks additional acquisitions in the market...” said Gordon.

Ilari Sahamies (Ziigmund) had a pretty bad run this month, by losing $885,460 until 18th August at the online poker tables. Although he made promises not to play $200/$400 in the next few weeks and concentrate on smaller games instead, he did not stop grinding the usual limits.

Anyway, he finishes the month much better than he started it by having won $550,595 between the 19th and 25th August.

Ilari 'Ziigmund' Sahamies

On Wednesday, Ziigmund met durrrr at the online high stakes tables, and they started chatting about Dwan’s upcoming challenge against Jungleman12. Ziggy informed durrrr in his usual ironic manner how much faith he has in durrrr’s success.

462 players took part in the WPT Legends of Poker Main Event, with a prize pool of $2,151,072.

The buy-in for the event was $4800+$200, and poker players battling for the title included Barry Greenstein, Maria Ho, Tim Phan, Jerry Yang, Justin "BoostedJ" Smith, Jonathan Aguiar, Jason DeWitt, Lauren Kling, Allen Kessler, Joe Sebok, Tom Marchese, JC Alvarado, Steve Gross, David Oppenheim, Eric Lindgren, Chad Brown, Steven Burkholder, Scott Clements, Zachary Clark and Jonathan Little.

Despite the many poker celebrities taking part, the fourth day already began without any truly big names still in. The most well-known player was Jonathan Little, aiming to win the third WPT title of his career. In fact, he had quite good chances, as he started day 4 at the second place with 1,314,000 chips, only Andy Frankenberger being ahead of him with 1,958,000.

Little and Frankenberger