Poker News

Norwegian online pro Kevin ’KevBoyStar’ Stani won the Main Event of EPT Season 7’s first stop in Tallinn.

The EPT7: Tallinn Main Event Final Table

The chipleader of the final table was French PokerStars pro Arnaud Mattern with 3,720,000, followed by Sunday 500 winner Stani with 2,586,000 and Konstantin Bilyauer with 2,498,000. The game started on level 25 (ante: 4,000, blinds: 20,000/40,000). The finalists were as follows:

Jungleman12 is one of the biggest names in the online poker world these days. He keeps hitting the headlines with huge amounts of money won in high stakes cash games, rumors of him accepting the ‘Durrrr Challenge’ and pictures of him partying with his buddies.

Daniel has recently also been making videos for CardRunners, while still going to college in Maryland.

Jungleman12 is in the middle with the hat on

Poker Curious has done an interview with Jungleman12, in which he is being asked about the launch of his poker career, his future ambitions and poker how-to.

From the interview it becomes clear that Daniel is truly a very honest and ambitious guy, with the kind of wisdom that is very rare among his contemproraries.
He talks about bankroll management, key moments of his career, personal characteristics that are a necessity to become a pro, his blog on CardRunners and a lot of other interesting topics.

Along with the 7th season of the PokerStars European Poker Tour, a refreshed version of the EPT Awards ranking system, debuted last year, was unveiled. Eight titles, including EPT Player of the Year, are there to compete for and winners receive trophies and packages for next season’s opening event, in addition to the recognition, as PokerNews.com reported.

According to feedback from players, PS modified last year’s system so that it is now not possible to gain the PoY title with a single victory at one of the largest events. Additionally, field size is now a factor in rewarding points, which was a key issue last year, as Maxim Lykov was able to beat Kevin MacPhee to the title by defeating a field of 296 players in Kiev for the same number of points MacPhee received for beating 945 people in Berlin.

Only a couple of days after his $200,000 winning, Phil Ivey is once again on ‘killing spree’; he drained all his opponents the other night, cashing $435,899 in total.

The first and probably the most interesting two hours of the night were provided by his heads-up games with Tom ‘durrrr’ Dwan. They played 132 hands in $300/$600 PLO, 108 hands in $500/$1,000 Cap NLHE and 66 hands of $500/$1,000 Cap PLO. Ivey won in each, $210,160 in all. After two losses in a row, which were arguably bad beats, durrrr quitted, but that didn’t stop Ivey.

The second Day 1 event of the first stop of EPT 7 took place yesterday with a number of renowned players once again. Among the 239 people entering the day were Betrand 'ElkY' Grospieller, bracelet winners Dario Minieri and Richard Ashby as well as EPT Berlin winner Kevin MacPhee.

The day, as the one before, saw 9 levels with stacks rising from 50/100 with no ante to 500/1000 with ante of 100. While 89 players survived Wednesday, about 130 were eliminated during Day 1B, making up a total of around 190 participants to enter Day 2 today. For the race with the €400,000 first prize 420 players have registered, which is a record number in the history of Estonian tournaments, according to PokerNewsDaily.com. What is more, it is truly an international filed, as opposed to US tourneys: no one nation gives more than 13% of the field, the top countries represented being Russia and Finland with 53-53 players.

In the end, Perica Bukara, who placed 6th in Prague at the Unibet Open, became chip leader of the day and he even took the overall lead from Ali Tekintamgac with his stack of 210,600. Top 10 Day 1B chip counts are as seen below:

You can follow PokerNews.com’s live reporting on Day 2 here.

Macau and Hong Kong may have little else than their special governmental status in common; whereas the former can be considered the "Las Vegas of Asia", the latter has strict rules against poker and gambling in general.

The latest issue was DonkDown.com forum member hongkonger’s. PokerStars co-sponsored room The Hong Kong Poker House organised a final all-you-can-eat party the other night, together with a freeroll tournament, before closing doors. The 160 participants got raided by the police who were looking for money and confiscated their stacks. Even though prized tourneys are legal in Hong Kong, all players were arrested “under suspicion of illegal gambling.” Although the tournament started at 7 pm, the raid, together with identifying the players, moving them to the police station by two(!) vans in 9 trips and keeping them at the station, took several hours. Eventually, they all could go from around 5:30 am on a bail of HKD $400 (USD $50) per person.

Hongkonger's fellow players get arrested

As I have noted, EPT Season 7 started yesterday with the main event of the first stop, Tallinn. The Swissôtel in the downtown of the Estonian capital hosted 181 players, including several PokerStars pros like Vanessa Selbst, Pierre Neuville, Michael Keiner and Ivan Demidov.

The term ‘Year of the Brit’ doesn’t seem to apply to the day as both promising names Praz Bansi and James Mitchell (Irish Open winner) were eliminated. The cards favoured the Russians instead, as Matvey Linov was in lead for most of the time, and although the end of the day saw German Ali Tekintamgac gather the greatest stack, it is Linov and his fellow countryman Artem Litvinov right behind him.

The Top 10 Day 1A chip counts are as follows:

Day 1B is already under way right now; you can follow PokerNews.com’s live thread here.

Those of you who read my post on Mike Matusow losing $2 million on a bet with Ted Forrest and concluded that The Mouth couldn’t possibly pay that sum have now turned out to be right.

Ted Forrest and Mike Matusow

After losing about 50 lbs (22 kgs) in only two months, thus beating the challenge on which they bet, Forrest now seems to be fooled by Matusow, as the latter sais he is unable as well as unwilling to pay the $2 million, at least in full. Matusow argued that the original bet was about paying the sum by monthly portions of $5,000, which would take 33 years and 4 months. He also admitted that he had made the bet because he couldn’t have imagined Forrest could do it, risking his life for the money: “I don’t have the $2 million to pay out. I made that bet because I didn’t think it was feasibly possible. I could pay him a big lump, but I’m going to wait six months to see if he dies first. I think he’s 50-50 to die. He starved himself for 11 days and ran 16 miles a day. He’s lost all of the muscle around his heart. He could have a heart attack. All that for $5,000 a month.”

The 7th instalment of the PokerStars European Poker Tour begins today with the €4000 + €250 NLHE Main Event of EPT Tallinn in the downtown Swissôtel.

The Swissôtel Tallinn

Tallinn is the first Baltic city to host the EPT, but encouraged by the success of the PokerStars Baltic Festival in October 2009, organisers expect about 600 participants. The Main Event takes place on 11-16th August with side events along the way varying between €300 + €30 PLO Turbo and €10,000 + €300 NLHE games.

Doyle Brunson celebrated his 77th birthday yesterday, and on this special occasion, he decided to reward Doyle’s Room players with a unique tournament with $50,000 in bounty money added to the prize pool.

The special $50K Birthday Bounty Tournament will take place todays at 9:30pm ET. Anyone knocking out a pro will receive $1,000 in bounty money. Two pro knockouts will make you $10,000 richer, and if you happen to knock out three pros, you will get a massive $50,000 bounty.

The marked poker pros will definitely include high stakes pro Todd Brunson, 2007 WPT Event 19 champion Pam Brunson  and Mike Caro.

Eliminate all three to win $50K!

Another extra is that today’s tournament also has a final table bonus. Players finishing in the top ten will be invited to the Todd Brunson Montana Poker Challenge Semi-Final on Saturday 14th August at 5pm ET.

The Bounty Tournament will have a $27.50 buy-in. For more info please visit the Doyle’s Room website.
Newly registered players will receive a full refund upon conclusion of the tournamet, no matter whether they win or lose.

A video interview made by Gambling Compliance has just been published, in which Congressman Jim McDermott speaks about the new online gambling legislation.
McDermott (who is a knight, by the way) is sponsoring the HR 2268, which basically sets up the structure of a revised federal online gambling taxing machine, the “companion bill” for Barney Frank’s HR 2267.

About five minutes into the interview, McDermott makes a statement predicting that “it is very very likely that this bill will pass” before the end of 2010. He also provides explanations for this, saying that the supporters of online gambling can influence Congress, “one Member at a time”.

The interview was made before the mark-up of HR 2267, where the bill had bigger success than expected. As HR 2268 is necessary to make HR 2267 work (and vice versa), the bills will probably merge at some point. Until then, however, the bills can easily be modified and shaped to meet the requirements of the clients’ interest.

After playing about 200 hands of $2,000/$4,000 LHE with ’IHateJuice’ the last weekend and losing $31,000, Ivey moved to the $500/$1,000 Cap NLHE games and faced the player known as ’riyyc225’, who was a surprise winner of $404,000 at the Full Tilt tables in July. After 227 hands, however, Ivey gathered a $190,000 profit.

Phil Ivey

Later on, the Full Tilt pro won an additional $68,000 in 40 hands of 10-handed $500/$1,000 Cap NLHE and a further $47,770 in 106 hands of heads-up $500/$1,000 Cap NLHE versus ’ginette22’. Then came Jungleman12 and the $500/$1,000 NLHE, in which Ivey lost $100,000 in merely 27 hands. This was enough for him not to push it further and added a handsome profit of $200,000 to his bankroll, which raised his total online winnings to $2,6 million this year. Now it is only Tom ’durrrr’ Dwan still ahead of him, who, despite his latest downturn period, is still leading the board with $3,9 million.

Thus climbing to the 2nd place in earnings not long after winning his 8th WSOP bracelet, Ivey is now competing with Michael Mizrachi for the fictional title of the Most Successful Player of the Year.

The fifth Ultimate Bet Online Championship (UBOC) will start on Cereus Network's UB and Absolute Poker on the 18th August.

With 20 online tournaments and a total prize pool of at least $4 million up for grabs, UBOC 5 will also have a MiniUBOC counterpart running simultaneously and joining in a $1,050 buy-in Monster Stack Championship Event on the 29th August.

The Championship Event will be hosted by no other than Phil Hellmuth, the Poker Brat himself. The tournament will have at least a million dollar prize pool.

Starting at 8pm EST/5pm PST /01am GMT, days 1A and 1B of the 2010 WSOP Main Event will finally be airing.

Tonight we will see the fifth and sixth episodes of the WSOP broadcasts; ESPN has covered the $50,000 Poker Player’s Championship and the Tournament of Champions so far.

ESPN will be airing two episodes every Tuesday, right until 9th November, the broadcast of the Main Event Final Table.

Big names playing day 1A and 1B included Mike ‘The Mouth’ Matusow, Chris Moneymaker, Michael ‘The Grinder’ Mizrachi, Maria Ho and Tiffany Michelle.

There also will be some celebrities to be seen, including David Alan Grier, Ray Romano, the NBA star Shawn Marion and gorgeous playmate Sara Underwood.

The Prague stop of the Unibet Open series (advertised by the beautiful host Tatjana – video below) has ended with a young Finnish poker player gaining victory, with the most well-known player Jan Skampa taking 3rd place.

424 players enrolled in the €1,500+€150 Main Event of Unibet Open Prague, making the total prize pool a nice €629,640.

The biggest names registering to the tournament included Sorel Mizzi, Jan Skampa, Pieter de Kover, Peter Dalhuijsen, Dan Glimne, Sergey Rybachenko, Zdenek Habala, Jordan Mitrentzova, the Golden Sands winner Dan Murariu and last year’s winner Fuat Caan.