Poker Guru Blog

The final day of the WSOP Event #42 - $1,000 NLHE was held on 25 June. 11 players were still fighting for the bracelet. The chipleader was Rory 'Mafews' Mathews with 898,000. 2 players had to be eliminated for the 9-handed final table.

Dealing started on the 22nd blind level (2,000-8,000/16,000). The first to go came to be the Romanian player Dan Murariu, who was beaten with A-K against Ariel Celestino's pocket jacks. Not much later Dana Buck went bluff all-in with 9-6 after it was folded to him, the BB Daniel Neilson called with K-J but a nine fell on the dry board, Neilson was out.

In the most expensive poker tournament ever, the WSOP 2012 $1,000,000 Big One for One Drop, Sam Trickett scooped in $10,112,001 in prize money for his runner-up finish. A four-part documentary on his march to the gargantuan win is now out.

The most expensive tournament in the history of poker was held in 2012: part of the World Series of Poker schedule, the $1,000,000 Big One for One Drop had 48 entrants, who amassed a prize pool of $42,666,672. The $18,346,673 first prize was won by Antonio Esfandiari and the runner-up was Sam Trickett for $10,112,001.

On the occasion of the 100 billionth hand dealt, PokerStars organised a world record breaking tournament of 225,000 players. The $1 event took place on Sunday at 19:00 CET.

On 4 December, 2011, PokerStars held the largest poker tournament ever with 200,000 players to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the poker room. The breaking of that record was due last weekend to salute the 100 billionth hand dealt at the cash game tables. The Guinness World Record Attempt tournament had a $1 buy-in and it kicked off on 16 June at 19:00 CET.

Republican Representative Peter King has filed a draft to regulate not only online poker but online gaming in general on a federal level in the US.

Despite being regarded as one of the most promising proposals to legalise the game since the UIGEA of 2006, the bill to regulate the online poker market in the United States of America on a federal level, filed by Senators Harry Reid and Jon Kyl, failed permanently in December last year. Republican Representative Peter King has just filed a draft resembling the Reid-Kyl Bill but aiming to eliminate its flaws. For example, the King Bill includes the state lottery companies in the regulation process, in order to weaken the counter lobby supported by them, the National Governors Association, Native American as well as religious groups.

Follow the events of the PokerStars GuangDong Asia Millions HK$1,000,000+R High Roller tournament here, at PokerGuruBlog.com!

It is expected that the one of the biggest High Roller events of all time be held in Macau, running 5-7 June, 2013. The HK$1,000,000 (US$130,000) GuangDong Asia Millions offers two re-buy options, implying an enormous prize pool to be built.

The biggest names of poker, as well as the richest businessmen will be seated at the tables, including but not limited to Erik Seidel, Igor Kurganov, Tobias Reinkemeier, Bertrand ‘ElkY’ Grospellier and Niklas ‘ragen70’ Heinecker.

The PokerStars Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) has ended and a number of the biggest pros have again shown us that they more than live up to their reputation. Most notably, both Viktor ‘Isildur1’ Blom and Daniel ‘KidPoker’ Negreanu achieved something remarkable.

The high stakes main event (Event #43-H $10,300 NLHE) of the PS SCOOP 2013 was won by no other than online high stakes poker ace Viktor ‘Isildur1’ Blom. After taking down not one but two events in 2012, he scooped in his third title in an incredibly strong field.

PokerStars presents a short documentary on the hardships and successes of the poker career of Team PokerStars Online pro Shane ’Shaniac’ Schleger.

Shane 'Shaniac' Schleger

Shane ’Shaniac’ Schleger started out as a waiter in New York City to become one of the most successful online players, as well as a Team PokerStars Online professional. The road, however, was far from smooth, requiring immense amount of work and dedication, as well as a “strong competitive spirit” to overcome the hardships.

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.

The 888poker iPad App Fast-Tracks your Poker Game!

The focus of the 888poker iPad App is mobile poker gaming par excellence. Now players can enjoy top-notch poker games on their iPad.

iPad Poker gaming is experiencing a groundswell of support from players the world over. Top-tier mobile poker is the order of the day and 888poker has developed a software platform to enhance your enjoyment of iPad poker play.

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.

 
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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.