Poker Guru Blog

Jonathan Duhamel has won the 2010 World Series of Poker Main Event. The Canadian pro plalyed very well, used his huge chip lead against John Racener winning the $8,944,310 main prize and the bracelet.

Jonathan Duhamel with his friends

The most important poker event of the year started at 8 p.m. PT. The audience could witness the enshrinement of Erik Seidel And Dan Harrington into the Poker Hall of Fame as promised, and Frank Kassela also received his '2010 WSOP Player of The Year' title.

WPT Barcelona 2010 champion Ali Tekintamgac was disqualified from the PPT Cannes main event final table after suspicion arose that Pokerb00m.eu bloggers helped him achieve his 4th place in the event. The blog is currently “under maintenance.”

Ali Tekintamgac wins IPT Venice

After checking video footage of the qualifying day, event management concluded that certain “press members” provided Tekintamgac with information regarding his opponents’ hole cards. The poker player’s associates allegedly were fake journalists of the Pokerb00m.eu blog and were there to help him in the first place. The local police now use the recordings for their investigation.

Jonathan Duhamel will face John Racener in the heads-up at the WSOP Main Event final table later today. Duhamel is in an enormous chip lead, he has over 180 million chips against Racener's 30 million.

The event kicked off at exactly at 3 p.m. last Sunday when Bruce Buffer, renowned presenter announced the beginning of the finals.The Las Vegas Rio Casino was full by this time, many poker pros and celebrities visited the event, such as Barry Greenstein, Mike Matusow, Tom Marchese, Sorel Mizzi, Carter King, J.C. Tran, Nam Le, Karina Jett, and of course the whole Mizrachi family, supporting the most successful Mizrachi.

You are not going to believe this. PokerStars (that's right, the largest poker site in the world) released this commercial recently. Almost instantly they removed it, but it was already too late. It's very successful at YouTube at the moment, PokerStars tries to remove all of the uploads, but we all know it's futile. This commercial is not for the faint hearted, watch with care. (If the video is deleted, just search for "Banned PokerStars Commercial").

As I previously announced, the WSOP Main Event final table starts tomorrow. Thankfully, we don't have to wait for the TV show to see the action itself, starting from this year, ESPN will broadcast the event live (with a 5 minute delay) on their website.

The live stream can be found at ESPN3.com, and will be live from Nov 6 Saturday at 3 p.m. ET. The coverage will continue with the heads-up play with the final two on Monday, Nov 8 at 11:30 p.m. ET.

I'm sure you are all eager to watch this year's biggest event in poker: the WSOP Main Event final table. That's right, it's officially here, the final table starts tomorrow with all the november niners battling for the huge, $8,944,138 main prize. Set at the Rio Casino in Las Vegas, the World Championship of Poker will start tomorrow and we will have our newest champion by November 9.

The identity of the 9 finalists is known since this July, but there must some of you might not be aware who are in, so I decided to collect some interesting facts about the november niners for you, courtesy of WSOP.com.

Remember Jared Huggins? Last time I wrote about him he was on his was to a better life thanks to Two Plus Two forum users, finally living in a rented apartment. He got a new chance from life, and now he has even more coming: He released his audition video for PokerStars' The Big Game.

Backed by Daniel Negreanu and Justin 'BoostedJ' Smith, the once homeless player can easily star as the "loose cannon" in PokerStars' hit TV show. You can watch his video below, and if you go to this site, you can vote for Huggins. I think the poor fella deserves it, if you are a registered PokerStars member, go ahead and click vote for him!

Tom ’durrrr’ Dwan wins the most in October, earning $990,000, while Ilari ‘Ziigmund’ Sahamies loses over $1.7 million.

Tom 'durrrr' Dwan

Having around $1 million in profit already at the beginning of October, durrrr eventually won $991,318 by the end of the month. He clearly dominated the PLO tables, winning $1.2 million in 2784 hands, but he was also successful in 7-game, winning $96,619. Hold’em (both fix- and no-limit), however, cost him $310,000 in total.

As you can see, we have had a banner on the right for some time now, promoting one of the biggest affiliate sites called Rakerace.com. Their main goal is to collect the greatest payback offers possible, as well as to provide exclusive rake races to their members in online rooms like Everest Poker, Poker Heaven, Betsson Poker, Ladbrokes Poker, Chocolate Poker etc.

Providing news, poker strategy articles, room reviews and extensive race analysis, Rakerace.com also organises exclusive rake races on a regular basis. These also come with extra rakeback and sign-up bonus offers, which means it is more than worth registering. Moreover, the site offers over $30,000 per month in exclusive promotions, daily stats update and 24/7 customer support. In case you are a novice poker player and feel getting confused about terminology, a detailed FAQ session answers your questions in terms of rakeback and rake races. Are you a US citizen? No problem: Rakerace.com filters rooms for you that welcome residents of the United States.

Has it ever come to you that at smoking casinos dealers are second-hand smoking all day long? Well, Wynn employees have had enough of it, and filed a lawsuit against their employer. A federal judge ruled that the Plaintiffs can proceed with the filing of their lawsuit against Wynn casinos, who seemingly failed to protect them from the dangers caused by second-hand smoking for prolonged times.

Is the time of smoking casinos over?

The case is interesting because Wynn Resorts LTD. wanted the dismissal of the suit, claiming it is not their duty in Nevada state to protect their employees from second-hand smoking, and they also questioned the court's jurisdiction in such a case. Unfortunately for Wynn, the judge disagreed with the the casino's legal department, and allowed the Plaintiffs to proceed with the case.

EPT Vienna is over, Michael 'mae9690' Eiler, 20-year-old german player has took down the title last Sunday, who won the final heads-up against Martin Hruby. Daniel Negreanu, Canadian PokerStars Pro set out to win his first EPT title, wanting to claim his "Triple Crown" (a WSOP, a WPT and an EPT first place) that only Roland de Wolfe and Gavin Griffin could win so far, but in the end he only came in 4th.

Michael Eiler

For the first time ever, Paul Cézanne’s group of paintings of French card playing and pipe smoking peasants have been brought together by The Courtauld Gallery of London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York.

Paul Cézanne's The Card Players

Cézanne’s works, considered by many “to be among his most iconic and powerful” ones, are put in the focus of an exhibition for the first time. The impressionist masterpieces depict French peasants of Aix-en-Provence, who thus make an appearance unusual of their class at that time. Although not all of the series is shown, it is nevertheless a “unique opportunity” to witness an in-depth presentation of the works as five peasant portraits as well as quite a number of preparatory drawings and oil studies are staged in addition to the three card player paintings. While the Courtauld owns two pieces out of the five (The Card Players and Man with a Pipe), most of the exhibition is loaned from elsewhere, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), the Musée d’Orsay (Paris) and the State Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg).

PokerControlsTM has recently introduced their latest product to make life easier for all of you who feel that the keyboard and mouse combo is either insufficient for your gaming style or simply out of fashion. The Wireless Poker Controller is a gadget designed specifically for online poker and is compatible with all the major poker rooms.

“Now there's no need to worry about making the wrong move or not having enough time to make your bet,” the product info reads at the official website. It also adds that “Poker Controller can help both beginners and pros to increase their bet speed, accuracy, avoid errors and generally play more comfortably and efficiently.”

Nanonoko in real life

According to PokerTableRatings.com, Randy 'nanonoko' Lew is down in popularity. I'm not saying he's not popular at all, but he definitely lost some of his revenue since March according to PokerTableRatings. This of course might be only due to PTR Premium's launch that limited access to player searches, that is why all the players lost some popularity. The popularity graph (which is based on the number of profile views) is very telling nevertheless.

Marek Sosnowski with his new ride

A 19-year-old Polish player, Marek Sosnowski took down PartyPoker's latest 'Drive the Dream' challange, winning a super-cool Ł150,000 Aston Martin DB9 Coupe. Sosnowski doesn't have a driving license yet; he's working hard to get one as soon as possible. He has only been playing poker for a year, but as he states, he has taken the game very seriously, studied and learned very hard to be able to win this freeroll. As he goes on to say:

"This strategic approach has helped me get better and better. This is a life changer for me.”