Poker Guru Blog

A few days ago, my friend linked this video on Facebook. Whoever feels like they need some motivation for the Vilamoura stop of the EPT, starting today, should definitely watch this!
 

Golf & Poker at the EPT Vilamoura
EPT Official

The European Poker Tour’s next stop will be in Vilamoura, Portugal. With all the usual events being held, this stop of the EPT offers something truly unique: an extra event will be held, in which the poker players also need to prove their golf skills.

The beautiful Vilamoura coastline

Named ’Fairways and Felts’, the tournament will consist of one day of golf play, and one day of poker play. The buy-in will cost €770+€70 for the poker tournament, and an extra €260 for the golf event, making a €1100 total buy-in.

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

The North Gauteng High Court in South Africa has decided to make all forms of online gambling illegal, and whoever fails to oblige to the law will have to face a million-dollar fine or up to ten years in prison, says RakeRace.com.

On the 20th August, North Gauteng High Court banned all forms of online gambling in South Africa. The initator of the decision was a lobby by the Gauteng Gambling Board (GGB). The South African gambling industry has been fighting for years to protect its US$2.2 billion (!) gambling monopoly from international gambling service providers.

GGB managed to win judge N. B. Tuchten, who, with this decision, has put an end to all online gambling services, and also forecasts severe sanctions to be expected in the case of breaking the law. Whoever fails to abide the new laws will face a US$1.36 million fine or even ten years in prison.

According to an article published on RakeRace.com, the biggest online gambling firms continue to grow in revenue across Europe and the United States, despite the economic crisis.

In Europe, most companies release financials every quarter year, and many have recently made their quarterly profit viewable for the public.
Paddy Power, Ireland’s biggest betting company reported a nice revenue growth during the first half of this year, with their profits leaving  those of this time last year behind by 50%. This also has to do with this summer’s FIFA World Cup, which has earned Paddy Power €11 million in bets. Customers of Paddy have won €205.6 million altogether in the first half of 2010.

Dan Fleyshman, Victory Poker CEO confirmed that Victory Poker will leave the Everlef Network and move to Cake, which will be officially announced on 1st September.

In an interview with CoinFlip.com, Dan admits that he is excitedly looking forward to the collaboration with Cake and plans to organize a party on his birthday, 1st September, where, besides the announcement, lucky attendants will 2007 Playmate and Victory Poker hottie Sara Jean Underwood locked up in a cage (hopefully with not too many clothes on).

In the interview, Dan Fleyshman seems truly motivated and determined to make Victory the next big boom in the poker world:

The storm that was caused by Daniel Negrenau’s recent statement about Annie Duke doesn’t seem to calm. The Canadian poker pro expressed his views in a less elegant fashion in an interview. However, the scandal has not came out of thin air, they have been hating each other for nearly a decade now.

Daniel Negreanu insulted Annie Duke in his interview given to PokerPlayer magazine, while he was evaluating the results of the WSOP Ladies event. His rant is still the object of debates and discussions, even though their dislike of each other is well known in the poker scene.

Their disagreement can be traced back to the early 90’s, but it has become apparent 7 years ago, when Negreanu posted a list of the reasons why he dislikes Duke. It contains 7 short stories, here’s one as an example:

“Annie habitually leans over to look at the cards of the person sitting beside her in a game, whether they like it or not. Well one day one of the players was fed up with her sweating her neighbor's hole cards and he spoke up about it. She obliged saying, "Ok, I won't look anymore." Not an hour later, a triple draw hand comes up, and she is caught red handed looking at her neighbor's hole cards again.  This time the player objected furiously, "I told you to stop looking at your neighbor's cards!" To which she replies, "I SWEAR ON MY CHILDREN I WASN'T". This was an absolute lie. She saw EXACTLY what card her neighbor got and ANNOUNCED the hand before it was turned over, also saying something to the effect of, "Oh you would have made it anyway."

Ben Grundy is one of the most profitable cash game players online in the past 2-3 years, states Poker-King.com. According to a graph he posted on his blog (which many of his followers and fans think is inaccurate, or downright fake) his winnings already reached $7,805,169. Though, it seems he might have spent huge part of his money on houses, and now needs stakes as he posted the following on his blog:

“I'm at a weird stage with poker really. I can't be bothered to play small, as grinding doesn't really change my financial position at all. With all my money i've tied up in a couple of houses, i can't afford to play big and lose. Bleh... so if someone out there wants to bankroll me for $100/$200+ action on Full Tilt i'm open to offers . I'm up $2 million ish in the last 2 years with my current backer at 25/50 - 50/100.”

Last week, we saw the start of a series of videos by Chris Olaafson, claimed (by himself) to be the best poker player in the world. The humorous video featured Daniel Negreanu, Tiffany Michelle and Arnaud Mattern, all praising Chris, calling him the God of Poker and other honorable titles.

The Chris Olaafson Story goes on, the second part of the series was made public yesterday, and you now have the opportunity to watch it below.

In this part, Chris (once again, with the help of several poker celebrities) tries to convince the audience that he is truly the best poker player in the whole wide world, and that the training program he offers will unveil tactics and strategies never seen or heard of before, to make the average player a poker monster.

The third video, appearing on the 30th August, will allegedly already contain the first lesson, and I, together with all the poker players out there, am eagerly waiting for it. Not only because of the knowledge that Chris claims to possess, but also out of curiosity, whether the next part will contain at least one sentence to be taken seriously.

Until the beginning of this year, gambling was illegal in Singapore. Because of the opening of two major casino complexes, however, Singapore permitted gambling within its borders, and has already made around $4 billion out of it.

The country was aiming to broaden its legal sources of income, this is why around $10 billion has been spent on building the two gigantic casinos, The Genting Resorts World Sentosa and Marina Bay Sands, one of the most spectacular resorts in the world, with a magnificent swimming pool on the top of the complex.
These two casinos have already provided around $4 billion income for Singapore, whith reports predicting a more than $5 billion revenue for 2011.

The Marina Bay Sands Experience

“Singapore is already the second-largest casino market in Asia after Macau and could potentially overtake the Las Vegas strip as the second largest casino market in the world after Macau in the next two to three years”, say DMG & Partners analysts.

Michael Jordan has always been known not to despise gambling, and it seems that his sons follow suit.

Marcus Jordan, 20 years old, spent last weekend in Vegas with his borther Jeff, 21, and felt like sharing their adventures with the public.
Marcus ranted about his casino losses on Twitter, saying the following:

"Last night was stupid… 35k at Haze… Totals 50k something the whole day.. Damn!! Going to the pool again today.. Gotta relax!"

For those who are not aware, Haze is a nightclub in the Aria Hotel and Casino City Center. This leaves only one question: how did the 20-year-old celebrity get admission? Well, nobody speaks about that.

21 Indian tribes, led by the Morongo Band of Mission Indians, joined forces to create the California Intertribal Intrastate Poker Consortium, a limited liability company to be a member of the California Online Poker Association.

As of yet, online gambling is still prohibited in California, however, as the last attempt for legalisation was a bill from Senator Roderick Wright, but he cancelled the hearing of it earlier this year. Ever since, the movement of the tribes is the first and only initiative to press for the establishment of the regulation: “While we have some disagreements with the bill, we’re hopeful that all sides can come together and do what’s best for the state,” Morongo Band spokesman Patrick Dorinson told the Capitol Weekly. He added that they were negotiating with Wright as they wished to be one of the three groups to operate a hub of online gambling in the state.