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In 39 hours and 25 minutes, Alex ‘AWice’ Wice collected the 100,000 VPPs necessary for the PokerStars SuperNova status, becoming the first one to reach the level in 2013. Ryan ‘MouldyOnions’ Bell almost beat him to it but a software error crossed his calculations.

Alex Wice

To reach SuperNova status, a player needs to collect 100,000 VPPs, while 1,000,000 points are needed for the SuperNova Elite level in a calendar year. This is not an easy task, even for multi tabling pros: cash game ace Randy ‘nanonoko’ Lew reached the status as late as December last year.

In our end-of-the-year retrospective we take a look at the highlights of the past year. Let us review the most important moment of each month in 2012.

January

PokerStars pro Randy 'nanonoko' Lew set a new Guinness World Record at the PCA 2012, playing 23,493 hands in 8 hours with realizing profit.

Read more on the insane record here

The epic online poker documentary “BOOM: The Incredible True Story of Online Poker” can be out within weeks.

High stakes pro Jay ‘pr1nnyraid’ Rosenkrantz announced in October 2010 the start of the shooting of a feature length poker documentary, in cooperation with Taylor Caby and Ryan Firpo.

"Our goal: to use key events to chronicle the evolution of online poker and examine its impact on the lives of a handful of online poker players from around the world. We are not simply looking to recount the memes that we all know and love and make photoshops of.

Phil Galfond has launched a new coaching site with coaches like the Dang brothers and Steve ‘gboro780’ Gross.

Phil Galfond

Phil Galfond is considered a role model in poker, considering his results, his personality as well as his attitude towards the game, and few would doubt that rightly so. Accordingly, many have welcomed it warmly that he had launched his own coaching site, RunItOnce.

Facebook and Zynga have altered their partnership agreement, allowing Zynga to offer real money online poker directly through Facebook.

Zynga has previously made an agreement with bwin.party to launch its first real money online poker service in the UK in the first half of 2013. According to the original plans, Zynga would have used the PartyPoker platform to enter the real money online poker market but apparently, now the company has the opportunity to do that directly via Facebook.

It has been reported that the two social media giants have revised their partnership agreement, loosening their ties, which allows Zynga to offer real money gaming directly through the social network.

British MTT pro Chirs ‘Moorman1’ Moorman won three tournaments in three different online poker rooms within a week, collecting his 12th Triple Crown.

Chris 'Moorman1' Moorman

While it does not come with any special prize, the P5s Triple Crown is one of the most coveted title for online tournament players, right next to the great end-of-the-year awards. This is mainly due to the fact that it is outstandingly difficult to obtain, requiring victories in tournaments in three distinct online rooms within one week’s time.

The United States Department of Justice has currently no real idea on how exactly to repay the US players of Full Tilt Poker.

John Pappas, PPA

Three months after the acquisition of Full Tilt Poker and over a week after the reopening of non-US players’ accounts in the re-launching room, the United States Department of Justice has still not begun to compensate US players in the worth of a total of $200 million. It is not going to happen soon either, as it turns out following a meeting of representatives of the DoJ and the Poker Players Alliance (PPA).

Next year, it is time for the Little One and in 2014, the Big One returns to the World Series.

WSOP 2012 Big One - The Field

WSOP Big One organiser Guy Laliberté has officially announced that the $1,000,000 event returns to the schedule in 2014. The Big One was introduced this year and was an outstanding success with the top number of participants, 48 players. Antonio Esfandiari took down the tournament for $18.3 million.

A poker reality show is going to launch soon, highlighted by the names of poker legends Johnny Chan and Doyle Brunson. However, the promotional footage recently released met outrage from most of their fans.

Johnny Chan in the reality show

Ten times WSOP champion Johnny Chan will host the “Full House with Johnny Chan” poker reality show, which is planned to launch in February, 2013. A promotional footage has recently been released and it shocked the poker community. It is widely condemned as a mockery of poker, even among Chan’s most hardcore fans.

In September, WSOP released the list of the nominees for the Poker Hall of Fame 2012 induction, as a result of a public vote. 10 players and background workers made it to the final stage, namely Chris Bjorin, David Chiu, Eric Drache, Thor Hansen, George Hardie, Jennifer Harman-Traniello, John Juanda, Tom McEvoy, Scotty Nguyen and Brian "Sailor" Roberts.

The living members of the Poker Hall of Fame and a few poker media representatives then got the list, and in the end elected two persons, who met the following criteria:

• A player must have played poker against acknowledged top competition
• Be a minimum of 40 years old at time of nomination
• Played for high stakes
• Played consistently well, gaining the respect of peers
• Stood the test of time
• Or, for non-players, contributed to the overall growth and success of the game of poker, with indelible positive and lasting results.

Reese Newell, Michael Leow, Michael Song, Kurt Fruchtman and recent WCOOP champion Michael ‘mrw8419’ Weisbrod are highs stakes pro players from the United States, now residing in Budapest, Hungary. Watch our video interview with the guys here!

In this years’ WCOOP, a “Hungarian” player, ‘mrw8419’ took down the #21 $215 NLHE Event, besting 8,226 players. Following a deal in the 4-handed phase, ‘mrw8419’ added $164,619 to his bankroll.

Full Tilt Poker has officially announced to have their former pro, WSOPE and WPT champion Dane Gus Hansen back representing the room. Hansen is the first official ambassador of the re-opening FTP.

Full Tilt Poker (FTP) is to re-launch on 6 November at the latest, repaying 100% of non-US players’ money frozen on their accounts. Preparations of the restart are well underway, including the transportation of some of the room’s assets, including its servers, to the PokerStars headquarters on the Isle of Man in late September.

According to several of the most reliable media sources, Amaya Gaming Group, Inc. has purchased the Ongame network. It appears that the final price for Ongame is between $6.5 and $8 million, which is about 25% the amount Shuffle Master had originally offered.

Montreal-based online gaming provider Amaya has been said to be interested in acquiring the network for the past two weeks. Official announcement of the acquisition is expected to happen next week, during the G2E gaming expo in Las Vegas.

SrslySirius, the autotune artist of the poker community is back with his latest brainchild, 'Howard Lederer Confesses EVERYTHING'. The remix made up of The Howard Lederer Files presents viewers with a fun reinterpretation of what FTP's leader had to say. We have posted many of the remixes the amazing SrslySirius did, so we couldn't leave out his latest creation, which portrays the Howard Lederer interview from a very different angle as we've seen so far. Enjoy!

he two high-profile pros, the trash talk king Antanas 'Tony G' Guoga and Phil 'Poker Brat' Hellmuth, the 12-time WSOP champion decided to find out who's tougher in a more physical challenge. They set out to battle in Basketball, Swimming and Running. The official judge came to be Jesse May poker commentator.

Now you can see all the events and the exciting finale of the Match-Up. Enjoy!