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As Everest Poker's global and French traffic decreased gradually in the past few months, the company decided to give up their indepedence and join the largest poker network, the iPoker Network.

Both clients of Everest Poker (the global, licensed in Malta and the French one, licensed by ARJEL) lost 30-40% traffic during the last 6 months according to PokerScout. Even though the .fr client held its 3rd place on the regulated French market, the .com client fell behind.

This might be behind the decision Everest Poker has made recently, namely they are joining the biggest poker network,  iPoker. This will affect Everest Poker players in many ways including the ability to play at much more tables, and the iPoker Speed Holdem fast-fold game will also be available to them.

PokerStars is planning on introducing a “run it twice” option. The feature that would reduce all-in variance may become available for testing in the TestPokerStars client in August.

"Running it Twice" as seen on FTP

The latest PokerStars feature to be introduced is a “run it twice” option that may debut in the TestPokerStars client this month, according to a short summary published by the room via the 2+2 forum.

The PokerStars European Poker Tour Barcelona €50,000 Super High Roller event has ended with the victory of Aussie Millions High Roller champion Dan Smith for €962,925. He made a deal with JC Alvarado and defeated him heads-up for the Shamballa bracelet.

Dan Smith

Play in the 8-handed Final Table of the PokerStars EPT Barcelona €50,000 Super High Roller commenced on Level 16 (4,000/15,000/30,000) with Smith, Mike ‘Timex’ McDonald and Alvarado holding 80% of the chips in play. The final table setup was as follows:

Dan Smith is in the chiplead of the incredibly strong final table of the PokerStars European Poker Tour (EPT) Barcelona Super High Roller event.

Dan Smith

On Day 2 of the PokerStars EPT Barcelona €50,000 Super High Roller event, players still had the opportunity to buy or re-buy entries, which resulted in a total player pool of 64 and a total prize pool of €3,072,960.

The PokerStars European Poker Tour (EPT) Barcelona Super High Roller event has launched, with Steve O’Dwyer in the lead after Day 1. In second place follows Erik Seidel.

Steve O'Dwyer

On 17 August, the PokerStars EPT Barcelona €50,000 Super High Roller event started with 54 participants. Since registration is still open and re-buy is possible on Day 2, there is no official prize pool yet.

The field primarily consists of the biggest names of the industry, including Steve O’Dwyer, who packed away 1,249,000 in chips at the end of Day 1 for a massive chiplead over 2nd finisher Erik Seidel (738,000).

Viktor 'Isildur1' Blom continued his insane high stakes session from yesterday, but this time around, he left the tables with major losses. He was beaten in games which he doesn't usually play. As we reported yesterday, Viktor 'Isildur1' Blom returned to PokerStars tables after he and the poker room parted ways, and he logged a marathon session of 24+ hours and won more than $400,000. He continued his grind on Thursday after a few hours of sleep, which proved to be less of a success than the previous day; he lost all of his profits and his PokerStars bankroll took a serious hit as well.

Viktor 'Isildur1' Blom

PokerStars will not renew Viktor ’Isildur1’ Blom’s professional contract: they part ways on a mutual agreement.

PokerStars head of corporate communications, Eric Hollreiser announced that Viktor ‘Isildur1’ Blom and the room will not continue to work together: on a mutual agreement, the professional contract of the young poker star has not been prolonged.

The latest poker scandal is delivered by Matt Marafioti: the Bandidos motorcycle gang may have cheated a number of high stakes players out of their money with the help of hackers.

Matt Marafioti

It is not the first time Matt ‘ADZ124’ Marafioti gets into the centre of attention with a scandal: in July, he treated his ex-girlfriend Lauren Kling with little to no respect, calling her names via his Twitter. His latest issue, however, goes beyond everything we saw from him before, even though the exact nature of his role in all this is yet unclear. 2p2 forum member ‘cbt5000’ posted Skype and Facebook chat logs of Marafioti’s with Swedish IT professional and hacker Samer Rahman. Based on these logs, Marafioti and Rahman planned to install Trojan programs on high stakes players’ computers during the PCA to cheat them out of their money later, seeing their hole cards.

PartyPoker's highly anticipated fast-fold format is here; FastForward, "the turbo-charged way to play cash games" is released to real money tables. As we reported a few days earlier, slowly but surely PartyPoker's fast-fold game arrived to the tables. As the debut went very well, without any hitches, PartyPoker already released the format to its real money cash game tables as well. Real Money games are currently at NL4-NL25 tables, and an NL50 heads-up table is also offered, but at the time of writing of this article nobody played there.

FastForward does not seem to offer radically new features as the competitors' solutions. Players can connect to the very same table 4 times, and the Forward Fold button will instantly fold the players hand, even before their turn in the given hand.

The 2012 British Poker Awards will be held on 17 September, as a part of the London Poker Festival, as usual. The names of the nominees were just made public and voting is open.

This year's British Poker Awards (BPA) will be held for the third year in a row now; many prominent figures of the poker industry will get awards, mostly based on public vote.

The categories are the following: Best Cash Player, Best Tournament Player, Best Online Player, Poker Personality of the Year, Best Poker Forum, Best UK Tournament, Best Card Room Restaurant, Best Card Room Bar, Best Poker Blogger / social media, Best Poker League, Biggest contribution to growing & promoting poker, Player of the Year, Best International Player, Best Card Room, Best Card Room Manager, Best Tournament Director.

PokerStars' Road To 100 Billion promotion continues, the poker room will soon arrive at the 85 billionth milestone hand. $1 million is at stake once again.

Another milestone hand is approaching at PokerStars. The largest poker site will deal the 85 billionth hand during the next two weeks. If you've followed the promotion so far, you are aware that $1 million is distributed amongst a lucky few, who are dealt into milestone and Mega Milestone hands.

PartyPoker, the 3rd biggest online poker network finally decided to release an ever so popular fast poker format. They call it Fast Forward, and the beta testing is underway, they plan to release it in the following weeks.

The so called fast-fold poker format has been a major success in online poker, Full Tilt Poker developed Rush Poker, PokerStars Zoom Poker, and many smaller rooms followed suit by releasing fast-fold games. PartyPoker was highly criticised due to their inability to roll out the format for so long, but the company stated they are working on it.

RedKings Poker released its Android client that will allow poker players to play for fun and for real money on their Android devices. RedKings also hopes to release a mobile app for iOS in the next few weeks.

All RedKings Poker players with an Android device rejoice: RedKings Poker just released the mobile client for Google's mobile operating system. With crisp graphics, easy to use navigation and lots of features, the app features play money and real money fixed limit, pot limit or no limit Holdem games at stakes from $0.05/$0.10 up to $3/$6. Plus there is heads-up 6-max or full ring tables. The app is bound to be a huge success, as Jack Simmons, RedKings European VIP Manager explains:

"Our new RedKings Android App allows players exactly the same functions as their PC or Laptop. Players can open a RedKings poker account through their Android device, make deposits or withdrawals and check for Daily offers while on the move. That long journey home by train doesn’t seem so bad anymore!"

PokerStars currently has a 42% share of the online poker market and could be in for an even more devastating edge with the FTP acquisition.

On 31 July, 2012, PokerStars has announced the settlement with the United States Department of Justice, according to which the company could purchase Full Tilt Poker (FTP) for $547 million and take on the responsibility to restart the room in 90 days, in addition to repaying players everything they had frozen on their FTP accounts. The new Full Tilt would be a stand-alone room with a separate management, while its profits remain the property of PokerStars. This will ultimately lead to an unprecedented PokerStars dominance on the online poker market.

’KidPoker’ is back after a longer pause, due to the World Series of Poker, and discusses a range of topics in a longer than usual vblog entry. He speaks about the WSOP and the final table, of course, in addition to heavier topics like homosexuality and the passing away of Ryan Young, next to the Olympics, Breaking Bad and his planned travels, including his return to business at EPT Barcelona.