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According to RakeRace.com, an unusually grim debate seems to evolve between the Poker Players Alliance and top California-based card rooms. The dispute revolves around the Congressional testimony from Commerce Casino board member Tom Malkasian on HR 2267.

In July, Malkasian testified against the bill before the House Financial Services Committee. First, he questioned the revenue estimations that forecast about $42 billion tax income in 10 years: “The problem with these estimates is that they are all built on false assumptions and conflicting representations,” he stated. He added that with the states being allowed to opt out, the revenues were even less guaranteed. This would also mean that “supporters of HR 2267 are straddling two conflicting claims” as they could either have the estimated incomes or the option for opt-out.

ESPN’s coverage of the 2010 WSOP Main Event started to air on 10th August and continues to screen two episodes every Tuesday until 9th November, when the Finale will be broadcast. Eps 5 and 6 cover Main Event Day 2, while 7 and 8 are airing tomorrow.

The event day presents poker stars like Daniel Negreanu, Patrik Antonius and Michael Mizrachi. 

Episode 5:

Please note: due to bug in the embed code, Ep5 part 1 is only available at PokerTube. The link above will take you there. You can watch the rest and Ep6 here.

In this episode of "This Week In Poker by WickedChops.com" guests include Kimberly Lansing, who talks about the WPT, Legends of poker and much more; Phil Laak, who gives a Skype interview, in which he talks about his horrible ATV quad accident (which I already wrote about) in which he broke 7 bones; and Jess Wellman, with some of the most important poker news. Finally, we have some comments on the recent Negreanu vs. Duke affair.

If you won't watch the whole 1:19 minutes of the video, I definitely suggest you watch the bit from 49:28 till 1:14, where Phil Laak talks about his accident, it is really worth watching.

As it was big news for a few days now, on August 5th  the San Jose mine collapsed in Chile, trapping 33 Chilean miners half a mile inside the earth. All the miners are safe and sound thankfully, though their rescue might take very long, approximately 4 months.

Through the 6 inch (15cm) wide tube that leads to the survivors, where they get food and air supplies, the miners requested a deck of poker cards, and they have been playing poker to pass the time ever since.

Have you ever though about what happens to the poker pros that stop playing?

Well, some of them obviously go on living average lives, or go broke and live worse-than-average ones. Others continue grinding under secret nicknames, or just find other activities to do. Former Full Tilt Poker sponsored player Thomas Wahlroos decided to try himself out in investing after closing the poker chapter in his life.

According to a Norwegian newspaper Dagens Näringsliv, Wahlroos has made a massive $15 million through his and his father’s investing company. And that is only the last year. Wahlroos has a degree in financing, but before his investing adventures, he was a professional poker player who made more than a million dollars in live tournaments, finishing 3rd at the EPT Paris in 2006, and 7th at the WPT Championship in 2007.

Wahlroos ended his poker life in 2008, when he decided to go into investing. He still plays poker as a hobby, and sometimes he can be found on Full Tilt under the nick ’susisisu’.

The video below was made when Thomas eliminated Phil Hellmuth, who immediately started his usual ranting, of course. 

59-year-old Ron Wall is a very popular person in the Las Vegas poker rooms: the well-known poker player basically got stuck in the ‘50s, and cruises between casinos dressed up as a gangster from that time. The whole thing, of course, is just a joke mixed with a bit less common sense, as the guy called ‘Duke’ never hurts anyone.

Somebody, however, thought the guy’s time on Earth had expired and tried to finish with him. Thirty-year-old Edmond Price and girlfriend Victoria Elizabeth Edelman cheated Duke into a hotel room with the promise of selling him gold, and Wall happily went with them, as, according to him, he had several successful deals with them in the past. This time, though, the business did not go down smooth. Both Edmond and Elizabeth instantly started hitting Duke when he entered the room. They wanted to take hold of the $137,000 that was in Duke’s bag.

But the old man did not obey easily. He knew that if he had abandoned fighting, he would have been killed and hidden somewhere in the desert. But the couple was stronger, grabbed the money and left the room. Duke was left there bound by ropes in the room, but somehow he managed to free himself and call the police.

They soon caught the two robbers, who – as it later turned out – were already sought after by the police for some time.

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

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.

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.”