Until new details emerge, this will be the last installment of Cardplayer Lifestyle’s poker blog coverage of the U.S. online poker crisis. This poker blog entry will look at what the big news means in terms of PokerStars’ and Full Tilt Poker’s broader business ventures and interests.
Taking a look at PokerStars’ new .eu homepage, there honestly doesn’t seem to be too much of a difference from their old .com webpage. All words and Web content aside, the most intriguing part of this, to this poker blogger anyhow, are the faces of the company. With PokerStars stacked with poker’s top pros, one must wonder if past WSOP Champions like Joe Hachem, Chris Moneymaker, Joe Cada, and other notable names like Vanessa Selbst and Jason Mercier will remain in the company stable and continue promoting online poker in the United States.
To allay the fears of the world’s online poker players, let’s begin by saying that Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars, and Absolute Poker will most definitely not disappear from the online poker landscape. While player volume will decrease at all 3 sites, to help compensate and offset the losses, each site will likely market harder to promote more poker play from their European and Asian player databases.
As reported in yesterday’s poker blog, the FBI and U.S. Justice Department issued indictments to the founders of PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker. This blog entry will address some of the fallout of the government’s actions.
Millions of online poker players in the United States awoke to a harsh new reality yesterday, as they found themselves unable to log in and play poker for real money online. Poker players attempting to visit PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, or Absolute Poker got the shock of their lives as they saw that the FBI and U.S. Justice Department assumed control of the popular online poker sites’ domain names, claiming that the sites illegally accepted wagers in violation of U.S. law.
What do Doyle Brunson, Phil Hellmuth, Phil Ivey, Johnny Chan, Erik Seidel, and President Barack Obama all have in common? They will all be playing in a special poker tournament on Air Force One today. Obama, an admitted poker fan, invited the top 5 all-time WSOP bracelet winners to join him for some 6-handed action on a flight from Las Vegas to Atlantic City this afternoon.
Just a shout out to all of our fans here at the Cardplayer Lifestyle poker blog… You’ll notice there’s no recap for this latest episode of High Stakes Poker. That’s because we’re busy working hard on a new feature that will totally change your viewing experience for all the poker videos you love to watch. One we get the technical glitches worked out, you’ll never want to watch poker videos anywhere else besides the Cardplayer Lifestyle website. Indeed, we can (hopefully) promise you a totally unique poker video viewing experience.
1st hand: Croak vs. Ruffin. Ruffin hits the nut straight and overbets $50k into a pot of $16k. Croak luckily hit a runner runner flush, and yet folded it! An absolutely horrible fold, as the only hand that could beat him would be 2 higher hearts; a practical impossibility. Makes me think the show should be called FSP: Fish Stakes Poker. And to think he even bragged about his fold to the rest of the table! Antonio’s reaction is priceless :-).
Isildur1 vs. Negreanu! I can just hear the right music playing in the background… Ever since Viktor Blom joined PokerStars, hundreds of thousands of people have been waiting for this matchup to happen.
Inflation seems to be everywhere these days – and the poker world is no exception. Full Tilt Poker has raised the stakes yet again by announcing the creation of the ONYX Cup poker tournament series. The series is comprised of 6 no-limit hold ’em tournaments each with a buy-in of at least $100,000 that will take place all over the world with the goal of recognizing the world’s best poker player.
The largest poker site in the world: PokerStars? Full Tilt Poker? Despite what their advertising says, neither of them are actually even close… It’s Zynga!
In what was supposed to be the next stop of the PokerStars North American Poker Tour (NAPT), the renamed “Big Event” at the Bicycle Casino in Los Angeles still attracted hundreds of players and plenty of poker’s biggest names, among them former World Series of Poker Champion Joe Hachem.
Here at the Cardplayer Lifestyle poker blog we usually cover the more major issues going on in the poker world. Needless to say, there’s plenty of other poker action going on that doesn’t always make it into our headlines. That being said, here’s a summary of some of the other “smaller stuff” that’s been going on recently in the poker world.
In 2010, Erik Seidel won over $530,000 playing poker. To most normal humans, this would be life-changing money, or at the very least it would represent their best-ever year in poker earnings, probably never to be repeated. Erik Seidel, on the other hand, is no normal human – with over $4.3 million won so far this year, his total half-million-plus earnings from last year represent just about 9 days of 2011 “work”.
Over the last few months, countless thousands of words have been written and dedicated to the current legal status of online poker in the United States. We haven’t said too much about these topics here at the Cardplayer Lifestyle poker blog, as, simply put, there’s been a lot of talk but nothing has actually happened. Well, that was all about to radically change a couple days ago until New Jersey Governor Chris Christie struck down a bill to legalize online poker with a last-minute veto.
Over the last few days, I’ve been debating how to best recap the action on High Stakes Poker season 7. Last season’s recaps went into great detail about each hand, and that was the plan for this season as well. The problem with this season though, as mentioned in my last poker blog post about HSP, is that it simply won’t stack up well to seasons past. With Gabe Kaplan and all the Full Tilt Poker players out, the game can only be SO good.
Over the past couple years, Sunday has become the most important day of the week for tournament poker players, with the largest (and most lucrative) Texas hold ’em tournaments being spread by top poker sites like PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker on that day each week. Today, PokerStars ups the ante with a $5 million guaranteed Sunday Million tournament, celebrating the fifth anniversary of their marquee weekly event.
You read that title correctly. At just 19 years of age, John Riordan was able to make a $200,000+ score and win the World Series of Poker Circuit Main Event at the Palm Beach Kennel Club in Florida. Unlike most states in the U.S. with a minimum gambling age of 21, in Florida it is legal for anyone over the age of 18 to gamble.
This poker blogger’s favorite poker TV show, High Stakes Poker, is finally back for its 7th season! The producers of the show have decided to “shuffle the deck” as it were, and have made some changes, most notably in replacing host Gabe Kotter Kaplan with Saturday Night Live alumnus Norm MacDonald.
Just a mere 7 months ago, Peter Eastgate, the 2008 World Series of Poker Main Event Champion, stunned the poker world when he declared that he was retiring from poker. Shortly thereafter, as if to emphasize that he was serious about his retirement, Eastgate put his WSOP bracelet up for auction, donating the approximately $150,000 in proceeds to UNICEF, a very generous, benevolent, and highly commendable act. Lo and behold, a mere few months since then and Eastgate goes ahead and publicly announces his return to poker.
In a stunning development, The World Series of Poker Europe has announced that it will be moving from London to Cannes, France, until 2014. Does this mean that for the next 3 years, poker’s top pros will be hearing things like “Big Blind S’il Vous Plaît” and “French only at the table sir”?
Does anyone out there know why Great Britain is called “Great”? Well, this poker blogger can think of one reason: it’s the homeland of poker bombshell Liv Boeree! Yes, the term is more traditionally used for blondes, but c’mon! Seriously! Anyhow, Boeree cemented her place in the poker scene last year with a €1,250,000 win at the EPT San Remo. Up until now, Boeree’s major poker successes had been made on the live felt, but this past Sunday, the PokerStars pro notched her first big online poker score.
Just to bring closure to yesterday’s poker blog entry, I’m sure you’re all wondering who won when the 2010 November Nine reconvened to play in the $15,000 freeroll at Foxwoods. Well, before I reveal the winner and spoil the fun, let me share what other fun facts I learned about the event since yesterday.
World Series of Poker 2010 Main Event Champion Jonathan Duhamel, fresh off his recent victory at the EPT Deauville High Roller event, is set to try and repeat history against the rest of last year’s November Nine. As part of Foxwoods’ Mega Stack Challenge XIX poker series, 18 qualifiers will join all 9 members of last year’s WSOP main Event final table, including Duhamel and Michael “the Grinder” Mizrachi, in a special 3-table no-limit Hold ’em poker tournament.
2010 World Series of Poker Main Event Champion Jonathan Duhamel just did something very few recent WSOP Champions have done; follow up his performance with another meaningful victory. Over the last few years, since Chris Moneymaker in 2003, the poker world has seen the various WSOP Champions come and go with various degrees of success. Some of the champions proved that their victories weren’t flukes; specifically 2005 champ Joe Hachem and 2004 champ Greg Raymer come to mind. None of the past few champs, however, has managed to score a convincing victory while in defense of his title, until Duhamel took down the recent High Roller event at the EPT Deauville.
Can a poker player possibly win $40 million in one year? Though the thought sounds preposterous, Erik Seidel is actually on pace to win that much money in 2011, having just wrapped up a January that saw him take home a whopping $3.4 million.
I thought that after more than half a decade of involvement in the poker industry and after tens of thousands of poker hands played live and online that I’d seen it all. Boy was I ever wrong! I recently came across an advertisement in CardPlayer magazine for something called the Poker Cube.
After more than 1 year online, apparently people are starting to take notice of this site and poker blog. Congratulations to Card Player Lifestyle 🙂 on being ranked among the top 30 poker blogs by Online Poker Lowdown.
So yesterday I played in one of the Sunday majors for the first time (Sunday 1/4 Million at PokerStars). It took me about 4 hours until I busted (I made the money) and then I started wondering how much longer it would’ve taken to finish the tournament, if somehow I got lucky enough to make the final table. That inspired me to do some research about PokerStars’ biggest tournament, the Sunday Million. Here’s what I came up with.
The high stakes online poker pro known to the world simply as Isildur1 has finally “gone public”, revealing himself to be none other than Viktor Blom. PokerStars scored a coup, signing Isildur1 to become one of their site pros and promising that his identity would soon be revealed. Keeping to their word, PokerStars reportedly has big plans for Viktor Blom this year.