On Sunday, the final table of the 2013 European Poker Tour Monaco Grand Final Main Event concluded with Steve O'Dwyer taking down the tournament for €1,224,000 and an exclusive Slyde watch after defeating Andrew Pantling heads-up.
It's time to get excited as PokerStars Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) kicks off this Sunday! SCOOP 2013 will take place May 12-26 and feature 44 events with buy-ins ranging from as little as $5.50 to a massive $10,300! Besides the millions of dollars in guaranteed cash prizes to compete for, the tournament series has an exclusive leaderboard in which you can win tournament tickets, PCA and EPT packages.
Another day of the EPT Monaco Grand Final main event is in the books. There are now only 34 of 531 players left in the tournament and it starts getting really exciting as the final table is just around the corner.
There are lots of big names left in the tournament, including Steve O'Dwyer, Andrew Pantling, John Juanda, Noah Schwartz, Victor Ramdin, Jason Mercier, Jake Cody, Paul Volpe, Daniel Negreanu, Andrew Lichtenberger, Andrew Chen, Freddy Deeb, Luke Schwartz, Mickey Petersen, Ville Wahlbeck and Norwegian Team PokerStars Pro Johnny Lodden, who remained out front throughout Day 3.
All the remaining players are now guaranteed a minimum payday of €21,500 - with the chance of a bank-busting €1,224,000! We will be back with a final table recap on Monday morning!
The road to 100 billion hands played at PokerStars is soon to be reached. The 100 billionth hand is predicted to be played in June and to celebrate this event, PokerStars is adding promotions with a total value of $5,000,000!
The 100 billionth hand will carry a value of $1,000,000 to be shared by the players that are dealt the hand. (Dealt into Mega Milestone: (# of VPPs in last 50 hands x $1,000) + $10,000 = Cash Prize.) The winner of the hand will walk away with at least $100,000 guaranteed. The remaining prize money from the Million Hand will be split across all other players seated at the same game and stake when the hand was dealt.
Another million USD will be added to 300 Milestone hands that leads up to the 100 billionth hand. The remaining $3,000,000 will be dedicated to special promotions that has not yet been disclosed....
After 4 days of play at the PartyPoker World Poker Tour Canadian Spring Championship, 735 players have become only 6 who are ready for the final table. The chip leader at today's final table will be Amir Babakhani, of Canada, with 6,635,000 chips. Babakhani sent two big stacks to the rail to build his stack to the chip lead on Wednesday and now he has a fantastic chance of taking down the tournament and the $442,248 first prize. However, no matter what happens on today's final table - he's already guaranteed the biggest cash of his entire tournament carrer.
About 110 players remain in the EPT Monaco Grand Final Main Event after 2 days of play. Team PokerStars Pro Johnny Lodden pushed past the half a million mark late during Day 2 and finished the day as the chip leader with 605,200. Lodden will be joined by the likes of Calvin Andersen (472,400), Oleksii Kovalchuk (414,700), Noah Schwartz (453,400), Steve O'Dwyer (389,200) and Daniel Negreanu (340,100) to the third day of the tournament.
The remaining players are fighting for a first prize of €1,224,000! The money bubble will burst during day 3 when 80 players remain (€16,000 min cash). We will be back with a bigger update tomorrow. Stay tuned!
The second flight of EPT Monaco attracted a much greater field of players than Day 1A. In total, 423 players came to start and boosted the total number of entries to 531. There were many familiar faces at the poker tables including Viktor Blom, Patrik Antonius, Sam Trickett, Phil Ivey, Jason Mercier and Gus Hansen.
After eight levels of play, the tournament director called it a day and approximately 200 players remained. Only Mercier (48,200) from the players mentioned above survived the day. Victor Sbrissa, who won LAPT Brazil in Sao Paolo a week ago, was in the lead with 224,800 chips, which is a quite impressive results from a single day. Another two notables who made it through the day with about 200k chips were Noah Schwartz and Calvin Anderson.
American poker pro and high roller Phil Ivey still hasn't received the money he won at Crockfords casino (London) in August last year. Ivey, who has 9 WSOP bracelets to his name, won £7.8 million playing Punto Banco at the casino in question and the casino management assured him that the winnings would be transferred to his bank account before August 28th.
On the 20th of February we launched the "Guess date and time of 500,000 Members"- competition where mobsters could guess when BankrollMob's 500,000th member would sign-up. When we started the competition we had 479,331 registered members. On Saturday the 4th of May 2013, approximately 11 weeks after the competition started, BankrollMob had its half-millionth member registered!!
The Main Event of MiniFTOPS (Full Tilt Online Poker Series) XXII saw a field of about 14,000 players last weekend. The tournament started at 19:15 CET on Sunday and it took 14,5 hours of play before a winner had been crowned. lawnower0, of Sweden, was the last man standing and received an increadible first prize of $152,640! The final table included another Swedish poker player as well (HejaLuppen), but he finished in 8th place for $14,000 and was never among the big stacks who battled for the title!
A field of 108 took seats at the first day of the European Poker Tour Monaco Grand Final Main Event. At the end of the day there were about 53 players left and Dan Smith (picture) held the lead with 136,500 chips. Other big names that made it through the day with 100k+ stacks were Freddy Deeb, Jake Cody and Paul Volpe.
Day 1A attracted an unusually small field for a Grand Final Main Event (163 players more took part last year), but let's hope that a massive field will show up for Day 1B today! We will be back with another brief update tomorrow morning.
Lots of well known poker players are in Monaco at the moment for the 2013 EPT Montle Carlo Grand Final, which begins in a few hours. However, what everyone's talking about is a €1,000,000 buy-in cash game! Rumors about the massive cash game have circulated on the web in the past 1-2 weeks or so and several people have already said they would play if the game goes (Sam Trickett, Isaac Haxton, Philipp Gruissem, Paul Newey and Niklas Heinecker). Apparenlty the game would be eight-handed, with €1,000/€2,000 blinds and optional straddle. The game would be played on May 11 (Saturday) at 16:00 local time.
"It's not often you get an opportunity to play in a game this big, so obviously that's pretty exciting," Isaac Haxton (picture) told PokerStars last week.
Jae Kyung Sim had a relatively small stack during both Day 1 and Day 2 of PokerStars Asia-Pacific Poker Tour Cebu main event. He remained anonymous (short stacked) during most of Day 3 as well and was down to 8 big blinds on the money bubble. However, at the end of the day, he began operating at a faster peace and took down a few well-sized pots to eventually progress to the final table - for the second year in a row!
That's right! Sim made it to this very same event's final table last year and finished in 8th place. This time, however, he played outstanding poker and, believe it or not, eliminated 6 of 8 opponents to lay hands on the top prize of 3,948,00 PHP (about $96,000) - the biggest tournament cash of his career!
Tillis Davis and his wife, Denise Daniels, has sued Parx Casino in Bensalem, chair maker Majestic Industries and casino builder TN Ward in the county court. The reason is that Tillis, 56, of Pennsylvania, went to Parx Casino on Christmas Day 2009 and allegedly got injuries on or about the entire head, neck, shoulders, arms, legs, torso and extremities after falling from a slot machine chair.
According to Davis' attorney Robert Price, there is video evidence showing how the chair's back panel came off and his client falling out. Tillis and his wife are asking for the amount of $30,000 to cover medical bills and costs for 3-4 months of physical therapy he had to go through after the accident.
Team PokerStars Pro Marcel "Flying Dutchman" Luske, 60, who's well known for always wearing a suit and singing at the poker tables, has been running extremly well in the past five months or so. It all started in December 2012 when he bested a field of 130-players at the PokerStars Hold'em Challenge Winter Edition €500 NLH event at the Casino de Namur in Belgium ($15,162).
A month later, he went across the world to take part in the 2013 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure and managed to win two events: Event #16 $1,000 HORSE for $18,500 and Event #32 $1,000 8 Game for $13,810.
Britsh poker pro Marcus Bebb-Jones, 49, was arrested at his home in Kidderminster, Worcestershire, in 2009 for the murder of his wife Sabrina, 31, in 1997. He admitted second-degree murder, telling police he killed his wife in a "heat of passion". On Wednesday, bbc news wrote that he had been jailed at Garfield County Court for 20 years, but his sentence will be reduced to reflect the time he has severed awaiting the trial.
Almost 750 players participated in the 2013 PokerStars.net Latin American Poker Tour Brazil main event ($4,000 buy-in). The tournament, which was played at the Tivoli Hotel in Sao Paulo, Brazil, concluded on Tuesday with Victor Sbrissa as the last man standing. Sbrissa overcame a final table that included Team PokerStars Pros Andre Akkari & Leo Fernandez and he collected $255,400 in prize money - by far the biggest cash of his live tournament career!
Final table results: 1 Victor Sbrissa $255,400 2 Daniel Murta $166,684 3 Rafael Pardo $115,481 4 Leonardo Brescia $85,338 5 Andre Akkari $64,335 6 Marcos Paulo Ximenes $47,266 7 Leo Fernandez $34,140 8 Thiago Grigoletti $26,254
Matthew Anthony Roth, of Fairbanks, Alaska, made a living from playing online poker since he was 18 and had a very bright future ahead of him, but his life (and many others) changed drastically on April 15, 2011 when online poker was shut down in the U.S. by FBI (Poker's Black Friday). Roth (in the middle of the picture) spent months reclaiming his funds, which were spread around several poker sites. Although he recovered most of his money and graduated in 2012 with a degree in finance - his life never became what it once was.
The final table of the 2013 World Poker Tour bestbet Open main event concluded yesterday. Mike Linster came into the final table with the second largest stack and played extremely well until he had advanced to heads-up against David Bell, who started the day in third chip-position.
Do you dream of going to Las Vegas and participating in the World Series of Poker? Believe it or not but you can realize your dream already this summer without spending a dime! That's right! PartyPoker is running freerolls and satellites around the clock to a tournament each Sunday where they award 1 of 20 players a 2013 WSOP package worth $14,000!
Each Main Event package consists of:
$10,000 WSOP Main Event buy-in
$2,000 in spending money
Hotel accommodation in Las Vegas for 10 nights
Besides the main event package, PartyPoker is also running daily satellites and freerolls to a tournament (also played every Sunday) where packages worth $5,000 are up for grabs!
The $5,000 package consists of:
$2,500 WSOP side event buy-in
$1,650 in spending money
Hotel accommodation in Las Vegas for seven nights
The promotion is running until 16th June, 2013. Satellite buy-ins range from as little as $1 to $700+$50, but not to be forgotten: you can win a package for free in the daily WSOP freerolls!
The final table of six is set after three days of intensive poker at the World Poker Tour bestbet Open in Jacksonville, Florida. Danny Schechter will be the chip leader (3,825,000) when the final table kicks off at 20:00 CET tonight (2pm ET). Schechter only had 52,000 chips when Day 3 started, so you can just imagine what an incredible winning streak he has had.
He has almost double the amount of chips of his closest opponent (Michael Linster) and it will be interesting to see if he can keep a cool head at tonight's final table - where a first prize of $321,521 is up for grabs!
Final table chip counts: Seat 1: Pete Tinnesz - 1,035,000 Seat 2: Danny Schechter - 3,825,000 Seat 3: Michael Linster - 2,150,000 Seat 4: Pete Chwala - 1,180,000 Seat 5: David Bell - 1,980,000 Seat 6: David Diaz - 375,000
PokerStars Macau Cup Red Dragon main event saw a record 891-player field when it kicked off last week. The final table was played yesterday and 30-year-old Taiwanese poker professional Terry Fan ended up taking down the title and HK $1,771,000 (approx. 228,110 USD). Fan became the fourth Taiwanese ever to win the Red Dragon. This was the 18th edition of the Macau Poker Cup, a tournament that's just getting more and more popular every year!
FINAL TABLE RESULTS:
1 Terry Fan Chinese Taipei $1,771,000 2 Gie Reyes Philippines $1,242,000 3 Neil Chen Chinese Taipei $743,000 4 Fei Xie China $555,000 5 Andy Asihwardji Canada $393,000 6 Fanny Li USA $328,000 7 Sailesh Lohia India $262,000 8 Wesley Zhu China $196,000 9 Ryan Yu Canada $153,000
The EPT Berlin High Roller (€10,300 buy-in) attracted 103 of the very best poker players in the world. The final table was played last Saturday and included experienced tournament players such as Max Lykov and Scott Seiver. However, it was a famous online player who had laid hands on the title when the final table concluded...
Daniel Pidun, of Germany, took an early lead on the main event final table last Saturday and eliminated player after player to increase his lead. After about 5 hours of final table action, Pidun was the last man standing and collected €880,000 and a Slyde watch worth €5,000.
On Thursday, Ronny Voth was eliminated from the main event after 4 days of play (50th place - €15,000), but the German pro had no plans whatsoever to take a break from poker given that he signed up for the €10,000 buy-in High Roller event. He and another 135 players battled it out for several hours before the tournament director called it a day.
It's time to get excited as PokerStars Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) kicks off this Sunday! SCOOP 2013 will take place May 12-26 and feature 44 events with buy-ins ranging from as little as $5.50 to a massive $10,300! Besides the millions of dollars in guaranteed cash prizes to compete for, the tournament series has an exclusive leaderboard in which you can win tournament tickets, PCA and EPT packages.
Team PokerStars Pro Marcel "Flying Dutchman" Luske, 60, who's well known for always wearing a suit and 
