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How to join?
The following requirements have to be met to participate in the ecxlusive BankrollMob Freeroll at 888poker on the 9th of January at 19:00 GMT:
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Details What: BankrollMob New Year Freeroll. When: 9th of January @ 19:00 GMT (20:00 CET). Where: 888poker client - All Games - Tournaments - Restricted - BankrollMob New Year Freeroll. Prize: Winner gets a $220 worth ticket to Race Horse Syndicate Qualifier on the 10th of January!
The Race Horse Syndicate - Qualifier is scheduled on the 10th of January at 19:55 GMT!
There's a lot of action at Atlantis Casino Resort in The Bahamas at the moment. Not only was the final table of the Super High Roller ($100k buy-in) played yesterday, but also Day 1A of the Main Event kicked off with 320 participants. 150 survived the day with Maxim Lobzhanidze, from Italy, out in front (248,900). Also heading to Day 2 are Team PokerStars Pros Ville Wahlbeck, Luca Pagano, George Danzer and Joe Cada.
Day 1B starts tonight and, according to PokerStars, a gigantic field is expected to show up. Let's hope that they are right about that! We will be back with another brief update tomorrow.
When the final table of the Super High Roller started yesterday, David "Doc" Sands had nearly half the chips in play. Sands, as many expected, remained in the lead for most of the day as the field was reduced.
According to Viktor "Isildur1" Blom's twitter, he will be heading to Vegas January 24-26th to take part in the yearly NBC National Heads Up Poker Championship (NHUPC) at Caesars Palace. A total of 64 players (only invited) will take part in NHUPC, widely considered to be the World Cup of Heads Up in No-Limit Hold'em.
Blom ended up as one of the biggest losers (online) last year, but he has won an incredible $2.4 million this year and is looking extremely strong at the moment. But the question is: Will he stand a chance against the more experienced live players?
On Saturday, the 2013 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (10th Anniversary) kicked off at Atlantis in The Bahamas. First out was the the $100,000 Super High Roller which saw a field of 47 players (Phil Ivey, Antonio Esfandiari, Daniel Negreanu etc) who accounted for 57 entries (10 re-buys).
Daniel Negreanu posted his first rant of 2013 on Wednesday. This time Daniel discussed charity, his poker goals for 2013 and his divorce from his ex-wife, who helped him become a better person.
Believe it or not but already a player has reached the Supernova status on PokerStars! The race to reach 100,000 VPP was between "AWice" and "MouldyOnions". The two registered for almost every single high-stakes hyper turbo sit-and-go when the clock ticked over to 2013, and it was a even race from start to finish.
The British poker pro Sam Trickett, 26, is soon a married man. On Monday, Trickett, who has won millions of dollars live and online, announced via twitter that he proposed to his girlfriend, Natasha Sandhu, on New Year's Eve.
Trickett asked Natasha whilst celebrating with friends at Whisky Mist, one of London's trendiest nightclubs, and she said yes. He and his future wife have received lots of congratulatory messages on twitter since breaking the news.
Sam Trickett won more than 11 million dollars in live tournaments last year. Most probably he won't win that much this year, but what does it matter when you're in love?
It's high time to compile last year's biggest winners and losers on Full Tilt and PokerStars. According to highstakesdb, Ben "Sauce123" Sulsky won an incredible $3,595,666 - about a million dollars more than the Finnish poker pro Jens "Jeans89" Kyllönen in second place.
The American poker pro Joe Sebok, 35, has almost $2 million in live tournament earnings (no major title) and was well liked for several years when he was known more as Barry Greenstein's stepson than a poker pro.
It has been very quiet from Sebok in the past year or so and the question is if he ever will win a major tournament title - because, according to a recent interview, he spent last year at Vinify, a premium custom crush winery in Santa Rosa, California, where he worked really hard and lost almost 17 pounds during the last 3-month harvest.
The candidates for this year's European Poker Awards have now been revealed. One of the nominees is the high-stakes player Viktor 'Isildur1' Blom from Sweden. Blom is up against Jens Kyllönen, Chris Moorman and last year's winner Ilari Sahamies for the Internet Player of the Year award.
It feels like it was yesterday that I wrote a similar news item, like this one, but for 2011. I guess it's true what they say, time flies when you are in good company, and if there's one thing us at the BankrollMob administration is, then it's being in good company, with thanks to our almost 500,000 members!
If you want to take a quick stroll down 2012 memory lane, check out our just-posted A look back at 2012 news article.
On behalf of the entire crew here at BRM headquarters, I would like to wish you all and your families a very Happy New Year - and be careful out there if you play with fireworks!
2012 has been a very interesting and eventful year on the poker front. We have really enjoyed keeping everyone up to date with the latest poker news and, of course, we are very happy and thankful that so many of you comment on it and discuss it in our forum. Now we are looking forward to 2013 and what it has to offer. Until then, make sure to check some of our favourite news of 2012.
BREAKING NEWS: Full Tilt Poker Open For Business This news article had nothing to do with the actual re-launch of Full Tilt Poker about 2 months ago, but instead it was already posted on April 1. We know that it was a pretty mean April Fools joke, but we just couldn't help ourselves Click here to read the full story
Ilari Sahamies: "I don't have any money left" It has been an extremely turbulent year for the Finnish poker pro Ilari Sahamies, who was the biggest winner on PokerStars in 2011. At the moment he's only down about $28k this year. However, he was in pretty bad shape for some time. Click here to read the full story
Viktor Blom won PCA Super High Roller ($1.2 million) Viktor "Isildur1" Blom is best known for playing high stakes cash games online, but in the beginning of 2012 he also made a name for himself in the live tournament world by winning the Super High Roller Championship at the 2012 PCA. The win was worth about $1.2 million and, to add to that, the poker community finally got to see a video interview with their favourite Swede. Click here to read the full story
Jens Kyllönen is Going to Space Many professional poker players love to travel and see new places. The Finnish poker pro Jens "Jeans89" Kyllönen is no exception, but the question is if his upcoming journey in 2014 takes the cake. Click here to read the full story
Antonio Esfandiari Wins One Drop and Mind-Blowing $18 Million! Who can forget when "The Magician" took down the most expensive tournament in poker history at the 2012 WSOP? The $18 million first place prize sent Esfandiari right to the top of the all-time tournament winnings leaderboard, but even today people are speculating about how much he got to keep of it. That's right! Esfandiari revealed after the win that he didn't pay the buy-in of $1,000,000 all by himself. Click here to read the full story
In case you missed it: Party Poker had lots of good news to its customers last week. Not only did the site release an Android App (still only available in beta mode) available in many languages, but also it completed the poker software merge with bwin to overtake the second place from Full Tilt Poker in online traffic.
As a part of the merge, Party Poker added an increadible $5 million ($15 million in total) to its monthly tournament guarantees, and now a new tournament starts every 15 minutes, 365 days a year!
Team PokerStars Pro Daniel Negreanu, who dated the 2008 Miss Earth Hungary for some time in 2011, is tired of being single. The truth is... he's so tired of being alone that he took part in the American reality show The Millionaire Matchmaker to find his perfect partner. The TV show, which is presented by Patti Stanger, aims to match millionaire males with a future wife. According to a recent tweet, Negreanu will appear in the first episode of season 6, which is set to air on January 10th.
Here is a teaser of season 6 of The Millionaire Matchmaker:
This year we continued the Lottery from last year, where you could win MobPoints, MobDraw tickets and MobSafe shots. The way to get entry tickets to the lottery, would be if you won a prize in the Christmas Calendar that you were unable to use, for one reason or another. If you won a freeroll entry worth $15 you would get 15 tickets for the lottery if you decided to claim lottery tickets, instead of the actual prize.
The lottery in 2012 would then have the following prizes available:
5 x 4,000 MobPoints
10 x 3,000 MobPoints
15 x 2,000 MobPoints
10 x 500 MobDraw tickets
20 x 100 MobSafe "shots"
20 x 50 MobSafe "shots"
And today, December 27th, as promised, we ran the "randomizer" and found the winners to the prizes above. Basically, the more tickets you had, the bigger chances of winning.Read more » Christmas Calendar 2012: Lottery Winners
PokerStars announced late last week that it has started a partnership with Casino Gran Madrid (Spain) to build a new PokerStars-branded poker room in the casino. The poker room will have more than 20 tables and space for over 200 players. According to PokerStars blog, the new poker room will most probably open its doors in the first quarter of 2013.
PokerStars' popular tournament series Turbo Championship of Online Poker (TCOOP) will return in the beginning of 2013. A total of 50 fast-paced turbo events will be played between January 17-27 and $15,000,000 is guaranteed by PokerStars! TCOOP 2013 is for all types of bankrolls as the buy-ins start from as little as $7,50 up to the Main Event's $700 buy-in.
There are satellites up and running 24/7 on PokerStars already, so you don't have to wait until next year to win a seat in one of the 50 TCOOP events. Click here for further info. Good luck!
Howard Lederer, the former Full Tilt Poker president, settled with the U.S. District Court in New York on Tuesday the 18th of December. Lederer agreed to pay more than $2.5 million to settle the civil suit that was brought on him by the U.S. government.
According to Bluff Magazine, "Lederer will turn over to the government two bank accounts of unknown value, a 1965 Shelby Cobra roadster, two Las Vegas properties with a combined value of approximately $975,000 and an additional $30,000 traceable to the sale of a third Las Vegas property".
In addition, "Lederer also agreed to pay the government a two-part money judgment, comprised of a civil money laundering penalty of $1.25 million and an additional $168,000 that will be liquidated from certain of Lederer’s other bank accounts. The money laundering penalty is payable in two installments, due 18 months and 36 months from now, and is secured by Lederer’s two remaining Las Vegas properties".
With Lederer's settlement, two of the four people that was "personally named" in the Black Friday case against Full Tilt has reached an agreement with the court. A few weeks ago, the former director Rafe Furst settled his case with the U.S. District Court in New York by paying a $150,000 penalty.
Chris Ferguson and Ray Bitar's cases remains pending.
Several poker forums and sites has reported that Luke Schwartz has been accused of cheating during the FTOPS Event #23 where he finished 2nd and cashed in $27,664. An anonymous forum writer claims that on the night of event #23, he was sitting two tables from the table where Schwartz was playing cashgame at the Victoria Casino Cardroom in London. The anonymous forum writer claims that Schwartz must've had someone else playing the FTOPS evnt #23.
In his response, Schwartz explained that he was playing Chinease poker at the casino and that he brought his laptop to the table and played the FTOPS event #23 from there.
The most poker players usually recognise the 2010 World Series of Poker Main Event Champion Jonathan Duhamel. Believe it or not, but Phil Ivey, who many consider the world's best poker player, had no clue who Duhamel, 25, was until he was seated next to him at a featured table during a $100,000 buy-in EPT event earlier this year.
Ivey:"Hello, what's your name?" Duhamel:"Jonathan..." Ivey: "Nice to meet you."
Daniel Negreanu, who sat at the table, couldn't believe his ears and told Ivey: "He won the main event last year."
Day 4 started with 3 players with more than a million chips each: Ramzi Jelassi, Chris Brammer and Sotorious Koutoupas. Brammer didn't make it, but both Jelassi (1,975,000 - 3rd place) and Koutoupas (1,450,000 - 8th) pressed on and made it through the day with healthy stacks.
There are now only 55 players left in the EPT Prague Main Event. All the remaining players are guaranteed to get away with a min-payday of €15,000 - with the chance of laying hands on the first place prize of €835,000!Read more » EPT Prague: Ramzi Jelassi Leads Last 55
Day 1 chip leader Iosef Beskrovnyy, from Russia, played amazing poker during the second day of PokerStars European Poker Tour (EPT) Prague and turned his 239k stack into an impressive stack of 625,200 chips - about 140k more than his closest opponent. A total of 162 players made it through Day 2, and the biggest names among the top 10 players are Fabrice Soulier (over $3.2 million in live poker tournament winnings) with 396k and Todd Terry with (over $2 million in live tournament earnings) with 392k.
Only 34 players need to be eliminated during Day 3 before the money bubble will burst (min-cash of €8,000). A final table apperance is worth €75,000 - with the chance of taking home €835,000!
Team PokerStars SportStar Rafael Nadal played his first real-money tournament over the weekend at the brand new Spanish Championship of Online Poker (ESCOOP). The €200 buy-in Main Event saw a field of 1,842 players, all of whom received 20,000 chips each. Read more » Rafael Nadal's Real-Money Debut On PokerStars
The British poker pro Sam Trickett, 26, is soon a married man. On Monday, Trickett, who has won millions of dollars live and online, announced via twitter that he proposed to his girlfriend, Natasha Sandhu, on New Year's Eve.
It's high time to compile last year's biggest winners and losers on Full Tilt and PokerStars. According to highstakesdb, Ben "Sauce123" Sulsky won an incredible $3,595,666 - about a million dollars more than the Finnish poker pro Jens "Jeans89" Kyllönen in second place.
The American poker pro Joe Sebok, 35, has almost $2 million in live tournament earnings (no major title) and was well liked for several years when he was known more as Barry Greenstein's stepson than a poker pro.
The candidates for this year's European Poker Awards have now been revealed. One of the nominees is the high-stakes player Viktor 'Isildur1' Blom from Sweden. Blom is up against Jens Kyllönen, Chris Moorman and last year's winner Ilari Sahamies for the Internet Player of the Year award.
Team PokerStars Pro Daniel Negreanu, who dated the 2008 Miss Earth Hungary for some time in 2011, is tired of being single. The truth is... he's so tired of being alone that he took part in the American reality show The Millionaire Matchmaker to find his perfect partner. The TV show, which is presented by Patti Stanger, aims to match millionaire males with a future wife. According to a recent tweet, Negreanu will appear in the first episode of season 6, which is set to air on January 10th.
This year we continued the Lottery from last year, where you could win MobPoints, MobDraw tickets and MobSafe shots. The way to get entry tickets to the lottery, would be if you won a prize in the Christmas Calendar that you were unable to use, for one reason or another. If you won a freeroll entry worth $15 you would get 15 tickets for the lottery if you decided to claim lottery tickets, instead of the actual prize.
PokerStars'
Team PokerStars SportStar Rafael Nadal played his first real-money tournament over the weekend at the brand new Spanish Championship of Online Poker (ESCOOP). The €200 buy-in Main Event saw a field of 1,842 players, all of whom received 20,000 chips each. 
