There's some serious action at the Atlantis Resort and Casino on Paradise Island as the 2012 PCA is now alive and kicking! The first day of the Super High Roller tournament brought a field 32 players (In fact it was 30 players, but two re-entered the tournament) who could afford the buy-in of $100,000, which created a total prize pool of $3,136,000 and a first prize of $1,254,400.
Ilari "Ilari FIN" Sahamies ended up as 2011's biggest winner at PokerStars' nosebleed tables with a 2 million dollar profit. In an interview with a Danish poker magazine, the Finnish poker pro says that he had a great year at PokerStars but that he also lost about $700,000 at Full Tilt Poker before Black Friday. This means that he made a yearly profit of about $1.3 million.
In the interview, Sahamies, who's in Thailand with his girlfriend at the moment, also says that he will try out the Entraction Network (KickoffPoker etc) once his back in Finland. According to Sahamies, the action is getting better and better on the Entraction Network's nosebleed tables and it's making it possible for high rollers like himself to play there.
On Wednesday, John Duthie announced in a forum that he has resigned as CEO of the European Poker Tour. Duthie, who didn't renew his contract with PokerStars when it ended on Dec. 31, founded the European Poker Tour in 2004 and has made it the richest and most prestigious poker tournament in Europe. Below you can read John Duthie's forum post:
"It is time to move on and to leave the EPT in the capable hands of the existing management team," Duthie said. "It has been a fascinating and challenging seven years and I have watched the EPT grow phenomenally in that time, thanks to the support of the players and the professionalism of a great team on the ground."
2012 will be a fresh new start for the classic Las Vegas Hilton hotel that changed name to The LVH-Las Vegas Hotel & Casino a few days ago. The changeover began last month with removal of the gigantic Las Vegas Hilton sign out front.
The hotel, which is owned by Thomas Barrack's (a billionaire from Los Angeles) Colony Capital LLC, decided not to renew the licensing deal, which expired at the end of 2011, with Hilton Worldwide - after an light-year business relationship. It remains unclear why Colony Capital decided to terminate the contract after so many successful years. And neither Colony Capital nor Hilton Worldwide have commented on the matter.
After a few weeks of silence, the Danish poker pro Gus Hansen once again updated his blog with some pretty interesting news. Hansen writes, for example, that he has arrived in Hong Kong and that he and a Danish friend will go to Macau and check whether or not the rumored high stakes games are as crazy as some people claim they are.
In Macau, Hansen hopes to meet some of his old buddies from Full Tilt Poker - Patrik Antonius, Tom Dwan, Phil Ivey etc. But he still isn't sure if he will take part in the games were some players bring millions of dollars.
Last Sunday, rumors that John Duthie, the man who created European Poker Tour and has $2,7 million in career tournament winnings, was no longer part of Team PokerStars Pro started circulating in different poker forums. It didn't take long before Duthie confirmed that he didn't sign a new contract after the last one expired in December 31, 2011. Duthie's departure comes just a few months after that JP Kelly left Team PokerStars Pro. This leaves only Liv Boeree, Victoria Coren and Jude Ainsworth representing Team UK and Ireland.
Two major poker tournaments are just around the corner. PokerStars Caribbean Adventure will kick off in 2 days time and will run until January 14th. The highlights of the 2012 PCA will be the $10,000 main event and the $25,000 High Roller event. Both events will be streamed online with hole cards.
Ben Lamb had a fantastic 2011 with not less than 5 big cashes at the World Series of Poker. A few days ago he was also given the prestigious Player Of The Year title by one of the most popular poker magazines in the world. In total, Ben Lamb has $6,575,016 in lifetime tournament winnings - of which $5,352,970 comes from the 2011 World Series of Poker. In other words, it wasn't a big surprise that he was among the favorites to take home the title.
A few days before Christmas Jonathan Duhamel, the winner of the 2010 WSOP Main Event, was attacked in his home by two strangers who got away with a huge amount of money, a Rolex watch and Duhamels WSOP bracelet. Now the police have arrested 4 persons for the robbery and according to a popular poker magazine one of them is Duhamel's Ex girlfriend, 20-year-old Bianca Rojas-Latraverse.
It's high time to take a look at the high stakes results of 2011. The Scandinavian poker players dominated the nosebleed tables at PokerStars. In fact, 3 of the top 4 players of 2011 come from Finland and Sweden. Viktor "Isildur1" Blom, from Sweden, won amazing $1.5 million and ended up as the third biggest winner. Most of Blom's winnings come from December.
We would like to thank all our members and affiliate partners for a fantastic year! 2011 has been a fun and exciting year full of challenges for us working at BankrollMob. Our aim for 2012 is to grow even bigger and to get more exciting bonuses, leaderboards, freerolls etc.
This is of course impossible without all of our current members help, so we hope that all of you will stay with us and keep on supporting our affiliate sites by, for example, making deposits and generating some rake
Patrik Antonius and Ilari "Ziigmund" Sahamies, both from Finland, played an action-filled (but short) heads-up the other day that thousands of people watched on PokerStars. Sahamies, who's one of the biggest winners this year, took the command almost straight away and totally dominated against his fellow country men. In fact, he took every single cent from Antonius account - about 190k US dollars - and the game was over.
Well, not for Sahamies. Instead of enjoying the win and eating some Christmas turkey, Sahamies continued playing at PokerStars nosebleed tables. Unfortunately things didn't go so well from there on but still he got away with a profit of about $144k for the day.
Due to Christmas holidays et cetra, we somehow managed to miss out on Tony G's latest video blog. The video, which was uploaded by Party Poker on December 22, has the description "Tony G sends his Christmas Greetings".
Maybe "Tony G sends a message to Phil Hellmuth" would be a better description. Yes, once again the Lithuanian poker pro is attacking Hellmuth. This time however, Tony G thinks that Hellmuth should retire for good from poker and that he's overrating himself in the poker world.
This year in our Christmas Calendar we introduced a lottery 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 tournament ticket worth $215 you would get 215 tickets for the lottery if you decided to claim lottery tickets, instead of the actual prize.
The lottery would then have the following 100 prizes available:
10 x 4,000 MobPoints
10 x 3,000 MobPoints
20 x 2,000 MobPoints
10 x 2,000 MobDraw tickets
20 x 1,000 MobDraw tickets
10 x 500 MobSafe "shots"
20 x 250 MobSafe "shots"
And today, December 27th, as promised, we ran the "randomizer" and found the winners to those 100 prizes above. Basically, the more tickets you had, the bigger chances of winning.
According to a Swedish poker news site, a young Swedish poker player died just a few days before Christmas Eve in a fire at a hotel in Bali, Asia. The news site writes that it most probably was an accident and that the young Swede was the only one in room that caught fire.
The man, whose name we have decided not to write here, is from the North of Sweden and he was in Asia on a longer holiday. He has been playing in quite a few major tournaments but has no cashes, according to different live tournament tracking sites, however, he was a very talented cash game player and a very respected person among many professional poker players.
A few days ago the organizers of the European Poker Tour revealed that there will be 3 new stops on the tour during 2012. Two of these stops, Madrid and Berlin, were part of the previous season, while Campione in Italy makes it first appearance on the tour. In total, there are 6 stops left on season 8 of the European Poker Tour. Below you can find the complete schedule for season 8:
January 7-13 - PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, Bahamas Jan 31 - Feb 6 - EPT Deauville, France February 20-25 - EPT Copenhagen, Denmark March 12-17 - EPT Madrid, Spain March 26-31 - EPT Campione, Italy April 16-21 - EPT Berlin, Germany
We would like to take this opportunity to wish all our members and affiliate partners a Merry Christmas. We, the mob crew, will of course continue working during the Christmas holidays, however, it might take a bit longer for bonuses to be processed as many poker and casino sites are short-staffed for the next week or so. Now, have a relaxed and fun Christmas and don't forget that today is the last chance to win prizes in our Christmas Calendar!
On Wednesday morning two unknown persons broke into Jonathan Duhamel's (the 2010 WSOP Main Event Champion) house in Boucherville, Quebec, Canda and attacked him. Police arrived at the scene shortly after and Duhamel went to the hospital for treatment of the wounds he got from the attack.
Below you can read Jonathan Duhamel's full statement and find out what happened exactly and what the thieves got away with.
Jonathan Duhamel, the 2010 WSOP main event winner, had an unwelcome visit on Wednesday when thieves broke into his house Boucherville, Quebec, Canda. According to a poker news site, two unknown persons entered his home at 9:15am on Wednesday and attacked him. However, the news site can't confirm whether or not the thieves got away with something.
The Winnipeg Free Press reports that Duhamel was treated for wounds at the hospital, but released shortly after. It remains unclear who the 2 thieves are and why they targeted Duhamel's residence. No arrests have been made so far, and Duhamel has still not spoken to the media about the incident.
We will keep you updated as the investigation develops.
The action at PokerStars highest stakes hasn't calmed down even though Christmas is just a few days away. And last week we got to see Viktor "Isildur1" Blom, Ilari Sahamies and other poker wonders battle it out on PokerStars nosebleed tables.
Blom made an amazing comeback on PokerStars 2 weeks ago and won an amazing $1,5 million in 2 days, which also made him one of the biggest winners this year. But Blom ran out of luck last week and lost $867,2126. A lot of money, but he's still about $500k plus this month and also one of the biggest winners.
PokerStars has just reveled that it will launch a new type of online tournament series next year. The name of the new tournament series is TCOOP - Turbo Championship of Online Poker and it will included 50 events that will be played with turbo and hyper turbo structures. The buy-ins for the events will be everything between $11 and $2100 and there are already plenty of satellites up - running around the clock.
PokerStars Sunday Million 10th Anniversary had a guaranteed prize pool of $10,000,000 when it was about to start yesterday. But the prize pool ended up even bigger ($12,423,200) as a field of 62,116 players joined the tournament and created one the biggest online tournaments ever.
The 2011 World Poker Tour Venice is over as the Main Event has a winner, Edoardo Alescio from Italy. Edoardo wasn't the big favorite to take down the tournament when only 6 players remained. Actually no one believed that an amateur could win the tournament.
But Alescio proved everyone wrong and played amazingly and showed no sign of being nervous. It was very hard to believe that it was his first ever final table. After defeating Steve O'Dwyer in heads-up he received a price check of €175,000 and a WPT Championship Seat worth $25,500. A big congratulations to the new WPT Venice Champion, Edoardo Alescio!
Final table payouts: 1 Edoardo Alescio €175,000 2 Steve O'Dwyer €95,530 3 Michele Caroli €66,090 4 Andrea Dato €43,170 5 Andrea Benelli €34,254 6 Alexander Dovzhenko €27,035
Recently Martin Finger, 21, from Germany won the EPT Prague main event and received a huge prize of 720k euro. Finger became the third German poker player ever to win an EPT main event and received lots of positive feedback in the media.
However, it didn't take long before his big win became overshadowed by other headlines. During EPT London, according to a poker news site, Finger went out to party after the tournament, got drunk and behaved aggressively. After Finger left the exclusive club Kensington Roof Garden in central London, he broke into a restaurant to get himself some food. But the heavy night came to an end quickly as the British police arrived at the scene and arrested him. It remains unclear what charges Martin Finger will face. If he gets away with paying some fines, the EPT Prague winnings might come in handy.
The sale of Full Tilt is about to be finalized as a new agreement between the company and the French buyers Groupe Bernard Tapie has been made. The agreement states that all Full Tilt's shares, which are confiscated by DOJ at the moment, will be transferred to the new owners.
The current Full Tilt shareholders, according to different sources, have voted about the sale of Full Tilt Poker and most voted, ''yes.'' These shareholders will also have the chance to invest in the new company. The owners of Groupe Bernard Tapie have apparently also been in Dublin, Ireland, and talked to Full Tilt's employees about the current process.
This year in our Christmas Calendar we introduced a lottery 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 tournament ticket worth $215 you would get 215 tickets for the lottery if you decided to claim lottery tickets, instead of the actual prize.
