Online Poker Press

SKYCITY Auckland have announced the return of the second annual SKYCITY Auckland Anniversary Poker Championship. The tournament will be held at SKYCITY Auckland from 25 January until 1 February 2010, with the Main Event kicking off on January 31^st with a guaranteed prize pool of $50,000.

In 2010, the Auckland Anniversary Poker Championships will coincide with the Chinese New Year, which for 2010 is ‘Year of the Tiger’ and as such it follows the theme of ‘Be Brave’. Players will need to call on their bravery for this tournament as with only 180 places available, the quality of players is expected to be exceptionally high.

Satellites for the championships will kick off in early January at SKYCITY Auckland’s poker room, SKYCITY Poker.

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Carbon Poker has just paid out on its Bad Beat Jackpot. A player going by the handle of baseball127 lost his straight flush to the royal flush of another player. That bad beat won baseball127 an incredible $211,758.31 and the winner of the hand took $105,000 as well as the comparatively tiny pot of $128. The seven other players got $15,000 just for being there. The jackpot has now been reseeded to more than $125,000.

Baseball127 must be very happy, as could you get a bad beat worse than that? Straight flush meet royal flush… I’d be screaming at the monitor if that happened to me without a jackpot to ease the pain. Scratch that – I’d stave in the monitor with the keyboard.

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PartyBets continues to duck for the cover, as a torrent of money continues to flow in for Phil Ivey to take down the 2009 World Series of Poker Main Event title. Ivey has now moved into outright favouritism to capture the title, dropping from $5 to $4.50 in the last week. The public money continues to love Ivey despite the fact that he enters the final table seventh in chips and Darvin Moon has a monster stack that many believe should be big enough to roll over his opponents. Moon continues to offer what is seemingly fantastic value, now out to $s mortensen5 for the win.   PartyPoker.com ambassador and World Poker Tour commentator Mike Sexton is baffled by the support for Ivey. Read full

Just as it appeared the final touches were being put on a deal to sell the World Poker Tour to a subsidiary of PartyGaming, a third offer to buy the company has been made.

At the beginning of August, Gamynia Limited agreed to pay $9,075,000 plus a percentage of future revenues for almost all of WPT Enterprises assets, including its television, sponsorship, distribution and licensing units.

The deal was put on hold pending stockholder approval and in the interim another offer was made.

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Europeans have a new direct flight to Las Vegas from Paris.Poker players can now go from sipping wine in Paris to flopping sets at Bellagio in less than 13 hours time thanks to a new direct flight sponsored by ChiliPoker.

The XL Airways flight will fly out of Paris Charles de Gualle airport on Thursdays and Sundays every week.

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EPT Warsaw, $9,000 No Limit Hold’em, Warsaw, October 20th-25th 2009

Entrants: 203
Buyin: $9,000 US
Prize pool: $1,717,000 US

1.

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A slow grind.

That is perhaps the best way to describe the play during day 3 of the WPT Bellagio Festa Al Lago Main Event.

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‘It sucks not to have made it when you keep getting so close, but really, that’s poker.’The World Poker Tour returns to familiar surroundings Wednesday as the annual Festa al Lago main event begins inside the Bellagio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

A win in the $15k event last year began Team PokerStars Pro Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier on the path towards WPT Player of the Year honors, but the Warsaw leg of the European Poker Tour will keep the French pro from returning to defend his title this time around.

Grospellier came into the final table last year with a rather sizeable chip lead and completely dominated a final six that included Nam Le, Osmin Dardon, Nenad Medic, Adam Levy and William Mietz to win the $1.4 million first place prize.

However, it was a hand on the event’s penultimate day, one that would become one of the most talked about hands of the WPT’s seventh season, that Grospellier later claimed propelled him to victory.

Joe Sebok, no stranger to WPT final table bubbles having finished seventh at both the Legends of Poker and Bay 101 Shooting Star in 2007, had the chip lead nine-handed and appeared to be a lock to finally make a televised final table on the tour.

Sebok fell back to the pack doubling up short stack Olav Prinz Von Sachsen losing a race with ace-king against sevens and a few minutes later, Grospellier raised his big blind from the small blind, just has he had been doing all day long.

This time Sebok decided to a take a stand, pushing all in with K 9 and without much hesitation, Grospellier made the call with the dominating A 9.

The board bricked out, Grospellier had the chip stack and table image needed to take a stranglehold on the Festa al Lago title and an utterly shocked Sebok was suddenly on the outside looking in.

For weeks after, Sebok’s play was both criticized and lauded on Internet poker forums and his own PokerRoad radio show ad nauseam.

Now, a year later, as he headed back to Las Vegas looking for redemption and another shot at the WPT glory he was so close to attaining he could practically taste it, Sebok told PokerListings he’s come to terms with it all.

The WPT Season 7 Festa al Lago champion.

“It makes me kind of sad that some of the most discussed hands in WPT history are ones that I’ve lost,” Sebok said.

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On Thursday, the oral arguments for one of the most prominent poker-related cases will take place in Kentucky. And you can watch it live.

The hearing, which is open to the public and available on http://courts.ky.gov/, could be the conclusion of what has been a lengthy battle between the Interactive Media Entertainment & Gaming Association (IMEGA) and Kentucky Governor Steven Beshear.

The court case is a result of Gov’s Beshear’s controversial move to seize the domain names of several online sites, including many poker sites, such as PokerStars, Full Tilt, DoylesRoom, Bodog, UltimateBet, Absolute Poker, and Cake Poker.

In all, 141 domain names were seized.

IMEGA, an organization that has fought for poker players’ rights in the past in both federal court and in state courts, immediately took up the fight. Th

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Simon Watts wins the 2009 edition of APPT Auckland.For the second straight year a local has triumphed at PokerStars APPT Auckland.

Simon Watt outlasted 263 players to win the biggest chunk of a $789,000 NZD prizepool in just the second APPT event ever held in New Zealand.

The event drew several recognizable players to the Skycity Casino, including Team PokerStars Pros Grant Levy, Emad Tahtouh, Tony Hachem, Celina Lin and Lee “Final Table” Nelson.

Nelson was eliminated in just the second hand of the tournament when he made a full house, but his opponent rivered quads.

The nine-player final table played out on Saturday with Assadour Assadourian the sole PokerStars sponsored player remaining.

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