If you play most of your online poker on PokerStars, the biggest real money virtual card room in the world, you’ll be happy to know that the site’s software is receiving a major overhaul within a few days. Some of the features deal with strategy, while others relate to convenience or simply aesthetics.
Cash Game Lobby Improvements – Cash games can now be sorted by a new column entitled Type. The Type column displays the buy-in structure and the game speed.
Large Opponent Cards – Enlarges the size of opponent hole cards, making it easier to see at a glance who’s still in the current hand.
Full Hole Cards – Shows your entire hole cards instead of just their top half, making them easier to read.
Fold and Show – After you’re the last to act in a hand, you’ll have the option of showing one or both cards after you fold. You can select the cards to show simply by clicking on them.
5 Players in 4-Max Final Tables – All 4-Max tournaments will be sent to the final table when five players remain. Previously, 4-Max tournaments created an unfair situation by having one heads-up table and one 3-handed table prior to the final table.
Timed Tournaments – An interesting new tournament format in which play concludes at a pre-defined time. Once the clock reaches zero, players receive payments based on their current chip counts. These tournaments will be low-stakes-only initially.
Easy Seat – Perhaps the most convenient new feature, Easy Seat allows you to set your table preferences and automatically join ideal tables with the click of one button. This feature is built with multi-tabling in mind, so you could theoretically seat yourself at 20 different tables, all with the same stake levels, game types and speeds with just one click.
Other updates include new table themes with overhauled graphics, improved animations, bigger, more readable fonts and minor client/server bug fixes.
Germany’s Martin Schleich was able to survive the Spanish-dominated final table at the European Poker Tour Barcelona Main Event, winning a whopping 850,000 Euro in the process (that comes to a little over $1.2 million USD, given current exchange rates).
It was an incredibly long day, with action persisting until 3:30 a.m. The final hand played out in dramatic fashion when Schleich’s A-9 offsuit was pitted against Dragan Kostic’s A-7 offsuit. A 9 appeared on the flop, and the deal was sealed in Schleich’s favor.
Fan favorite Eugene Katchalov, the Ukrainian player from Team PokerStars, finished in 3rd place for a 315k Euro score. This was an impressive feat, given that he entered final table play in 8th place with under 700,000 chips, less than 10% of that of Tomeu Gomila who started the final table with around 7,000,000. Kathalov is quickly turning into one of the most dangerous forces in professional poker, with an astounding six final table forays in 2011 alone.
Gomila, a native of Spain, put on a relatively disappointing performance at the final table and dropped from 1st place to 5th by the time the action had concluded. He still picked up a respectable sum of 185k Euro for his efforts.
Spain had a strong showing overall: Dragan Kostic took 2nd (532k Euro), Raul Mestre took 4th (244k Euro) and Juan Manuel Perez took 7th (105k Euro) in addition to the aforementioned Gomila’s 5th place showing.
Israel and France also had representation in the form of Saar Wilf and Isabel Baltazar, respectively. Baltazar was the first player to receive elimination at the final table, and received 73k Euro for her deep run. Wilf fared slighty better with a 145k Euro score in 6th place.
Sep 2 2011
Full Tilt Poker issues statement on payments and possible investors
written by: Steve Comments: Comments Off
This weekend, one of Full Tilt poker’s lead attorneys, Jeff Ifrah, joined the 2+2 poker forum and started corresponding with the numerous users on the site. One of the revelations Ifrah made was that Full Tilt Poker would be multiple statements in the coming days, now that an alleged confidentiality agreement with one group of possible investors has expired.
On Wednesday morning the first of these statements was issued, and unlike prior communications from the site, Wednesday’s statement was quite lengthy, and pretty detailed:
As is obvious from the events that have transpired since April 15th, Full Tilt Poker was not prepared for the far-reaching, US government enforcement effort of Black Friday.
The events of Black Friday came on the heels of prior government enforcement activities and significant theft. Over the two years preceding Black Friday, the US government seized approximately $115M of player funds located in U.S. banks. While we believed that offering peer-to-peer online poker did not violate any federal laws—a belief supported by many solid and well-reasoned legal opinions — the DOJ took a different view. In addition, as was widely reported, a key payment processor stole approximately $42M from Full Tilt Poker. Until April 15th, Full Tilt Poker had always covered these losses so that no player was ever affected. Finally, during late 2010 and early 2011, Full Tilt Poker experienced unprecedented issues with some of its third-party processors that greatly contributed to its financial problems. While the company was on its way to addressing the problems caused by these processors, Full Tilt Poker never anticipated that the DOJ would proceed as it did by seizing our global domain name and shutting down the site worldwide.
Over the last four months, Full Tilt Poker has been actively exploring opportunities with outside investors in order to stabilize the company and pay back our players. At least six of those groups, including hedge funds, operators of other internet businesses and individual investors, have visited Dublin to inspect the operation. We have recently engaged an additional financial advisor through an investment banking group to assist us in our search for an infusion of cash as well as a new management team to restore the site and repay players. While any deal of this nature is necessarily complex given the current regulatory environment, our players should know that Full Tilt Poker is fully committed to paying them back in full and restoring confidence in our operations.
Unfortunately, most of the poker players responding to the letter across the online poker forums are viewing it with an enormous amount of skepticism, with the main complaint being that the statement is months overdue. Much like the waffling of Haseeb Qureshi and Daniel Cates in the recent “Girah” scandal, many of us have been left wondering what would have happened if they had issued this statement immediately after Black Friday?
The fourth day of action at the European Poker Tour Barcelona poker tournament, sponsored by PokerStars.com and hosted at the Gran Casino, solidified a final table of eight players, with Tomeu Gomila emerging as the player to beat. Gomila is a force to reckoned with, holding nearly 7 million chips compared to the 4.55 million currently owned by second-place contender Saar Wilf.
A total of 24 players started Day 4, and it only took around a half hour for Xavier Carruggi and Benjamin Juhasz to receive their final payouts in 23rd and 24th place, respectively. Six other players got their exit tickets within the next hour and a quarter, with Miikka Anttonen chief among them when his Q-Q was sent to the rail by Isabel Baltazar’s J-J.
Martin Schleich also used Q-Q to knock out Evgeny Zaytsev on the relative weakness of his A-K offsuit, shortly before Eugene Katchalov delivered a similar fate to Javier Contreras. It wasn’t long before Matthias De Meulder, Marton Czuczor, Massimilano Martinez and Marcos Fernandez hit the rail as well.
Soon after, the final nine players moved on to a single table, though the official “final table” would only include eight. The pace of play slowed considerably as the remaining competitors vied to avoid losing on the bubble. It was Jose Miguel Esteban who finally broke down and pushed all-in against Martin Schleich. A-10 and a garbage board weren’t enough to save Esteban from Schleich’s A-J suited.
The final table is listed according to their chip counts below:
1. Tomeu Gomila – 6,985,000
2. Saar Wilf – 4,555,000
3. Raul Mestre – 4,260,000
4. Isabel Baltazar – 2,270,000
5. Martin Schleich – 2,260,000
6. Dragan Kostic – 2,155,000
7. Juan Manuel Perez – 1,090,000
8. Eugene Katchalov – 690,000
Sep 1 2011
Ike Haxton will be joining Justin Bonomo in Malta
written by: Steve Comments: Comments Off
It appears that online superstar Justin “ZeeJustin” Bonomo will have some company at his new digs in Malta –the locale he decided to move to in order to continue his lucrative online poker career—as he will be joined by good friends and fellow online poker pros Steve O’Dwyer and Isaac Haxton. The revelation was made by Bonomo in a recent interview with the poker media outlet PokerNews.com.
Apparently Bonomo is simply not cut out for live play, telling PokerNews.com, “Happiness matters more than anything when making a decision like this, and frankly, I’m miserable when I play live poker… It’s incredibly slow, and I’m often surrounded by people I don’t want to be around. Live poker is not meant for a cynical person like myself. Much less important than that is the fact that I expect to make a lot more money playing online. I can get in hundreds of thousands of hands at high stakes, which I could never replicate live,”
Haxton is considered one of the top heads-up No Limit Holdem players on the Internet –he’s the only man to defeat Viktor “Isildur1” Blom in the Superstar Showdown Challenge matches on PokerStars—so it was only a matter of time before the phenom made his way overseas.
O’Dwyer is another top online poker player, although he doesn’t have the name recognition of Haxton or Bonomo –both of whom have appeared on televised poker shows in the past—he is a well respected high-stakes poker pro who plays under the screen-name “MrTimCaum”.
Comments Off - Click Here to Speak Up