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The PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker has always been home to a large number of well known poker players. This year, WCOOP was the feeding ground for many of these poker professionals – most notably this year’s winner, Jason Mercier. Mercier battled his way through all of the competition WCOOP had to offer and ended up the winner, taking home a total prize package of around $435,000 in the $1k NL Texas Holdem tournament.

More than 3,000 poker players turned out to compete in this year’s World Championship of Online Poker to compete for their piece of a $3 million prize pool – much more money than the tournament guaranteed. During the final phase of the tournament, Mercier took part in a 3 person battle with an additional prize package being offered to both the winner and 2nd place finisher, $60k and $15k, respectively.

Long known for featuring huge attendance stats on the East Coast of the United States, the World Poker Tour again set an attendance record at the popular Borgata Poker Open. The most popular stops on the World Poker Tour have typically been Foxwoods and Borgata. However, the attendance this year was far above what anyone on the tour expected – and the packed tournament was evidence of this. After last year’s enormous attendance numbers, it’s hard to believe that this year could have been any better – but it was.

In 2009, the Borgata Poker Open buy in was officially dropped from the normal $10k to only $3.5k – attracting a great deal more players by itself. However, World Poker Tour officials also made the decision to increase the total guaranteed prize package to $2 million. While officials debated whether these changes would have any significant impact on the event attendance, Borgata owners and poker players agreed that the changes would have a positive influence on turnout.

After surviving a star studded final table at the European Poker Tour Vilamoura main event on Thursday, British poker player Toby Lewis came out on top to win the coveted tournament title – not to mention a nearly half million Euro prize. The 20 year old poker newbie described his feelings after the event as being “pretty happy at the moment.” The final table at Vilamoura consisted of a few notable poker vets included the EPT superstar Rob Hollink, the legendary soccer player Teddy Sheringham and the runner up to this year’s Aussie Millions event – Frederick Jensen.

Lewis is just beginning his poker career. In fact, his largest win before Vilamoura in a live event was when he played in Venice at the IPT PokerStars event. Lewis has every right to be happy at that event as the final table was indeed a struggle with Swedish poker star Martin Jacobson fighting him the whole way. After building his stack with a hefty win over Jacobson on the day before the final day, Lewis went on to face him head to head for the tournament title.

Recently, Fox Sports and the World Poker Tour came to an agreement to televise the World Poker Tour over the next three years – seasons 9 through 11. Throughout each week, FSN will broadcast reruns of previous episodes while new episodes will be shown on the network each Sunday at 8 and 11 p.m. President of the World Poker Tour, Adam Pliska, was optimistic about the deal saying that FSN has long been a champion of the World Poker Tour and that he is happy that they have decided to continue the long standing contract to continue broadcasting World Poker Tour events on the network. He also was pleased about the better time slot that is being awarded the WPT with Fox and the increased volume in promotions and reruns that promise to enhance the visibility of the WPT with returning and new viewers.

Beyond the changed time slot, little else will be changed about the shot itself. FSN still plans to keep seasoned poker announcers Vince Van Patten and Mike Sexton to host the show. 2011′s season will mark the ninth season that Van Patten and Sexton have acted as announcers for the tour. However, the show will feature a new “Raw Deal” special where a poker player will make remarks on a variety of topics. This segment will also be home to the popular Royal Flush Girls. Auditions for the host of this new segment took place during the Bicycle Casino Legends of Poker tournament earlier this month.

Long considered to be one of the golf capitals of the world, Vilamoura, Portugal is once again one of the favorite stops on the European Poker Tour this year. Last season, Vilamoura was a very successful stop on the tour with a prize pool of around 1.5 million Euros and hundreds of the top professional poker players around the world in attendance. Last season, 322 players competed for the final table - which consisted of memorable play by pros such as Jan Skampa and Jeff Sarwer along with the French poker veteran Michel Abecassis. In the end, Antonio Matias was successful and took home a total prize package of a little more than 404,000 Euros.

This year, Vilamoura is once again a very successful tournament – after only being played for a total of two years. So successful is the tournament, in fact, that this year will break the record for the largest poker tournament taking place in the city of Vilamoura with 384 participants. At the beginning of day 2 on August 30th, Leonid Bilokur was the chip leader as one of the PokerStars qualifiers from Russia – holding 161,000 in chips. Following behind on day 2 were Sam Trickett with a little over 132,000 in chips and Dario Minieri with just over 131,000.