Online Poker News Blog

German Court Over-Rules Previous Internet Gambling Ban

A German court has just over-ruled a lower courts decision on whether Bwin could provide gambling to German citizens. They over-ruled the previous ban because of the impossibility of enforcing an online gambling ban. This puts German more in line with the rest of the European Court justice system who have ruled similarly to allow internet gambling. This puts even more pressure on the US as the rest of the world seems to be going ahead with regulating the industry instead of trying to ban it.

Source: The Register 

Bodog.net Life Poker Promotion - One Billionth Hand

Bodog.net is celebrating their poker room dealing its one billionth hand. They have estimated that the hand will be dealt near the end of November and to celebrate they are giving away $50 dollars to 10 poker players everyday from November 5-26th. They will also be giving away $10k to the table that is dealt the 1,000,000,000, $5k for 995,000,000, $4k for 990,000,000, $3k for 985,000,000 and $2k for 980,000,000. Each player sitting at the table will also get $109 in tournament credits. To cap the promotion off they will be giving away $1,000 dollars monthly bankroll for a year to the grand prize drawing winner. There is no better time to be playing at Bodog Life.

Final Table of the North American Poker Championship

The North American Poker championship has been running since October 25th. The buy in was $ 10,000 CAD and was hosted at the Fallsview in Niagara Falls, Ontario. It is a world poker tour event that will be shown on TV in the upcoming months.  The final table was set yesterday and the final table has yet to play but will include popular poker pro John Juanda who sits last in the chip count with 425,000.

Final Table:

Seat 1: Jim Worth 1,305,000
Seat 2: Marc Karam 1,290,000
Seat 3: Jason Sagle 2,970,000
Seat 4: John Lam 2,285,000
Seat 5: Soren Turkewitsch 1,690,000
Seat 6: John Juanda 425,000

Party Gaming is Doing Just Fine

PartyGaming’s stock has jumped 10% after they reported that their revenue climbed 24% and they had $115.7 million dollars up from $93 million last year at this time. While their poker revenue has gone down a bit they have doubled their casino business from $14.2 million up to $36 million.

PartyGaming took a huge hit a year ago when they stopped allowing US players to play at their poker room, casino and sportsbook. They have since focused their marketing internationally and have been growing exponentially in those markets.

Source: Market Watch 

High Stakes Poker Raises Buy-in

The GSN Network has just raised the buy-in from their hit poker show “High Stakes Poker”. On November 5th, they will begin airing season 4 with over $5 million dollars on the table. The buy-in for the event used to be $100,000 but it has been raised to a half million dollars! The episodes will begin airing every monday night at 9pm.

High Stakes Pros playing are: Doyle Brunson, Sammy Farha, David Benyamine, Barry Greenstein,Antonio Esfandiari, Jamie Gold, Daniel Negreanu, Patrik Antonius and Guy Laliberte.

If you interested in watching high stakes online poker check out the full tilt poker high stakes summaries.

PPA Lobby for Poker as a Game of Skill

The Poker Players Alliance will be lobbying legislators on Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington D.C. Over 100 members of the PPA will be their including poker professionals Annie Duke and Moneymaker and Sen. Al D’Amato (R-N.Y.). The goal of the lobbying is to exempt poker from the 2006 UIGEA because of poker being classified as a game of skill. This is great news that the PPA is pushing to legalize online poker once and for all.

The PPA had been quite over the last couple months which does not mean they weren’t working but it was mostly behind the scenes. It is great to see them in the publics eye once again. The Poker players alliance has over 800k poker members and growing everyday!

Source: USA Today

Absolute Poker SuperUser Account

Well it looks like the story of the Absolute Poker super account has unraveled into epic proportions.  The story started when a tournament player at 2+2 requested a hand history for a tournament he played. He felt like one player seemed to make all the right moves and it was such perfect play that he thought foul play may be involved.

Absolute poker then sent him the hand history for the entire tournament…(don’t think they meant to do that). He then shared the hand histories with friends who all determined that “potripper” was indeed cheating and had knowledge of players hole cards. Absolute poker said they would investigate the situation and returned days later to say that nothing happened and there is no way this could have been done.

This didn’t stop people from gathering more evidence into the mysterious superuser account. There was a ton of evidence that it links the user account to an employee (or past employee) of Absolute Poker. It looks like Absolute Poker may be coming clean on the situation and will return the money to effected players.

More on the topic:

• Gambling Splendor Absolute Poker Wiki
• MSNBC
• 2+2 forums - Orgin of Allegations

PokerStars WCOOP Champ “theV0id” Disqualified

Poker Stars has taken away the first place prize from “theV0id” because an investigation found that he was using two computers on the same IP during the tournament. This is strictly against the Poker Star.com Terms and Conditions so they took away the first place prize money and redistributed it to the other players in the tournament.

The bubble boy of the tournament must be very happy as he now moves up a place and will receive part of the prize pool. It is great to see Poker Stars so careful and when an allegation comes up they immediately investigate and make sure no foul play is involved. In this case there was foul play and they did the right thing to redistribute the prize and make a point to other players that they will not get away with this.

US Faces $100 Billion Fine

The US may have to pay up to $100 billion dollars in  trade concessions to European industries because of the recent gambling laws in the US.  This is due to the WTO ruling  that the US could not try to ban some forms of online gambling while keeping other US sanctioned online gambling going. The article can be found at itnews. The US has already lost its appeal and is now looking at a lot of money to pony up for trying to protect “US citizens”. Every member of the WTO (151) are seeking compensation.

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