Poker News Round-up

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Poker News Round-up: Week #33

By Adam Noone, 17/08/2007

The August leg of the Grosvenor UK Poker Tour moved down to the newly refurbished G Casino in Luton this week and attracted 315 players to the £1,000 main event. Some of the country’s best players such as Sunrinder Sunar, Roland de Wolfe and Ram Vaswani made the trip to Luton but none of these three were left in the game when the money was dished out to the top 27 players. A reasonably affordable buy in and the opportunity to qualify online has meant that the GUKPT has been an excellent opportunity for some previously unknown players to pick up some good live tournament experience and occasionally steal some of the limelight. Whilst there were a few players at the final table who have been doing the rounds for a few years such as Alan Vinson, it was one such newcomer who managed to overcome the rest of the field here and pick up a nice cheque for £107,300. Dave Clark from Colchester emerged victorious from a lengthy final table and also assured himself of a place at the grand final at the Vic in December.

Also running at the moment is the National Poker Tour being held at Loose Cannon in London. The NPL is still in its infancy and has not generated fields the size of the GUKPT events yet but nevertheless there were some familiar players on view when the first events kicked off. Tony G, Dave Colclough, Roland de Wolfe and Shannon Elizabeth were all in attendance for the opening event, a £500 no limit hold’em tournament. Both Colclough and Tony G made the final table, but it was Loose Cannon regular Mike Conway who did the club proud by finishing top of the pile and collecting the first trophy of the series.

Dave Colclough probably has more trophies than he knows what to do with, but he added to his tally when he picked up first place in event 2, again a £500 no limit hold’em event. After an extended heads up battle with Jason de Freitas, Colclough got all his chips in pre-flop with the worst of it and missed the flop but managed to hit both the turn and river for trips to take the title.

Buy ins will increase as the series progresses, culminating in a main event for which players such as WSOP bracelet winners Mel Judah, Perry Friedman, Todd Brunson and Max Pescatori are all registered.

Scandal of the week comes courtesty of Dustin “Neverwin” Woolf, who has had his Pokerstars account closed down for multi-accounting. Whilst he has made appearances at major tournaments over the last three years, Woolf is known as an internet player who has progressed to high stakes cash games in a relatively short space of time. Much of his success has come at heads up games, which is where the benfit of his multi-accounting is most pronounced. Whereas Justin Bonomo’s multi-account cheating from a couple of years ago involved him entering the same tournament under different screen names, Woolf’s is different in that he has been playing on various accounts in order to disguise his identity and playing style from opponents in cash games. Some would say that this is not as bad or not even a form of cheating but just a feature of the anonymity of internet play. This was a tactic famously employed by an account that went by the name of Dreamclown which engaged Daniel Negreanu in a series of heads up games that developed into grudge matches after Dreamclown started trash talking whenever Negreanu lost. It emerged that one of the reasons Negreanu was having difficulty beating this opponent was that there were in fact four different players using the same account so Negreanu was struggling to get to grips with Dreamclown’s way of playing. When this information surfaced it just seemed to make Negreanu more determined to find a way to win, but little seemed to be made of the fact that this might be an underhand internet tactic.
Woolf is claiming that he has not done anything wrong but it is hard to imagine that Pokerstars security have got it wrong here. Having closed two accounts that he had been using last year and issuing him with a warning about multiple IDs, more accounts have been suspended this week in the face of further evidence. Even accounts which have simply transferred money to the Neverwin account have come under scrutiny and been suspended. However this progresses though, it seems that there is little anyone could do to stop a multi-accounter setting up a new IP address, bank accounts and screen names and starting over again until the next time they get caught and have to repeat the process – further evidence that poker needs to be properly regulated by authorities with some sort of power to act.

As a final note, the Phil Laak story from last week seems to have fizzled out somewhat although there is still an air of mystery about how it all concluded. Having threatened to post further details of his story last week, Tom Grant’s website remained strangely silent for some time. Naturally, people wanted to know what was going on and blogger Bill Rini emailed Grant for an explanation. His reply states simply “Phil Laak has compensated me. That is all that needs to be said.”

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