Poker News Round-up

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Poker News Round-up: Week #37

By Adam Noone, 12/09/2008

Last week Tom Dwan was in the news after featuring in a number of extremely large pots online, including a monster pot lost to Peter Jepsen for just under half a million dollars. The size of the pot caused quite a stir, but possibly not as much as the comments made by Dwan to Phil Ivey that day in the on-screen chat box. Knowing full well that the high stakes tables are watched by large numbers of rail birds, Dwan warned Ivey that he thought it was not Jepsen playing on his red pro account but Sami Kelpuro. Kelpuro is a young Finnish player going by the name of Lars Luzak on Full Tilt who has been very successful at the high stakes tables with his aggressive style. Presumably Jepsen’s play that day reminded Dwan of Luzak’s style and having become convinced that Jepsen was lending out his account for someone else to play, Dwan decided to try and out him publicly. Dwan has since claimed that the only reason he did that was because he didn’t know Ivey’s new mobile number, but it’s hard to imagine that there wasn’t an element of Dwan playing to the public by using the Full Tilt chat box.

Peter Jepsen

That drew an indignant response from Jepsen when he got wind of this, and he swiftly moved to both deny Dwan’s accusations and seek an apology. However, having had a chance to reflect on the situation, Dwan was in no mood to back down and replied that he still believed it was Kelpuro playing, even calling Jepsen retarded for denying it. One of the reasons Dwan quoted for thinking it was Kelpuro playing was that both him and Jepsen were supposedly in Cannes at the time, but when Jepsen posted a screen shot of his Full Tilt log in history it showed that during the session in dispute the account had been logged in from his native Denmark the whole time.

Since then Dwan has gone rather quiet although Jepsen says that he has been contacted privately and things have been smoothed over. Nevertheless, giving a man a bad name in public then only backing down in private is pretty low on Dwan’s part and Jepsen’s reputation is bound to have suffered in the view of the many Durrrr fan boys despite the fact that he appears to be perfectly innocent.

Meanwhile it’s been a bad week for the former market leader of online poker Party Poker. In the past year the worldwide online poker market has grown by 25%, with most of the major players showing significant growth in that time. Pokerstars has grown by a massive 72%, whilst Full Tilt is up 54% and the iPoker network 53%. Crucially though, in the same period of time Party Poker’s share of the market fell from 12% to just 8% as they struggle to compete with those sites which are still accepting US customers. That has prompted a re-think by parent company PartyGaming and job cuts are expected, although a spokesman from Party said that any job losses are yet to be decided upon. It is expected that amongst the changes to be made, customer service jobs will be outsourced to Bulgaria and IT jobs to India.

But the declining number of customers is not the only concern to Party right now after it was announced this week that the company are facing a lawsuit with a compensation claim of $287 million for trademark infringement. WMS Gaming Inc has filed a claim alleging that Party knowingly reproduced their Jackpot Party and Super Jackpot Party trademarks between 2004 and 2006. Despite being asked several times to cease use of the trademarks, Party refused and in 2007 a US District Court judge found in WMS’s favour and awarded $2.67 million in damages against Party. That was substantially less than WMS were seeking and now appeal court judges have ruled that a further claim may be made for another award based on Party’s revenue at the time. At the height of the poker boom Party was pulling in around a billion dollars a year and seeing as they have already been found guilty of this offence once, a further award for a much more damaging sum seems a very real prospect. The future looks a little bleak for Party at the moment.

There have been plenty of tournaments taking place in the past week including some very large ones online at Full Tilt and Pokerstars. The pot limit Omaha $25,000 heads up challenge at Full Tilt predictably drew a very strong field (from which the suspended Brian Townsend had to be withdrawn) with the UK’s Ben Grundy looking to add to his superb run at Omaha this year. After beating first Phil Ivey then Robert Williamson III Grundy exited just short of the paid positions though at hands of Ugadabugada when his top pair and nut flush draw could not improve. From Grundy and Ugadabugada’s side of the draw Slaktarn emerged victorious to meet Finn Patrick Antonius in the final. When the pair of them got all their money in Antonius’ aces and gutshot were behind Slaktarn’s set of jacks which then went on to make a straight to earn victory for the mysterious online player. Slaktarn is thought to be Swedish but his or her real identity is not generally known which is unusual for someone who sits at the high stakes tables with the likes of Ivey and Galfond. Whoever Slaktarn is, another $560,000 was added to their balance which is apparently already showing a profit of over $2 million from Omaha this year.

The Pokerstars World Championship Of Online Poker is also underway and there have been some good results for players from this part of the world. Shane Hellyer from the Isle Of Wight defeated a massive field of 7217 runners over the course of nineteen hours to take victory in the very first event for just over $200,000. There have also been creditable final table appearances for UK players SC72A, drunked and lucasino as well as an excellent second place finish in the six handed Omaha for forum regular mddgfc.

Tony Cascarino wins the GUKPT Bolton

The latest leg of the GUKPT saw a relatively small field of 175 runners turn up at Bolton but as usual it was an accomplished field competing for the title. A final table that included Surinder Sunar and Roberto Romanello was testament to that strength in depth, but it was a former footballer who upstaged them all to take victory. Tony Cascarino has been a keen poker player for a number of years and has now added a GUKPT to his list of achievements after turning round a big chip deficit when heads up against Ali Mallu. After having previously posted a very good result in last year’s EPT London event, this win becomes the biggest score of Cascarino’s poker career with another £52,850 to his name. That may only be what some footballers get for turning up to a couple of training sessions these days, but Cascarino is rightly very proud of his win. “I had a great sports career, but even this I think has overtaken some of things I have done in football” he said afterwards.

The rest of the month looks to be pretty hectic for live poker with WPT, EPT, WSOPE and GCBPT events all taking place in September. Don’t forget to check out the live coverage on the site as our reporting team brings you the best of the action direct from Liverpool’s Gala casino next week.

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