Poker News Round-up

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Poker News Round-up: Week #08

By Adam Noone, 22/02/2008

Downtown Mashantucket

Turks and Caicos

One of the attractions of being a top poker player is that you get to travel the world playing poker in exotic and interesting locations. Or is it? According to Steve Lipscombe, founder and president of the World Poker Tour, the answer is actually no. The WPT has released its new schedule and around a third of events from this year have been dropped for season seven. Lipscombe says that these revisions have been made based on feedback the WPT has had from players, so it would appear that people would rather visit Mashantucket and Biloxi than Barcelona and the Turks and Caicos Islands, both of which have been dropped.

That might not make much sense to passport owning Europeans but seemingly that’s the way Americans want it, and now every single event on the so called world tour will take place in North America. In truth both the Barcelona and Turks and Caicos events could be seen as a bit of an embarrassment for the WPT this season though. The Caribbean event failed to generate enough runners to cover the advertised guarantee whilst in Spain the WPT event didn’t attract even half as many runners as the EPT tournament in the same city. With WPT broadcasts recently being dropped from the Travel Channel as well it might be that as a brand the WPT feels it needs to streamline and avoid any further potential banana skins.

Online there has been major upheaval this week for numerous sites, most notably Full Tilt Poker. For several days customers have experienced the frustration of repeatedly losing connection in the middle of games (including the final table of the Full Tilt Online Poker Series main event) apparently attributable to distributed denial of service attacks. These occur when a source bombards the server with bogus requests for information which overwhelm it and slow the response time down to a crawl, at which point regular users of the site are disconnected.

Several other gaming sites have been targeted such as Titan Poker and Party Gaming as well as a long list of other businesses like payment processors and advertising firms. The fact that many of the sites under attack are Russian may well point to the fact that this is another extortion attempt by criminals similar to the spate of attacks suffered by the British bookmaking industry in 2004. Prior to major events such as the Cheltenham festival and the Superbowl several bookies found their websites went down when they did not comply with extortion requests. The gang behind that was traced back to Russia and arrested but despite the apparent lack of success last time around, it seems likely that a new extortion racket has been set up with different targets.

Jaffa Cake Jeff Kimber

The second leg of the Grosvenor UK Poker Tour took place in Walsall, where the field of 287 was a little down on last year’s attendance but still provided a tough test over four days of play. Nik Persaud’s consistency saw him make his third GUKPT final table but it was Ladbrokes sponsored pro Jeff Kimber who claimed first place. The world heads up champion is on a roll at the moment and days after winning the Daddy (one of the bigger weekly tournaments that take place on Ladbrokes) here Kimber also picked up a win worth £83,910 plus a place at the champion of champions event in Luton later this year. Next up for the tour is the London leg at the Vic in March.

Sorel Mizzi

The cheating scandal which Sorel Mizzi found himself embroiled in last year appears to have done him little harm as he became the latest internet star to pick up a sponsorship deal this week. Following a ban from Full Tilt, Mizzi has been steadily keeping the money rolling in on Pokerstars but it is UK owned Betfair who have offered him a contract. With their sponsorship of the WSOP Europe and subsequent winner of that tournament Annette Obrestad, Betfair seem keen to raise their profile in the live poker scene in recent times. The addition of a second player who has previously been ranked the number one online player in the world should see them well represented in forthcoming events. Both are currently in Denmark for the EPT Copenhagen so we’ll see how they get on next week.

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