Poker News Round-up

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Poker News Round-up: Week #43

By Adam Noone, 24/10/2008

If you’re one of the most successful internet poker players in the world, being banned from both Full Tilt and Pokerstars is going to be a very serious handicap to your earning potential, yet that is exactly what has happened to Sorel Mizzi. The man who for the past few years has been tearing up the online tournament scene with over a million dollars worth of cashes on Pokerstars alone now finds himself excluded from both the big two sites. Back in October 2007 Mizzi was banned from Full Tilt after it was discovered that he bought the account of Chris Vaughn who was at an advanced stage in the big Sunday tournament, then completed the tournament on Vaughn’s account. Now Mizzi has also been banned from Pokerstars for allowing somebody else to play on his zangbezan24 account. The explanation from Mizzi as to why somebody else came to be using his account, as you might expect, attempts to play down the seriousness of it all and attribute it to nothing more than a little absent mindedness. Apparently Mizzi was at Barcelona airport when he realized that he had registered himself for a $300 tournament which was due to start so called a friend and asked him to play until Mizzi got to his hotel in London, whereupon he took over.

Sorel Mizzi / Imper1um / zangbezan24
/ who knows who else

Given his previous run in with Full Tilt, Mizzi should be fully aware of how easy it is for a site’s security to spot when an account is played from two different IP addresses in the same tournament, and also that they are always on the look out for this sort of thing. So is his explanation really plausible given that he must have known he was risking having his account suspended for the sake of a $300 game? Not according to some who know the online scene well such as Shaun Deeb who say that this is just the tip of the iceberg for Mizzi and his shady practices. He has also been accused of approaching the winner of the Pokerstars WCOOP main event with an offer to ghost him during the latter stages i.e. Mizzi would be privy to the hole cards of this player and would offer advice in return for a percentage of the win. After initially making an appearance to play down the claims being made against him, Mizzi has simply refused to face his critics over the past few days when some of the more difficult questions were being asked of him. It doesn’t look good for him at the moment, although some have been questioning his integrity for a long time now, especially seeing as he is known to be close to Josh Field aka JJProdigy who is also banned from both Pokerstars and Full Tilt for cheating. If he is anything like Field, he won’t stay banned for long though and will find a way back under another name.

It’s been a bit of a quiet week for live tournaments but there was a new venue for the GUKPT when it stopped off at Thanet in Kent last weekend. These events always attract a strong field and a quick glance at the entry list showed that there were several sponsored pros in attendance as well as some as yet unsigned internet full timers. Over the course of the four days the experience of the pros told and the final table was full of serious players who had made the journey to Thanet in search of wages. Simon Trumper and Karl Mahrenholz were the first two to fall at the final but it was still a strong table they left to fight it out, and it was two young online pros who remained as the last two men seated.

GUKPT winner Andy Teng

23 year old Andy Teng had a big chip deficit against 22 year old Andy Brown, but he managed to reverse that over the course of two hours of heads up play to eventually emerge victorious from a field of 226 players. First place was worth £68,380 plus a place in the champion of champions tournament later this year where he will be joined by Tony Phillips and Jeff Kimber who also won side events. There was no time to celebrate for Kimber though as he was straight off to Barcelona for the world heads up championship. Last year’s champion is off to a good start in defence of his title and at the time of writing is through to the last 32.

It’s yet more bad news for the WPT this week as they have announced that their online poker site is set to cease operation on November 14th. The WPT online poker room only went live in June 2007 and earlier this year WPT Enterprises extended their agreement with host network Cryptologic until 2011. The bad news for WPT shareholders is that WPT Enterprises had guaranteed Cryptologic $750,000 from site proceeds, and now that this figure will not be reached from traffic on the site some sort of compensation package is surely imminent. The WPT share price is already so low that it is facing being de-listed from Nasdaq, and this is the sort of news that can only drive it further downwards.

Which one is this?

And as a final note for this week, cast your minds back six months to the week when Harrah’s announced that the final table for this year’s WSOP would be delayed until November. We were told that this would be so the finalists could receive greater publicity whilst their stories were told and poker would benefit from a boost in popularity amongst the general public again. Well so far the only publicity for any of the players has really been of their own making e.g. Dennis Phillips’ charitable gestures and Ivan Demidov making the final table of the WSOP Europe main event. Did you even know that Yion Schwartz is just a few spots away from becoming world champion? Do you know which players have picked up sponsorship deals since July? Do you know if or how you are going to be able to watch coverage of the final table in two weeks’ time? If Harrah’s really had players’ best interests in mind when they made this decision then they’ve done a pretty poor job of generating public interest on their behalf. The alternative is that they never really gave a stuff about the players and just wanted time to generate some extra income for themselves from television advertising and having the whole WSOP entourage visit the Rio not once but twice per year. Either way, we’re not far off now so it’s time to start picking your favourites.

Adam Noone is a Full Tilt Pro, Play with him and the Mob at Full Tilt Poker

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