Poker News Round-up

Brought to you every Friday

Poker News Round-up: Week #30

By Adam Noone, 25/07/2008

It’s been an understandably quiet week after 55 WSOP events in quick succession but for those not pokered out by events at the Rio, there have been plenty of other tournaments on offer in Las Vegas. The Bellagio Cup has become a popular fixture despite competing with the WSOP for players, and has attracted some decent fields for their events. Jimmy Fricke, Clonie Gowen and John Gale all claimed nice victories in $5,000 preliminary events, then 446 runners came together for the $15,000 buy in WPT event. The increased buy in (up from $10,000) perhaps led to a smaller turn out than last year but there was still plenty of money up for grabs, and a tough field to overcome in order to claim the biggest share of it.
A rather unorthodox payout structure saw the top 100 paid out, with little more than the initial buy in back for most but as usual most of the money was reserved for the top few spots. Still in contention when play was reduced to the televised final table of six were Ralph Perry, Luke Staudenmaier, David Benyamine, Gabe Thaler, Michael Watson and incredibly John Phan with the second biggest stack looking for his third big tournament win in the space of five weeks. Phan’s tournament ended in cruel fashion though with a runner runner flush loss to Benyamine, whilst Watson set about eliminating every other player to go heads up against the big Frenchman. Benyamine appeared to have already used up all his luck by this point, as having been one card away from picking up his third WPT title his pocket queens were crushed when a much needed ace fell on the river for Watson to win a massive pot. Any hopes Benyamine had of turning things around were then ended when his all in pre flop with K 9 came unstuck against Watson’s Q 9 and the Canadian became the second champion of WPT season VII for a win of $1,673,770.

Michael Watson

The future of the WPT had been in some doubt since the announcement that the Gameshow Network would not be taking up the option to broadcast the latest series of tournaments, but the WPT broadcasts have now found a new home. Series VII will go out on the Fox Sports Network which broadcasts to a similar number of households in the USA as the show’s first home, the Travel Channel, which is more than the previous hosts GSN. It had been thought that a change of management personnel at the GSN meant that the network were not keen to go with gambling related shows, although their other big poker show has been granted a reprieve. High Stakes Poker had been a popular feature on GSN since the channel started but the contract had been allowed to lapse after the end of the last series. Now though, a new series has been commissioned and Jamie Gold and Guy Laliberte will once again get a chance to line the pockets of wily old pros like Greenstein, Farha and Brunson.

Back home, the heats for the Ladbrokes Poker Million VII are underway (SPOILER WARNING – if you don’t want to know results of matches please stop reading now)... and it has been a good start for the two Hendon Mob players who have been involved so far. Barny Boatman won a thrilling heads up battle against Simon Zach with pocket aces which fell behind on the flop before making a full house on the turn to win heat two. Brother Ross then joined him in the semi finals with victory in heat three, and they are joined by Jonas Danielsson, Ryan Fronda and Ciaran O’Leary so far. Of the matches left to play heat ten looks like it could be a good one as defending champion Joe Beevers faces off against John Duthie and recent WSOP bracelet winners Marty Smyth and Mike Matusow. Heat eleven also looks lively as Annette Obrestad, Tony G and Ram Vaswani are all involved but the other three in that heat are certainly also in with a decent chance (John Magill, Stuart Fox and Eoghan O’Dea)

Other tournaments in this country to look forward to in the near future see summer festivals held at the Broadway casino in Birmingham, the Empire in Leicester Square and the smart new G casino in Thanet before the GUKPT returns to Luton in early August. So if the British summer lets us down again why not get down your nearest venue and try to get your hands on a trophy.

Post your comments in our forum

What's this?