Poker News Round-up

Brought to you every Friday

Poker News Round-up: Week #13

By Adam Noone, 28/03/2008

€3,000,000 might have seemed like a reasonable guarantee to put on the prize pool for the Irish Open as last year’s guarantee was easily met and a similar number of runners would again cover the advertised amount. Perhaps the increased buy-in of €4,200 this year put some players off entering though and the final registration of 667 runners meant that there was a shortfall of around €200,000. Fortunately this was a proper guarantee rather than a WPT one (see 28th of September 2007 News Report) and Paddy Power stumped up the extra money he had promised for a decent overlay.

Neil Channing opts for a red t-shirt over
the top of a longer sleeved white one

74 year old Doyle Brunson made the trip to Dublin and began well finishing the opening day as one of the chip leaders, but could not hang on to his chips and was eliminated along with son Todd on day two. Meanwhile the English visitors to Ireland were doing rather well, none more so than Neil Channing who summoned forth an almighty bad beat when he hit a one outer on the river to eliminate Mark Spellman in tenth place. There would be no stopping Neil after that – with more than twice as many chips as his nearest rival going into the final table, Channing’s commanding stack just kept on growing until only Donal Norton stood between him and the title. Having previously been known as more of a cash game player in the past, Channing has strung some good tournament results together in recent times and further confirmed his tournament prowess by finishing off proceedings against Norton to become the Irish Open champion. The €801,400 first place prize money will have been most welcome, but that was actually topped up further as Neil had £500 on himself to win the event at odds of 100/1 for a bonus £50,000.

Five players left not feeling particularly happy after the Irish Open though were the winners of sponsorship packages from Gnuf Poker. Gnuf is a German company based in Malta which ran a series of qualifying tournaments, eventually awarding the top five players with live tournament sponsorship advertised at a value of $250,000 per person. However, when all five failed to make the money in Ireland they all had their sponsorship revoked on the basis that they were not winning players. Only one player had recorded a cash of any sort during the sponsorship deal period when Harald Dohm placed 17th of 187 in the Bregenz Open. The problem with Gnuf’s conclusion that these can not be winning players is that it was made after just three tournaments, two of which – the Irish Open and EPT Dortmund had very strong fields. Gnuf’s decision has caused much unrest amongst German players as three tournaments is clearly not long enough to get an idea of someone’s ability (Annette Obrestad has gone fifty consecutive tournaments without cashing in the past.) Not only that, to win sponsorship required participation in several tournaments costing €30 apiece so those who took part have been left feeling ripped off that the prize pool funds have not been used appropriately. This looks to be a very poor decision on Gnuf’s part, and the bad publicity they have already received could yet become worse as the five are said to be considering legal action.

Mr Channing will also be appearing on your tv screens very soon as the latest addition to the Great Britain team taking part in the Party Poker Nations Cup in April. Neil will be joined by captain Roland de Wolfe, ever present in the side Joe Beevers, the man who always seems to get himself on tv – Ian Frazer, online qualifier Francis Durban and legend of the game Surinder Sunar. We don’t know much about Durban but overall the side looks to be a very strong one with a good chance of reclaiming the trophy they won in 2006. Defending champions Sweden remain unchanged with the exception of their online qualifier, whilst America have had to go for a celebrity rather than an online qualifier due to Party Poker not accepting customers from the USA. Former chat show host Montel Williams will join up with the likes of Chris Ferguson and Freddy Deeb in a strong US team in which the weakest link amongst the pros is probably former world champion Jamie Gold.

Jerry Yang

Since his WSOP main event win, Gold has actually been very generous with his money. The problem is that the recipients of his generosity have been the richest and best high stakes cash game players in the world to whom he seemingly can’t help but blurt out the strength of his hand - “I got a hand…feels like aces, I wish it was aces, but it feels like it” is the not so cryptic clue he gives to Patrik Antonius on High Stakes Poker whilst holding pocket kings. His WSOP successor has also been making several charitable donations but Jerry Yang has been a little more prudent as a benefactor. In his victory speech last July Yang stated that he would donate 10% of his winnings to charity and he has been making good on his promise this week with the Feed The Children charity. Yang will be picking up the tab and personally helping with the distribution of ten truckloads of food, hygiene products and toys to families in his home state of California. His generosity has extended far beyond this event though and he has in fact easily surpassed the 10% he originally quoted with charitable donations of over $1,000,000 already. Whatever you might think of his unseemly antics at the table last summer, or indeed his ability for a world champion, it is hard to argue that a win for Yang in 2007 wasn’t a good result when some would have been losing that money back at the craps pit.

Post your comments in our forum

What's this?