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Poker News Round-up: Week #48 Daniel Negreanu Peter Eastgate’s recent WSOP main event win for over $9 million doesn’t even place him in the top ten on the live tournament all time money list, such is the strength of the competition he is up against in the form of Hellmuth, Ivey et al. In contrast his predecessor Jamie Gold’s monster score for $12 million has seen him head the leaderboard for over two years now, but that looks set to change in the near future. The pack is closing in on him, led by Daniel Negreanu who is now within a million of Gold’s total following his latest tournament win. Returning to his native Canada, Negreanu saw off the biggest field he has ever defeated at 689 players on his way to winning the BC Poker Championships in Richmond. The extra $371,910 Canadian he added to his tally was achieved despite by his own admission being hungover for the first day of play and unable to concentrate. Gold on the other hand does not have a single recorded tournament cash to his name for 2008 and seems unlikely to be able to hold on to top spot for much longer. For most of us involved with poker there is little need for further explanation of how players on Ultimatebet and Absolute Poker were cheated out of millions of dollars. The story is so big though that it is being taken to the public at large in America via the television programme 60 Minutes this Sunday. This much anticipated broadcast seems to have divided opinion amongst online players as to whether this will turn out to be beneficial or detrimental to the game. Some believe that it could act as a catalyst for proper regulation of the industry in America, but there are fears that online poker as a whole will be portrayed in a negative light. Those with concerns about the approach the programme will take will have found little comfort in the previews released so far by the CBS television network. The synopsis for the show states that “60 minutes and The Washington Post reveal how online poker players suspecting cheating were forced to successfully ferret out the cheaters themselves. That's because managers of the mostly-unregulated $18 billion Internet gambling industry failed to respond to their complaints.” Citing managers of the industry rather than a few criminally minded individuals working from within the two sister companies Ultimatebet and Absolute Poker does not convey an accurate picture of what happened, and the video preview has similarly inspired little confidence. That claims that the online poker industry is illegal in the US, and whilst there are too many within the outgoing Bush administration who would like it that way, playing online poker in America is in fact not illegal. Any potential new recruits to the online player pool are likely to be put off by advice that they would be acting illegally, so the editing of this programme could have a significant impact on the future of online poker. For those who see this show and decide that they will be giving the names Ultimatebet and Absolute Poker a wide berth, the owners of these companies have a solution. Just days before 60 Minutes is due to feature this cheating scandal, the two have merged into one entity under a new name – Cereus, which claims to now be the third largest network in the world. A leaked memo to staff shows that Ultimatebet CEO Paul Leggett believes that the programme will not be fair or balanced, but he may actually have little to fear from bad publicity. There are plenty of people who are fully aware of how players were cheated on his site but continue to play there, including in many cases those who were the victims of this fraud in the first place. There has been little in the way of good news for the WPT recently and this week has been no different. Following the closure of their unprofitable online poker room, now one of the best attended tournaments on the tour in previous years has been withdrawn from season seven’s schedule. Rumours had been circulating for a couple of weeks that The Borgata Winter Open would no longer be a WPT event and now that has been confirmed, but new plans for the January festival seem to have generated more interest from players than the original WPT tournament. The poker room has now come up with a new schedule including several deepstack events and a $3000 main event with a massive guaranteed prize pool which has not yet been confirmed but is thought to be a likely $2,000,000. Some of the criticisms levelled at the WPT in the past have been that it is badly run and doesn’t cater for players’ wishes very well, so they might do well to look at the positive feedback Borgata has received in the past week for listening to what their players want. There’s not much to report on the live tournament scene this week but next week we will be able to bring you news of the GUKPT grand final at the Vic as well as the PartyPoker.com Premier League featuring newly crowned world champion Peter Eastgate and many other top players.
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