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Poker News Round-up: Week #10Following hot on the heels of the WPT event in Los Angeles, many of the most famous players in the world straight away made the journey to Las Vegas for the NBC National Heads Up Championship, meaning a hectic itinerary for final tablists Hellmuth and Ivey. This was not a tournament where you could afford to let a tiring schedule prevent you from bringing your best game though – amongst just the first round games were enthralling match ups such as Chris Ferguson v John Juanda, Barry Greenstein v Howard Lederer and Doyle Brunson v Sammy Farha. Bad beats seemed to be the order of the day such as Phil Hellmuth’s AA losing to Tom Dwan’s 10 10 just three hands in, as well as Jerry Yang’s 44 outdrawing Chris Moneymaker’s 10 10 in the clash of current and former world champions. Another former world champ Jamie Gold also managed to make it to round two despite surprising onlookers by folding pocket queens face up pre-flop at one point. It might have been nice if his opponent Tom Kelly had flipped over a total bluff but sadly his hand remained unknown. Last year’s surprise package in this event was actress Shannon Elizabeth and this time around there was also a celebrity from another walk of life who took the event by storm. Orel Hershiser is a big name in American sport having played baseball for the LA Dodgers and was named MVP at the 1988 World Series. He attracted a lot of support from the crowd and was able to give them what they wanted when he scored a victory over Ted Forrest to progress to round two. There he faced another tough test when he was drawn with Allen Cunningham, but again he managed to find a win against world class opposition. By the time he had also accounted for Freddy Deeb in the next round Hershiser had to be taken seriously as a potential winner, but the tie against Andy Bloch in the quarter finals proved to be a match too far. Nevertheless, joint fifth was an impressive result especially given the standard of his opposition.  Jesus Meanwhile some familiar faces joined Bloch as Chris Ferguson, Phil Ivey and Huck Seed progressed to ensure an all Full Tilt pros affair in the semi-finals. After Ivey missed his draw and Seed lost a race all in, Ferguson and Bloch sat down to play out the best of three final. Despite establishing a healthy chip lead Ferguson lost the first game to Bloch, but came back to take the second in style with quad queens. With the pressure mounting in the decider, Ferguson put Bloch to the test by moving all in on the turn with  Jonathan Little One of Ferguson’s defeated opponents, Jonathan Little, has posted some good recent results including a WPT win in 2007 which in turn led a sponsorship deal from Full Tilt Poker last November. In addition to live tournaments Little is a prolific internet sit n go player, but the use of his account was called into question when some claimed that they had seen him online when he was in fact playing in the heads up tournament at Caesars Palace. Further investigation showed that he had recorded 1227 STTs in the space of a week – the equivalent of ten tabling for over seventeen hours a day, seven days a week. Quite how those figures were possible became clear this week when Full Tilt announced that they had terminated his sponsorship deal for allowing others to play on his account. Little (or at least the Little account) is actually down after playing over 10,000 sit n goes, but when the 100% rakeback and hourly rate that were allegedly part of his deal are taken into consideration the account would show a big profit. Now without those, he must surely be regretting biting the hand that fed him. Little is not actually the first pro to be busted for this. Phil Hellmuth’s account was found to be in use on Ultimatebet whilst he was attending a book signing in 2005, although Hellmuth did not suffer the same fate as Little. After the Hellmuth incident Howard Lederer is reported to have sent out an email warning of the consequences if any of the Full Tilt stable were found to be doing the same thing, and he has stood true to his word by taking the hard line with Little. The big tournament in the UK this week was the first leg of the new season of Gala Casinos British Poker Tour festivals in Edinburgh. The main event has already been covered in great depth on this site, but to briefly recap, this was a £500 tournament attracting 175 entries including Hendon Mob representation in the form of Barny Boatman and Joe Beevers. With similar chip stacks, the final three players came back from the break to announce that a deal had been made whereby Colin Wu, Rory Mathews and Robin Yiltalo would all receive the same payout of £20,500. As slight chip leader Wu was also given the trophy and a seat to the grand final in Bristol later this year.  Annette_15 To win a tournament with 175 runners is some achievement, but to outlast a field of 20,000 runners is something special which very few people have experienced. The latest to achieve such a feat is the young queen of online poker Annette Obrestad who won the Pokerstars Hunded Grand tournament. Showing controlled aggression, excellent positional play and an insane ability to repeatedly hit two outers when all in, Obrestad turned $10 into $20,000 to add further to her bankroll. At the age of just nineteen she has now recorded over $4 million in tournament wins both live and online.
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