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Poker News Round-up: Week #30So with another WSOP done and dusted (at least until November) what comes next for the poker world? Well the WPT doesn’t have a summer break like the EPT does so the answer is that even before the WSOP main event had found its final nine another big buy in tournament was underway a little further down the road in Las Vegas. In fact the buy in for the WPT Bellagio Cup V was even bigger than its Rio counterpart at $15,000, but the attendance was anything like as impressive. This event has seen in excess of 500 entrants in the past (albeit with a $10,000 entry then) but people seem to have a lot less expendable cash these days and only 268 were willing to put up the money this time round. Needless to say there was little in the way of dead money, and consequently some of the toughest starting tables ever seen on day one.  Bellagio Cup winner Alexandre Gomes Faraz Jaka lived up to his online name of The_Toilet0 when he won a pot with a big flush to crack a set of aces on day three, driving his opponent round the bend as Jaka assumed a massive chip lead. Although retaining that lead all the way to the final table, the strain became too much as The_Toilet managed to dump off most of his stack when Brazilian Alexandre Gomes showed down a bigger flush with five players left to take over as chip leader. That marked the start of several pots in which these two passed chips back and forth between one another whilst Christoffer Sonesson, Alec Torelli and Justin Smith all busted to send play heads up. A fairly straight forward finish saw Gomes call with a dominating ace when Jaka pushed pre flop and found no help for his kicker, leaving the Brazilian with $1,187,670 more to his name. What was notable about this final table though was an accident which has to rank as one of the most serious injuries ever seen in professional poker when Justin Smith aka Boosted J somehow managed to rupture his anterior cruciate ligament. After shoving with A3 and sucking out on the river Smith leapt into a crowd of his supporters on the rail, only to find his leg bending the wrong way by the time he wanted to walk back to the table. Mike Matusow gallantly carried Smith back to his chair, but this fine example of the perils of overcelebrating the suck out/karma at work has left Smith seriously incapacitated for the next few weeks. Back home, the Vic was hosting a fairly lucrative tournament of its own as the London Poker Championships drew to a close with a £2,500 no limit hold’em tournament which saw numerous players from mainland Europe making their way over to London. Finland, France, Sweden and Poland were all represented at the final table, with Mohamed Muse and Arkady Kielman carrying the flag for England. A very respectable first prize eventually went to online qualifier Thanh Doan from Finland who picked up £163,126. In the past year or two Russia has begun to firmly establish itself as a serious poker playing nation, with big wins for the likes of Alexander Kravchenko, Vitaly Lunkin, Alexander Kostritsin and Ivan Demidov – all of whom hail from Moscow. Unfortunately for them the Russian poker scene has just received a huge setback after the Russian government declassified poker as a sport on July 20th, meaning that taking part in a game of poker may become a criminal offence unless it is within one of four officially designated gambling zones. Unfortunately for Muscovites all are more than 1,000 kilometres from the capital, and none have even been built yet. It’s a somewhat curious decision seeing as it was only 2007 when Russia specifically declared that poker was a sport, but its youth, sport and tourism minister Vitaly Mutko says that the original decision was an error which now has to be corrected during a mass crackdown on gambling in Russia. Clearly this will drive the game underground for many, and it would be no surprise to find that some of the more high profile players move west to find a new home in a more poker friendly country. Incidentally, as is often the case with these government decisions, the national lottery (0% skill, 100% state run) has managed to find an exemption and will continue despite the new gambling ban. In the immediate future it does pose a problem for the EPT which is scheduled to kick off season six in Moscow next month. The EPT website still has Moscow listed as hosting an event from August 17th to 23rd, and Pokerstars press officer claims that as far as she knows the tournament is still going ahead. Curious stuff, so we’ll just have to wait and see what the next couple of weeks bring.
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