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Poker News Round-up: Week #10We’ll start with a quick recap of the LA Poker Classic which concluded last week, and very popular it was too – the 696 entrants for the main event making it the best attended WPT event for two years. The Commerce Casino has plenty of room to host poker so only one starting day was scheduled but the large turnout meant that some players had to be seated outside in a tent in scenes reminiscent of the unpopular poker pavilion at the 2007 WSOP. Numerous large pots early on saw the field trimmed considerably though and after two days of play Antonio Esfandiari had built up a massive stack to lead the 167 who would be coming back for day three. The winner of this event in WPT season two appeared to lose his magic touch the following day though and steadily bled chips until he busted out as the unfortunate bubble boy in 64th place.  The fortunate Cornel Cimpan Few of the 63 left on day four would have been keen to see Chris Ferguson’s stack constantly growing, and although several others overtook Jesus in the latter stages he was clearly the most accomplished of the six players who made it to the final table. There would be no first WPT title for Ferguson though as he lost a race with Cornel Cimpan for all his chips to finish in sixth place. It was not long after that Cimpan found himself heads up against Binh Nguyen, but from then on it seemed as though the match would never end. It took five and a half hours to find a winner from these two (in part due to Cimpan not once raising from the button for the first 74 hands of heads up) but with $1,686,760 up for grabs it would still be a pretty decent hourly rate for the victor. Eventually they got it all in pre-flop and Cimpan’s K  Freddy Deeb at the Commerce A couple of days later the WPT celebrity invitational was also hosted at the Commerce, which saw a mix of pro players and celebrities of various standing vying for $100,000, a WPT bracelet and entry into the WPT grand final in April. Kassem “Freddy” Deeb managed to win the event despite a considerable lack of effort on his part in the early stages. Deeb claimed to have played just ninety minutes on day one, favouring going off to smoke cigars instead, but managed to defeat a field of 433 upon his return, finally beating actor Nicholas Gonzalez heads up. The event also raised $112,000 for the chosen charity The Vine Group which helps to provide education for African children. One final piece of WPT related news this week is that the tour is set to venture further afield than ever before with a trip to Africa planned for season eight. October will see the first ever WPT Marrakech – the city in which Amarillo Slim famously rode a camel through a casino. A three year partnership deal has been signed between the WPT and Chilipoker which will host satellites to the event, although they will also be running on other sites on the ipoker network.  GUKPT Walsall winner Sunny Chattha Closer to home, a turnout of 301 players at the £1,000 Walsall GUKPT main event proved that the UK poker scene is still in good health. As is usually the case there is strong competition for GUKPT main events and the final table saw some of the best players from these shores such as James Akenhead, Micky Wernick, Joe Grech and Sunny Chattha. Grech and Chattha were the last two left to battle it out, and as with Nguyen and Cimpan it started off as a cagey affair with little pre-flop raising. Chattha gradually began to turn up the heat though, successfully so, and having fallen behind Joe Grech decided to make a stand with K The durr challenge has not really developed much in the past week, but March 1st saw the beginning of another online challenge organized by Bluff Magazine. 25 of the best online players around are playing throughout the month of March to accumulate as much cash as they possibly can from a starting bankroll of $200. Sit and goes or multi table tournaments are allowed but no cash games, and there is no reloading – lose the $200 and they are out of the challenge. Amongst those taking part are Eric “Rizen” Lynch, Bryan Devonshire, Kevin “BeLOWaBOVe” Saul, Shaun Deeb, Full Tilt pro Soren Kongsgaard and the UK’s Chris Moorman. There has been some pretty committed play including an astonishing 201 tournaments in a single day played by David Chicotsky over the course of 19 hours, but at the moment it’s quality over quantity at the top of the leaderboard. Brian Hawkins playing as Sno0owman is setting the early pace despite not logging nearly as many hours as Chicotsky and so far has been registering an impressive average profit of over $600 per day. Chris Moorman has had an up and down time of it and despite registering the single biggest loss in one day by any player so far, he is still towards the top of the leaderboard. The original line up of players had controversially included Josh Field aka JJProdigy who has been banned from Party Poker, Full Tilt and Pokerstars for his cheating ways. “We knew that putting Field in would raise some eyebrows.” said Bluff Magazine co-founder Eric Morris. “However, we felt we’d done our due diligence and in conversations with him he made it clear that he was ready to make amends for his previous actions”. Eric must have been one of the few people in the world charitable enough to believe that Field is now on the straight and narrow, but it seems old habits die hard for multi-accounters. Shortly before the challenge was due to start a statement was issued by host site Lock Poker stating that Field would not be allowed to compete due to violations of the network’s terms and conditions. Precise details of the infringement have not been released, with Lock simply stating that they had no choice but to disqualify him before the event had even started. Looking ahead for the rest of March there is plenty of tournament action on the way with the Empire festival, Loose Cannon festival, GUKPT London and the regular deepstack action at Dusk Till Dawn. The first of the newly created London Poker Circuit events are also just around the corner and it will be interesting to see just who has the money and the gumption to get stuck into the £10,000 buy in events.
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when a five appeared on the flop. Cimpan is the LA Poker Classic champion but Nguyen will be feeling very hard done by – having bossed the heads up match four times he got it all in with the best hand only to see Cimpan draw out on him each time. It’s a cruel game.
J
