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Poker News Round-up: Week #44As was mentioned last week at the $15,000 main event of Bellagio’s Festa Al Largo Jack McClelland took the unusual step of keeping registration open up until the ninth level on day two, leading to some interesting choices from several well known players. Thirty players decided to skip day one completely including the perma-tardy Phil Hellmuth who entered proceedings during level seven, but within two hours he was unsuccessfully racing for his tournament life with AK due to his stack size allowing no other move. Even later was Kenny Tran who bought in at the last possible minute, didn’t even sit down at the table for a further hour then busted within ten minutes after pushing his thirty big blind stack in pre-flop with Q  Tommy Vedes A second WPT title of the year was looking a realistic possibility for Deeb until his pocket kings went down in a huge pot against the queens of Tommy Vedes, and shortly afterwards he was out in fourth place. For Vedes that hand was just one of several when he had everything in the middle drawing very thin, but it was his day as the deck came to his rescue each time. After inflicting another bad beat against his final opponent Jason Lavallee with A Here in Europe it was a second EPT of the month as Poland played host at the Hyatt Regency in Warsaw. This event has usually been one of the less well attended on the tour and that was the case again as just 203 players put up the zloty, although it seems that many were prepared to make long journeys to be there as 33 different nationalities were represented. It’s not often we see Ukrainean players in the latter stages of major tournaments but, perhaps inspired by the recent visit of the EPT to Kiev, Ruslan Prydryk made the final table along with Oleksandr Vaserfirer who held a big chip lead. With five players left Vaserfirer was still ahead and looked poised to take a monstrous lead when he got both Prydrk and Christophe Benzimra all in pre-flop with their jacks and queens miles behind his pocket aces. It’s a cruel cruel game though and the aces could not dodge the four cards in the deck they needed to as Benzimra instead collected the massive pot.  Warsaw winner Christophe Benzimra Like Tommy Vedes in the WPT Benzimra made the most of his good fortune and when the time came for his own hands to hold up they did, finishing up by dodging Italian Alfio Battisti’s flush draw when heads up to settle matters. As well as the first prize worth around £326,000 Benzimra will also be off to Monte Carlo next year for the EPT grand final. These days it seems that there are new poker related law suits being heard more and more regularly and the latest this week sees Harrah’s at the centre of controversy over marketing for the World Series Of Poker Academy. Winner of the 2007 WSOP ladies’ event Sally Anne Boyer is suing Harrah’s for using her name and likeness in an advert which claims she is a graduate of the academy and appears to claim that “The quickest way to your WSOP bracelet” is a quote attributable to her. Not so says Boyer, who maintains that she didn’t say that, didn’t complete the academy course and didn’t agree to participate in any advertising. Meanwhile Full Tilt has also been back in court again, successfully seeing off legal challenges on two different fronts. Firstly the state of Kentucky was defeated over the attempted seizure of gambling domain names including many of the most popular poker sites. Full Tilt’s service provider is based this side of the Atlantic so the case was heard in a UK high court, where the judge agreed that Kentucky is not in a legal position to enforce the seizure of Full Tilt’s domain name. Perhaps realising that they would be flogging a dead horse, no representatives from Kentucky even bothered to make the journey to plead their case. Another case which seems to have been knocking around for some time now is the dispute between Clonie Gowen and Full Tilt, which was originally dismissed back in April. Since then Gowen has amended her claim, focusing on Full Tilt and related companies rather than naming individual members of Team Full Tilt. This claim has also now been dismissed although the judge has granted her lawyers the option to prepare a third claim which would be aimed solely at Tiltware. In these hard times at least some professions never seem to be short of work.
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