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Poker News Round-up: Week #40

By Adam Noone, 05/10/2007

Having won the EPT London on home soil for the first three seasons of the tour in the form of John Shipley, Mark Teltscher and Vicky Coren, British players were at one point looking good value to make it four on the trot at the Vic. Surinder Sunar and Milky Bar Kid Ben Grundy led the field going into the penultimate day but their stacks did not make it through to the final table. Ian Cox and Paul Mendes were representing the home nation at the eight handed final but as two of the shorter stacks neither managed to get going, and were the first two to be eliminated.
Further bust outs followed in quick succession at the quickest EPT final table of all time until internet qualifier Joseph Mouawad was left as the last man standing. Having nearly cancelled the trip to England from his native Lebanon, Mouawad made what turned out to be a good decision to attend and was able to return to Beirut £611,520 richer.

Of the various online poker festivals that have sprung up, Pokerstars seems to have appointed its own series as the unofficial blue riband event with the title World Championship Of Online Poker, although with 2,998 players entering its $2,600 main event it is perhaps not an unreasonable claim. Former WSOP champions Greg Raymer, Chris Moneymaker and Tom McEvoy were all known to have entered as well as other notable players such as Daniel Negreanu and JC Tran, and in all likelihood numerous others going by screen names that are not widely known.
The large field and generous blind structure meant that this was a lengthy affair and it took over sixteen hours to reach a final table, which in itself lasted a further six hours. Team Pokerstars member Vanessa Rousso made it all the way to third place, but the $1.2 million first prize went to TheV0id who was listed as coming from Monte Carlo. Overcoming such a large field during a 22 hour playing spell is a remarkable achievement and TheV0id must have been feeling extremely proud and excited at their achievement but the story doesn’t end there though as it did not take long for tales of impropriety to emerge. Rumours appeared that the TheV0id account was being played by former EPT London winner Mark Teltscher, but the account that he is known to use, Play2Kill, was eliminated early on in the tournament. It seems that the account which won had never previously played a tournament on Pokerstars and was registered in the name of Teltscher’s sister. People claiming to know him have commented on internet forums that his sister would not know a straight from a flush and that Mark Teltscher had actually entered five different accounts in the same tournament.

At the moment it seems that there is little in the way of verified evidence to corroborate the claims being made against Teltscher, but something is definitely amiss here, as confirmed in the following statements from Pokerstars security:

“PokerStars's standard practice is to conduct a special security review for players in each large tournament…….at this time the review is completed for all players in the WCOOP Main Event which concluded on October 1, except for the winner, where the investigation is continuing”
“Having read much of the speculation in this and other similar threads, I feel compelled to clarify a couple of points.
1. The account that won the WCOOP main event was played from the same computer and the same IP from the start of the tournament until the finish.
2. No other account played from this same IP or computer, during the tournament.
Having stated the above, there are still serious open questions that require the investigation to continue.”

Josh Arieh is also thought to have set up multiple accounts on Pokerstars, having previously been known to play as Razorbax. This account has not been played since April ’05 following accusations of collusion in Omaha hi/lo cash games and a ban from the site. Sixth place finisher in the WCOOP main event was an account going by the name of Nitbuster (active since May ’05) which was generally considered to be Arieh. During the official event commentary Daniel Negreanu once accidentally referred to Nitbuster as Josh, so it seems Arieh has indeed made a return to Stars under a new screen name.

Sadly, further tales of multi-accounting were not the only accusations of skulduggery in the tournament. Vanessa Rousso was seated at the same table as her partner Chad Brown and many observers felt that there was soft play and chip dumping taking place when Brown was the shorter stack. Several hands have been highlighted where compulsive caller Rousso would pass to a re-raise from Brown or not call an all-in from him when she was in the big blind despite getting favourable odds to do so.

Over at Full Tilt’s big Sunday tournament, the $750k guaranteed, there were no stories of foul play, but there would surely have been plenty of foul language from the regularly successful internet player bigegypt. Having got himself heads up with 80% of the chips his internet connection failed and his stack rapidly disappeared during the disconnection. By the time he had reconnected he had just 15% of the chips, could not recover and the $133,000 first prize eluded him in very unfortunate circumstances.

Adam Noone is a Full Tilt Pro, Play with him and the Mob at Full Tilt Poker

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