Poker News Round-up

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Poker News Round-up: Week #07

By Adam Noone, 16/02/2007

Search for poker news on Google and you will be furnished with over 36 million results – a veritable cornucopia for the poker enthusiast. However, such a wealth of information can prove counter-productive for anyone wishing to hold down a job/have a social life/do anything at all constructive with their life. Fortunately help is at hand in the form of this new weekly column which will bring you a round-up of noteworthy events in the world of poker, thus saving you the effort of trawling the net and sorting the wheat from the chaff yourselves.

Over in the US the authorities continue to turn the screw on internet poker. Once we had got over the shock of the passing of the Safe Port Bill it seemed things might not be so bad after all, as it looked like traffic from Party, Paradise etc had mostly just migrated over to sites such as Full Tilt and Pokerstars that were still happy to accept US customers. More recently though things have really taken a turn for the worse following the arrest of Neteller’s founders and the freeze placed on the funds held by them. Pokerstars report that volume for the first week of February was a massive 36% down compared to the first week of January as a result of this. Click2pay has now stopped accepting registrations from the US, and whilst new payment options are appearing there is real cause for concern that the world of online poker is being eroded beneath our very feet. Further evidence of this came with the announcement this week that Paradise Poker is to close down and move players to the Boss network pool.

The power of the internet was ably demonstrated on Monday 12th Feb as rumours pinged back and forth across cyberspace that Doyle Brunson had been arrested. Whilst this proved to be untrue it did provoke comments that perhaps it might not have been a bad thing for online poker’s resistance movement if a high profile, ageing legend had been the latest victim of the crackdown.

Domestically, Praz Bansi has been following up his World Series event win last year with some very impressive results to kick off 2007 including first places in the £1000 GPT event at Bolton and the recent £1000 main event at the Broadway casino in Birmingham for a combined total of over £100,000 in winnings. Following on from further good tournament results in Vegas at the back end of 2006, it seems that Praz has a bright future in poker.

Next week sees the start of the Great British Poker Tour in Edinburgh and with any luck we might even have some pictures of Brandi Hawbaker in her new job as a pole dancer.

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