Live Poker
This month WSOP ended, with the final table still to be played by 9 finalists, seven of whom will win prizes of over 1 million USD. An amount of over 222 million USD has been paid in prizes, with an attendance of more than 74,000 people from 101 countries, where 13 of them won at least a bracelet.
Time passes by and the big WSOP tournament rooms are quiet now – but we still hear about new results and events that will capture our attention at the end of this summer.
A good result for Cristinel Lita. Placed second at PokerFest Bucharest in November 2011, he got on a second place at WPT National Venetia and received a 51,000 EUR prize. If we brought it up about PokerFest, we need to mention that the satellites for the Mamaia event are underway and take place on Concord Gaming, where you can fiind 1,000 EUR packages to be also won after the freeroll tournaments. The Mamaia event will take place between 5 and 9 September and you must be there – it will be an unforgettable experience. This year, there will be more events in Iasi, Bucharest and Brasov.
PokerStars announced a record audience at EPT Barcelona. Circa 300 players will qualify online this year, 130 more than last year, which means a new record for the team of live events of PokerStars. EPT Barcelona will take place between 15 and 25 of August and you will be able to watch the show on Holdem.ro, with a delay of tens of minutes. The satellites are already on PokerStars and you can win packages with all expenses included.
ISPT ( International Stadiums Poker Tour) is an ambitious project to have been announced at the end of last year. Many people doubted that this event would take place but it seems to be coming soon, in spite of all delays and almost cancellations. The interval will be May 31 – June 6, 2013 – and this tournament in Europe will compete with and even outdo WSOP. The concept is new and revolutionary and the show will be a perfect match. A number of 30,000 people will start the game in the stands, on an online poker platform, on devices provided by the organizers. The last 3,000 will come down to the tables in the arena to play live. At the end, we will have the final table in the middle of Wembley field.
The pool of prizes is of 20,000,000 EUR and 2,500 players are already registered for the event. The entry fee is 600 EUR and the players can do a rebuy and a double add-on in the first day. For those wanting to go straight to the live event, a number of seats have been reserved at the live tables, for a price of 6,000 EUR.
Michael Mizrachi is the first ambassador of ISPT and he means business. It is very likely to have ISPT one of the most expected events of 2013, considering the structure and location. The first to offer a live satellite is Tangiers Casino, but there will be satellites, live and online, in a growing number as the event closes in.
Online Poker
Is a new boom in poker possible?
April 15, 2011 was the day when the online poker got hit below the belt. After more than a year since the ‚Black Friday’, we saw a decrease of circa 35% for the online poker – even though there are weeks when traffic goes up, the trend in the number of the online players is to go smaller.
More and more people in this business believe that a new boom is to be expected next year, when the games might explode, in spite of the global financial crisis.
In March 2012, CEO Zynga declared that he would think natural to stretch themselves to gambling for real money. A few months later, there were rumors that the Zynga people would be interested in purchasing the Ongame network. Towards the end of July, an official statement was made, that Zynga will enter the market in the first half of 2013.
Since just a few people know what Zynga Poker is, we will try to give a short explanation, using numbers that might give a real picture of Zynga playing for real money on the market.
First, Zynga has over 100,000 players on cash at tables, at any time during day or night. This means 5 times more than PokerStars (which is the largest online poker site for real money in the world) and more than double compared to the entire industry. As for the online tournaments (SNG) and regular tournaments, things are even better for Zynga Poker, which has circa 3 times more players than all the other poker sites altogether. There is a number of 59-62 million active users per day for Zynga.
Let’s see the value of games on Zynga Poker, based on the chips transactions on the internet, from online auction sites to sites specialised in this field.
On the internet, the lowest value for transactions is 5 USD and the highest is 250. For 5 USD, you receive 1,6 million Zynga chips and for 250 USD, a number of 324 millions.
The stakes range from ½ to 4 mill/8 mill for cash and from 100 to 5 mil chips for SNG. It means that the cash games might have an equivalent of up to 3 USD/6 USD for the highest stake and the highest SNG that could be played would be the ones for 4 USD buy-in.
Should we think that the first licenses for the USA market have been already issued and legal online poker would be possible before 2013, there are big chances for a new boom, even bigger than the one in 2003 when Chris Moneymaker qualified online via a satellite and won the WSOP Main Event.
