Live poker – who is the world poker champion
On July 9, 2012, the fifth world poker tournament started, one of the greatest. The Main Event of the World Series Of Poker had a buy-in of $10,000 and registered a number of 6958 players. The prize pool reached $62 millions and $8.5 millions for the winner.
Over 60 hours of poker were played and the final number was 9 out of almost 7,000. They are called ‘October Nine’ and one of them will be chosen the world poker champion at the end of this month.
As a rule, we should wait until November 9 to find out the name of the world champion. We will have elections this year and, as a result, the final table of the most-wanted and prestigious tournament in the world will be played between 29 and 30 of October.
Those nine players will be sitting around the table on the first day and play until a number of 3 is left. The three players will finish the game on the next day.
So far, we have had at least 4 or 5 nationalities at the final table – right now, eight out of nine players are from the United States and one is Hungarian.
To make it short, we are closing into the name of the new world champion. Along the money prize and the bracelet, specially designed for this event, he who will have all the chips at the end of the game will be part of history and have his name written down in the long list of the people who became famous when lifted up the champion bracelet.
The Final Table will be broadcast live on WSOP.com and, as usually, we are ready for the best transmission of a poker tournament. Commentators are expected to be exceptional. For further details, follow the site of Casino Life & Business Magazine or Holdem.ro for updates on the WSOP 2012 Final Table.
Online poker – Gambling on the fourth quarter
Last edition, we were talking about the fact that WCOOP (World Championship of Online Poker) will somehow diagnose whether the online poker is recovering after the ‘Black Friday’ or the shock is still present.
WCOOP has shown that, after events like ‘Black Friday’ and the recent separation of the Spain market – one of the strongest in Europe – the number of the online players has increased and so did the cash pool. Thus, WCOOP 2012 gathered together 126,041 players for the tournaments, who collected USD55 millions in prizes. These numbers are much higher than last year.
It is a sure thing that the online poker is back on track and as the saying ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’, the virtual poker is building solid foundation and rules that will assure itself a brilliant future. Most states are working or at least thinking of a legal context that will protect the poker players and help this industry come out of the shade and grow healthily, for a long time on.
Spain, Italy, France and Great Britain are already considering joining their pools of players and it is very likely that they will accept to have any regulated market associate with them. Improvements in the legislation have been made, which allow the players to deduct expenses/losses and the European Union is about to release a directive for the online gambling sector.
All signs are positive and, towards the end of the year, we should have the first poker rooms legally operating on the USA territory.
We mention that the list of remarkable events also includes the re-opening of the FullTiltPoker under the PokerStars ‘umbrella’ and the surging efforts of PartyPoker and iPoker to re-invent themselves and vie with the giant PokerStars.
We will see how things will be going – the direction is quite clear and, in the future, we will have a world pool of players whose funds are safe and who play on already checked and licensed sites.
