Live Poker – Romanians are making more money at the live tournaments in Europe
October can definitely be called a very good month for the Romanian live tournaments players. Everything started with the EPT San Remo, where our players did an excellent job and Iulian Ruxandescu was very close to playing at the final table. He was though eliminated to the 12th, when he had all in with KQ versus AA.
The buy-in to this tournament was EUR5,300 and it had 16 players registered from Romania. Mihai Manole and Liviu Ignat managed to get in the money and each cashed in EUR8,000. Iulian Ruxandescu collected an amount of EUR40,000.
Concord Million was maybe the tournament outside Romania that had the highest number of local players. A number of 2,000 players paid EUR550 for a EUR1 million prize pool. It is estimated that there were around 70-80 players from Romania, where many of them are regulars at the PokerFest tournaments. They won circa 14% of the total prizes, which means EUR140,000. Dany Parlafes – ‘k_man’ placed fourth and won the second prize in size (thanks to the deal) valued at EUR112,000.
Within less than 24 hours and close to Vienna, the GCOP (German Championship Of Poker) final table was played. Alain Medesan refused any deal and placed on the second position in the tournament, for a prize of EUR43,195. The tournament was hosted by King’s Casino – the largest cardroom in Europe.
Live poker is growing more and more in Romania and the main reason behind it is the PokerFest circuit. The months of November and December will again be busy with poker events and we hope for such results every time we play. PokerFest Bucharest and Brasov, GSOP Prague, WPT Prague and EPT Prague will be ‘chased’ by our players.
Online Poker – Re-launching of FullTilt Poker, the fireworks of the year
On November 6, over USD100 millions will be ‘wired’ into the online poker industry, straight to the poker tables and more tens of millions have already started flowing for advertising campaigns via all the available media.
The re-launching of FullTilt Poker is giving rise to new talks while announcements about the event become more often heard.
The players will no longer have the same awarding system and the 27% rakeback is gone – the main attraction to the former FTP. In exchange, a similar system with PokerStars will start operating on November 6. With all the bonuses and promotions, the incentives will hardly exceed 30% with the new formula.
Another change came in terms of the affiliation and the previous contracts of FTP. PokerStars has stated that it had only purchased the players’ soft and account balances, without entering any obligation regarding the debts to other people who had made agreements with FTP. It is estimated that the great affiliates of the former poker site had to recover a few tens of millions of dollars and the loss would amount to millions of dollars every month.
In the meantime, a team including the most awarded players is building. So far, FTP has signed contracts with Tom Dwan, Viktor Blom and Gus Hansen and a few more names are pending to join the Full Tilt team before this year ends.
In a paradoxical way, the smaller poker sites find among the beneficiaries of this new beginning. By an excessive advertising, the online poker will reach the ears of many likely players, who are on the lookout for alternatives of gambling. Hence, the possibility to access another site is quite high.
The authorities in this field say that FTP will return on the second place in less than 2 weeks, but it is still to be seen whether this comeback is possible.
