Calling The Clock: PokerStars Players Strike and Tony G Sent on His Bike

Calling The Clock: PokerStars Players Strike and Tony G Sent on His Bike

In this week’s poker news roundup, we bring you up to speed on the PokerStars player’s strike, an irate Tony G and much more.

Calling The Clock: PokerStars Players Strike and Tony G Sent on His BikePokerStars slink into town with their undulated swagger to take over things this week. It seems there is no news unless it’s PokerStars related news. Unless, you want to talk about people biting off ears and shooting guns, none of which shows poker in a good light, so I will choose to be interested in other matters.

We will start with the players strike.

Dani ‘Ansky’ Stern and a ton of Russians proved to the world that nuclear weapons can be put to one side for 72 hrs, as poker’s united nations went on strike in anger of the solipsistic attitude of the world’s largest online poker room.

There was nothing cryptic about it. PokerStars make gazillions of dollars. They want to make gazillions more. In the way stands the Supernova Elite. So PokerStars plans to kill them all. Ansky and 2,500+ of his brethren decided to boycott the site for 72 hrs in a show of solidarity.

Leading up to the strike the face of PokerStars, Daniel Negreanu, took part in a three-way Google Hangout with Joey Ingram and Stern to give his views on the behaviour of his masters. It was bold. It was brave. It was ballsy. Negreanu was embarrassed by the way PokerStars had broken their SNE pledge but seemed to be behind the red hand gang with most of the other planned changes.

Negreanu proclaimed that there would be some tremendous changes coming PokerStars player’s way in 2016. But he couldn’t talk about it. That was the end of that then. The vagaries of PokerStars appalling communication continues to become more like the norm.

Was the strike a success?

We will never know.

Rather conveniently for PokerStars the strike went ahead during a Milestone Hands Promotion, so traffic at most levels on the site were up rather than down.

In other PokerStars news, they released their Spin & Go game on mobile via a new app called Jackpot Poker, and talking about jackpots, Full Tilt’s The Deal Jackpot crashed this week. The prize pool stood at $204,431.98 when DECV1979 from Chile hit it. He won half and the other half went to the 6,855 players who had played The Deal in the previous 12 hours.

DECV1979 wasn’t the only Chilean winning this week. Oscar Alache was crowned the Season 8 Latin American Poker Tour (LAPT) Player of the Season after the LAPT Grand Final ended the tour in Sao Paulo. Yuri “theNERDguy” Martins, taking the final winners check of the season worth R$652,509.

The most winningest live tournament player in Norwegian history, Felix Stephensen, won the first-ever Norwegian Poker Championships to be held on home soil. Portuguese officials who know naff all about online poker have decided to ring fence the newly regulated online poker market, therefore killing it before it’s born; and Dutch poker players were thrown a bone when the Amsterdam Court of Appeal ruled that they wouldn’t have to pay taxes on winnings taken from PokerStars.eu.

Talking about appeals and Phil Ivey has been granted one in his fight to take £7.7m from Crockford’s Casino in London’s Mayfair. You may remember Ivey won that ridiculous amount playing Punto Banco while edge sorting with an accomplice. The casino refused to pay, both parties went to court and last year a judge laid down the gavel for the casino.

That changed this week after a different beak said the case “raises an important question of law and has a real prospect of success.” Ivey will get his second date in court Dec 10. The Borgata will be an avid viewer of the outcome.

Ivey’s former Full Tilt companion Andy Bloch has put his house up for sale. The asking price is $9m, giving teenage kids everywhere the right to tell their parents to fuck off the next time they complain about reneging on that college degree so they can stay in their polar bear onesie’s pushing buttons.

As usual we will finish with some splendour for the live tournament grinders.

Jake Bazeley won the Seminole Hard Rock Rock n Roll Poker Open for $568,687; Sunny Mistri won the partypoker Grand Prix Tour Stamford Bridge Event for £35,000; Mateusz Moolhuizen won his second Unibet Open title, this time in Antwerp €71,000, and Mike Dentale won the Borgata Fall Poker Open Championship for $336,331.

One person who didn’t win this week was Tony G. He was told he would not be able to join his beloved Lithuanian parliament because he holds Australian citizenry. Rumour has it; he was so pissed off, he nearly opened a PokerStars account and went on strike with the Russians.

Time Ladies & Gentlemen, please.

Someone has called the clock.