In this week’s Calling the Clock Lee Davy brings you a weekly round up of poker news that includes a penis winning €250,000, a Dempsey winning the Grand Prix Poker Tour Main Event, 
and a Foggy winning the partypoker Big Bluff Challenge.
The few weeks after the World Series of Poker (WSOP) disappears until November always feels like Monday on repeat when I used to work the nine to five. It’s not good. Very little happens, but I will do my best to create an update worthy of your time and attention with the scraps of poker news that breezed onto my desk this week like crispy brown leaves.
A few years ago, some Russian dude thought it would be a laugh to open up a PokerStars account and call himself SolidPenis. We’ve all been there. I once used the password SlimeyVagina for my BT account and had to change it after feeling a little sorry conveying it to the customer service clerk when moaning about poor customer service.
Well, the guy is probably regretting it right now after winning €250,000 while playing a Spin & Go while streaming live on Twitch. Now that’s one for the X-Files right there. A guy named SolidPenis wins €250,000 playing a PokerStars Spin & Go while streaming live on Twitch.
What a stroke of advertising luck.
And now he has to explain it all to his Mum.
I watched the Twitch video and was disappointed to see that he wasn’t wearing a Raising for Effective Giving (REG) patch. In fact, I am disappointed that only 260 people within the community have the right to wear a REG patch after reading their 2015 Annual Report and discovering that’s how many poker players have made the pledge to donate a portion of their gross winnings to effective charities in the past two years.
That’s not to say that people haven’t donated their money elsewhere. During my recent interview with Sir Daniel Negreanu, the Canadian told me that he preferred an emotional connection when giving away his PokerStars sponsorship money. REG’s Jan Dirk Capelle responded to Negreanu’s words with a blog post titled: Fuzzies From Charitable Acts: A Reply to Daniel Negreanu, and it’s well worth a read. REG members donated over half a million dollars to effective charities in 2015. Keep up the good work everyone.
From charitable news to not very charitable news and 2+2 member MeleaB sounded the alarm when he learned that cyber security outfit Bastille had been playing around with wireless keyboards and figured out your granny could hack half of them and steal your life.
If you have a wireless keyboard built by HP, Toshiba, Radio Shack, Kensington, Insignia, General Electric, Anker or EagleTec then go online and play in the new Winamax Expresso Eleven promotion because you won’t mind one bit if you end up smashing them over your little brother’s head.
The French Mavericks have created a spin on their spin by adding 11 playing cards to their Expresso Promotion. Each card represents a member of Team Pro and if you collect all 11 and win the final Spin & Go you could win €500,000. The reason you want a supply of dodgy keyboards handy is if you earn a card you already own then you lose that card.
Winamax weren’t alone in their promotions this week. 888Poker launched Blast Poker. The latest version of the Spin & Go model that sees players forced to go all-in once the game timer expires arrived accompanied by a host of promotional giveaways, and Unibet has a low-level MTT leaderboard promotion where the winner can win a package holiday to Brazil where they will go Jaguar hunting.
Good luck with that.
You are more likely to see Tom Dwan than a Jaguar.
Other prizes offered by Unibet include trips to London, Amsterdam, and Spain. One place they aren’t sending you is India. And that’s good news with that nasty Delhi belly thing. India was in the poker news this week after the All India Gaming Federation sent documentation to the State of Kerala asking for them to agree that poker is a game of skill.
They should have hired Matt Damon to deliver the news.
He would have said something like this:
“Why do you think the same five guys make it to the final table of the World Series of Poker EVERY YEAR? What, are they the luckiest guys in Las Vegas?”
That line comes from Matt Damon’s depiction of Mike McDermott in the 1998 cult classic Rounders, and this week Damon gave a massive hint that we might be seeing Rounders 2 sometime soon. Damon was on the Steve Eisen show to promote Jason Bourne when he said Brian Koppelman and David Levien had a new idea for a sequel that could involve online poker.
Edward Norton starred alongside Damon in that movie and some rich punter paid $120,000 to play in a Sit n Go with Worm and Jonah Hill. The prize was part of $48m worth of items auctioned by the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation (LDF) who like to protect Jaguars from being stared at by spotty Swedish teenagers.
Finally, 888Poker announced plans to host an 888Live event in Tallinn. Kara Scott will host that one. Scott used to be the Ambassador of partypoker, and they held a successful Grand Prix Poker Tour (GPPT) at Brighton’s Amex Stadium this past weekend. Four-Time World Superbike Champion, Carl ‘Foggy’ Fogarty won the Celebrity Big Bluff Challenge, designed to show that anyone can win a poker tournament, and James Dempsey got back to winning ways by picking up the $40k winners check in the Main Event…I just couldn’t pull the trigger on that one sorry.
Time, ladies and gentlemen.
Someone has just called the clock.
