You couldn’t take a leak without the World Poker Tour (WPT) waving a flag out of your pee-pee hole this week.
They announced plans to host their first Main Event in Beijing China as part of the Ourgame Chess and Card festival. The event will have a 400 player cap and will take place in April.
Linda Johnson became the first person to be handed the WPT Honours Award. The First Lady of Poker, who did a spot of commentary for the tour back in the day, was treated to a slap-up meal in Beverly Hills.
On the tournament front, Darren Elias won a record-tying third WPT Main Event when he took the top prize of $335,436 in the WPT Fallsview event. Sergio Castelluccio won the WPT National Main Event in Brussels, Belgium for €105,000. And James Poper took down the WPTDeepstacks Event in Parx Casino for $201,991.
And Mike Sexton made the final table of the $10,000 buy-in WPT LA Poker Classic. Sexton sits fifth in chips, behind Daniel Strelitz, Simeon Naydenov, Jesse Martin and Jared Greiner. Richard Tuhrim makes up the six. There are a million bucks for first place.
The American Poker Award Snubs Sexton
Sexton winning a WPT Main Event is old news, but apparently, it’s not news worthy of an award.
The Poker Hall of Famer and WPT stalwart was up for a record three American Poker Awards (APA). He left with the inside of a balloon. The judges believed Ari Engel’s Aussie Millions win was more interesting.
But I was the only one who seemed to care, and I blame Cate Hall. The GPI Female Player of the Year caused a hurricane on social media when she received her award, but proceeded to call it a ‘consolation prize’ and told the world that it was basically a crock of shit.
In Hall’s view, and she does have a point, there were 76 male players who finished higher than her so why on earth should she receive an award in a game where there are no biological advantages for men to be pounding on women.
REG Raise $1.4m; Ivey Could do With That
Cate Hall exists in a Tasmanian Devil of a whirlwind of noise, and because of this people don’t realise that she is an effective altruist, meaning she likes to earn a lot of money so she can give a load of money to others who need it more.
Raising for Effective Giving (REG) is the main charity for effective altruists in the poker industry and earlier this week they released their 2016 numbers showing an astonishing $1.4m raised by the poker community, largely thanks to he DFS brothers Crowley who donated a million during the Dan Smith charity drive. Smith received an American Poker Award for his troubles.
One person who could do with a million bucks is Phil Ivey. The man who is more well known for baccarat court cases than he is for poker these days received some good news this week. The UK Supreme Court judges have agreed to allow him to appeal a High Court ruling that sided with Crockford casino in their £7.8m Punto Banco case.
American Poker News
Finally, some Stateside regulatory news, and Michigan State Senator Mike Kowall introduced another online gambling bill in the hope that people of Michigan will be able to play online poker by the end of the year. New York Assemblyman Gary Pretlow told people listening to his interview on FiOS1 that felt New York was getting closer to accepting that online poker won’t turn everyone into Zombies. And a new white paper based on the fortunes of a yet to be born online gambling movement in Pennsylvania believes that it would take only five years for the state to $500m in tax revenue.
Time ladies and gentlemen.
Someone has just called the clock.
