Three short stories from the world of poker that don’t merit top billing, including Max Silver sitting in a Limit-Hold’em game with $600,000 wishing he didn’t, PokerStars adding a 62nd event to the World Championships of Online Poker schedule, and another appeal from Phil Ivey.
Imagine you win a poker tournament for €600,000. You’re in a casino in a foreign country. How do you get the goods from the winning post, safely into your bank account?
Well, this is how it happened for Max Silver after the British pro took down the 327-entrant €10,300 No-Limit Hold’em High Roller at the PokerStars European Poker Tour Barcelona for €600,924.
If you win money on the European Poker Tour (EPT), you can wire it to your PokerStars account. It’s a win-win for both parties. You get your money a tad closer to home, and Stars get the opportunity to convince you to spend it all, playing online.
Silver decided to transfer the winnings from his PokerStars account to his bank account but had to wait for 48-hours.
What to do in the meantime?
One for a laugh, Silver logged on to play a few hands of Limit Hold’em and thought it would be funny to sit down with the full $600,000,
before realising he would have to cough up currency conversion costs to return the amount to euros.
Silver reached out to PokerStars to solve his problem, asking them to have ‘some mercy on this lucky fool.”
Play stupid games win stupid prizes.
Save me @PokerStars support edition pic.twitter.com/xvxRAEB3RV
— Max Silver (@max_silver) September 3, 2018
And they did.
Lesson learned.
Last year, Silver beat 256 entrants to win the $3,000 Limit Hold’em Six-Handed event at the World Series of Poker (WSOP) for $172,645.
Now we know where he gets his practice.
WCOOP Add a $25k to the Bill
With the PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) underway, you imagine Max Silver needs all the money he can squeeze into his PokerStars account. Silver is one of the few people in the world who is likely to flick in a $25,000 buy-in event, and he’s in luck.
It seems that PokerStars’ storytellers weren’t happy with the ending of the 2018 WCOOP, so they changed it. The festival now ends with a $215, $2,100 and $25,000 buy-in No-Limit Hold’em High Roller with guarantees of $500,000, $1m and $1.5m, respectively.
A nice slice of glitz at the end of a hard slog.
Day 2 of the WCOOP is in the books.
106,489 entrants have whizzed through 18 events, including a whopping 33,835 who competed in a $5.50 Knockout event. PokerStars has handed out 16,846 prizes, and $8,375,814 in prize money
Amongst the stories so far:
Henri “I_Mr_U_Bean” Koivisto won his second WCOOP title, winning a $1,050 Pot-Limit Omaha 6-Max event for $89,249. His last title also came in a PLO event back in 2015.
Germany’s Nilsef bagged his second WCOOP title, winning a $2,100 Win the Button event for $74,459.48, eight years after winning his last. The German star, who also has a Spring Championship of Online Poker(SCOOP) title, has also made the final table of WCOOP Event #7: Omaha Hi-Lo, joining none other than Phil “MrSweets28” Galfond.
Phil Ivey Appeals (Again!)
And finally, Phil Ivey is not going down without a fight in the Borgata Edge Sorting case.
You may recall that a U.S. District Court Judge ordered Ivey to pay the Borgata the $10.1m he won during those heady nights in 2012, claiming that Ivey didn’t do a good enough job of convincing the beak that he was incapable of stumping up the cash.
Ivey’s legal team believe otherwise.
The appeal is on its way to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, but that doesn’t stop Borgata from still chasing down their cash.
