Frankly, we don’t know what some Mississippi casino was thinking when they minted a poker chip worth “100 zillions of dollars.” The (literally) invaluable chip was allegedly issued to one Valerie Joyce Wilson Turks, but Turks claims that Sean “P Diddy” Combs then stole the chip from her, and she’d like it back. Please. But lest you think Turks is some unreasonable nutter, she’s willing to settle for a mere trillion dollars in exchange for letting Combs keep the chip. She’s also filed a restraining order against Combs, whom she claims date-raped her 24 years ago, resulting in her 23-year-old son Cornelius. Oh, and she also blames Combs, his ex-girlfriend Kim Porter and Rodney “Can’t we all just get along?” King for having engineered the 9/11 terror attacks. Like we said, perfectly reasonable woman.
Turning to less batshit-insane news, Erik Seidel’s $2.5m victory at the Aussie Millions $250k buy-in may have grabbed the spotlight earlier this week, but the focus quickly returned to who’d take the Main Event’s $2m first prize. From a starting field of 721 (down a bit from 746 in 2010), the final eight took the field on Saturday. Patrik Antonius was the first to fall at the hands of local boy David Gorr, while the man who started the day as chip leader, Randy Dorfman, could manage only a fifth-place finish.
The final heads-up between Gorr and England’s James Keys was epic, with Gorr starting out with a five-fold chip advantage, only to have Keys battle back to take a 12:1 advantage over Gorr. Amazingly, Gorr regained his former advantage, this time for good. After four hours of mano à mano action, Gorr emerged triumphant when his two pair (Ks & 4s) topped Keys’ (7s & 3s). After Gorr, the remaining seven players cashed out as follows: Keys ($1.035m); Jeff Rossiter ($700k); Michael Ryan ($450k); Dorfman ($325k); Samad Razavi ($225k); Chris Moorman ($175k) and Antonius ($130k).
Meanwhile, over in Europe, the European Poker Tour Deauville is down to its final table. The surviving eight players (from a field of 891) are led by Martin Jacobson, who made two huge pots late Sunday to sneak ahead of Canadian Alex Wice. Wice began the day as chip leader and might have ended play that way had the Swede not made his late move. The battle for the title and the €880k prize is set to begin Monday at midday, and your chip count looks like this: Jacobson (7.28m); Wice (6.248m); Kenny Hallaert (3.599m); Julien Claudepierre (3.244m); Lucien Cohen (3.085m); Anthony Hnatow (1.644m); Ruslan Prydryk (1.154m) and Kaspars Renga (470k).
