Poker Blog and Poker Gossip

The Durrrr Challenge is back again and Daniel “jungleman12” Cates is still in the lead! The two got together after a two month break and played 348 hands of poker much to the surprise of railbirds who had thought that the Durrrr vs. Cates would become another incomplete story. Cates played well and stole the lead from Dwan after a 100 or so hands, he took in another $122,000 at the table and is now $941,263 ahead of Dwan. This has the Dwan vs. Cates Durrrr Challenge at one thirds of completing 50,000 hands of poker.

Initially, the poker community was very excited when it learned that Patrik Antonius had accepted the Durrrr Challenge. However, since the two have hardly played against each other after August 2010, the tourney has become lackluster and uninteresting after Dwan’s battles with Patrik Antonius. Antonius and Dwan have played 39,436 hands so far and have wagered more than $342 million together. Dwan has put up slightly more than $2 million. Rumors flew around that he permitted Antonius a cash buyout because he was obviously on the way to a huge win

One of the posters on TwoPlusTwo has stated that Durrrr “should start finishing challenges”; another played around with words and posted: “Durrrr is challenged when it comes to challenges”; and yet another posted a sarcastic message: “He should take on even longer challenges with more players and not finish those either.”

However, the Durrrr Challenge fired up soon after Tom Dwan took on Daniel “jungleman12” Cates and players began to get very interested. This interest also dropped when Dwan and Cates took almost a two month break from the tables to play world class level poker tournaments. But now that they are back again, perhaps Dwan’s popularity will pick up.

Viktor Blom is on a winning spree and recently thumped Scott Palmer for the second time; this time for $495k. It does seem like Blom has a great understanding of Maryland born Palmer’s poker tactics and is more than able to use them to his advantage.
On PokerStars, the two poker experts chose to increase their stakes and play 7,700 hands of $100/$200 heads-up PLO. One wouldn’t be exaggerating if one said that the game was extremely unpredictable which made it even more thrilling than the usual with Blom bagging $200k in the start and then mislaying $700k. In the end, he was able to complete the game with close to half a million dollars.
Before this game, Palmer had an upper hand over Blom and saw Blom getting tensed very often, while Palmer appeared to be a cool hand. All this is changing with Blom having won approximately $1 million on PokerStars. Talks are already happening among Railbirds that Blom will soon move up to $200/$400 PLO.
Unfortunately, the obviously displeased Palmer has gone down in 2011’s earning’s charts and has witnessed his whopping $1.3 million reduce to a measly $200k on PokerStars.
The atmosphere at the recent game at PokerStars was sizzling, with MrSweets28 taking down $468k and gavz101 bagging $308k. Also, Andreas “skjervoy” Torbergsen was the champion on Full Tilt as he bagged a whopping $287k in the game. In all, Palmer lost $576k, which pushed him right down to the last position in the game.
Although, there were various other players who had great losses, LuckyGump and Compris took the big hit losing $325k and $238k respectively. The poker community has been expressing its surprise for some time now over the fact that young poker players at PokerStars are taking the limelight as compared to experienced poker professionals on Full Tilt. Perhaps this is because Ivey, Antonius and Dwan are not performing all that well on the online poker circuit.

Subsequent to the L.A. Poker Classic High Roller Event that took place recently, American poker legend, Erik Seidel who was on the third position in ‘All Time Money List’ for a few days, has moved into the second position. Erik Seidel took this position when he beat Phil Ivey for $144,570 at the L.A. Poker Classic event.
Phil Ivey was leading Seidel by $57,000 in live poker tournament winnings. But after the LA victory, Seidel is at a whopping $13,947,297 while Ivey is at $13,859,944 in live tournament winnings. Seidel is now in second place, just behind Daniel Negreanu at the first position by a meager $168,895.
The poker community was well aware of the fact that having won the WSOP bracelet more than 8 times, Seidel always had great poker skills, but one cannot deny that the year is already looking promising for him. A few days ago, Seidel stated in an interview that he fancied playing poker tournaments to cash games. “It’s so easy these days to go through hundreds of thousands just playing tournaments. The fields have grown so much that your wins are bigger these days but sometimes you can go a long while between wins”, he admitted.
Despite this, Seidel has been rock steady in the last two months through his comeback with $3,592,284 in winnings, which consists of five final tables and at the moment, two tournament winnings, including the Aussie Millions $250k Super High Roller for $2,489,747. After that competition, Seidel said, “I’m really, really excited to win this. This was very special because it’s such an elite field. The entry fee was so big and I didn’t want to lose $250,000. I’m just having such an amazing month, year so far. It’s just incredible.”
After yesterday’s winning, there is no looking back for this Erik Seidel and he will in all probability out beat Negreanu in the next few months.

The APT, which was held in Macau, widely acclaimed to be the Mecca of Chinese gambling, attracted innumerable poker pros from all over the world, as a result of which the action at the high stakes tables was some of the best. Throughout the week, high stakes games were played all over Macau, eclipsing even the APT, which had actually drawn these talented professional players to Macau.

The high-stakes tables of Macau witnessed some of the widely acclaimed poker stars playing against wealthy Chinese businessmen for pots worth millions of dollars. The action was so intense that it drew the attention of poker forum posters and poker bloggers all over the world. Eventually, the news that was pouring in from the high-stakes tables was censored by the casinos and players involved so that poker news sites received only accounts of hands and pot sizes sans names. But before this could happen, several poker sites got the news that Phil Ivey and Tom Dwan were the highlights of the poker tables thanks to the posts of Tournament Director Matt Savage.

According to Savage, Dwan, John Juanda, Ivey, Chau Giang, and extremely rich Chinese businessman played for a pot containing more than $40 million. He believes that both Ivey and Dwan emerged as the winners, but is not very sure about his statements. Although recent reports say that the high stakes action has cooled down considerably, Savage believes that the high stakes games will begin against within a week, but does not know the names of the participants.

Reportedly, Tom Dwan added a cool $6.5 million to his bankroll in a heads up match. This, added to the profits he is believed to have raked in at other tables, makes a total of $8 or $9 million won on his trip to Macau.

Nik Persaud was the last man standing of 28 participants in the 2010 World Heads Up Poker Championship, an achievement that added a fabulous prize of £30,000 to his poker bankroll.
The prize pool of the event was small because of the relatively lower number of participants and a buy-in of just £2,000. However, since the 2010 World Heads Up Poker Championship has a reputable history, it had attracted noted players such as Victoria Coren, Jeff Kimber, and J. P. Kelly. Nik is one of most popular of English poker players, having won twice at the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event tables. His total winnings, including his WSOP players, so far are $400,000.
The final table of the 2010 World Heads Up Poker Championship saw Nik matching his poker wits against another English player Leon Louis, who has enjoyed a small degree of success in local poker tournaments. The final hand witnessed Louis with a chip stack of 55 and a flop of 764 while Nik had only 98. Since Louis finished second, he won £15,000. Toby Lewis and Kimber, who were knocked off the table at the semi finals, also won £5,500 each.
The World Heads Up Poker Championship is an annual prestigious poker event that was first launched in 2001. The event has been held in various parts of Europe, and talented players such as Bruno Fitoussi, Kimber, John Cernuto, and Kirill Gerasimov were the winners of the previously held events.
Unfortunately, the event appears to be diminishing in popularity. Its earliest versions attracted some of the most popular poker players in the world and presented huge prize pools, but the current versions have smaller prize pools and attract fewer players. Obviously, it has been eclipsed by more popular events such as NBC National Heads Up Championship.

The online poker world has seen some big winners and some big losers too. Talented poker player Scott “URnotINdanger2” Palmer no longer has any opponents at Full Tilt Poker because he beat them all and won a breathtakingly huge sum of $341,000 last weekend. He played a total of 1,874 hands and won huge sums of poker cash in a $500/$1000 Pot Limit Omaha Heads Up tournament against Gus Hansen, but a huge chunk of his weekend winnings come from a $200/$400 Six Max Pot Limit Omaha tournament played against Arbianight, harrington25, and trex313.

This doesn’t mean that Scott has always been this lucky. He has been in the red and then bounced back on seven different occasions this year. Earlier in 2010, Scott “URnotINdanger2” lost at least $428,000, but his current winnings stand at $441,000.

Scott is also not the only big winner of the weekend. His friend Dan “jungleman12” Cates, won close to $200,000 by playing only 256 hands in a Pot Limit Omaha Heads Up Tournament against Tom “durrrr” Dwan. Last week, Durrrr and Jungleman12 were competing fiercely for the status of biggest winner of the year, and Jungleman12 appears to have won. He has a cool $4.3 million in his bankroll, while Dwan has done nothing all week and seems to be content with just $3.9 million as this year’s poker winnings.

Another big winner of the weekend was Arbianight, who added a fabulous sum of $248,000 into his bankrolls.

The biggest losers are luckexpress10 who lost $158,000 this weekend, closely followed by FinnishNightmare, who lost $156,000 from his bankroll. While superbaldas lost $136,000, Ilari “Ziigmund” Sahamies lost $124,000. Of the four, Sahamies is deeply in the red, having lost a lot of poker cash during the past 3 weeks. In 2010, he is in the red by at least $878,000.