Poker Blog and Poker Gossip

Bwin.party Digital Entertainment, the world’s largest US gaming company created by the merger of Bwin and Party Gaming, which was named in an indictment filed by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) against Megaupload Limited, a file hosting service, has issued a public statement in its defense.

The indictment names Bwin.party, along with many other companies such as PayPal and Moneybookers. According to the DoJ, Bwin.party had signed a $3 million marketing and advertising deal with Megauploads.com, according to which Party Poker ads appeared on Megaupload sites, which are believed to get 50 million visitors per day. Ever since the merger between Bwin and Party Gaming, Party Poker is part of Bwin.party.

The DoJ has also accused Megauploads.com of infringing copyright belonging to third parties, money laundering, and pirating. Eighteen domain names belonging to Megauploads have been shut down and many executive officers, including Kim Schmitz, the founder owner of the company, have been arrested.

When Bwin.party learned of these developments, it immediately terminated its marketing and advertising deal with Megauploads.com and issued a release stating that it has no part to play in any of the allegations leveled against the company.

Bwin Marketing Executive John Shepherd said, “We had no knowledge about any of the alleged activities undertaken by Megaupload” and that the DoJ must have named Bwin.party in their indictment “to help make their case about the amount of money that was going through Megaupload.”

He also stated that he does not know why the DoJ has named only Party Gaming in its indictment and assured the online poker gaming community that Bwin.party is completely innocent of any illegal activity that Megauploads stands accused of.

Megaupload Limited is an online file-hosting company based in Hong Kong, and after the US federal crackdown on it, the Hong Kong government has frozen its assets worth HK$ 330 million.

Eight online poker players, three of them famous professional poker players, have filed a civil case against Excapsa Software, which used to own Ultimate Bet (UB), a defunct online poker room on the Cereus Network.

The three players are Dustin Woolf of America, Brad Booth of Canada, and Tom Koral of Chicago. The eight have filed a civil case under Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) against UB Poker.

While Brad Booth is absolutely sure that he has been robbed of at least $2 million, which belongs to him, and huge sums of cash, which he borrowed from other UB players, Tom Koral and Woolfe have also made similar claims.

The players are demanding damages and an injunction in connection with multiple charges including fraud, unfair gambling, negligence, intent to cause emotional distress, and RICO conspiracy, among others. The defendants are Excapsa Software, which is now known as 6356095 Canada Inc, and 10 previous employees of UB Poker. They can respond to the charges made against them individually.

UB was one of the US online poker rooms, the others being PokerStars, Absolute Poker, and Full Tilt Poker, which was cracked down upon by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) on April 15, a day commonly known as Black Friday in the online poker gaming community. The event and its results still feature on poker news networks.

Meanwhile, Ira Rubin, who was arrested in April shortly after the crack down, along with 10 other people associated with the above-mentioned online poker rooms, has pleaded guilty of bank fraud. Rubin, who was extradited to the US after being detained in Guatemala, has been indicted on 9 counts, including bank fraud. He used to assist the above-mentioned poker rooms to move gambling funds under the guise of payments made to Internet merchants and had created fake companies for this purpose.

A poker player playing under the moniker of Eulson won a breathtakingly huge Bad Beat Jackpot worth $1 million on the Merge Gaming Network.

While Eulson collected a prize of $$355,092.35 for winning the Bad Beat Jackpot, the winner of the game 123maryc got a prize of $177,546.17. The rest of the players at the table added a cool sum of $25,363.73 each to their respectively bankrolls.

Online poker players are required to lose the game with four sevens of a kind or a better combination while playing at a table marked as a Bad Beat Jackpot table. Each of the players with quads or a royal flush or a straight flush is required to use their hole cards. At least four of the players on the table must have a hand and the total value of the pot must be $5 or above. For every $5 added to the pot, a fraction of $0.50 is added to the Bad Beat Jackpot, which continues to grow this way till it is won.

Whenever a player gets a bad beat and wins the jackpot, 70 percent of it is distributed among players who have received hole cards in their hand. Of this 70 percent, the player with the bad beat holding at least four sevens of a kind will receive 50 percent, the winner receives 25 percent, and the other players at the table will receive a share of the remaining 25 percent.

Of the remaining 30 percent, the house keeps 10 percent as fees and the other 20 percent is used as the seed value of the next Bad Beat Jackpot.

Reliable online poker rooms such as Carbon Poker, Poker View, and Lock Poker form part of the Merge Poker Network. Currently, the Bad Beat Jackpot at Merge Gaming Network is worth over $219,000.

Gus Hansen, the Danish professional poker player, has already made an impressive profit of US$3.86 million at the big money games in Macau. The poker player had arrived at Macau a few days back and is soon scheduled to participate in the Aussie Millions.

Poker King Club of StarWorld Macau has been hosting the HKD $10k/$20k or US$1,300/$2,600 poker games for the past several weeks and a number of rich Asian entrepreneurs are playing for recreation against top professional online poker players such as Andrew Robl, Phil Ivey, John Juanda, and Gus Hansen.

Fortune has been smiling on Hansen ever since he sat down at the tables, and he has already raked in profits of US$258,000. Pleased with his own performance, Gus intends to stay back in Macau for a few more days before heading over to Australia.

According to his latest blog post: “This session was more up and down than the previous 2 sessions and at one point I found myself holding Aces – unfortunately I was also holding Jacks vs. Queens in another huge all-in hand. At first a Jack hit the flop, but a Queen came sailing in on the river.”

According to his blog, Gus is in high spirits right now. Moreover, he is feeling more than ready for the competition in Melbourne. Simultaneously, he also said that he is amazed at the high energy level of the other poker players in Macau and stated that he was one who had to quit the game and go to bed, leaving the others playing till the wee hours of the morning.

Hansen also expressed his appreciation of the big money games hosted at Poker King Club. He stated that the games are being played in an excellent spirit with plenty of laughter; while simultaneously, the players respect one another, the dealers, and the staff.

Team PokerStars pro Viktor “Isildur1” Blom was not a grand success at online poker tournaments last year, but he surpassed all expectations at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure 2012. This year, Blom’s performance was spectacular, and at the end of the event, he emerged as the online poker winner of a large prize of $1.2 million.

Commenting on his spectacular victory, Blom said: “This was more fun than winning the same amount in a cash game. I’m not used to making it this far in a tournament. I didn’t expect it. It feels great – very different to playing online.”

Blom played against a field of 30 players. While it is not a great achievement to buy-in to the event with $100,000, winning the $1.2 million prize pot is the greatest achievement ever. Blom has earned the online poker community’s respect forever with his great win. While stating how terrible he felt when he participated in the PCA last year, Blom said: “It feels so good to succeed. I really appreciate this win, and I love the Bahamas.”

Blom knocked Galen Hall, the champion of the PCA 2011 main event, when he was in the third position, after which he systematically knocked off Dan Shak and Humberto Brenes.

The other players who raked in profits at PCA 2012 were Jonathan Duhamel and Daniel Negreanu. Negreanu, who finished in the second position in 2011, was knocked off in the fifth position this year. He collected a cool prize of $250,900 for his efforts. Duhamel, who is still recovering the recent assault made on him at his residence, finished fourth and collected a prize of $313,600. Later, Duhamel posted a tweet on Twitter, stating “Yeah that was a good rebuy.”

Poker fans are now looking forward to the super high roller events of Aussie Millions, which is round the corner.

PokerStars has announced that it would only be changing the rake formula from January 01, 2012.
Following a huge outcry from the poker player community in response to its earlier announcement of a slew of changes to its rake schedule, the online poker site quickly moved to abandon most of those changes. What will change though is the rake formula.
Earlier, under the dealt rake formula, the VIP Player Points (VPPs) that were given to a table were evenly shared between all the players who had been dealt a hand – irrespective of the individual player’s contribution to the pot.
From January 01, players will receive a proportionate share of the total VPPs based on how much they actually contributed to the pot. This method of distributing the rake is called weighted contributed.
The new formula that has been published on the PokerStars official website goes like this: <<VPPs = (your contribution to pot / total pot) * (rake collected * VPP multiplier).>>

The website also has a set of Frequently Asked Questions with examples to help understand the formula better.
PokerStars has said that this change was necessary to ensure that the benefits of the VIP Club are more equitably distributed and also to prevent a bias towards the big players which currently renders the player pool top heavy.
The response from the players to this change was less than enthusiastic. The consensus seemed to be that the change would impact loyal players and make it that much more difficult to attain the coveted SuperNova status.
PokerStars also announced the imminent launch of a new product that it described as a “fast moving ring games product”. This could be the PokerStars version of Rush Poker and it is slated to be released during the first quarter of 2012.