Who says tournament poker is dying/hurting? It’s hard to go anywhere on the planet these days without finding a major soccer poker tournament. Lots of kids with disposable bankrolls, it seems … and lots of older folks trying to grab it.

At the EPT Deauville, which just wrapped up, all eyes were on Elky and Peter Eastgate to take down the biggest tournament ever in France. But out of 768 runners, they went out in 9th and 8th, respectively, with 21-year-old Brit Jake Cody winning the €847,000 top prize and presumably earning himself a spot on the PokerStars Kids Team.

Elky, meanwhile went pimptastic/not-gay in his homeland, sponsoring Team ElkyLady:

The LAPC is just getting into the thick of its WSOP-duration run. Click here to follow the winners as the events unfold. Of all these events going on worldwide, this one is still probably the biggest.

Across the continent, in Atlantic City. the World Poker Open at the Borgata is rolling along, with their $3,500 main event starting Sunday. They’re still drawing fields in the multi-hundreds, making Borgata the East Coast place to be.

But let’s not forget Mississippi — which used to be the preferred place for poker players to kick off the new year. They only got 208 entries into the $10k WPT main event at Beau Rivage. The final table for the Southern Poker Championship is set:

Name Chips

Hoyt Corkins 2,069,000
Tyler Smith 1,169,000
Jerry Vanstrydonck 1,044,000
Jonathan Kantor 894,000
Jared Jaffee 762,000
James Reed 377,000

Follow the good-ole-boy action here.

Halfway around the world, the Aussie Millions is into Day 2 of their main event. After a festive Australia Day celebration, things got underway for the big-daddy of this Southern Hemisphere main event:

Some other cool tourneys at the Crown Casino still going … It’s very 2 Months $2 Milliony In the Australian heads-up championship, they’re duking it out to see which four will advance to the money matches against Andrew Lichtenberger, Barry Woods, Vanessa Selbst, and Martin Gudvangen.

And action is just getting underway for the Team Event. Here’s how they play team poker down under:

How Does Team Poker Work
The game is No Limit Hold’em. Teams of two, only one member from each team is on the felt at a time.

The partner’s rotate whose turn it is to play the team’s stack each level. The first players in the game get half of the team’s start bank, if they bust in the first level the team mate comes in immediately and plays with the other half of the team’s starting bank.

That person will play the remainder of the first level, and the second, before the original partner resumes play in the third level.

From the second level onwards team will have their full stacks in play, and once it’s gone the team is eliminated.

And our new-good friends at the Heartland Poker Tour are in Quapah, Oklahoma — at the Downstream Casino in the far northeast end of the state, running qualifiers for their next televised main event, which gets underway this weekend. This one is good clean All-American fun for the kids, too, as you only need to be 18 to play.

The Venetian Deep Stacks is also getting ready to start — with Event #1 kicking off Friday, so it’s not like nothing’s going on here in Las Vegas these days. .

This could turn out to be quite the Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa thing, with less Creatine. Daniel Negreanu and Phil Ivey could be going back-and-forth at the very top of the Hendon Mob leaderboard for all-time tournament winnings.

Ivey just re-passed Negs by finishing 2nd in the Aussie Millions $100k event.

Here’s the all-time leaderboard (not yet updated).

[via WCP]

BTW, I’m pretty sure the winner, Dan Shak, was not the same guy who helped send Beth Shak on her renegade red-carpet/no-carpet milf path. If so, he sure has aged since the divorce:

UPDATE: I could be wrong. I was confusing Dan Shak with Bill Gazes, one of the other milfly departeds in poker:

Players are flocking to Poker’s Second City for that other, LA version of the WSOP, aka the LAPC. Early numbers look strong. Much more to come from this festival of poker tourneys to be sure:

Elsewhere around the world, the big action is going at the Borgata Winter Poker Open in Atlantic City, at EPT-Deauville in France, and the Aussie Millions in, er, Australia … where our favourite under-25 Betfair-blogging scrapper fought FTW in the $1k PLO event. @Annette_15’s inspirational tweet-story:

Dinner break in plo, avg 32k, got 20k. Lost half my stack with KxJxTs9s on KJs8sAx5x board lol. 30 something left, 16 paid. Start in 1h.

22 left. At avg

Got 50k. Avg 56. On the bubble now. 17 left. Good table

Itm yay

Final table . 9 left. Cont. tomorrow at 4. Avg 100k. I got 150k. 40k for first. 1x?

One hour break. Got 550k i think. Didnt count. 4 left. Got over half the chips in play. Go me

yayyyyy i won!!!!

A nice little roadmap on how to move from the middle of the pack to the final table with the momentum it takes to go all the way, no? 40k AUD ($36.7 USk).

REMINDER: Today is Omaha day at the Hard Rock in Las Vegas. Playing 1/2, half no-limit hold’em, half PLO … w Run-it-2x. I like to think of this game as PLO with training wheels. Did you know sets aren’t necessarily all that good in Omaha?

Another fine tribute — from Pauly … with links to other fine tributes, and a video of Shronk taking on a Vegemite prop-bet at the Aussie Millions:

Pauly, btw, has been in Argentina for the LAPT, where he’s been huffing paint and engaging in bar fights. True story — at least half of it.

Hope so. January is packed with tournaments spanning the globe. But if you’re not traveling, you can still keep up with the main events via various websites and blogs.

• January 5, Bahamas: Where better for a tournament than a place called Paradise Island? The PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (PCA) starts and ends with the main event, the final table of which will take place on the 10th. This is an 18-and-over tournament, so look out for the kiddies young, skilled online pros to turn out in force. Otis will be blogging from the event.

• January 5, Australia: A quick 14-hour flight or so away will be the Aussie Millions Poker Championship in Melbourne. This is a series that starts on the 5th with a $1,100 buy-in no-limit hold’em event, continues with a wide range of games and buy-ins (including the $100,000 no-limit event), and wraps up with the main event that begins on the 14th and runs for seven days. A plethora of reporters, including Dr. Pauly and Change100, will be covering it all for PokerNews.

• January 3, Tunica: The World Poker Open has already begun with its preliminary events at the Gold Strike Casino in Tunica, Mississippi. By the 20th, the main event will be underway and hosted by the World Poker Tour. Aaron Hendrix is there and will be providing daily coverage of all of the events for PokerWorks, and the WPT will be live blogging for the main event with BJ Nemeth at the helm.

• January 15, Atlantic City: The Borgata Winter Poker Open starts its preliminary events on the 15th, and the WPT main event (Borgata Poker Classic) begins on the 27th with a final table on the 31st. It doesn’t seem that any media outlet is covering the prelim events, but surely PokerListings will be there for the main event along with the WPT live bloggers.

While Todd is in Tunica, Clonie may or may not be hiding from him at the Aussie Millions. She must be really scared, too … because she has dyed her hair black. Apparently Goth is the new blonde bombshell Maxim cover trend something.

She appears about two thirds of the way through the video.

via Change100 via the Hendon Mob