Jonathan Taylor
Photo: WSOP.com

Today’s Boxscore

Jonathan Taylor $138,938 – WSOP-C Lodge Casino Main Event
Allen Kessler $20,859 – WSOP-C Lodge Casino $580 NLHE
Dan Shak $450,000 – PartyPoker Premier League VI
Michael Harris $95,663 – HPT Belterra Casin Main Event

There were plenty of results posted around the world over the weekend with the PartyPoker Premier League VI wrapping up, the Heartland Poker Tour crowning another champion, and the WSOP-C handing out a few more rings.

Dan Shak seems to love the big action, big attention games. He defeated Sam Trickett to capture the PartyPoker Premier League VI title after a few days of play for $450,000. As expected, it was a stacked final table with Antonio Esfandiari, Jonathan Duhamel, Daniel Cates, and actress/poker player Jennifer Tilly. Negreanu made a big splash as he just missed the final table (video can be viewed below).

Jonathan Taylor is the latest World Series of Poker Circuit event winner, his 3rd ring ring of the 2012/2013 series. He topped the other 420 entrees in the tournament for over $138,000. Perhaps only interesting to me, the small buy-in WSOP-C event in Blackhawk, CO drew exactly 150 less entrants than a similar Heartland Poker Tour event held in the same town just a few weeks. Also notable during this WSOP-C stop was the stunning non-min-cash of Allen “Complainsaw” Kessler who won the $580 No Limit Hold’em side event for his 2nd career ring.

Next up for the WSOP-C is a trip to the great Northeast and 12 tournaments at the mammoth Foxwoods Casino.

Link Dump

Tweet(s) of the Day – Allen Kessler’s humble brag with the Matt Salsberg follow up needle. Good stuff, now where is my Entourage movie?

@allenkessler @wsop You put the ring on Craig’s list yet?

— matt salsberg (@msalsberg) March 26, 2013

Atlantic City’s Revel casino files for bankruptcy – This news isn’t very shocking. The latest, greatest, fresh casino in Atlantic City hasn’t been doing well since it opened. My one and only experience there left me wondering how quickly I could catch a cab to the Borgata. The Chapter 11 filing will help them try to cut debt and stay alive, but we’ve all heard those stories before.

Kane ‘Nascar_1949’ Kalas – Risks and Riches – As a Philly boy, I grew up listening to Harry Kalas call Phillies games but most sports fans probably know him as the “voice” of NFL Films. I had no idea his son has been a professional poker player/degenerate for years. “Friend of Pokerati” Remko Rinkema has a very in depth interview talking about all things gambling and sports.

UK’s online gambling sector worth £2bn in 2012 – An article detailing the size of online gambling in the UK, complete with a numbers for the stats junkies and pretty graphs for those less inclined towards words.

Louisiana To Study Possibility of Online Gaming – Louisiana adds it’s name to the list of states looking to follow in the footsteps of Nevada, New Jersey, and Delaware to pass online poker legislation. The more the merrier.

Emotions run high as poker pro Daniel Negreanu throws all his chips – WATCH THIS VIDEO is how Jesse May would extort you to view the following (I just see the words coming out of his mouth in all caps). Negreanu, the self appointed judge of all things poker etiquette, lost his mind a little when he caught a bad beat during PartyPoker Premier League VI action.

The Super Bowl is coming up in New Orleans … should be good for the Harrah’s casino there, even without sports betting.

Check it out … the Louisiana edition of the Let Texans Decide campaign … I’d say just in time for the Big Game, but I think for Louisiana — not just in New Orleans but also from Shreveport to Lake Charles — its not so much about majillions being wagered on San Francisco vs. Baltimore … it’s more about the recreational spend going across state lines on any given weekend.

Here’s a quick rundown of what’s going on in one of the hungriest industries out there, and, game of skill or not, the parent biz of our beloved little poker world:

ALABAMA — A small little gambling fight is going down in the land Spencer Bachus represents, over a matter of semantics, technology, and the millions of dollars bingo machines represent. Bingo is legal in ‘bama … but should video bingo be? The fight is a dirty — complete with one agency repeatedly trying to raid a well-monied operation that believes it’s on the right side of the law.

CHINA — After a slow start, gambling revenues in Macau are reaching record levels.

IOWA — The Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission’s computer system got hacked, and they’re blaming China:

Chinese foreign ministry officials strongly disputed the report, issuing a statement calling it “full of bias and ulterior motives.”

Personal information in the breach included names, Social Security numbers, home addresses and dates of birth. Most of the people in the licensing database are Iowa residents, but it also includes residents of Illinois, Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wisconsin and other states, Ketterer said.

The list includes workers such as card dealers, slot machine technicians, jockeys, trainers and owners of horses and greyhounds.

LOUISIANA — The New Orleans-to-Shreveport casino-biz is in a definite recession, one not planned for when the state planned on becoming the central-coast alternative to Las Vegas and Atlantic City. They blame Texans for not gambling enough Oklahoma and Mississippi for cutting in on their action.

NEW JERSEY — Big fight going on over laws related to the building of Revel — the east coast’s $2.5 billion version of CityCenter. Should be an interesting development to watch go up (or down) as New Jersey fights to stay competitive with the smaller casino operations set to open shop in Delaware and Pennsylvania, but not Maryland.

MARYLAND — Gov. Martin O’Malley is saying Maryland’s not gonna jump into the gambling expansion fray, despite assertions that his state is gonna lose out as neighboring locales up their casino offerings to include table games + poker.

OHIO — As we know, Lyle Berman has effectively bought himself a piece of all the newly legalized action to come in Cincinatti, Cleveland, and Toledo. But he’s run into some blowback over the location of a new casino in Columbus. The constitutional amendment voters approved in November called for a full-blown casino-resort downtown, but now a referendum on a May ballot will decide if the Penn Gaming development should be moved to a blighted part of the city.

Related: “It’s Lyle’s Ohio Now”

UNITED KINGDOM — Once upon a time, Great Britain was leading the world in all things online gambling. But regulations and tax issues are messing that up — and it’s turning into a battle of Labour vs. the Tories for the UK’s gambling future. Good rundown on some British gambling-law history and where the different parties stand on gambling in the UK … as the rest of Europe catches up.

Details are just coming in, but it took place in an underground game in southwest Houston late Wednesday night …

Three armed gunmen burst into a strip-mall game to rob it, and one of the players pulled out his own weapon and began firing. The player shot one of the bandits (whom police found dead in the parking lot) and the other two escaped. One player was hit and transported to Southwest Memorial Hospital with what appear to be non-critical wounds.

From the Houston Chronicle:

Sigh. This is what we saw in Dallas … The underground blossoms for a year or two, the police start raiding rooms … games move more underground … robberies follow the next year … eventually someone gets hurt. Expect a huge boom for poker business in the card rooms just across the Louisiana border in 2010.

UPDATE: More details here.

The final table of the $5k main event at the WSOP-New Orleans goes down tomorrow at 2 pm central. Semi-live video coverage at worldseriesofpoker.com.

Click below for all the official details after the jump. I’ll be paying attention to Marc Fratter, from Clonie’s hometown of Murphy, TX. (Kinda near where my folks live, too.) He seems to have his game on these days, and if so seems well-seated with a medium stack:

Fratter

SEAT 7: Marc Fratter
HOMETOWN: Murphy, TX
CHIP COUNT: 311,000
Marc Fratter is a 36-year-old attorney from Murphy, TX. He has a three-year-old daughter named Kate who loves to play poker with her dad. Fratter was the co-champion of the 2007 Caesars Indiana Poker Championship. He won $117,000 in that tournament. He also cashed in the 2007 Red River Roundup. This is his third time to cash in a major tournament.

Miles

Go Mark! I mean Marc!

He’s going up against Timothy “TK” Miles, who won a $1,000 WSOP-Circuit event in New Orleans this past winter and has the chip lead.

Drogba

The WSOP-Circuit final table, however, is in a tough time slot tomorrow — going up against the UEFA Cup finals, being broadcast live from Moscow. (Bluff Media video honcho and former Fox Football Fone-in host Nick Geber is presumably ocnflicted.) Honestly, the soccer game will probably get most of my attention even though I’m not sure whom to root for — Chelsea vs. Manchester Utd. — since I usually just root against those two teams. (Go Liverpool/Wigan/Blackburn Rovers!)

Rooney

Chelsea, of course, is are the bad-ass team from the yuppity side of London, loaded with great players, most notably Drogba from the Ivory Coast. Man-U are the working-class faves from Britain’s Second City, with bratty high-paid hotshot Wayne Rooney … who likes to gamble (badly) and used to play Texas Hold’em in a rough-and-tumble Man-U home game.

Again, click below for details on the poker event going up against what is essentially, worldwide, the Super Bowl:
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Nolan Dalla’s recap and pic tell the story:

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Former Lodge Amateur Poker player and Rounder Club honcho Terry Keratsopolous is at the final table at a WSOP-Circuit event in New Orleans. Haven’t found any semi-live coverage yet … but just an FYI for those of you who’d like someone to route root for.

UPDATE: It’s reportedly a $500+ event … First place is about $28k, 10th place about $2,800. They started the final table at about 4 pm eastern … and Terry was short-stacked, standing 8th in chips.

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