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. .

After spending quite a bit of time as the small stack, Dallas’ own Allen Carter bested the most recent WPT Final table at the Southern Poker Championship in Biloxi, MS, taking home $1,000,000, an entry into the WPT Championship, and his first major bracelet. This win also marked his first 6-figure drag.

Allen is a member of a very elite group of poker players. Not because of his new bracelet or his arguable transition to pro ranks. It actually has little to do with how he plays, but more to do with why he plays. In my opinion, there are about 5 different kinds of players. Let me also note that I recognize that the majority of players belong to more than one of each.

1) Those who play for fun (Think Guy Laliberte)

Even his txt msgs have the right attitude.

2) Those who play for profit (Tom Schneider)
3) Those who play for action (Dan Michalski)
4) Those who play because of addiction (Endless list)
5) Those who play for lack of better options (Think tomorrow’s Madsen and other young guns turn college drop-outs of today)
…and finally…
6) Those who play purely for competition (Allen Carter)

I first met Allen in ’06 in the DFW airport, waiting to board a flight to the WSOP. He had won an entry into the Main Event through and online tournament. Actually, I should be clear,… He won FOUR entries. Pretty awesome in its own right, but totally redonkulous if you consider that he did all of it in only 6 attempts! And I believe that I remember he also came in 2nd in another one of those events.

You can’t enjoy success like that if you can’t commit yourself completely and exclusively to a single player category. And in case it isn’t obvious, the only two categories capable of supporting such are 1) Profit and 2) Competition. Allen has expressed to me multiple times that competition is his only reason for playing. Without that, he simply won’t play.

I understand that this philosophy almost completely contradicts the principles of the only other successful player category, profit, where you try to find the juiciest and softest game available. But maybe what Allen has figured out is that as long as you have enough water in the sports bottle (bankroll), you should always opt to play against the young, tall, black team, and never against the short, white, computer nerd, poker enthusiasts. Because with poker, unlike any other sport, you can put yourself or find yourself in the ‘big game’ at any time. This time it was a white, 40-something, former CPA from Dallas who prepared for and conquered the biggest game of his life. While he was preparing, you were checking your fish lists and looking for the softest SnG’s you could find.