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. .

The World Poker Tour dropped another tournament from its already-trimmed Season 7 schedule, and it just happens to be a player favorite – the Borgata Winter Poker Open. Even players who hate Atlantic City love the Borgata, and while the other event stayed on the schedule in September, the January tourney is no longer a WPT event.

A press release from the Borgata noted that the main event is now a $3,000 buy-in, reduced from the going WPT rate of $10,000. Thus, the drop from the WPT schedule could have been a result of indicators that player turnout would be low. Economy? Damn right.

Almost all major tournaments, with the exception of the WSOP main event, have been lower in 2008, the most sad embarrassing obvious was the 2008 U.S. Poker Championships in September that only brought 52 players to the $10K main event, as compared to 164 players in 2007 and 261 players in 2006. Turns out that when the lights and cameras go away, not to mention people’s IRAs, stocks, and day jobs, people are less willing to plunk down $10K for a poker tourney.

So, if you want a WPT title, you won’t be getting it at the Borgata next month. There are other choices, however, like the Five Diamond event coming up at Bellagio, which will cost you a mere $15K to enter. The rest of the revised WPT Season 7 schedule can be viewed by clicking this handy link below:

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