The Ryan Seacrest of Poker? Matt Savage joined us on This Week In Poker live from the WPT Borgata last Tuesday.
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We never ever pick favorites. Never. Ever.
With that said, our interview with Matt Savage last Tuesday on This Week In Poker was our favorite so far. Lots of solid topics covered, and great questions submitted from our viewers, including one from Jay “WhoJedi†Newnum on whether WSOP bracelets should be awarded outside of Vegas.
“I don’t like it,†said Savage. “I don’t think it’s like a real bracelet.â€
Day 1a of the £10,000 + 350 Main Event drew a field of 137 players and an appearance by Phil Hellmuth (video below). The day 1a chip leader is Nicolas Levi with 153,850 in chips. Some notables returning Saturday afternoon: Bruno Fitoussi – 120,250, Leo Margets – 109,000, Allen Cunningham – 84,725, Barny Boatman – 73,200, Chris Ferguson – 52,950 and Jeff Lisandro 43,500. A full list of chip counts available at WSOP.com.
The £10,000 + 350 High Roller No-Limit Heads-Up event reached the best-of-three final, with Gus Hansen winning the first match, and Jim Collopy making a comeback from an over 2-1 deficit to even up the match. The third and deciding match is currently scheduled for Friday afternoon, but with both players planning to play in the Main Event, the exact time has not been announced. Be sure to check PokerNews or WSOP.com
Elsewhere …
WPT Borgata Poker Open, Atlantic City :: Play is currently heads-up between Dwyte Pilgrim and Kia Mohajeri. WPT Live Updates
UPDATE: Dwyte Pilgrim finishes first, winning $733,802, moves into first place in the CardPlayer Player of the Year standings.
LAPT Grande Finale – Rosario, Argentina :: $5,000 Main Event draws a field of 254 players, with 131 returning Friday afternoon. Winner takes down over $300,000. According to Terrence Chan, the Argentinian government will tax 31.5% of net winnings to all players outside Argentinia, which has some people upset. Updates at PokerNews and PokerStars Blog
With the £10,000 + 350 Main Event scheduled to start at 12pm London time Thursday, the final prelim event, £10,000 + 350 High Roller No-Limit Holdem Heads-Up will come to its conclusion at 3pm. Four players remain with the two winners playing a best-of-three final shortly after both matches are completed.
Gus Hansen v Andrew Feldman
Jim Collopy v Ram Vaswani
For results from day 2, check out PokerNews or WSOP.com.
Elsewhere …
WPT Borgata Poker Open – 10 players, including Dwyte Pilgrim and Lee Childs, remain as they play down to the TV final table. Defending champion Olivier Busquet finishes 25th, Mike Sexton finishes 20th. WPT Live Updates
UPDATE: Here’s the final table, starting at 4pm ET Thursday:
PokerStars LAPT Grande Final – Rosario, Argentina :: Final stop of season 3 features a $5,000 Main Event. Can Jose “Nacho” Barbero win his 3rd LAPT event this season? PokerNews and the PokerStars Blog provide updates throughout the tournament.
November Niner Matt Jarvis tweeted over the weekend that Sorel Mizzi would coach him in preparation for the WSOP ME final table.
JP Kelly fell ohsoclose of winning his 3rd WSOP bracelet in Event #3 – £1,000 + 75 NL Holdem, finishing 2nd to Scott Shelley, an employee at online poker site PKR, who won his seat in an office freeroll*. Shelley earned £133,857 for the win, while Kelly pocketed £82,854 for the runner-up finish. Full results available at WSOP.com.
Day 1 of the £10,350 No-Limit Hold’em High Roller Heads-Up drew a field of 103 players, with the winner earning a coveted WSOPE gold bracelet along with £288,409. Round 2 action has concluded with 32 players returning with three more rounds of play starting Wednesday afternoon at 3pm. Among the players who made it to Wednesday action: Phil Ivey, Scott Fischman, Mori Eskandani, Andrew Feldman, Andrew Robl and Shawn Buchanan. The draw for round 3 is available at WSOP.com.
Elsewhere …
WPT Borgata Poker Open – Atlantic City :: Day 3 playing down to 27, defending champion Oliver Busquet leads the field. WPT Live Updates and Borgata Poker Blog
SportingBet, former home of Sportsbook.com and Paradise Poker, settles with US Department of Justice for $33,000,000. – EGR Magazine
The final table has been set at the WSOP Europe Event #3 – £1,000 + 75 NL Holdem as the defending champion, JP Kelly, is in contention to defend his bracelet triumph at last year’s WSOPE. If Kelly won, he would also become the first player to defend a NL holdem bracelet since Johnny Chan back in 1987-88, and the youngest player to win three bracelets. That distinction belongs to Phil Ivey.* Here’s how that final table will be seated when play resumes at 2pm:
* Credit to Donnie Peters at PokerNews.
Follow along in the updates at PokerNews or WSOP.com
Event #4 will take place at 5pm London time Tuesday, the £10,000 + 350 NL Holdem High Roller Heads-Up event. The field will contain a maximum of 128 players with registration closing when the tournament starts. In case of an unevenly sized field (more than 32, 64, or 128) there will be byes for round 1.
Elsewhere…
WPT Borgata Poker Open – Atlantic City :: Day 2 underway, just over 200 players remaining with the top 100 making the money. A brawl almost takes place just before dinner as described by BJ Nemeth here. Other updates and goings-on here.
Heartland Poker Tour – Black Hawk, Colorado :: The poker tour that people forget keeps chugging along with Mark Dunbar taking down over $180,000 in defeating a field of over 400 players. HeartlandPokerTour.com has the recap.
T.J. Cloutier Choctaw Classic – Durant, OK :: Week-long series of tournaments w/ $1,650 Main Event Sept. 25-26 – Schedule
PokerStars WCOOP :: Jason Mercier and Chad Brown in the top 30 of 1k NL event, winner takes down nearly $500,000. RaiseOnce, allegedly Phil Ivey, takes down $25,000 HU title. PokerStars Blog
Day 1c of the £1,000 + 75 NL Holdem event drew a field of 185 players, with the 25 survivors joining the 55 day 1a and 1b players with chips Monday at 2pm to play down to the final table. 54 players will make the money with the winner pocketing £133,857. The day 1c chip leader is Frenchman Leonard Truche with 42,400 in chips. Other notables returning: WPT winner Tommy Vedes – 27,200, and Allen Kessler 12,700. Day 1c players with chips and payouts available at wsop.com.
Elsewhere …
WPT Borgata Poker Open – Atlantic City :: 729 players turned up for day 1b of the $3,300 Main Event, creating the largest field for a WPT event (1,040), beating the record set at last year’s Borgata Poker Open. WPT Live Updates and the Borgata Poker Open blog are both handling updates.
PokerStars APPT Auckland :: New Zealand’s “Godfather of hip-hop” Danny ‘Brotha D’ Leaosavaii defeats Tom Grigg to take down the title for over $123,000. – PokerStarsBlog.com has the final report.
Event #2 of the WSOPE, £5,250 Pot-Limit Omaha, has concluded with 2009 WSOP Player of the Year Jeff Lisandro earning his 5th career bracelet, defeating Joe Serock heads-up, earning £159,154 in the win. Serock collects £98,262 for the runner-up finish. Willie Tann and Chris Bjorin, final tablists in event #1, finished 3rd and 9th respectively. Full results and Nolan Dalla’s tournament report, will be available shortly at www.wsop.com.
Day 1b of the £1,075 NL Holdem event drew a field of 195 players, with 27 returning Monday afternoon after 9 levels of play. The day 1b chip leader is Wesley Pantling, brother of Andrew Pantling, who finished 2nd to Phil Laak in Event #1 earlier this week. Other notables returning: Andrew Licthenberger – 42,400, EPT Vilamoura winner Toby Lewis – 35,300 and Scott Fischman – 23,200. Full chip counts at WSOP.com.
Elsewhere …
WPT Borgata Poker Open – Atlantic City :: 311 players registered for day 1a of the $3,300 + 200, $2,000,000 Guaranteed event, check out the updates over at WorldPokerTour.com.
PokerStars APPT Auckland – Final table action has just begun, PokerNews and the PokerStars blog are covering that action. The “godfather of New Zealand hip-hop”, Danny ‘Brotha D’ Leaoasavaii holds the chip lead.
Commerce Holdem Series – Final table of 2,085 NL Main Event – live streaming available here.
The WPT-Borgata Poker Open is underway … big action of the season for East Coast grinders and top pros willing to travel to New Jersey. New Jersey happens to be one of the most fascinating states on the online gambling legal fronts for many reasons — sports gambling, poker, and casino games all included — as their state lawmakers attack severe budget deficits at a time when Atlantic City took some of the biggest recessionary gambling hits.
But arguably the biggest and most immediate threats they’re facing are from neighboring states that have expanded gambling — with new tables, poker and otherwise, rapidly opening. Though it’s just a single anecdote and hardly statistical evidence of anything, I got this text message from a Pokerati player about new games in his home state of Delaware:
I’m back in DE. Playing @ DE Park right now. Casinos 15 mins from my house. 20 tables, separate tourney room, pretty nice. haven’t gone to AC since I’ve been here.
Yikes, if not indicative of likely continued economic woes for New Jersey, it seems to at least suggest something about the redistribution of gambling wealth currently going on in the Northeast corner of the United States.
WSOP Europe – London :: – Event #1 – £2,500 NL Six-Max, starts Tuesday – Live updates available at PokerNews and WSOP.com.
Borgata Poker Open – Atlantic City :: – Tournament series culminates with $3,500 WPT, $2,000,000 guaranteed Sept. 17. – Results and updates at the Borgata Poker Open Blog
World Poker Open – London :: Sam Trickett defeats Yevgeniy Timoshenko heads-up, wins $200k, tournament airs in UK later this year. – PartyPoker Blog
English Poker Open – London :: Day 2 starts with 93 players, playing down to final table, over £220,000 for first. – Live streaming at EnglishPokerOpen.com
PokerStars UKIPT – Dublin :: Max Silver defeats Ronan Gilligan heads-up, wins 72,000 Euros. – PokerStars Blog
Commerce Holdem Series – Rudy Fulson wins $120 NL, $300k guarantee in 10-way deal for $44k, guarantee bested by 30 players.. $1,100 Ironman tournament (no breaks) starts Wednesday – Commerce Tournaments
Also…
BBC Radio 5 program investigating cheating in online poker, centered on PokerStars Double or Nothing scandal by chain of Chinese colluders. Podcast link
Compared to some of the marathon WPT final tables, it probably seemed like it took only ten minutes to complete the final table of the WPT Borgata Poker Open. Vivek Rajkumar did, however, win the title in only 48 hands, beating the previous record of 53 hands set by Eugene Katchalov at the December 2007 Bellagio Five Diamond.
Vivek was surrounded by his group of internet young-gunnish friends like Gobboboy and Devo, and the support probably didn’t hurt as he came to the table as the chip leader and went into heads-up play with a massive 16.8 million to 3.9 million lead over Sang Kim. That HU part of the event took only one hand, and Vivek was the latest to win a WPT title. Oh, and he won $1,424,500 to get a good haircut go along with the bracelet and the victory.
The final table results were as follows:
6th place: Andrew Knee ($237,500)
5th place: Mark Seif ($287,500)
4th place: Jason Strochak ($337,500)
3rd place: Dan Heimiller ($387,500)
2nd place: Sang Kim ($750,000)
1st place: Vivek Rajkumar ($1,424,500)
Photo courtesy of World Poker Tour, where WPT Live Updates detailed all of the final table action.
There’s a lot of action going on, now and into this weekend …
First off, in the online world, the WCOOP (World Championship of Online Poker) is going on on PokerStars. You can rail it live as an observer on PokerStars itself, of course, or if you’ve got an offline life you can follow it semi-live on the PokerStarsBlog in the capable hands of our own California Jen and some of your other favorite bloggers (Change100, Tuscaloosa Johnny, Otis).
Believe it or not, they’ve also got “TV” coverage of these big online tourneys — they’re about halfway through 33 of them. Check it out right here if you’ve got a half-hour to kill:
The new PokerStars TV will also be all over the EPT Barcelona, which just got underway — including some live video coverage viewable on the internet, along with more traditional blog-coverage and chip updates.
On the salty side of the pond, the Borgata Poker Open is getting heated in Atlantic City. That’s where Pauly’s at. And he’s covering all the action (along with the ever-illustrative Tropical Steve and poker-media journeyman Michael Friedman) on the official Borgata Blog. The WPT main event kicks off on Sunday. The WPT has their own blog-crew coverage, too — something called “The Muck”.
Meanwhile, I’m stuck here in Vegas, where it’s a Freerollin’ Saturday for me:
I start the day in Event #2 of the PokerListings Run Good Challenge. Supposedly we’re having some blind-structure issues with PokerStars, but regardless, it will be a chance to redeem myself from my lackluster Event #1 performance.
Then, later tomorrow evening, it’s the grand-opening tourney at the Hard Rock, where I’ll be playing against Phil Hellmuth, Anjela Brunson, Rick Fuller, Scott Fischman, Scott Ian (of Anthrax), Jeremiah Smith, Andre Agassi, Montel Williams, Randy Couture, Jermaine O’neal, Paul Pierce, and others for an important motorcycle. Will be texting in updates via CSR should you care to follow my quest against a field that should be a combination of great and terrible, with a less-than-skill-friendly blind-structure.
Click below for more detailed info on the event itself, and the motorcycle.
It really is shaping up to be a Good Poker September.
