Tag: pokerstars

PCA Main Event and High Roller Event To Feature Live Webcast

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2012 Pokerstars Caribbean AdventureThe PokerStars Caribbean Adventure has quickly become one of the most interesting and exciting poker tournaments offered, and they’ve done a little something to make their events even better overall.  Fans of the game of poker will get a great opportunity to be able to follow the action throughout the tournaments this upcoming year, with a live stream that will give players the chance to see hole-cards as well.  The stream will be on a 40-minute delay that players can see on PokerStars.tv.

Players who tune in will not only get to see all of the action and get to see the hole cards on the delay, but they will get analysis and live broadcast from the likes of Joe Stapleton, James Hartigan, and a poker player who a few people may know the name of, Daniel Negreanu.  It will feature the final tables of two events with huge buy-ins, the $10,300 Main Event, and one of the largest buy-in tournaments on the planet in the $25,500 buy-in High Roller event.

The PCA Main Event draws in a huge number of players in especially the past two years.  The event has had over 1,500 players each year, and the first place prize for last years winner, Galen Hall, was over $2.3 million, which probably comes in second to about one other tournament series; the World Series of Poker.  For this coming year, there are actually a total of 800 players registered already, and there’s a chance that this could be one of the largest events in their history.

As far as the High Roller event goes, it has been around since back in 2009 and last season featured 151 players.  Last years winner was Will Molson who won over $1 million for beating out those 150 other players.  While this event is obviously a huge buy-in, PokerStars has actually decided to go even bigger in 2012.  They are introducing a $100k Super High Roller tournament, that already has a total of 20 players registered including names like Negreanu himself, Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier, Brian Rast, Dan Shak, David Sands, Jason Mercier, Jonathan Duhamel, and many other big names as well.

Action for the PCA will kick off on January 5th and runs through January 14th.

Poker Stars Kicks Off New Year With New Events: Live And Online

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Poker Stars is kicking off 2012 with the addition of several new events to its lineup, including three new stops on the European Poker Tour Season 8 schedule and a new online poker championship series, Turbo style.

Let’s start with the new live poker action sponsored by Poker Stars. Season 8 of the site’s European Poker Tour kicks off with the usual PokerStars Caribbean Adventure in early January. As Winter progresses, the EPT will head to Deauville, France and Copehagen, Denmark, always normal stops on the EPT schedule. But now is when things get new and interesting, as Poker Stars adds EPT stops in Madrid, Spain March 12-17; Campione in the Lugano-Como-Milan region of Italy March 26-31; and Berlin, Germany April 16-21, all of which will include a €5,000 + €300 main event.

As for new online excitement to start this year off right, just as players will be returning home from the PCA, they’ll be able to sit down at the TCOOP, or the Turbo Championship of Online Poker. Like the World Championship of Online Poker, WCOOP, and the Spring Championship of Online Poker, SCOOP, this is a multiday, multievent series. Specifically it’s a 50-event, 11-day turbo tournament extravaganza with events in all buy-in ranges, all poker types, all tournament types, all table structures and all betting structures. If there’s a way to play poker, there’s a turbo tournament for it in PokerStars’ new TCOOP, running January 19-29 with a $1.5 million guaranteed main event and a total $10 million guaranteed prize pool overall.

PokerStars Creates Turbo Championship of Online Poker (TCOOP)

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PokerstarsPokerStars knows exactly what they are doing in the cash game poker world, and also  the online poker tournament circuit.  They are the inventors of the World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP), and have decided to expand their horizons a bit, and invent another “Championship of Online Poker” this past week.  The event is called the Turbo Championship of Online Poker (TCOOP), and it is set to get underway starting on January 19th of the upcoming year.  There will be a total of 50 events running over a ten day span.  One of the final events that kick off on Sunday, January 29th is the Main Event, which will feature a buy-in of $700 that will cater to all different levels of players.

The idea behind turbo events is that the blind levels will move up much quicker than a standard online poker tournament.  This makes it so that players have to be much more careful about their remaining number of blinds.  These turbo tournaments have become incredibly popular in the past years, as players love the fact that the tournaments typically don’t last as long as other poker tournaments do.

The $700 TCOOP Main Event actually won’t be the final event of the tournament, as it will be followed up by a Hyper-Turbo event, which is a $215 tournament called the “Wrap Party”.  But what really makes this tournament series a huge draw for players is the fact that the buy-in’s will range anywhere from $5 all the way to $2,100, which is the High Roller event.  Over the ten day span, there is a minimum of four events running each day.  It will all kick off on Thursday the 19th with a $22 No Limit Hold’em Six-Handed event.  Stars has done their best to make it so that the event series will offer buy-in’s that are better for recreational players (smaller buy-in’s), and also have larger buy-in’s for the high stakes players; but have them mixed throughout the day so that everyone can get in on the action.

Overall, it seems that PokerStars has put out another hit with the TCOOP, and it will be interesting to see the types of prize pools that these tournaments generate.

The Sunday Million On PokerStars Sets An Impressive Record

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PokerstarsPokerStars is well-known for their constantly running top notch cash games, and their massive online poker tournaments as well.  This one sets the bar to a new standard though, as their 10th Anniversary Sunday Million tournament offered players a $10 million guarantee.  On top of that, there was also a $2 million payday for the first place winner of the event as well.  Even more exciting about this huge opportunity for players though, is that the buy-in for the Sunday Million is only $215.  PokerStars was in a tough spot here, because in order to hit the guaranteed prize pool of $10 million, they would need to have over 46,000 entrants into the event, which would be unheard of.

This is why it was a shocker when the prize pool ended up being $12,423,200, which is well past the guarantee.  This meant that Pokerstars didn’t have to put any additional money into the tournament, and also that there was an insane amount of players playing in this.  To be exact, there was 62,116 players when all was said and done.  The prize pool of over $12.4 million topped the old record of $12,215,000 that was set during the WCOOP Main Event as well.  And for those of you who are curious what the number to make the money was; well, the top 7,000 players got into the cash of this one.

As you might imagine from a pool this huge, the final table didn’t have the big named players, but it did have a pretty excellent score for one player.  The winner of the event was a Canadian player named Kyle “First-Eagle” Weir, who is actually unemployed, and his old biggest cash was a $4k win.  The final six players in the event decided to do a six way chop, which gave everyone at least $580k.  In an interesting situation, the second place finisher, “unstoffable” actually took home the least amount of money out of everyone, while the fifth place finisher got a payday of almost $1 million because of this chop.

The following is the final table, with the top six players taking part in the six way deal:

  1. Kyle “First-Eagle” Weir – $1,146,574.65
  2. Unstoffable – $580,724.34
  3. BLAABAR – $709,896.78
  4. tunafish919 – $627,317.26
  5. Dimedroll – $995,996.85
  6. SkunDen – $758,986.42
  7. fireballdio– $182,406.00
  8. kaalen – $119,866.80
  9. yokouno1980 – $86,512.56

PokerStars and Well-Known Poker Pro Joe Hachem Part Ways

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Joe HachemPokerStars is one of the most well-known online poker sites today, and it is definitely the largest out there currently.  Those are two of the key reasons that make this bit of news so shocking to many people.  Joe Hachem, who is one of the most popular and well-known poker players in the world, was one of the biggest Team PokerStars Pros on their site.  This was until we found out today that Hachem has decided not to resign any sponsorship deal with the massive online poker site.

Hachem had some incredible results in his career, but none was bigger than his win at the 2005 World Series of Poker Championship Event, which was one of the largest fields in WSOP history.  The news was not negative for either side involved, as Hachem simply said that he was excited to “spend some downtime with my family”, and also to pursue “other career opportunities”.  PokerStars on the other hand stated that they appreciated his time and that he was  “terrific endorser” for the site.

What makes this news even more interesting is that PokerStars is fresh off of their decision to make a few other cuts to their roster, including well-known names like Tom McEvoy (World Championship winner in 1983), Dennis Phillips (2008 November Niner), and Bill Chen (two time gold bracelet winner).  The site also failed to work out a deal with Greg “The Fossilman” Raymer not too long before that.

Simply put, Hachem’s results spoke for themselves.  After winning the World Championship in 2005, he went on to pull in four cashes at the 2006 WSOP, including two final tables and a runner up finish in a No Limit Hold’em event that year.  That wasn’t the end of the run for Hachem though, as he also won a World Poker Tour event before the year came to an end.  As far as his total career numbers go, no one can shake their head at his top 10 total lifetime earnings of $11.4 million, and also the fact that he has won over six figures in every year since 2005.

Of course Hachem will be missed by the PokerStars community, but we assume that we’ll still be seeing quite a bit of him at the big time poker tournaments, and also hopefully still pulling out impressive results in the online poker world as well.

Randy Lew to Attempt to Break World Record at PCA

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2012 Pokerstars Caribbean AdventureMany people in both the online poker world and the live poker world know the popular name Randy “nanonoko” Lew.  He is an online juggernaut and has brought in some incredibly impressive results in recent years.  In a bit of interesting news, Lew will attempt to become a Guinness World Record holder, by breaking a poker record at the 2012 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure tournament.  As far as the world record goes, no one, not even Lew knows exactly what world record that he will be looking to break.  The reason for this is that both PokerStars and Lew have decided to let the poker world make the decision for them.

The decision will be made on the popular online poker forum, Two Plus Two.  PokerStars VIP Manager “PokerStarsCaleb” posted that they were looking for a world record for Lew to break this upcoming January.  It can be a wide range of things, but the general idea behind the record has to be something simple and straight forward that even someone who doesn’t play poker could understand.  They also are hoping that it can have something to do with online poker in some way, which will be interesting as it is a live poker tournament.

While there have been many different ideas coming out for the world record, PokerStars and Lew are looking for something that stands out above the rest.  PokerStars has offered to give the person who comes up with the best suggestion a free entry into the $215 Sunday Million on their site this upcoming weekend.  When all of the world record options are up, both PokerStars and Lew will make the decision in the end.

Lew is incredibly popular in the game of poker, and has hit Supernova Elite status four years straight up until 2011.  His streak came to an end when Black Friday hit unfortunately, but he is back in action after he moved to Vancouver to continue playing on PokerStars.  Now, the action at PCA will kick off at the Atlantis Resort and Casino in the Bahamas on January 5th.  This event is a part of the always popular European Poker Tour, so keep your eye out for Lew in it!

Poker Stars Reveals Last Two 10th Anniversary Promos

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Pokerstars has now revealed all ten of its 10th Anniversary promotions with the last two to be revealed: the Road to the 72 Billionth Hand and Cash Prize Week for the Battle of the Planets Sit & Gos.

The Road to the 72 Billionth Hand is actually the latest Mega Milestone stop of the larger Road to 100 Billion Hands promotion Poker Stars has been running for a while now. Between hands 71.7 billion and 72 billion, every billion hands, Pokerstars will award cash prizes to players dealt into that hand, even if they fold. The winner of each milestone hand wins the biggest prize. The winner of the Mega Milestone 72 billionth hand wins $10,000.

Then there’s Cash Prize Week for the Battle of the Planets Sit and Gos that run regularly at the site. The dates are December 11 – 17, 2011, and here’s how it works. Battle of the Planets is a leaderboard promotion with a low-stakes, or low-orbit, and high-stakes, or high-orbit, leaderboard for eight different Sit and Go tournaments with varying buy-ins and prize pools. Get on the leaderboard by playing in at least 20 of these. Earning a certain Target Score over the course of Cash Prize Week entitles a player to a $10,000 cash prize. For example, in Mercury division, beat 650 points on the low-orbit leaderboard or 2,000 on the high-orbit leaderboard and you win. In addition, the regular prize pools for all Battle of the Planets tournaments will be doubled for all of Cash Prize Week. So for the Jupiter division, for example, the regular $10,000 prize pools will be doubled to $20,000.

Poker Stars Latest World Record Attempt Successful

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Poker Stars has succeeded in once again holding the biggest online poker tournament, based on the number of players registered. There were 200,000 in all, this time, and there would have been more if technical issues hadn’t capped the potential pool at 200,000, the target number to set a new record, according to Ondrej Drebota, Manager of the Czech Republic PokerStars.com. The previous record was set by Poker Stars as well, on December 2009, for 149,196 players.

The ceremony celebrating this latest world record was held at the site of the EPT Prague, which is taking place now. Poker Stars’ WCOOP Radio broadcast the tournament live, which took place at the same time as the world record ceremony, Sunday the 4th of December, 2011.

When the 200,000 player tournament started, it crashed the PokerStars servers, causing all the other tournaments taking place at the site at that time to be held up for 20 minutes.

The game lasted seven hours and change. First place went to a player going by “sokoluk1991”, who, for his $1 buy-in, took down a $40,258.83 first prize. Runner-up, for $34,000, was “Kaitz20”.

This event also marked the start of the 10th Anniversary festivities taking place at PokerStars throughout the rest of the year. It features ten promotions in all, eight of which have already been detailed earlier in these pages. The last two 10th Anniversary promotions – special cash prizes for the Battle of the Planets Sit ‘n’ Gos and a 72 Billionth Hand bonus – will be featured tomorrow.

PokerStars Breaks Record for Online Poker Tournament

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PokerStars is not only the largest online poker site online, but is also the only one of the three online poker sites to overcome Black Friday and continue to bring in impressive results.  The online poker site also held the record for the largest online poker tournament in history, and just this month they decided to attempt to break their own world record once again.  The site placed a cap on the tournament, which featured a $1 buy-in and $250k in the guaranteed prize pool.  The numbers were so high that they brought in an incredible 200,000 players, which is even more amazing considering the fact that they were in the United States market when they originally broke the record.

As if the 200k players wasn’t impressive enough, take into consideration that this number was hit more than three hours before the tournament actually began.  Based on the old numbers, if PokerStars was still in the US market, there is a very realistic chance that this number could have hit 300k in total players, which would have been absurd.

The old record that PokerStars set was 149,196 players, and was set around two years ago, back on December 27, 2009.  It was seen that this number was actually passed in the pre-registration period, many days before the tournament even began.  It’s not much of a surprise that the players were eliminated incredibly fast from this tournament, as many players went for the “go all-in and either double up, or go home” method, since it was only a $1 tournament.  This meant that the players were in the cash only 2 and a half hours into the event.  This meant there was 12,150 players left, and the first payouts were $4.  The first place prize was set at $50k, but the players had a bit of work to do in order to outlast 12k more players.

While it was a nice feeling for everyone who made the money to get into it so quickly, they weren’t nearly as fortunate when it came down to finding an eventual winner.  It took five additional hours for a champion to be found, and a deal was actually made over three handed play as well.  The deal gave the first place winner $40,258.83, and he played by the name of sokoluk1991.  Second place went to Kaitz20, and this player took down $34k for their efforts.  Third place was a player who played under the name King-2-Z, and they took home $25,741.17.  Not a bad deal for just a $1 investment eh?

Martin Staszko Added to Team PokerStars

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Martin Staszko is fresh off of an incredible run at the 2011 World Series of Poker Main Event, in which he outlasted almost the entire field and ended up finishing in second place.  While he was not able to win the event, he was one card away from sending the eventual winner, Pius Heinz, home; and winning the event himself.  A few weeks back, it was reported that Pius Heinz was added to Team PokerStars Pro roster, and there had also been rumors that Staszko could be added to the roster as well.  These rumors ended up being true, and Staszko will now represent the online poker site starting this upcoming week at the European Poker Tour’s Prague event.

Staszko is an impressive story in the world of poker, as he actually didn’t start playing the game until 2007.  It took until January of 2010 for him to pick up his first live tournament cash, when he finished just outside of the final table at the European Poker Tour’s Deauville Main Event.  Staszko finished 11th there, and picked up a pay day of $50k for his efforts.  After that he pulled in a 10th place finish at the Unibet Open a few months after, but hadn’t cashed any events after that until this year’s World Series of Poker.  He had a few cashes at the WSOP, but the one that everyone was focused on was the $5.4 million pay day that he got for his second place finish in the Main Event.

He didn’t have an easy task though, as he was actually in third out of three when they were down to only him, Pius Heinz, and Ben Lamb remaining.  He was up against the Player of the Year in Lamb, and a player in Heinz who was playing incredibly well, and already had another final table at this year’s World Series.  Staszko is 35 years old, and he was up against the young and aggressive style of the two players listed above, but he never blinked in his efforts, and sent Lamb home on the fourth hand of the three handed play.  All in all, the decision to add Staszko to their pro roster was a good one for PokerStars.