Online Poker News

There is more competition and new challenges coming to Europe in the form of the Poker Pros Network (PPN), which has become the latest site to move to a European internet domain to comply with the crackdown on sites offering online poker to US players.  The site also stated that it would be leaving the Cake Network in the near future and establishing its own proprietary software platform, a move expected to take place sometime in early autumn.

The PPN will stop accepting new customers based in the United States from August 31st, although players who have registered accounts prior to that date will still be able to play on the site. PPN pros are accessible at all levels anyone can challenger a team pro to a heads up game for amounts from $2 to $2,000.  PPN team professionals include Kevin Vandersmissen, the 2010 Belgian Player of the Year, Matias Gabrenja, Stefan Mattsson, Neil Stewart and James Worth.

If you want to get into the World Championship of Online Poker 2011 (WCOOP) then you’d better get your skates on as the satellites will soon be up and running. The event kicks off this coming weekend when there will be a Mega Satellite into WCOOP-52 – a $320 NL Hold’em tourney with a prize fund of $400,000 guaranteed. There are 250 guaranteed seats to be won this Sunday alone. The main action starts on Sunday September the 4th until the 25th when the main event a $5,200 Hold’em takes place. This year’s WCOOP features 62 events with a staggering $30,000,000 in guaranteed prize money.

The 2011 WCOOP will be one of the biggest online poker tournament events ever staged and culminates in the $5,200 NL Hold’em Main Event ($1M 1st Place Guaranteed) on September 25. The prize pool for the main event will be at least $5million, so get into those satellites now!

The major talking point at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas this summer was the extent to which experts had got their predictions wrong. Following on from the closing down of the three largest sites to American poker players essentially imposing prohibition on one of the undisputed boom industries of the 21st century fears were expressed over the WSOP main tourney with player numbers predicted to plummet, perhaps by as much as 60% but there was almost no change in attendance at all.

Although its legality in the United States has been uncertain since 2006, a study in 2009 by Poker Players Research showed that 10 million Americans played online poker, and it had grown into a worldwide industry worth at least $2.5bn Prohibition did not work in another context some time ago and it would seem that it has not again.

Online poker site Full Tilt, which employs about 600 people in Dublin and is regulated on Alderney in the Channel Islands, is one of a handful of sites that continued to accept players from the US after the introduction in 2006 of legislation making it illegal for payment processors to transfer funds from American residents to gambling sites offshore. However in a shock move Alderney suspended Full Tilt’s licence two weeks ago. A message on the site says: “The system is currently down.”

Following on from this, Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt is preparing to radically overhaul online gambling licensing rules which have left hundreds of British poker players unable to get hold of their funds after the founders of Full Tilt Poker, the world’s second-largest poker site, found themselves at the centre of money-laundering and illegal gambling charges in the US. Together with market leader PokerStars and number three online operators Absolute Poker, Full Tilt has been accused of using hundreds of bogus online retail websites and corrupt banks to hoodwink the US authorities into believing payments taken from American residents were for goods and services other than poker.

Yet again the question of whether the game of poker is a game of skill or luck has been raised again and has been at the centre of arguments over the legalisation of online poker in many jurisdictions, including the United States. A new paper has attempted to answer that vexed question and the author Steven Levitt has come to the same conclusion that poker players themselves have: that poker is indeed an enterprise governed more by skill than chance.

Using data from the 57 tournaments of the 2010 World Series of Poker, it was found that those skilled players made a 30% return on their investment during the series, while the remaining group suffered an overall 15% loss. Also using other sports as models Levitt came to very similar conclusions, for example considering where skilled players finished in tournaments when compared to unskilled players, he found that a skilled player was approximately 54.9% likely to finish ahead of an unskilled player.