Gambling News Blog

Two representatives of Stoxpoker, the online training site, will battle against Polaris, a poker-playing series of computer programs developed by researchers at the University of Alberta. The match will take place July 4-6 during the Gaming Life Expo in the Rio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

One of the two human competitors will be Nick “Stoxtrader” Grudzien, the successful high-stakes online player and co-founder of Stoxpoker. The other has yet to be named, though will also come from the group of Stoxpoker pros. The match represents a chance for Polaris — and its creators, the University of Alberta’s Computer Poker Research Group (CPRG) — to avenge its narrow loss last July to Phil Laak and
Ali Eslami.
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You don’t want to miss the first week of the 2008 World Series of Poker. Although some of the biggest stories of the 2008 won’t materialize until later in the series, those epic stories often take root during the first couple of days at the Rio. Don’t wait until the $50,000 H.O.R.S.E. event to roll around to start following the action in the most prestigious poker tournament in the world, because you’re guaranteed to miss out on the little fires that have the potential to ignite into raging infernos.
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With slightly over 24 hours before Event 1 of the year’s biggest poker tournament kicks off, PokerNews is still giving you many ways you can get in on the good stuff and possibly walk away with your very own World Series of Poker* (WSOP) package.

If you still haven’t won yourself a seat to the poker competition everyone wants to be at – make sure you’re pumped and ready to play on the following days;
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Everyone knows who Kathy Liebert is when she walks into the poker room. Kathy boasts lifetime tournament earnings well over $4.4 million, the career leader among women by a wide margin. To date, no other woman is within about $2 million of Liebert’s impressive total.

I recently sat down with Kathy to find out how the last year has been and what she is doing to prepare for this year’s World Series of Poker. Since the 2007 WSOP, Kathy has added over $223,000 to her total life earnings. Another bracelet is definitely on her priority list, but not as much as keeping her eye on the top prize, the Main Event.
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Titan Poker’s European Championship of Online Poker (ECOOP II) has seen a fabulous turn out since its launch last Friday May 23. Following a very successful ECOOP 2007 where $2.5 Million in prizes were given away throughout the duration of the ten day tournament, the ECOOP II will feature an even bigger prize pool – a guaranteed $3.6 Million!

Similar to last year’s tournament, the ECOOP II schedule sees 10 days of back-to-back poker culminating in the $1.5 Million Guaranteed Main Event on Sunday June 1. Interested players can buy-in to the Main Event for $1,000 + $60 or qualify through daily satellites running daily as we speak.
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With the first bracelet event of the 2008 World Series of Poker just a couple of days away, the Rio opened its doors today to the first wave of event registrations and an early handful of single-table satellite and cash-game players. While demand at the event registration desk was light early on, satellite action began at 10:00 AM with a handful of tables soon underway.
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PokerStars has now announced an expanded Season 2 schedule for its successful Asia Pacific Poker Tour (APPT), adding a new, exciting location to cap off the start of the new season. As expected, the first event of the APPT will be held in the People’s Republic of China, at the luxurious Grand Waldo Hotel and Casino, the site of the recently opened PokerStars Macau, Macau’s first live poker room. This event will begin on September 1, 2008, and will feature two big events over nine days. The $3,200 main event will run for six days and will host up to 1,000 players and guarantee a $1.3 million prize pool. Following that, the APPT will host a second prestigious “high rollers” event at Macau. The $19,250
three-day event will be open to 300 players and guarantee $1.3 million for the prize pool. More information, including online satellite qualifying specifics, is available at www.appt.com/tournaments/macau/.
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Prevailing wisdom has held that businesses that rely on gambling are recession-proof, and to some extent, that may still be true. But while gamblers are still making their ways to the tables, the economic slowdown is definitely being felt on the Vegas Strip. The Strip has profited over the last few years by reinventing itself as a luxury destination, replete with $200-and-up-per-night rooms, high-end dining, upscale nightclubs and top-flight entertainment. But straying from its gambling roots appears to be making the Strip more vulnerable to economic conditions.
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Poker players aren’t necessarily thinking about the environment when they hear the word “green”, but a new eco-friendly poker table scheduled to make its first appearance at the 2008 World Series of Poker hopes to change that in a good way. New Jersey-based EGM Green will showcase its new Earth-conscious poker table at this year’s WSOP, as part of the firm’s larger push to bring its line of eco-friendly gaming products into the casino and luxury industries.
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Tokwiro Enterprises ENRG (Tokwiro), proprietors of UltimateBet.com, today issued a formal statement detailing the complete results of an ongoing internal investigation into alleged unfair play on the site, occurring from March 2006 through December 2007. In its statement, Tokwiro confirmed that unfair play did occur, identified the online poker accounts involved in the fraudulent activities, created an investigative timeline covering the incidents and published a healthy list of corrective measures. Tokwiro worked in cooperation with the Kahnawake Gaming Commission (KGC) and other third-party experts in reviewing hand histories and game data, analyzing software and network security and auditing the site’s
security practices and procedures.
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