Read what's fished up this week in the poker net. The latest poker tourneys seem to have excellent game conditions for good players.
Welcome to a new feature, readers! You’ve found the
first installment of what we believe will become a
PokerMagazine.com mainstay, a weekly look at the best
and most entertaining happenings in the poker world.
Nothing’s off the table, and we’ll stop the pre-ramble
right here. So, without further lead-in...
Aussie Millions Getting Underway -- The first week of
the year finds much of the poker world’s attention
focused way down in Melbourne-Town, as the four-week
long Aussie Millions poker extravaganza kicked off at
Melbourne’s Crown Victoria casino. It’s an apt
locale, as the Crown Vic is the largest casino in the
Southern Hemisphere. Gabriel Xiourouffa and Nick
Sutar have already claimed titles in the first two
events.
Moneymaker Millionaire Crowned -- Poker Stars flew 27
players to the Bahamas for the finale of their
“Moneymaker Millionaire” promotion, part of the larger
Poker Stars Caribbean Adventure, and the winner has
been decided. As reported by Stars’ house-blogger
supreme, Brad “Keno Crayon” Willis, a wild hand saw
the million-dollar prize land in the lap of Quillan
Nagel. Nagel sniffed out a blatant bluff by runner-up
Jerry Watterson on the event’s final hand, taking down
the first prize of $850,000 and one of those James
Bond cars, a custom-designed Aston-Martin. (And okay,
Brad Willis’s nickname is really “Otis.” But we do
have fun.)
Mansion Up... -- Mansion Poker’s trying to increase
its online footprint as 2007 begins, kicking off a
series of daily tournaments with a minimum $100,000
guaranteed prize pool in each. So far, this has
created several massive overlays, as happened in
Mansion’s December $250,000 value-added promotion.
Several of the early January events have seen $40,000
to $50,000 overlays in the $100+10 events.
... and Ultimate Bet Down -- On the flip side,
Ultimate Bet seems to have discontinued its own Sunday
$200,000 Guarantee for the time being. The recently
concluded Ultimate Bet Online Championships offered
some surprising overlays to its participants,
including a wonderful value in the UBOC Main Event
that saw several hundred thousand dollars in overlay
in play. While that was a bonanza for the players, it
was expensive advertising for Ultimate Bet, and it was
followed by another major overlay in UB’s Christmas
$200K tourney. Other sites still servicing the United States have reported sizable traffic increases, and UB
also issued a press release in December touting a 60%
increase in traffic. Unfortunately, that release
offered no specifics, and wherever the purported
increase was, it wasn’t in the big-money weekly
guarantee, which has held almost perfectly steady over
the past several months, in usually offering a nominal
overlay, and for the time being, UB seems to have gone
in a different direction.
Oshkosh “Poker Stripper” Case Moves Forward -- The
case of Dawn Hamilton, a 22-year-old Oshkosh, WI woman
who played a game of strip poker with a 13-year-old
girl also in attendance, moved forward as Hamilton
waived her right to a preliminary hearing. This
charge was originally filed as a felony but has since
been downgraded to a misdemeanor, though Hamilton also
has still to answer on a felony bail-jumping charge
from a previous incident. This writer used to live
only 20 minutes from the Oshkosh area, and doesn’t
remember the home games being anything like this...
Poker After Dark Kicks Off, Viewers Treated to
Hellmuth Antics -- If “treated” is the right word,
that is. It turns out that having Phil Hellmuth and
Shawn “Sheiky” Sheikhan in adjacent seats is a recipe
for weirdness. Hellmuth is always Hellmuth, and
Sheiky has his own antagonistic reputation, originally
becoming notorious through his running war-of-words
with Mike Matusow in the 2005 World Series of Poker
Main Event. Readers looking for more should search
YouTube for some of the relevant Poker After Dark
clips.
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