The 22 year-old Jeff Forest recently won the World Poker Tour Finals at Foxwoods, the most significant victory in his poker career so far. The $10,000 buy-in tournament hosted 242 players and ended with a final table formed of:

Thomas Marchese – 3.022.000
Jeff Forrest – 1.949.000
Mohsin Charania – 1.024.000
Nikolai Yakovenko – 624.000
Dave Inselberg – 344.000
Keven Stammen – 341.000

Therefore, Marchese entered the final table as chip leader while Jeff Forest was second in chips. However, Marchese was dethroned and eliminated by Forrest, leaving the table in 3rd position. This left the title to be disputed in a heads-up between Forrest and Inselberg.

As the heads-up got underway, Forest was surpassing his opponent in terms of chips and just ten hands later the outcome of the Foxwoods World Poker Tour Finals was sealed. It was when Forest held Qd-Qh against Inselberg’s 9h-6s.

Forrest mini-raised to 200,000 and Iselberg called and then check-raised Forrest all-in on a 9d-8s-5c flop. When the turn revealed a Qs and the river an Ac, Forrest became the winner of the WPT title and Inselberg won the 2nd place worth $325,608.

This victory was Forrest’s first major win since the beginning of his poker career. In just over a year of play, Forrest succeeded in cashing twice in World Series of Poker events and finishing 2nd in a $1,500 buy-in event at 2010 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure tournament series. His victory at Foxwoods increased his all-time aernings to $740,000.

The final table cash outs at Foxwoods were:

1: Jeff Forrest – 548.752$
2: Dave Inselberg – 325.608$
3: Thomas Marchese – 211.759$
4: Nikolai Yakovenko – 170.773$
5: Keven Stammen – 128.650$
6: Mohsin Charania – 104.741$

Full Tilt recently announced the upcoming launch of their popular Rush Poker game on mobile devices. This announcement was made via an email sent to their Black Card members in which they are asked to assist in the beta testing of the mobile version of the game. The Rush Poker mobile application is available for mobile devices running Android 2.2 and Full Tilt members that possess such devices are asked to participate in the preliminary testing phase of this software.

The mobile phones that support this software are:
Acer Liquid Stream S110
HTC Desire
HTC Droid Incredible
HTC Evo 4G
HTC Google Nexus One
HTC Desire HD
Motorola Droid 2
Motorola Droid Pro / Droid 2 World Edition
Motorola Droid X
T-Mobile G2

The online version of Rush Poker was launched back in January and since then it has had a tremendous success. Rush Poker represents regular cash games played at a higher speed, with players randomly moving from one table to another when they click fold.

The mobile version was designed on the Adobe Flash Platform. According to some, the success of the mobile Rush Poker depends to a great extent on the signal strength of the phone.

“I think going to Rush first is a ballsy move – me thinks you’ll need a strong signal to make this work. Even if it sucks in the short-term, bandwidth will improve and phones will improve to the point where mobile will not perform differently from the PC-based Full Tilt Poker,” said one player knowledgeable about mobile phones.

One of the testers of Rush Poker Mobile was Leggo Poker instructor Brian Wilber. Some of the negative points he mentions about the application’s performance are that it is “a little clumsy” and that he couldn’t figure out the bet size because of the lag. “Sometimes you have to click the buttons a couple of times to get them to work, but I assume that is just the lag,” he adds.

Despite the limitations, there are elements that make the application easy to handle. Wilber mentions some of them:
“ The ‘Fold’ and ‘Call’ buttons do what they say and the ‘Raise’ to button brings up another prompt with a slider and ‘+’ and ‘-’ buttons where you can adjust the bet size and then click ‘Bet. [...] It is easy to see everything you would want to know like players’ names, stack sizes, your cards, and the community cards.”

Full Tilt wants to render Rush Poker Mobile available to anyone with a compatible phone. The Americans will be able to take advantage of this innovation while the French may not, according to a Full Tilt source.

Daniel Negreanu, a poker legend and PokerStars pro, has proved his poker and golf skills at EPT Vilamoura. He has won this innovative tournament that beautifully combines golf, poker and the exotic landscape of Vilamoura, a sea-side resort in Portugal.

On Day 1 players had to compete against each other on the golf fairways and their golf results were converted at the end of the day into chips to be used on Day 2 at the poker confrontation.

After Day 1, Daniel Negreanu boosted his chip stack with $2500 which shows that he had a good performance on the golf course. Day 2 was also a good day for him as he lasted to the final table where he went heads up against Pieter De Korver, whom he eliminated, Negreanu holding Q-J against Pieter’s J-2.

Though the prize money from Vilamoura was not as substantial as some of his previous winnings, Negreanu has surely enjoyed this tournament. The golf fairways and the poker action brought him more excitement than the modicum $8000 which he received for his victory.



In the last few months, attendance rates at the World Poker Tour events have plunged, due to high entrance fees it seems. As soon as the organizers reduced those fees from $10000 to $5000, the positive results soon appeared: 462 players were attracted which created a $2,15 million prize-pool, a little less than last year’s $2,63 million prize-pool, claimed by Prahlad Friedman along with his first WPT title.

The cream of the poker community has come together at WPT Legends at Bicyle Casino of Bell Gardens in California. Some of the poker masters participating at this event were Daniel Negreanu , Barry Greenstein,, Phil Hellmuth and Allen Cunningham, leaving the competition right from Day 2.

The top of the leaderboard so far is Phil“USCPhildo” Collins, leading with a $898,000 stack while the average stacks are around $192,500. Among the other most noticeable players, who stand a chance of winning three quarters of a million dollars, are Jonathan Little, JC Alvarado and Erica Schoenberg.

This is what we call true bad luck! Sothea Sinn, a young man from New Zealand, was enthousiastic about winning 60,000 New Zealand dollars ( i.e. $44,000 US) from a progressive jackpot at a Caribbean Stud Poker table at a casino in Auckland.

Unfortunately, his enthousiasm soon turned to sorrow as the casino officials announced him that they could not give him the jackpot. Even worse, it was Sinn himself that brought this upon himself. In 2004, he asked the casino to ban him and his girlfriend from playing at that casino because he felt he was gambling too much.

Sinn returned to the casino thinking that his ban expired long ago. However, according to the casino staff, Sinn had initially agreed to undergo counseling for his gambling problem and this would allow him readmission. Since he hasn’t undergone counseling, he automatically didn’t comply with this agreement and as a result the ban was still active.

Sinn declared to the Dominion-Post newspaper that he was “absolutely gutted” at hearing this news.

According to some sources, local law would side with the casino. Even if the casino wanted to pay Sinn the jackpot, they probably couldn’t; the self-exclusion list that Sinn had placed himself on is a legal instrument that forbids the casino to pay Sinn his winnings.

Sinn can’t simply accept this situation and he is determined to go to New Zealand’s gambling authorities for investigation.

European countries still turn to online gambling for financial help during times of economic crisis.

In contrast to Europe which has taken a more practical stance toward this subject, US is concerned about the social implications of online gambling.

Instead, Europe is more concerned about protecting the domestically state monopolised lotteries and other domestic gambling operators from foreign competition.

European countries seem to have reached the conclusion that it is wiser to come with a practical solution to the problem instead of continually trying to prevent gamblers wagering their money online is we also take into consideration the decline of land-based casinos.

David Trunkfield, consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, explains:

“What’s happened is a realization that you can’t uninvent the Internet. People are gaming online. You either try to regulate and tax it, or people are going to go to the offshore operators, where you don’t get any revenue.”

This is why the European online gambling industry has been growing steadily to the point where it’s biggest in the world at present while US continues to be inflexible about this issue. This year alone in Europe, the revenues from online gambling accounted for almost half of the entire gambling industry’s revenues. In the US, despite the high demand for online services, the American online gambling ban is being rigorously reinforced since 2006 causing a downwards revenue spiral since then.

The trend setter in Europe was UK, the first major European country to embrace online gambling and begin regulating its market in 2005. Following its example, countries such as France, Italy and Denmark started regulating their markets and gaining impressive tax revenues from partially liberalizing this industry. Other EU states including Germany, Spain and Greece are interested in liberalizing their markets too.

Betfair’s Tim Phillips concludes on this:

“The gambling business is one of Europe’s real success stories online. This is a business in which Europe leads the world.”

A shocking study was released by the Nova Southern University. The study discovered that 4 out of 5 poker players (i.e. 80% of them) use drugs for enhancing their performance at the poker table.

Kevin Clauson, the study author and pharmacy specialist, reveals that drugs help poker players to “stay awake longer, to focus and concentrate better” increasing their competitiveness. The professor adds that these substances are bad for human health and can produce serious negative effects if taken for a long period of time.

The drugs they use range from regular energizers to down-right drugs. For example they use caffeine from coffee and guarana from energy drinks but also marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines, Valium and other prescription drugs.

Those who participated in this study and admitted taking drugs were players from last year’s WSOP in Las Vegas as well as international players who answered an online questionnaire. The respondents were professional, semi-professional, amateur and recreational players in Europe, North America and Asia. They used drugs to increase their concentration, to calm their nerves, to help them stay awake or sharpen their memory.

Poker players who take drugs are like sportspeople who take doping substances. They all take these substances to improve their performance but the difference is that in sports this practice is punished while in poker it is not which is unfair.