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The WPT World Championship marks the end of the WPT season. The only event to follow is the Super High Roller. Both are held at Bellagio in Las Vegas. The current Season IX WPT World Championship started on May 14 and will run till May 20. At first it was expected that the events of Black Friday would impact the starting field. As the event kicked off only 188 players had registered as compared to 195 last year. But many players register late and the final starting field of 220 eclipsed last year’s count by a fair margin. But Black Friday did show its hand. Players participating under the Full Tilt banner were down to one third. There were only five Full Tilt players. Notable absentees were Howard Lederer, Phil Ivey, Andy Bloch and Gus Hansen.

At the time of writing, Day 3 is over and 52 players are in the fray. The chip leader is Sam El Sayed with 1.1 million chips. Hot on his heels is Nenad Medic. Of the big names remaining is only Doyle Brunson. But Brunson has been steadily pushed down. He ended Day 1 in sixth position. At the end of Day 3 he is 33rd with a chip count of 250K. Two big live tournament players were knocked out on Day 3. There were Daniel Negreanu and Phil Hellmuth. However, it was Day 2 that proved to be the graveyard of the poker professionals. Players to bite the dust included Scotty Nguyen, Erick Lindgren, Michael Matusow, Justin Bonomo, Kathleen Liebert, Men Nguyen and Michael Mizrachi.

The payout structure for the WPT World Championship has been announced. The winner will take home $1,618,344. The runner up will not do too badly either. He will be rewarded with $1,061,900. The buy-in for this event was $25,000.

The Player of the Year will be named at the end of Season IX. The current leader is Andy Frankenberger with 2,100 POY Points. He is followed by Vivek Rajkumar with 2,000 points. The results of the WPT World Championship will not affect the top positions on the Player of the Year list. It will then all boil down to the Super High Roller.

Life is an amazing phenomenon. While some life gets extinguished somewhere, new life comes into existence somewhere else. This very phenomenon occurred in the world of online poker. On April 15 the Department of Justice seized the domain names of three US poker sites and on the same day Hustler launched its online poker room. The brick and mortar version of Hustler Casino opened in 2000 in Gardena in California. It is owned by Larry Flynt, the publisher of the adult magazine “Hustler” (in picture).

The Hustler online poker room can be accessed at http://www.hustlercasinola.com. But do not expect a plethora of naked girls or even scantily clad ones at the web site. However, the brazenness is evident. The most visible statement on the poker room web site is “Has your online poker site been seized by the FBI? Try ours today!” The statement goes on to add that the Hustler online poker room is completely legal, totally free and ready now.

That the new online poker room will leverage the brand of Hustler Casino is both expected and valid. A prominent display is the announcement of the A Night of Poker tournament that will be hosted by the recently engaged Annie Duke at the Hustler Casino. The event will take place on May 7 from 5.00 PM. The buy in is $225 and the first prize is a $10,000 Seat at the 2011 World Series of Poker Main Event. All players will receive an official tournament t-shirt and hat. And even though it is not an endorsement of the online poker room by Annie Duke, it makes great marketing sense to have her name there.

The Hustler online poker room apparently does not as yet offer cash games. But it has announced daily, weekly and monthly online tournaments for cash prizes and packages like holiday getaways. There even prizes with for players with the best records at the online poker room.

Larry Flint is a self styled poker aficionado who has been entering events in every WSOP. It matters little to him that he has been spectacularly unsuccessful at the tables. The only time that he has been in the cash was in 2000. Flint finished in eighth in a limit seven card stud event and won $10,100.

High roller poker tournaments seem to be the order of the day. In March the online poker room Full Tilt Poker had announced a series of high roller events ending with the awarding of the Onyx Cup. Now World Poker Tour (WPT) has jumped on the high roller bandwagon. Through a press release from Los Angeles, WPT has announced the debut of its Super High Roller Event on May 18 and May 19 during the upcoming World Championship series at the Bellagio. The Super High Roller event will have a buy in of $100,000, which is the largest entry fee in the history of WPT. Action from the Super High Roller event will be televised on FSN along with other WPT World Championship episodes.

Steve Heller, CEO of WPT, said, “Hosting a hundred thousand dollar buy in event within the WPT World Championship series means the world’s elite players have a chance to show their mettle as they battle for one of the year’s most coveted titles and one of the highest buy-in titles, all within a single week.” WPT champion and winner of eight World Series of Poker bracelets, Erik Seidel (in picture) has confirmed participation. So have Daniel Shak and Justin “BoostedJ” Smith.

The press release says that because the game’s top professionals will already be at the Bellagio for WPT World Championship during this period, the Super High Roller event will attract the premier players and generate a robust prize pool. However not everyone in the poker fraternity agrees with this assessment. The reason forwarded is that the inaugural Onyx Cup event takes place the week before and also will be the preferred event for most players. Not many players will be willing to shell out for two high roller tournaments in the space of a week. The pessimists are predicting a participation of about 20 poker professionals for the WPT event, which will reduce the prize pool to that of a second grade event. On the other hand they calculate that the turn out for the Onyx event will be around 45. Only time will tell who will have to eat his words.

The Cosmopolitan Las Vegas on the Strip is all set for a grand opening on December 15, 2010 with Jay-Z and Coldplay providing the entertainment. It is a massive two tower complex with about 3,000 rooms, the usual restaurants, nightclubs and slot machines. The highlight of the Cosmopolitan is a three-story crystal-strewn bar that will give clients the experience of being inside of a chandelier. The cheeky television advertisements feature a bottomless hotel bellboy with the tagline “Just the right amount of wrong.”

While this appears to be a fairy tale story there are two issues seriously wrong with it. This year has been a bad one for casinos in Las Vegas with rumors of Harrah’s Rio on sale at one time. The second issue is even queerer. The Cosmopolitan is owned by Deutsche Bank. At a time when fiscal prudence is top priority for banks Deutsche Bank is entering the gambling business. The fact of the matter is that Deutsche Bank was left literally holding the baby.

Deutsche Bank had given a loan of $1 billion to one Ian Bruce Eichner for development of the property into a luxury hotel cum casino. However in 2008 Eichner defaulted on the loans. Not wanting to sell out at a loss Deutsche Bank tried to enter into partnership deals with market leaders like Hilton Worldwide and MGM Resorts International, but could not succeed. They then decided to take up the project on their own. They hired engineers, architects and interior designers and pumped in $3 billion more. The end result is that the Cosmopolitan will be one of the most expensive resorts in Las Vegas history. Speaking about the bank’s decision in a meeting with Nevada regulators, Thomas Fiato the head of corporate investments said, “The best decision brought to us was build it and operate it in a world-class way.”

Industry experts feel that based on the present economic situation Deutsche Bank will have to wait at least 15 years before being out of the red. Competitors are wary that the Cosmopolitan will cut rates in order to keep its rooms full. But Deutsche Bank says that they are committed to see the investment through. And fortunately for them the Strip is showing signs of bottoming out after a merciless recession.

Some poker tournaments are hardball poker, just as the WSOP Main Event, which is down to the Heads Up at the time of writing. Others are more social and holiday events like the Punta Cana Poker Classic 2010, which begins on November 10.

The social events have exotic locales, and nothing can be more exotic than the Moon Palace Hotel in Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic. The entire package costs only $2,000 and includes 4 nights in the five star hotel that will soon be part of the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino franchise, airport hotel transfers, all inclusive premium food and beverages and the opening event “Dominican Night”. And it also includes the $1,000 + $100 buy-in to the main tournament, with $100,000 guaranteed and an estimated additional pot prize of another $100,000.

The celebrity brigade is headed by the grand daddy of poker, Doyle Brunson. When the event was announced he said, “I really like the idea that there’s going to be a great 5-star poker tournament in paradise this fall and I can’t wait to play in it and get some R&R with new friends and old. A lot of people are already excited about this event and hopefully next year Doyles Room will become the title sponsor of the tournament, increase the buy-in and prize pool a bit, and build it into a recurring event that the entire poker world looks forward to.” Doyle will be accompanied by his poker playing family and the members of Doyles Room who have won the packages through online tournaments.

But beyond doubt the celebrity who will stop the traffic in Punta Cana will be poker babe Jenny Woo. Jenny’s official tag line is that she is the Senior International Correspondent at Gambling911.com, but she is as much the subject of poker gossip as its creator. And as someone who has dated the likes of Vin Diesel, Dennis Rodman and David Navarro it is not difficult to imagine why. Jenny also has a Doyle Brunson connection. For two years in a row she has given him top billing in her list of the sexiest poker players. But when Doyle had his list of sexy poker players compiled through a vote system Jenny was conspicuous by her absence. She is as sexy as Lacey Jones and company, it is the poker part that she will need to work on.