Poker Blog & Poker Forum

WSOP 2011 will kick off this weekend. There will be some notable events on the way, but ultimately the focus will be the Main Event starting on July 7. After the final table is set for the Main Event, there will be a break. Then the final table will resume in November.

The sports betting site Bet365 is among the first to release the odds for the winner of the Main Event. Right at the top is the popular favorite Phil Ivey with odds of 66/1. Next are three players with odds of 80/1. They are Gus Hansen, Patrik Antonius and Daniel Negreanu. Negreanu will be thrilled to be placed ahead of rival poker professional Phil Hellmuth who has odds of 150/1. How the female poker players will fare has always been of interest. The woman with the shortest odds is not surprisingly Vanessa Selbst. She has odds of 200/1.

Other markets for the WSOP 2011 Main Event have been opened by Bet365. One of the more interesting ones is for the last woman standing. Selbst tops this with odds of 10/1. Next are Annette Obrestad, Kathy Liebert, Vanessa Rousso and Annie Duke with odds of 12/1. Poker babe Maria Ho who has been last woman standing before has odds of 20/1. Another related market is whether a female player will make the top 20 in the WSOP 2011 Main Event. The odds for this are 9/4, whereas the odds against this are 1/3.

Whereas the Main Event is the focus of the poker world, it is certainly not everything. The sports book Bodog has some interesting markets that cover the wider WSOP tournament. Both Doyle Brunson and Johnny Chan are tied at 10 bracelets, just one behind the record holder Phil Hellmuth of 11 bracelets. The odds of either of Brunson and Chan winning the 11th bracelet are 5/1.

Another feature of interest is whether WSOP 2011 will throw up multiple bracelet winners. According to the odds it is likely that a player will win two bracelets but unlikely that a player will win three bracelets. At Bodog the odds that a player will win 2 or more bracelets are 1/3, whereas the odds that a player will win three or more bracelets are 5/1.

The aftershocks of Black Friday continue to be felt. Not all the news is bad. There is some that is good and some that borders on funny.

The good news is that PokerStars has returned more than $100 million to American players who had deposits with the indicted online poker room when it closed down. The statement from PokerStars states that it is continuing to service payout requests and is committed to returning every cent. PokerStars has global interests. It operates worldwide under license from the Isle of Man Government. It also holds specific licenses in France, Italy and Estonia and has applied for license in many other jurisdictions. Clearly PokerStars does not want any adverse fallout from its American operations to affect its global ones.

The list of bad news is longer. For a start the other two indicted US poker sites are nowhere near paying off their customers. Full Tilt Poker had reached an agreement with the Department of Justice soon after Black Friday but has not reported any progress in this matter since. Absolute Poker reached its agreement just two days back.

In an exclusive given to Jenny Woo, Doyle Brunson said, “Reluctantly, I have decided to terminate my endorsement contract with Doyles Room. It pains me to leave at this time. I have aspirations of reentering the online poker business when the United States Government passes legislation, that officially legalize online poker sites.” The Doyles Room management has decided to continue to serve U.S. customers. Brunson has asked them to refrain from using his name and image, but they continue to do so. Watch this space for developments.

The organizers of WSOP have expressed a concerned that many players will not be able to pay the buy-ins this year. A large number of American players at WSOP are regulars at online poker sites and with funds blocked at the indicted poker rooms they may find themselves out of cash. Also these poker rooms ran satellites offering free WSOP seats, which is now not open to American players.

On the funny side there are posts at online poker forums of Absolute Poker having sent a debt collector to recover $700 from an unnamed player. The player claims never to have played at Absolute Poker or UB.com.

WSOP and ESPN have come together to organize rematches of three classic poker games, in which history was made. The matches will be filmed on June 2 during WSOP 2011 and will be aired by ESPN on July 26. The telecast will include footage from the original matches.

2003 was a watershed year for poker. Henry Orenstein had invented the hole camera that enabled television viewers to see the players’ hole cards. Online poker had brought a flood of players to land based tournaments like WSOP. In WSOP 2003 online poker qualifier Chris Moneymaker, playing his first live tournament, reached the heads up of the Main Event with a legend of the game Sammy Farha, and won. The first WSOP rematch pits Moneymaker and Farha, but with an interesting twist. It will be played in a best of three format. The first match will replicate the WSOP 2003 chip situation. Moneymaker will start with 5,490,000 chips and Farha with 2,900,000 chips. The second match will reverse the chip positions. If the players are tied then there will be a third match with equal starting stacks.

In 1989 Johnny Chan reached the heads-up of the Main Event. He had won this event in 1987 and 1988 and was aiming for a hat trick. Up against him was Phil Hellmuth, then with zero WSOP bracelets. If Hellmuth won then he would become the youngest Main Event champion. That time history favored Hellmuth. This rematch will be a single game in which both players start with equal chip stacks.

Poker fans like to feel involved and the Internet is a willing medium. Fans will have to vote for one of the following WSOP Main Event heads up pairings for the third rematch: 1988 Johnny Chan vs. Erik Seidel; 2004 Greg Raymer vs. David Williams; 2006 Jamie Gold vs. Paul Wasicka or 2010 Jonathan Duhamel vs. John Racener. The rematch will be a single game with equal stacks. Fans will be able to vote on the WSOP Official Facebook Fan Page from May 2.

Of his rematch Moneymaker said, “Winning the WSOP Main Event was a life altering moment. Even though I’m agreeing to run it again against Sammy, I have been assured they can’t take away my title if my bluffs don’t work as well this time.”

It is not only the female of the species that has the right to change their minds. Even the males can do so. This has been demonstrated by the 2008 WSOP Main Event winner Peter Eastgate. In July last year he stunned the poker fraternity by announcing a premature retirement. And then to prove that he meant it, Eastgate sold his gold and diamond WSOP bracelet on eBay. Though to be fair to him he did this for charity. Now, Eastgate has stunned the poker fraternity a second time by announcing that he is coming back from retirement.

On his PokerStars blog Eastgate wrote last week, “Last summer I decided that I wanted to stop playing poker and catch my breath and find out who I am and what I want to do with my life. Over the last 8 months I have had a chance to reconnect with my friends and most important, my family. I have spent quality time with my family and really had an opportunity to figure out who I am and what I want to do with the rest of my life.”

And according the Eastgate that something is playing poker. It took Eastgate all of eight months to find out how much he loves playing poker. He said that he enjoys the competitive element and the mental challenges of tournament poker. Earlier he felt that he was not growing as a person while playing poker, but now he feels that he will be able to both play poker and lead a healthy life outside of poker. In the blog Eastgate wrote that does not consider this as a comeback. In his heart he always knew that he would be back. It was only a question of when.

He also thanked PokerStars who continued to support him while he was not playing. Eastgate has announced his comeback events and both are sponsored by that online poker room. The first event will be the PokerStars EPT Copenhagen. This means a lot to him as it is his home ground. Then he will play the NBC Heads Up Championship. And Eastgate will get back in tournament shape by playing online at PokerStars.

Caesars Interactive Entertainment (formerly Harrah’s), who are the owners of WSOP, had launched WSOPE in 2007. WSOPE is a series of live poker tournaments along the lines of WSOP in Las Vegas but on a much smaller scale. WSPOE was launched to cater to the growing popularity of poker tournaments in Europe as evidenced by the increasing number of European players on the American poker circuits. London was the epicenter of European poker and till 2010 the annual WSOPE tournament was held there.

Caesars Interactive Entertainment has now announced that WSOPE 2011 will be held in Cannes in France. The tournament will start on October 7, 2011 and will end on October 21. The announcement does not speak of a permanent shift in location but pertains to this year only. Cannes is a popular tourist destination on the French Riviera in southern France and is known for the annual international film festival held there. It is very close to the gambling paradise of Monte Carlo.

The reason for the change appears to be the increasing number of participants in WSOPE. In London the WSOPE events were spread over three casinos. In Cannes they will be held at two casinos, which are the Casino Barriere de Cannes and Hotel Majestic Barriere. These two casinos have two times the space of the three London casinos and hence WSPOE 2011 can play host to double the number of participants. That WSOPE will be a major focus of Caesars Interactive Entertainment can be seen from the fact that the number of bracelet events for WSOPE 2011 has been increased to seven. This though is far short of the number of events in the Las Vegas WSOP. With increasing prize money as well the WSOPE 2011 will be the biggest WSOPE till date.

The Main Event will be the place of pride as usual. Annette Obrestad won the inaugural Main Event in 2007, at an age when she would not be allowed to play in Las Vegas. The subsequent winners were John Juanda in 2008, Barry Shulman in 2009 and James Bord in 2010. The most prominent loser in the heads up was Daniel Negreanu in 2009.