Tue, 01/25/2011 – 01:36 – PokerPages Staff

PCA Main Event
With an apparently insurmountable chip advantage before him, victory looked virtually done and dusted for Chris Oliver at the start of the PCA Main Event.  He arrived at the final table with control over no fewer than 40 per cent of the chips and it’s only fair to congratulate him on his solid and intelligent play throughout most of the event.  He looked unstoppable for much of the day, relentlessly increasing his chip stack and blithely laying waste to the other players, who fell like bowling pins in his wildly confident path.  But just when everyone thought this “Run-Good” would see him take down the first prize, he was blind-sided by Galen Hall.  Stunningly, after nine hours of play, Galen took minutes to decimate Chris’s apparently impregnable 37 million chip lead into a disastrous 10 million chip disadvantage.  After just thirty minutes, the demolition job was done and Galen Hall became the new PCA Main Event Champion.

Hall had some tricky moments, like when he folded a straight to Oliver’s full house.  But his fortunes began to change when he found himself holding a bottom-two pair (A-2) on an A-4-2 board.  He was able to double through and, suddenly, Oliver found himself eye to eye with an extremely dangerous adversary.

PCA High Roller Tournament Winner Emerges
The PCA High Roller poker tournament saw a stunning win over a massive field of 158 players by Canadian poker pro Will Molson after three grueling days of pitched battle.  This was surely one of the toughest fields to win upon if not in poker history, then at least for a very long time.  2011 saw the largest High Roller tournament in history with Molson’s first-prize win amounting to over $1 million.

Will Molson nearly made it to the top in the High Roller tournament for two successive years, finishing runner up to French poker-meister Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier in 2009 and to William Reynolds in 2010.  2011 has seen him finally claim the crown he’s come so close to owning in the recent past.

Viktor ‘Isildur1′ Blom and the Swedish Tax Man
Another poker pro is drawing publicity this week – and not for his poker successes.  Viktor Blom, who revealed himself to be the Scandinavian mystery man ‘Isildur1′ earlier this month, is in a little hot water with the taxman in his native Sweden.  That’s according to the Swedish newspaper “Dagens Inustri,” anyway.

The Swedish tax authority was apparently alerted to his status as high-earning poker pro thanks to his activities on Full Tilt Poker.  It may indeed, have been in order to keep under the radar of his home country’s tax authority that Blom maintained his hidden identity for so long: Swedish tax law requires a cut from all pots – not just the money won – played at any site which operates outside the European Union.  A spokesman for the Swedish tax authority claims that Full Tilt Poker, which is based in Ireland, is classified as a site beyond the confines of the European Union, and as ‘Isildur1′ gambled around $4.5 billion during his brief stint there, his back taxes are estimated at around $149 million!  The young Swede currently lives in London; with a tax bill of this magnitude facing him in Sweden, he’s probably unlikely to make a visit home in the foreseeable future.

Wed, 01/26/2011 – 17:09 – PokerPages Staff

The World Blogger Championship of Online Poker is returning with $58,000 worth of Spring Championship of Online Poker on offer as prizes. Free to enter WBCOOP preliminary tournaments run from January 24 to 29.  There is a fantastic range of prizes for online poker players on offer for the top 200 finishers in each of the preliminaries.  The top prize is two $215 SCOOP tickets, plus two Sunday Million tickets as well as a WBCOOP Main Event ticket.

The WBCOOP preliminary tournaments go live on the afternoon of Monday 24 January at 14:00 ET with a Pot Limit Omaha.  On the Tuesday at 19:00 ET there is a No Limit Hold’em.  On Wednesday there is a Pot Limit Hi/Lo at 22:00 ET, followed by another No Hold’em on Thursday at 14:00 ET.  Friday sees an 8-Game Mix at 17:00 ET.  And the WBCOOP preliminary tournaments end at 19:00 ET on Saturday January 29 with a No Limit Hold’em.  The WBCOOP Main Event takes place on January 30th with SCOOP tickets as prizes.

Meanwhile European Poker Tour Satellites continue for EPT Copenhagen and EPT Deauville.  January 21 sees EPT Copenhagen Satellites run throughout the morning.  Starting at 09:25 ET there is a 5 Turbo to 20 Satellite.  These also take place at 09:45 and 09:55 ET.  At 09:59 ET, and an hour later at 10:59 there are 7.50 round 1 satellites.  And at 12:30 there is an EPT Copenhagen 27 + R Rd 1.  And at 12:30 on January 21 there is an EPT Deauville -5 + R Turbo Satellite.

Wed, 01/26/2011 – 16:37 – PokerPages Staff

We live in strange times.  The decidedly coercive and often punitive “morality” governing the public utterances and policy-leanings of many mainstream politicians pretends to be against Evil and in support of victims, but its proscriptions and punishments, prohibitions and persecutions, would have been unrecognizable to the great revolutionaries of liberty who founded the USA.  They were not blind to evil, but they were passionately in favor of a massive extension of freedom against authoritarian despotism.  That the dominant creed in the Land of the Free, at least amongst our politicians and moral crusaders, should have mutated – although perhaps reverted is a better word – to an almost pre-democratic form of authoritarian conformity is a mater which requires urgent attention.  As the founding fathers knew well, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and it seems today as though we may have been less vigilant than we should have been of late.

In the new morality of the more pious of our politicians, Evil is everywhere and must be resisted on all fronts.  In addition, it appears that Evil thrives when there is too much freedom, so the latter must be curtailed.  In addition, one of the forms Evil toady takes, so the logic of this argument goes, is gambling, including poker.  It encourages reckless betting, leads to ruinous addictions, and causes financial penury.  The vulnerable, especially the young, must be shielded from it at all costs before it seduces them and lays waste to their lives.

It is the contention of our argument here that such a perspective rests upon a misguided, over simplistic and ultimately misanthropic vision of humanity.  We are, in this shamelessly bullying moral world, all one-poker game away from oblivion, or corruption, or helpless addiction.  We need to be protected against the irresistible temptations which will overcome us should we start out along this path, where the only winners are ruthless gambling houses and casino owners.  Evidently, what this moral ideology cannot endow us with is intelligence, resilience, and individual agency.  There is something just a little sour and joyless about it – if you are having fun; the assumption appears to be that you are flirting with the Devil, or with his secular descendants in the gambling industry.
 
Politicians who think it is somehow “moral” to oppose the licensing and regulation of online poker are suffering from a curious form of social amnesia.  It is, apparently, the height of morality to risk labeling hard-working, law-abiding Americans in Washington State as felons if they dare to indulge in a little online poker.  Equally, it is “moral” to bully money-transferring companies into banning U.S. citizens from playing online poker; for fear that, they will be busted by the feds and severely penalized.

What would President Warren Harding have made of twenty-first century US politicians?  He played poker regularly, as did Secretary of State Daniel Webster, President Truman (who used to mix poker with generous quantities of Kentucky bourbon), and even a young future presidential candidate called Barack Obama.  Were these politicians less moral than their contemporary descendants were?  Hardly; and yet many of our politicians – who we should see as our servants rather than our masters – are imposing a narrow and simply assumed “moral” agenda on everyone else.

If we were to recover our traditions, to listen to Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin rather than the narrow-minded zealots of modern fun-aversion, we might realize that it is profoundly immoral to seek to control the behavior and limit the freedoms of ordinary Americans.  It is a lamentable indictment of their tunnel vision hubris that so many politicians believe that is where morality begins.