April 04 2011, Elaine Chaivarlis

We hope you had as awesome a weekend as we did, and that you still have a chance to win your March Madness bracket pool (who are we kidding, most of your brackets were busted a long time ago). In any case, Roberto Romanello had a pretty good weekend winning the WPT Bratislava. We’ll bring you the action from that final table, a preview of the newest Poker After Dark, and more in this edition of the Nightly Turbo.

In Case You Missed It

Last week, we brought you the first part of the Sunday Grind where Kevin “ImaLuckSac” MacPhee showed us his on-the-road grind station. In part two, he gives us his list of things he can’t live without while on the road.

Sunday’s tournaments saw 18 players add six-figure scores to their bankrolls. Find out who notched the biggest score on Sunday by checking out the Sunday Briefing.

Viktor “Isildur1″ Blom and Scott “urnotindangr” Palmer battled on Sunday in the latest installment of the PokerStars SuperStar Showdown. Miss it? Check out the Showdown recap to find out who came out on top in part one of this two-part match.

FSN aired part two of the World Poker Tour Festa al Lago coverage Sunday night. If you didn’t watch it, catch up on what you missed in our WPT recap.

In the latest episode of High Stakes Poker, a new group of players took their seats at the felt, including 2010 World Series of Poker Main Event champion, Jonathan Duhamel. How’d he do? You know we’re going to send you to the High Stakes Poker recap to find out.

Romanello Wins WPT Bratislava

On Sunday, the final nine players of the World Poker Tour Bratislava converged on the Golden Vegas casino poker room to play down to a winner and fight it out for the title and €140,685 first-place prize. Full Tilt Poker Red Pro Roberto Romanello began the final table with the chip lead, and when all was said and done, he was the man who had all the chips in front of him.

The first player to be eliminated with Lubomir Kudlicka, followed by Marek Tatar in eighth. Then, PartyPoker Pro Bodo Sbrzesny made his exit in seventh place, leaving the table six-handed.

Not long after Chris Williamson was eliminated at the hands of Romanello, when his ace-king was no match for Romanello’s queens. Less than an hour later, Jesper Hoog took his walk to the pay-out cage in fifth, and shortly after, Frank Dollinger followed suit in fourth.

Just before the dinner break, Alexander Jager was eliminated in third place, leaving Romanello and Mayu Roca heads-up for the title. In just a couple of hours, Romanello had dispatched Roca to the rail. In the final hand, all the chips went in the middle preflop and Romanello’s fives bested the ace-king of Roca when the board rolled out . Romanello is now one step away from achieving poker’s coveted Triple Crown — all he’s missing is a World Series of Poker bracelet.

WPT Bratislava Results

1. Roberto Romanello – €140,685
2. Mayu Roca – €71,000
3. Alexander Jager – €42,000
4. Frank Dollinger – €33,000
5. Jesper Hoog – €26,000
6. Chris Williamson – €21,000
7. Bodo Sbrzesny – €17,000
8. Marek Tatar – €14,000
9. Lubomir Kudlicka – €11,000

Head on over to the PartyPoker Blog for more action from the WPT Bratislava final table and a video interview with the newest WPT champion.

Taking on a Legend

New episodes of Poker After Dark are making their way to your television sets this week. The theme for the week is Idol (no, not American Idol), but five young guns of poker will be taking on the godfather of poker himself, Doyle Brunson.

The buy-in was $50,000 and the winner will take home $300,000. The lineup includes Annette Obrestad, Andrew Lichtenberger, Eric Baldwin, Melanie Weisner, and Tom Dwan.

Lichtenberger, Baldwin, and Weisner, will all be making their PAD debuts, while Obrestad will be gracing the PAD felt for the second time. Dwan is a fixture on the PAD cash games, and Brunson will be making his 13th appearance on Poker After Dark.

The action begins Monday night at 2:05 a.m. on NBC and continues five nights in a row. Be sure to check your local listings, and you can PokerAfterDark.com for bios on the players.

WPT Super High Roller

Remember last month when we confirmed the World Poker Tour $100,000 event, but not all the specifics were nailed down? They are now. Thanks to the presser we received in our inbox this morning, we can tell you that the $100,000 buy-in World Poker Tour Super High Roller will run from May 18 to 19 at the Bellagio.

“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,” Steve Heller, CEO of the World Poker Tour said.

Already confirmed for the event are Erik Seidel, Dan Shak, and Justin “BoostedJ” Smith. (Hey guys, save your $100k, Seidel’s in this one and we all know how his year is going.)

Check out the press release at the World Poker Tour’s website.

Parting Ways

On Sunday, we were checking our Twitter feed and came across a tweet from Maria “Maridu” Mayrinck.

“After 5 great years with @PokerStars I’ve decided to leave the team, & will have pretty big news in about 2 weeks for all Brazil Poker!”

Followed by:

“I leave @PokerStars w/ nothing but the best things to say of them & am very happy w/ my decision. This will be huge for Brazilian Poker!”

Now we’re not really sure what her new project is, and she could even be tweeting it, but we’d never know – most of her tweets have been in Portuguese.

Whatever it is, we’ll be sure to let you know the news as soon as it becomes available.

You know what else is great for Brazilian poker, the BSOP — and you can be a part of it by signing up for a ROX Poker account and playing in our PokerNews BSOP events for a chance to win a BSOP package.

Game of Your Life

On Monday, PokerStars launched the Game of Your Life promotion. It’s being touted as one of the site’s “biggest and most exciting promotions ever.”

What’s at stake? A $100,000 package to the sporting event of your choice, anywhere in the world. And if that wasn’t enough, there’s more than $1 million in freerolls for players.

This promotion runs for the next six weeks. Players will need to qualify for the weekly freeroll through the daily freerolls that will run on the online poker site. The first five finals will have a guaranteed $100,000 prizepool, while the sixth is the freeroll where the Game of Your Life package will be awarded.

Game of Your Life package winners will be able to choose the event they want to go to, anywhere in the world, take as many friends as they want, and have all travel and accommodation included.

The first step in winning this awesome prize is signing up for a PokerStars account through PokerNews. And we hope that if you take down this event, you don’t forget who brought you the news of the promotion. (Hint, hint.)

If you aren’t following us on Twitter, we don’t know what to say, except follow us on Twitter. How else are you planning on getting up-to-the-minute news?

February 21 2011, Rich Ryan

The seventh season of High Stakes Poker starts on February 26, and for the first time, it will be without legendary poker broadcaster Gabe Kaplan. Last week, the Game Show Network announced that Saturday Night Live icon Norm Macdonald will replace Kaplan in the booth. GSN released an official statement which read:

“Gabe Kaplan did an outstanding job hosting High Stakes Poker for six seasons and we wish him all the best in his future endeavors.”

The move set the poker industry abuzz, and both players and fans began voicing their opinions.

“I liked Gabe Kaplan a lot,” Christian Harder told us. “He’s been doing poker commentary forever and he’s obviously very funny. [Norm] Macdonald’s funny, as well, but I’m not sure how much he knows about poker.”

Jon Eaton is less concerned about analysis. “I think HSP is the best poker show on TV and I’ve been a big fan of Norm’s since his SNL days,” he told us. “I’m not really interested in his poker insight as I am in hearing his banter between hands about the players.”

“I think that the poker community just looks for things to get worked up about,” Joe Sebok said. “Gabe is incredible at what he does, but maybe Norm will do a great job, as well. I think we all just need to sit back and relax. HSP will be all good; Norm’s a funny guy.”

With thanks to GSN, we were able to sit down with Macdonald and pick his brain about hosting HSP and poker in general.

Thanks for taking time to join us today. You’ve been playing poker for a while now, and on an episode of the Howard Stern Show, you said you played at the legendary Mayfair Club. Is that where you started playing?

I started at the Mayfair Club because I had a huge gambling problem back then and I realized that poker was a way to bleed money way slower [laughs]. And it worked. I would go down there, play limit hold’em and play every hand down until the end and lose [laughs]. Eventually though, somebody – I think it was Joey Bagels – showed pity toward me and gave me a book. After reading the book, I thought to myself, “Holy sh** I thought poker was just gambling.” Then I became fascinated with it and now I almost like reading about poker more than playing it.

How have you progressed as a player since your days at the Mayfair Club?

I think I’m better, but Sharkscope thinks otherwise [laughs]. My results aren’t great and I’m going back and forth all the time. When I’m on the road I play sit-n-go’s online. I’ll play three or four at a time, but it’s becoming robotic. Now I’m trying to figure out cash games – sometimes I play at the Commerce – but those are really hard. Overall though, I think I enjoy watching and reading about poker more, and when I received an offer to host HSP I was pretty shocked because it’s one of my favorite shows.

It must have been difficult to jump into the role so quickly.

When I first got the call, I was shocked because Gabe Kaplan is an awesome host who knows a lot about poker and is also a really good comedian. I grew up watching Welcome Back, Kotter, it was a great show. I definitely don’t know as much as Gabe does about poker and I really wish I was filling someone else’s shoes. I’m kinda nervous, ya know, because HSP is my favorite shows and I don’t want to tear the franchise down [laughs].

Some say the one-man booth is difficult to do, but you’re most famous for flying solo on SNL’s Weekend Update. Do you like this type of format?

Yeah, but I don’t think I’m going to do much play-by-play. The viewers can already see the hole cards and the flop, so I don’t see why I should repeat it. Plus, poker’s great because you’re always trying to get into your opponents head and figure out what their trying to do. Unfortunately, whenever I do that I forget about what I’m going to do and then lose [laughs].

How have you prepared to host the show?

I DVR’d a bunch of HSP and Poker After Dark episodes and watched them with a few poker buddies. I’ve also been reading a lot about poker and looking up YouTube videos of some of the players.

Which of the players are you excited to watch?

All of the businessmen are going to be cool to watch because they’re billionaires and have no regard for money. Usually the sharks can use fear to their advantage and check-raise real big, but these guys have so much money it doesn’t really matter. I’m also excited to see Vanessa Selbst because I’ve seen her at the WSOP and she’s one of the players I’ve been watching on YouTube. The hand between her and Robert Varkonyi showed how tough she is and she’s a great tournament player. It will be interesting to see if she can do well in a cash game.

Are you surprised at the amount of money they’re playing for?

It’s crazy. I remember the one HSP hand between Daniel Negreanu and Gus Hansen where Hansen has quads and Negreanu has a full house. There’s like $800,000 in the pot, Negreanu is thinking about calling, and Doyle Brunson is having a conversation about whether or not Robert Duval is a good actor [laughs]. The prop betting is crazy, too, because these guys are already playing for big money. I feel like whoever is writing down all the bets has an edge, too, because everyone else thinks they’re not paying attention [laughs], but then when you see the director’s cut you see they were paying attention to everything. These guys play at such a high level.

The WSOP schedule was just released. Do you know what events you’re going to play this year?

Not yet, but I’m not going to play much hold’em. I really want to learn some other limit games, especially Omaha. We’ll see when the summer comes.

Along with HSP you have a show coming up on Comedy Central called The Sports Show. Tell us about that project.

The Sports Show is going to be about current events in sports. [In a previous interview Norm called it the “Daily Show of Sports.”] I love sports and poker because you can yell and scream about them with a friend and at the end of the day it’s OK because they don’t really matter. When I did “Weekend Update” on SNL everyone thought I loved politics, but if you argue about politics or religion somebody always gets hurt. With sports you can have a lot of fun without hurting anyone’s feelings.

High Stakes Poker begins February 26 at 8 p.m. EST on the Game Show Network. To be on top of all the latest poker news, be sure to follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook.

*Photo courtesy of Dan Steinberg/Associated Press