June 14 2012, Brett Collson

Groupe Bernard Tapie was back in the news on Thursday. Sorry, it had nothing to do with Full Tilt Poker. We’ll cover the latest on GBT, plus a calling for poker to be taught in high schools, in this edition for the Nightly Turbo.

In Case You Missed It

Phil Ivey made another final table on Wednesday. How close did he come to winning his ninth bracelet? Find out in our Day 17 recap.

Scotty Nguyen and Joe Cassidy are playing heads-up for a bracelet on Thursday. Read about that and more in the WSOP What To Watch For.

2011 bracelet winner Aaron Steury joined the PokerNews Podcast on Wednesday. Find out what he had to say about defending his title in the $1,500 HORSE event.

Looking for a fun, behind-the-scenes perspective of life at the WSOP? The Muck is providing several daily stories from inside the Rio, so check it out!

Setting The Date

The details of Bernard Tapie’s International Stadiums Poker Tour (ISPT) have been sketchy since we first came across an impressive advert for the poker tour late last year. But it appears an official date has been set for the first event next summer.

According to the ISPT website, the first event will take place from May 31 through June 6, 2013, at Wembley Stadium in London. The event will feature a “4,500 buy-in with a “20 million guarantee, and the organizations claims that 2,119 players have already registered.

The tournament itself will begin with up to 30,000 players competing a shootout format using electronic pads offered to them from their seats in the stadium. Then, after the first round, the remaining players will move to actual tables laid out on the Wembley lawn and play until a champion is crowned.

For more information, including the tournament betting structure, visit ISPT.com.

Poker in High Schools?

International Federation of Poker (IFP) President Anthony Holden is calling on high schools in the U.K. to follow the lead of a New York City high school and introduce poker as an official extracurricular activity.

Holden leads the IFP’s campaign to promote poker as a genuine mind sport. He believes that poker helps children learn necessary life lessons, from the skill of “reading an opponent – essential to all negotiations – to the ability to rapidly calculate probability.”

“Like other mind sports poker is a valuable support tool in education,” said Holden. “It promotes the development of concentration and the memory, helps develop a structured mind and the power of reasoning and positive behavior patterns.”

The Henry Street School, located on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, launched its Poker club in 2007 and it remains the only sanctioned high school poker club in the city. There are weekly tournaments held on school grounds and, in 2008, the school took a poker team to Massachusetts and defeated a team from Harvard Law School.

Learn more about the Holden and the IFP at pokerfed.org.

Progress in Delaware

A bill that would allow Delaware residents to gamble online passed in the House this week by a vote of 29-8. The bill will next move onto the Senate for discussion.

House Bill 333 calls for a centralized online gambling platform to be regulated by the state Lottery Office. Delaware casinos have been struggling to compete against casinos on the East Coast, and the Department of Finance estimates HB 333 would generate $7.75 million in revenue for the state next fiscal year. The state is also attempting to partner with other states to create a multi-state platform similar Powerball and Mega Millions.

If passed, the bill would permit the offering of games like poker, blackjack, digital slot machines. Online lottery tickets and limited sports betting would also be available.

Business Week has more.

Feldman Hits Reality TV

PokerNews learned Thursday that high-stakes poker pro Andrew Feldman will appear on the U.K. version of The Secret Millionaire on June 25. The 24-year-old Brit will be the youngest millionaire on the show since its creation in 2006.

The popular series features millionaires who take a short hiatus from their luxury lifestyles and go undercover in deprived areas and donate money for specific needs. Feldman is a former Full Tilt Poker Red Pro with more than $1 million in live tournament cashes, but he’s more known for his exploits in cash games.

Feldman’s appearance on the reality show won’t be his first television appearance. He’s played in several televised several high-stakes cash games, and last year he finished runner-up to Andy Frankenberger on Sky Sports’ Party Poker Premier League Mixed Games Championship. You may recall Feldman shedding some tears after taking a bad beat on the final hand.

Find out more about The Secret Millionaire at Channel4.com.

The Straddle

Fancy a look at the lighter side of things at the WSOP? Kristy Arnett is back with her second edition of The Straddle.

Follow PokerNews on Twitter for up-to-the-minute news.

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November 22 2011, Brett Collson

With more than 30 million active users per month, Zynga Poker is the largest online poker room in the world. The free-to-play site dwarfs real-money operators like PokerStars and PartyPoker with its laid back, social platform, and has successfully expanded into a sleeping giant of the industry without any intention of shifting toward the real-money market.

Zynga is so big, in fact, that the International Federation of Poker invited the company to compete in the inaugural Nations Cup, pitting six members of the Zynga Poker community against the best poker players from all over the world. Because its 30 million monthly users are more than the entire population of power-poker countries like Australia, Denmark and Sweden combined, Zynga was offered the opportunity to participate as a “digital nation.”

We recently sat down with Zynga Poker General Manager Lo Toney to discuss Zynga’s growth in the poker industry, its involvement in the IFP Nations Cup, and more.

Can you give us a brief background of Zynga Poker and how the company got off the ground?

Zynga started in July 2007, and Zynga Poker was actually our very first game as a company. In addition to Facebook, Zynga Poker is also available on mobile devices like the iPhone and Android devices, and we’re also on Google Plus. Our games are free to play, so anyone can come online to play them. We have a virtual goods model, so the way that we make money through Zynga Poker is by people paying for (virtual) poker chips.

After four years, we’re the world’s largest poker game. We have more than 7 million people who play our games every day on Facebook or one of the other networks or devices, and on a monthly basis we have more than 30 million people who play our games each month.

Why types of poker players are you looking to draw to Zynga?

We have a couple of different types of poker players. We have the player who comes on that is more focused on the competitive aspect of the game, and we have players who are new to the game and have never played poker before. So we have players who are looking for great players that they can play with, and we also have people who are coming online that want the social aspect.

Has business at Zynga changed at all since the Department of Justice shut down PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker?

We have always been the world’s largest poker site and we’re happy to able to offer our free-to-play game of poker to anyone that wants to come and play. The ability for us to bring on new users is fantastic, and if those users are very competitive players, the beauty of Zynga Poker with our 7 million users daily is that even people looking for competitive games are going to be able to find that.

Did you see any noticeable increase in new users since April 15, 2011?

As the world’s largest poker game I think our scale is so large that it takes a lot to be able to tip the scale for us. We were the world’s largest poker game before those actions were taken by the DOJ, and we remain the world’s largest poker game after those actions.

In the past you’ve denied any plans of shifting to a real-money platform. Are you still sticking to that, even if it’s a few years down the road?

Zynga’s business model is free-to-play and we monetize the virtual goods. That’s our business model. We have no interest in going after the real-money space. We have been able to build a very nice business for ourselves with our heads down focusing on our existing business model.

What are some of Zynga’s goals going forward?

While we don’t make any forward-looking statements, what I can say is that on a daily basis our main objective is to make sure that we can offer our poker players the best experience possible. For the people that want a more social aspect, on a daily basis we’re constantly striving to make sure that we can offer the most fun and the most social poker game.

Let’s shift to the IFP Nations Cup. What does this event represent for poker and how did Zynga get involved?

We’re really excited about the IFP because our main focus is on our 7 million people that play our game every day. We had six passionate players who represented our community and were really excited about the opportunity to go and play in a live tournament. For some of them, it was their very first time participating and the fact that they were able to play against some of the pros from the other nations is just an unbelievable experience.

The IFP approached us with a very novel concept. They said, ‘Well, you have 30 million people that play your game every month. That’s almost the size of a country. Why don’t we have a digital country?’ We thought that was pretty exciting for our community.

Can you talk about the unique variant of “duplicate poker” and how it could further prove that poker is a game of skill?

I’m going to defer on trying to explain how duplicate poker is a game of skill. What I can say is that for our poker players, the passion that they bring is going to be unmatched even by the people that are there to play professionally. What we want to happen is to give our players the best possible experience because they’re so passionate about poker. They’re the ones who are playing for the Zynga community.

What are some of the things Zynga Poker players can look forward to in the coming year?

The main thing we’re focused on at the moment is expanding what we’ve started at Zynga Poker. We feel that we can give our fans and users something that they’ve never experienced, and that experience is Zynga Casino. What we decided to do is create another app for Zynga Casino, and the first game that’s going to join Zynga Poker in Zynga Casino is going to be Zynga Bingo.

It’s a game that people can look forward to playing, and they’re going to have a fantastic time being able to reminisce and go back to a game that maybe they were introduced to the first time by their parents or grandparents. We’re going to make sure people know what the game is, but we’re going to add some twists. We’re going to make it fun, exciting, and, of course, we’re going to make it social because that’s what we do best.

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