August 12 2011, Elaine Chaivarlis

If you’re looking for the right amount of poker information to send you into the weekend, then you’ve come to the right place. In tonight’s Nightly Turbo we’ll tell you about Full Tilt Poker’s and its potential investors, the new spot the World Poker Tour is headed in Season X, and more.

In Case You Missed It

The final table of the first Epic Poker League Main Event was set Thursday. It’s a stacked final table with Hasan Habib leading the way. Jason Mercier and Erik Seidel are still in the hunt and could cause some shakeups in next week’s Global Poker Index.

Three players banked over $100,000 in the online high-stakes games this week. David Eldar came away with the biggest win of the week and you can read about it in the Online Railbird Report.

It’s vacation time for members of Congress, and that means they’re headed back to their home districts. It’s the best time to contact your representatives to discuss online poker legislation and meet with them face-to-face.

Between a cheating scandal, a car theft, and a major event kicking off for the first time, you can say it’s been quite an interesting week. Here are our Five Thoughts.

Potential Investors?

Canadian-poker.ca issued a press release stating that Full Tilt Poker may be close to reaching a deal with potential investors. Leon Daniels, a spokesman for Canadian-poker.ca, stated that 888poker, Bwin.Party, and Playtech could potentially each be the “unknown investors.”

“I’ve mentioned before why companies like 888 would be interested in purchasing Full Tilt Poker. 888 has one of the biggest online poker rooms in the world, and they lost many players to the illegally operated Full Tilt. Now that Full Tilt is no longer active in the Canadian market, it makes sense that 888, a stable and reliable company, would take the opportunity to win back players in Canada, even if it means having to take responsibility for Full Tilt’s infamous debts,” Daniels said.

He doesn’t believe PokerStars could be part of that group. ”I don’t believe PokerStars, formerly a huge presence in the online poker world, is a potential investor. Black Friday and subsequent investigations seem to have PokerStars’ hands full at the moment. While they’re faring better than Full Tilt by far, they still have to deal with the authorities,” he said.

Is he just stirring the pot? It seems like that to us. Read the press release for more.

New Stop on the WPT

The World Poker Tour threw us a curveball while we were writing the Turbo by sending a late-day press release. So of course, we couldn’t let you begin your weekend without the news of a new stop on Season X of the WPT.

The WPT’s three-year agreement with Parx Casino in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, will see a televised Main Event take place in 2012, as well as three WPT Regional Events.

“We have put an emphasis on finding the right partners for expansion. Parx was an immediate target for WPT and have been wonderful business partners in getting this deal done,” said WPT President Adam Pliska. “The ability to crown a WPT champion in a town that has recently seen the Flyers in the Stanley Cup, the Eagles in the Super Bowl and the Phillies win the World Series will be tremendous for both Parx and WPT.”

The date of the 2012 WPT Parx event will be released later this year.

Check out the entire WorldPokerTour Season X schedule at WorldPokerTour.com.

Google + Zynga Poker

Google+ is trying to get Facebookers to convert. The new social networking site launched a platform that includes popular games like Zynga Poker and Angry Birds. Google+ will offer 16 games from third-party developers.

In a press release issued by Zynga in March, we learned that Zynga Poker attracts an average of 38 million users a month, and that at any given moment, 400,000 players are logged on handing out bad beats. At the moment, Zynga Poker is available on Facebook, Yahoo!, and MySpace, but will soon roll out to Google+.

We’re sure a few of you U.S. players have pacified your online poker bug by signing up for Zynga Poker. Don’t worry, we won’t tell anyone.

The Wall Street Journal has more.

In 140 Characters

Some days we read tweets and think, “Our readers would probably like to know that,” but the news bite is only 140 characters long. Instead of separating them into their own sections, we’ve compiled them all right here.

Phil Hellmuth (@phil_hellmuth): Can U believe Major League Baseball investigators called me about a guy that PLAYED in a poker game: understand it’s 100% legal to PLAY?!?

Sick of athletes, politicians, and actors being persecuted for playing in poker games when it is 100% legal for them to play!! Sick of LIES!

• Buzzer Blog (@buzzerblog): High Stakes Poker on GSN lost its Saturday 10pm slot. Million Dollar Password is taking it.
• Poker Royalty (@Poker_Royalty): Happy to announce @Poker_Royalty client @LeoMargets has signed a sponsorship deal to become newest member of the Lock Poker PRO ELITE team.

Be sure and follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook.

April 26 2011, Matthew Kredell

We will be entering a critical post-indictment juncture during the next month, which will determine the direction of online poker in the United States, according to Poker Players Alliance executive director John Pappas.

“There are two ways this can go,” Pappas said. “One way, Congress becomes too scared to deal with this issue. Or Congress will realize that, to millions of Americans, this is their hobby and sometimes livelihood, and they need to make it legalized for them to play. The next month is going to be our month to either seize or lose.”

No bill will be passed in the next month to undo the damage done by federal indictments of owners from the big three poker sites. However, this period in the immediate aftermath of Black Friday is when reactions will be formed by members of Congress either to stay away from an issue that has become increasingly controversial or to step in and act to protect the rights of American citizens.

The indictments may still accelerate the effort to license and regulate Internet poker in the U.S., sparking Congress to act this year. Or it could push the movement back by years.

“If we want to get our game back,” Pappas said, “the PPA and PPA members and the poker community at large really needs to activate.”

In the first week after the indictments were announced and PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker pulled out of the U.S. market, Pappas said that PPA members sent more than 70,000 emails into Congress, President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. He believes the outcry already is making a difference in getting the DOJ to release the domain names back to PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker and agree to work with the sites to ensure that Americans are returned their money.

“It’s unprecedented for the DOJ to work so swiftly to mitigate what is becoming a public relations nightmare for them,” Pappas said.

Some in the poker community have remarked that PPA chairman Al D’Amato, a former New York senator who maintains influence in political circles, has been too quiet and not out there getting the PPA’s message out enough in reaction to such a big blow to the game and its players in the U.S.

D’Amato recently did show his value to the cause by penning a column for The Washington Post slamming the Justice Department’s attack on poker and calling for Congress to work quickly to pass legislation for “Americans to play the greatest American game.” But he has been conspicuously absent from television news channels that have covered the indictments, despite having the name and speaking ability to provide credibility to the argument that these indictments are the result of a DOJ witch hunt. One issue, according to Pappas, is that D’Amato has a contract as a political commentator with Fox that does not allow him to do any other cable news channels. Pappas did say that he expects D’Amato to appear on the Fox News Channel to discuss poker in the near future.

Pappas teased that another D.C. fly-in, perhaps the biggest yet, could be in the works. But little can be done until Congress returns from spring recess on May 2.

He thought the movement to license and regulate Internet poker was previously going in the right direction, and that the timing of the indictments may have been to slow down that progress and especially to stop Wynn Resorts and Fertitta Interactive from getting too far along with their recently announced respective alliances with PokerStars and Full Tilt, which were in fact broken by the casino companies following the indictments.

Though the bank- and wire-fraud charges are serious, they aren’t based on stopping any real harm from being done. If anything, the banks profited from the activity rather than losing from the fraud.

“The premise that poker is illegal is something we 100 percent disagree with,” Pappas said. “There were no victims at all in any of this until the DOJ decided to shut down the sites, and then the victims were the millions of Americans who play online poker and don’t have access to their money.”

The election of Barack Obama as President appeared to be a positive sign for poker. Though he wasn’t expected to take an active stance in favor of poker legislation with much larger concerns on his plate, it was hoped that his administration wouldn’t be as active against poker as its predecessor. After all, Obama helped form a regular poker game in the Illinois State Senate. Asked early in his presidential campaign by the Associated Press to name a hidden talent, Obama revealed that he considered himself “a pretty good poker player.”

Though Obama surely didn’t order these indictments and may not have even known about them beforehand, he did appoint Preet Bharara as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Bharara is the one leading this attack on online poker. This is happening during Obama’s administration, under the leadership of those he appointed.

“The PPA is embarrassed that we held an event during his inauguration hailing him as the ‘Poker Player in Chief,’” Pappas said. “We didn’t expect to see this aggressive action during his administration. We are really dismayed that the Obama administration is now the anti-poker administration even more so than President Bush was.”

The indictments are problematic for the PPA. Much of the PPA’s funding comes from the Interactive Gaming Council, and the two most prominent members of the IGC are PokerStars, through Regional Entertainment Enterprises Ltd, and Full Tilt Poker, through Pocket Kings Ltd. Even though the sites may only be guilty of trying to run legitimate businesses through government interference, the bank and wire fraud charges are serious and won’t be looked upon kindly by most lawmakers in the U.S. Being linked to these poker sites could tarnish the PPA’s reputation with lawmakers. Yet, at least at this juncture, the PPA can’t operate without funding from the IGC.

“Yes, the PPA is supported by Internet poker companies, but the PPA is not their organization,” Pappas said. “Poker companies support the PPA because we give a voice to millions of Americans who play the game. They want to support an organization that fights for the rights of Americans to do that. What we’ll continue to tell people is that we always have and always will represent the players in this fight.”

Be sure to follow us on Twitter for up-to-the-minute news.