Here’s the Deal - Corkins and Krost Win, Poker Players Give

Here’s the Deal presents a week’s worth of poker news - the good, bad, and sometimes ugly - in one place. Between the poker tournaments, player happenings, and political updates, there is a little something for every poker enthusiast.

Poker Events

The Aussie Millions saw its famous annual series come to an end at the Crown Casino in Melbourne, Australia last week with the conclusion of the Main Event. There were 746 players in the $10,500 buy-in tournament, which brought the prize pool to $7,460,000 for the top 72 finishers, with $2 million alone for the winner. Notables at the final table were Betfair-sponsored players Annette Obrestad and Sorel Mizzi, the former already having taken down a preliminary event in the series and becoming the only woman to ever do so. Final table finishes for the Main Event were seventh for Obrestad and third for Mizzi, and it was Tyron Krost who went on to defeat Frederik Jensen for the win. Krost kept the title in Australia, as the 23-year old Sydney resident grabbed $2 million for the local economy.

Another series that wrapped in the past week was the Southern Poker Championship at the Beau Rivage in Biloxi, Mississippi. The World Poker Tour swooped into town to host the $10K buy-in Main Event, which saw a smaller crowd than in past years when only 208 players registered. The subsequent prize pool only allowed for payment to 18 players and only $739,486 for the winner. But in the end, the excitement took over and headlines were made when long-time pro Hoyt Corkins beat Jonathan Kantor to grab his second WPT title.

The L.A. Poker Classic raged on with its impressive turnouts for nearly every preliminary event in the month-and-a-half-long series. Still weeks away from the World Poker Tour Main Event, players continue to head to Commerce Casino in Los Angeles for their chances at LAPC titles. And already running away with the series is Al Barbieri, better known in some circles as Sugar Bear, who took down two events thus far, one in an Omaha/stud mixed event and the other in no-limit hold’em. Also notable in the winner’s list was Eddie Alaei, father of well-known poker pro Daniel Alaei, who took down a NLHE tournament and showed that some families just have what it takes… The winners through Event 15 are listed here:

Event 6 - $335 Omaha-8 - Matthew Ho $25,230
Event 7 - $545 NLHE - Eddie Alaei $41,210
Event 8 - $335 7-Card Stud-8 - Al Barbieri $12,970
Event 9 - $545 Omaha/Stud-8 - Jack Rosenfeldt $18,920
Event 10 - $545 NLHE 6-Handed - Aaron Motoyama $31,810
Event 11 - $335 NLHE w/Rebuys - Stephen Ma $71,292
Event 12 - $545 HORSE - Stephen Evan Su $25,120
Event 13 - $545 NLHE - Al Barbieri $54,700
Event 14 - $335 NLHE - Amir Ghazvinian $34,230
Event 15 - $545 LHE - Nicholas Derke $15,670

The Borgata Winter Poker Open continued on with its slew of preliminary events. We last left off with results through the first ten events, and this week, we have everything leading up to the Main Event and two unfinished preliminary events. The championship tournament, which used to be a $10,000 buy-in event filmed by the World Poker Tour, is now a more reasonable $3,500 buy-in with a $2 million guaranteed prize pool. The no-limit hold’em deep stack tournament began on January 31 and will find its champion on February 5. But in the meantime, with Allen Kessler as one of the highlighted winners of the twelve additional events in the series, here are the champions:

Event 11 - $400 LHE - Ahmed Mohamed $8,453
Event 12 - $550 NLHE 6-Handed - Taylor Shpur $23,422
Event 13 - $400 Seniors NLHE - Henry Olszewski $26,583
Event 14 - $200 NLHE - Alexander Lindh $39,144
Event 15 - $350 PLO - Chris Reslock $9,370
Event 16 - $2150 NLHE Heads-Up - Farzad Najafabadi $49,664
Event 17 - $350 NLHE - James Lee $29,452
Event 18 - $1625 NLHE - Daniel Garon $143,041
Event 19 - $400 Omaha/Stud-8 - Allen Kessler $14,744
Event 20 - Championship event - ongoing
Event 21 - $450 NLHE - Michael McCarty $24,328
Event 22 - $400 NLHE - Steven Curtin $26,175

And in the world of online poker, the UltimateBet Online Championships (UBOC) finally wrapped up with five more preliminary events on UltimateBet that led to the Sunday, January 31st Main Event.

Event 13 - $30K Guaranteed Omaha/Stud-8 - MOTA_L_ZORRO $11,754.60
Event 14 - $300K Guaranteed NLHE Deep Stack - TAZED1SPURR $125,195.00
Event 15 - $100K Guaranteed PLO-8 - YOSSARIAN80 $25,000.00
Event 16 - $100K Guaranteed PLHE Deep Stack - TORREY5 $27,810.00
Event 17 - $100K Guaranteed NLHE Turbo w/Rebuys - I AM CLUTCH $30,678.00

The Main Event was a $1,050 buy-in no-limit hold’em tournament hosted by Phil Hellmuth that played out over nearly 13 hours. The final table featured UB pro Michael Binger, who ended up finishing in fifth place, but the heads-up match came down to DOUBLEDAVE22 and SUPERMODL, which didn’t take long. After 30 hands, DOUBLEDAVE22 turned pocket fives into a set on the flop and ultimate full house to beat the pocket nines of SUPERMODL, and DOUBLEDAVE22 grabbed the title and $279,044.50.

Poker Players:

The absolute best piece of news about poker players this week comes from one source - PokerStars. And it calls out all of the PokerStars players for their extreme generosity in the wake of the Haiti disaster. While several sites collected funds to send to relief organizations for the earthquake-hit nation of Haiti, PokerStars distributed final numbers when their efforts to collect funds wrapped on January 31. When the calculations were done, PokerStars players donated $746,390.26, and with the matching donation from the site itself, the amount sent to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies was $1,492,780.52.

The bigheartedness of the poker community comes shining through when it is needed the most, and we should be proud of our collective efforts on behalf of Haiti.

Along those same lines, Jennifer Harman recently announced that she will be donating one percent of all future earnings to the NephCure Foundation. Suffering from kidney disease throughout her life and being the recipient of two live-saving surgeries, Harman has decided to make ongoing donations to an organization dedicated to research and an eventual cure for several of the hardest hitting type of kidney diseases. Again, generosity resounds from the poker community.

In online poker news, the “durrrr” challenge surprisingly still continues on Full Tilt Poker. After many, many months and the loss of interest of most of the poker world, news of note has actually emerged from the challenge between Tom Dwan and Patrik Antonius. It seems like the small victories of Dwan have added up to a current tally of $1,077,932 with 64 percent of the challenge complete. Whether Antonius can come back - or whether anyone will still be following the saga if he does - remains to be seen in the months, possibly years, to come.

Poker in Politics:

A good week for poker in politics is often difficult to come by, but a move by the state of Delaware gives hope that other states will follow. A bill to legalize table games and add them to existing casinos throughout the state moved swiftly through the Delaware legislature in 2010, ultimately finding a passing vote from the Senate and immediate signing into law by Governor Markell. This means that live poker will be available in the state, possibly as soon as the summer of 2010, and the people with new jobs and the state with new revenue will benefit.

The release of a study puts the online gaming industry into perspective, especially as it relates to state and federal legislation in the United States. The Gaming Compliance study looked at the willingness of some states to accept the benefits of poker, whether as table games in their casinos or the possibility of intrastate online gaming on the internet, as well as the missing pieces on the federal level that need to be collected and pieced together before positive legislation can be passed. Though there are many skeptics about the issue being handled in 2010, the study discusses the missing links and what must be done to bring online gaming dreams to reality.