Top News – Online News Dominates, Cake Poker Cleans Up Mess

All of the news since the end of the World Series of Poker seems to revolve around online poker sites. Last week, the United States finally saw progress with its online gaming regulation legislation in Congress. And not only was there a significant amount of news regarding PokerStars-sponsored live tours, but PokerStars stayed in the news again this week with a number of announcements, like a Season 7 stop in Vienna and some women’s only events online.

Other websites are in the news this week as well, with the start of FTOPS XVII on Full Tilt Poker and some security hiccups with Cake Poker that caught everyone’s eye but are reportedly on their way to being resolved.

While many poker players continue to lay low after the WSOP and gear up for a whirlwind fall season of traveling, the online sites grabbed the attention of the poker community.

PokerStars Poker News

The most recent announcement from PokerStars came from its European Poker Tour, as one of several gaps in its Season 7 schedule was filled with a tour stop in Vienna, Austria. The season kicks off on August 11 in Tallinn, Estonia, and then travels to Vilamoura and London. Now, before the November Barcelona tournament, the Concord Card Casino in Vienna will offer players a stay in the lovely Kursalon Palace from October 26 to November 1, 2010. The €5,300 buy-in event will have a €500K guarantee for its prize pool, ensuring a good deal of action and incentive for players. And after many years of Vienna missing from the EPT schedule, many will welcome the chance to travel there again.

Speaking of the EPT Vilamoura, the player-favorite Portugal city added a little excitement to its tour stop, scheduled for August 28 to September 2. In addition to its €5,300 Main Event and side poker tournaments already on the agenda, PokerStars has announced the EPT Fairways and Felts Challenge. It will require a €1,100 buy-in and take place on September 1-2, and the first part of the challenge will be a golf tournament on the Pinhal Course near the Vilamoura Marina. Those who excel on the course will then be able to participate in the no-limit hold’em freezeout tournament the following day at the Solverde Casino. Team PokerStars Pro JP Kelly will host the festivities, and satellites are running on PokerStars for players to win their chance to compete at the innovative combination event.

PokerStars also announced its Women’s Poker League. The first site to offer female players a chance to compete in a comfortable, friendly, women-only environment, PokerStars revealed many opportunities for women in the poker community, starting with a number of daily events, starting as low as $5.50 that will allow them to compete for points in the league and prizes. There will be a rankings page so they can track their progress through the remainder of 2010 in the league. Also, there will be a special women-only poker tournament each Sunday night, and the results of that event will also be included in league standings.

Lastly, in PokerStars news, the Italian Poker Tour wrapped up its recent stop in the canal-centered city of Venice, where Tamas Lendvai of Hungary was able to grab that title and €235,000 in prize money. The stop made Italian poker history with the largest field and prize pool on the IPT thus far, and Lendvai wrote his own page in history by defeating Davide Cerrato of Italy heads-up for the title.

PokerStars now heads to several places around the globe for poker tournaments, with the aforementioned Tallinn scheduled to begin on August 11 for the EPT, the Gold Coast hosting the next stop on the Australia New Zealand Poker Tour on August 11 in Australia, and the Latin American Poker Tour taking players to Florianopolis, Brazil for the August 5 - 8 festivities.

FTOPS in Full Tilt Swing

It happens several times each year, but players wait for the opportunity to compete in the Full Tilt Online Poker Series, one of the most prestigious online tournament series in poker. The 17th running of FTOPS launched on Wednesday, August 4, and it will run through the 15th, with a total of 34 tournaments and a whopping $19 million in guarantees. Should the cumulative prize pools run over the $20 million mark, it would not be surprising though it would make FTOPS history.

This fall’s FTOPS offers some unique events, including the fact that six of the tournaments will be Rush Poker style, meaning they will be played at lightning speed, though the final tables will play out as in any normal tournament. And when the series begins to wrap with its Main Event, there will be a $3 million guarantee in place for the $600 + $40 NLHE tournament on August 15.

Cake Poker Faces Security Glitch

In similar fashion to the UB Poker glitch that was discovered in 2010, the online poker watchdog site Poker Table Rankings recently discovered a security trap on Cake Poker. The vulnerability was very similar to that which UB Poker recently fixed, as Cake Poker had a problem in its network encoding.

Essentially, the problem consisted of the site’s encoding being weak enough that a third party, someone who knows networking, could access players’ account information as well as their hole cards, especially players who logged on using unsecured wireless networks. PTR pointed out the weaknesses to Cake Poker, and Card Room Manager Lee Jones addressed the issue with a public statement.

In it, Jones confirmed that Cake Poker’s development team found the same vulnerability, took the problem seriously, and immediately implemented an SSL component to its security system, which was to secure communication between servers and client software. The statement also came with suggestions to players, such as using a secured network on which to play and to run anti-virus software on one’s computers, to help keep their own computers safe.

PTR recently acknowledged that Cake Poker did add the SSL layer to its encryption and the implementation was in process.