Poker News

Today’s edition of Poker News and Notes covers Jon Kalmar (Skalie) joining Team Ladbrokes, Poker Stars sending players to Life Ball 2008, and Phil Hellmuth donating $20K to charity during Poker After Dark filming. Full Edition Here

PokerStars.com landed themselves a new celebrity endorsement this weekend, and this one is big. The newest member of Team PokerStars is Victoria Coren who is one of the most popular female players in Britain. In 2006 she became the first woman to win an EPT Title, she is 10th on the woman’s all-time money list, and she is a feared cash game player, a poker columnist, television commentator and more. Her list of accolades goes on and on and not to mention, she is fairly attractive as well. To see her full list of accolades and to learn why this is such a big win for PokerStars and online poker players, read the entire story here.

In a true David versus Goliath like fashion David Chiu overcame a 4.3 million to 23 million heads up chip disadvantage, last night, to win the 2008 World Poker Tour Championship. Hansen was on a tear, personally eliminating four of the six final table players in a record 22 hands. It would take an additional 56 hands before his chip lead was relinquished and then two addition hands before he was defeated and denied his 4th major World Poker Tour Championship. This win now puts David Chiu over the milestone of 6 million dollars in career tournament winnings. Full Recap here

The World Poker Tour Ladies League has its first champion and the winner is… a successful political activist named Nancy Todd Tyner. She overcame huge odds to win this event beating out accomplished female professional poker player’s Karina Jett – 7th place, Van Nguyen – 6th place and Vanessa Selbst – runner up, for details read our final table recap.

Sun Poker announced today the addition of a no download required version of their online poker room to go along with the full download windows version they’ve operated on the Cryptologic Network since 2002. We had a chance to test the software out today using both Safari and Firefox and we must say we’re quite impressed. While it took a few extra seconds for the tables to load, once at the tables we noticed no difference between the download and no download versions.

Apparently Doyle Brunson is no longer as confident about the challenge he issued to Patrik Antonius as now he is asking for a 100 yard advantage in their $100K per hole golf match. To learn more and to also find out why Tom Dawn Durrr was wearing funny hats during the WPT Championship read our latest edition of Prop Bet News.

In our latest column we cover a variety of poker news and notes that include: Calvin Ayre hanging up the gloves and focusing on his charity work, Poker After Dark season 4 has new game formats, and Cake Poker offering new deposit option after ePassporte pulled out.

Cake Poker continues to become one of the dominant poker sites/network in the market and has raised the bar with their brand new software update. The players of Cake Poker were making requests for changes to be made to the software and Cake listened. The new software features new security implementations, manageable fonts and finally resizeable tables! Since the day Cake Poker launched, many players complained about the large size of their tables, which made it difficult to multi-table. For more details please read the full report here

Lee Jones who is perhaps the most famous poker room manager in history has signed on to become the Chief Operating Officer of cardrunners.com. Jones is currently the executive host of the European Poker Tour (EPT) but is best known for the roll he played for 5 years as PokerStars Manager and for his book “Winning Low Limit Holdem”. Full Story here.

In news that few care about these days, the World Poker Tour has reported they’ve settled the nearly two year old lawsuit which had been filed by some of the biggest names in poker. In case you’re interested you can read the full report here.