Author Archive - Steve Ruddock

It took over a week for Absolute Poker or UB Poker to issue a statement regarding Black Friday, and with the site losing over 75% of its players despite still allowing US players at the table, the poker world’s faith in the company was shaken even more, having only heard from the site that one time.

While this is far from confirmed, according to an E-Mail first produced by the website HoldemPokerChat.com, and later picked up by MSNBC.com, the Cereus Poker Network of Absolute Poker and UB Poker will be filing for bankruptcy protection in Norway.

Today the “Annie Duke” poker league –which is still unnamed, and still without a TV deal—announced both the 218 players that made the cut, as well as the criteria they used in determining the players who would be eligible. Details are in this post.

With Black Friday basically stopping all US online poker players’ cold in their tracks, we are likely looking at the yearly results for any US high-stakes poker player in the list below, and all of the movement that will be taking place will be amongst the European and Asian players.

“Grinders” tracks the lives of a number of small stakes poker pros and it also looks into the day-to-day operations of the game at these illegal card clubs and Gallagher’s journey from outsider to part of the underground poker culture.

In a lengthy blog post, Dusty “Leatherass” Schmidt goes into great detail on how the online poker community needs to be “cleaned up” beginning with creating an equal playing field for all players by banning HUD’s and other third-party poker tracking software and tools.

The poker world was expecting the 22% drop in online poker traffic reported buy pokerscout.com, and virtually everyone in the industry is in agreement that the World Series of Poker numbers will take a major hit thanks to the DOJ’s crackdown on online poker in the US.

More good news came out of the poker world on Tuesday afternoon as PokerStars announced that US poker players can now begin cashing-out their funds from the site, which should also bring a sigh of relief to the WSOP tournament staff.

We are now over 10 days after the infamous proceedings of Black Friday in the poker world—and as the US-friendly poker sites still serving the market have seen a huge increase in traffic, the overall online poker landscape has seen a 22% drop.

With Black Friday and all of its developments beginning to die down, the poker world is now looking toward the future –well about a month into the future as the World Series of Poker and its May 31, 2011 start date fast approaches.