Online Poker Blog and Poker News

Last week Full Tilt Poker unveiled two major innovations. The two new additions include Ring Game Tickets, where players can purchase cash-value tickets to buy into cash games at the site, as well as private, password-protected, tournaments.

It was an interesting theme for this week’s episodes of Poker After Dark, one of the longest running poker programs in TV. Dubbed, Idols Week, PAD pitted 5 young guns in the poker world against Doyle Brunson in a $50,000 buy-in, winner-take-all Sit and Go style tournament.

Few people outside of online poker are likely familiar with the name Ben Wilinofsky, but the phenom who goes by the name of “NeverScaredB” has racked up nearly $1 million in online winnings over the past two years; enough to land him a job as a poker coach at PocketFives Training.

The world’s third largest poker site has just unveiled its latest promotion, and this one is sure to get some serious attention. Party Poker is calling their latest marketing innovation Card Rush Instant Win, and the promotion will run through the end of April.

The winner of the last EPT tournament, Vladimir Geshkenbein, and the winner of the most recent WPT tournament, Roberto Romanello, both find themselves within striking distance of chip-leader Sander Berndsen heading into Day 2 of the PokerStars EPT Berlin Main Event.

You can add another name to the growing list of poker training sites as PocketFives has entered the market. PocketFives Training cannot quite be considered a brand new training site since they absorbed the content, and many of the coaches, of the now defunct online poker training site PokerPwnage.

Last weekend Full Tilt Poker held their first online qualifier for their newly formed Onyx Cup Series –a live tournament series featuring buy-ins from $100K to $300K. While these stakes are well beyond the pay grade of most players, the $600+$40 qualifier hosted by Full Tilt Poker was a little more reasonable.

In the past month a number of online poker rooms have teamed up with land-based casinos in what can only be seen as a push to get online gaming legalized in the USA: now comes the news that Full Tilt and Station Casino’s owners Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta have joined forces in a similar effort.

With a quarter of the 2011 online poker campaign behind us, the big names are starting to move to the top of the winners’ leader-board, with both Daniel Cates and Phil Ivey now both in the top 5, along with Gus Hansen who continues to be the biggest winner for the year with over $4 million in profits in 2011.

A look at the 2011 Player of the Year standings reminds me of the line from Major League where the manager says, “Things are starting to come together Patrick”. Now that players have had time to make a few deep runs, consistency is trumping the players with one big score.