ust a month ago Jose Montes won World Series of Poker Circuit Choctaw main event for $352,669. The poker pro based out of Bronx, New York has already found his way back to champion’s podium, coming out on top of a 761-entry field to win the 2015 Heartland Poker Tour Golden Gates $1,650 no-limit hold’em main event. For the win he earned his second title of the year and the $240,523 first-place prize.
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“It’s overwhelming. I’m blessed,” Montes said after the win. “This means so much for my family. I’m close to tears.”

In addition to the title and the money Montes also earned 912 Card Player Player of the Year points. As a result he climbed into fourth place in the overall POY standings with 1,872 points so far and year-to-date earnings of $593,192.

Montes had to overcome a star-studded final table that included the likes of WSOP Circuit Cherokee main event winner Jacob Bazeley (5th – $49,221) and World Poker Tour season X player of the year winner Joe Serock (2nd – $148,895).

Mark your calendars for March 4-17, 2015, and get ready for some high-quality poker action as the World Poker Tour heads to Montesino Poker Club in the fabulous city of Vienna, Austria. The spectacular poker festival will be highlighted by the €3,300 Main Event taking place March 12-17, but there will be plenty of poker options for all levels.
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From March 5-9, players can kick off the festivities with the €340 Warm-Up. Boasting a €200,000 guarantee, this event will allow players one reentry per day and provide a starting stack of 20,000 in tournament chips. Find yourself at the final table, and you will be featured on the streamed webcast.

Then from March 9-12, the €1,100 8-Max will take place, and this event will also allow one reentry per day. From March 11-12, the two-day €550 Pot-Limit Omaha will play out, but these two events are only the calm before the storm.

On March 12, it will be Day 1a of the partypoker WPT €3,300 Main Event. The second starting flight will take place the following day on March 13, and players are allowed one reentry per day. The event will conclude on March 17 and will feature a streamed webcast of the action. Each participant will begin with 30,000 in tournament chips. Levels will be 60 minutes long on Day 1 and 90 minutes long on Day 2-4. On Day 5, the final day of the event, the levels will revert back to 60 minutes in length.

The last time the WPT made a trip to Vienna on the main tour was back in April 2012 during Season 10. There, it was Denmark's Morten Christensen who topped a field of 396 entries to claim the €313,390 first-place prize.

For those who may not be so fortunate to make a deep run in the Main Event, there will still be plenty of money to be won in the €6,000 High Roller that will take place March 14-15. If that's a little too pricy for your liking, a €220 Accumulator Turbo will run March 14-15 with three different starting heats.

Outside of the tournaments, players can dive into their favorite cash games throughout the festival, with Texas hold'em, Omaha, seven-card stud, and others available.

Needless to say, there's plenty of poker options for everyone.

One of my poker-playing friends often asks me how on earth I can dedicate my free time to playing multi-table tournaments (MTTs) online. He often refers to them as “donkaments” and says that they frequently descend into a “shove-fest” where players have to get lucky in order to win.
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While he may be correct in certain respects — some tournaments do require a lot of luck to win and they are sometimes full of “donks” — for me tournament poker ticks all of the boxes I require from a poker format and I can’t ever see myself playing anything else.

When I first started to play poker online, you would only ever find me at the cash game tables. All my friends played cash games and the books and strategy articles I read were all dedicated to the art of cash games. But — and it’s a big “but” — I never enjoyed them. Why? Because they don’t fit in with my whole psyche, whereas tournament poker does.

Cash game players often say that cash games are one long, continuous session. When you log off, your “session” obviously ends, but resumes again when you return to the felt. This is a problem for me and something I have always struggled to get my head around. Maybe it’s the writer in me, or maybe I prefer more structure in my life, but I like to have a beginning, a middle, and an end on which to focus. Tournament poker gives me that because there are definite periods of an MTT to which I can assign those labels. They aren’t in black and white, yet I can still see the tournament progressing to a different stage whenever I play one.

Secondly, I don’t like how in cash games you never know how much money you are going to win or lose and being a bankroll nit this is a problem for me. With MTTs, I can plan to play 25 of them on a given night and I know exactly what the risk to my bankroll is and what I stand to win if the stars align and the “poker gods” allow me to run well.

These two points are important to me, but they may not be to you. I imagine you have little quirks and preferences that I can’t understand either. Beyond those two points, I can think of five other reasons why I prefer playing MTTs over any other poker format.

1. The ever-changing dynamics of MTTs
In cash games you often sit down at a table 100 big blinds deep with several other people who are 100 big blinds deep, which to me is boring. The blinds are minimal, too. Meanwhile in an MTT everyone’s stack fluctuates wildly, the blinds are ever-increasing (which puts pressure on you and your opponents), and the prize structure can create some unique situations when it comes to strategy.

2. The excitement of a deep MTT run or win
Unless you have won an online MTT, you cannot begin to imagine how amazing it feels to know you have outlasted, outsmarted, and outplayed your opponents on your way to clinching victory. Seeing the value of the prizes come into view and then increase as the number of entrants falls really gets the blood pumping!

3. Being able to turn a small investment into a large prize
One of the most attractive features of MTTs is they allow a poker player to make a small investment and turn it into a much more meaningful amount in a single event. While cash players can do the same to some degree, winning 40-60 buy-ins in a single session is practically unheard of. Yet there have a been a few occasions when I’ve managed to final table large-field tournaments like the PokerStars $3.30 rebuy and turn just a few bucks into four-figure scores that were over 100 times my initial investment.

4. My skills and style better suit tournaments
Maybe it is because I have played so many turbo-structured tournaments that I seem to be more comfortable with a 15-30 big blind stack at my disposal, or maybe it is because I am bad at deep-stacked poker, but MTTs make me feel at ease and I rarely find myself in spots where I do not know what to do. Likewise, how I approach the game often relies on being able to make players fold, which I find easier to do in a tournament scenario over a cash game equivalent.

5. I actually enjoy MTTs
Easily the biggest factor in my decision to play online MTTs is the fact that when everything is taken into consideration, I really enjoy them. I lead quite a busy life and my spare time is not as plentiful as some, so when I do get some time to myself to play poker it is important that it is an enjoyable experience. I mean, when all is said and done, poker is a game and if you don’t enjoy the game why bother playing it at all?

What poker format do you prefer and why? Let us know in the comments box below.

The winners of the Unibet-sponsored British Poker Awards were announced on the evening of Feb. 23 at the Hippodrome Casino, with a lavish ceremony attended by some of the United Kingdom's most recognizable names in poker.

Victoria Coren Mitchell, who stepped down from her position at PokerStars after the online gaming operator introduced casino games, had not one, not two, but three reasons to celebrate on Monday.
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Coren Mitchell first picked up the award for Best Social Media user, and then received an award for the Best Poker Personality of the Year.

But perhaps the best award for Coren Mitchell was saved for last, when she won the Performance of the Year award, mostly thanks to her becoming the first player in history to win two European Poker Tour (EPT) Main Events. After winning the EPT London Main Event in 2006, Coren Mitchell had to wait eight years to make her way into the history books before she won the EPT Sanremo Main Event in April 2014 for €476,100.

Coren Mitchell wasn't the only poker player to win multiple awards as Simon Deadman witnessed his stellar 2014 translate into two awards. Deadman received the first award of the evening's ceremony when he was declared Breakout Player of the Year. Deadman added more hardware later in the evening when he won the award for the Best Live Tournament Player, mostly due to his $1.1 million in cashes propelled by six runner-up finishes and a win in the Hollywood Poker Open in Las Vegas.

Two awards were separately handed to Dusk Till Dawn (DTD) and its owner Rob Yong. DTD won the award for Best Live Cardroom thanks to its hosting of the partypoker WPT500, while Yong won the award for Best Contribution to Growing and Promoting Poker.

It appears that DTD and Yong could be on their way for this same award in 2015 thanks to the multi-year partnership agreement with partypoker, and the announcement of a huge 18-starting-day Grand Prix Millions event where nine of the opening days will be played online and another nine played live in the poker room.

Other awards included Toby Stone winning Best TD, Daniel Negreanu winning Best International Player, Run It Once winning Best Training Site, Jake Cody winning Best Blogger, and Red Tooth Poker winning Best Poker League.

One year ago, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval and Delaware Gov. Jack Markell signed off on an agreement that would allow for the two states to join together for online poker. This would see the two states be able to share liquidity and online poker player pools — a necessary step in the right direction for the game's growth, especially in the United States' new regulated online poker market.
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A month later, reports were that Sandoval was eyeing a summer launch for the interstate compact, but that time has since come and gone. Now, Sandoval is optimistic to see everything come to light in the next four to six weeks, according to an interview with Steve Tetreault that appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

"An agreement Sandoval signed last February with Delaware Gov. Jack Markell for their states to share online poker players should go live in four to six weeks," Tetreault writes. "Sandoval said 'technical glitches' delayed the rollout that was expected last summer, but he has been told by Nevada gaming regulators it now is 'imminent.'"

More About the Attractiveness, and Not Actual Numbers
This is promising news, but one that poker players and those within the industry shouldn't risk everything on. Given the landscape of the US regulated online poker market, these movements tend to take longer than anticipated. Seeing the two states finally share liquidity for real would certainly be progress in the right direction, though, and would come off the heels of another positive development in the US market after New Jersey online poker recorded its second consecutive month of revenue growth. Unfortunately, discussions of shared liquidity involving New Jersey never progressed.

According to PokerScout, a site that monitors online poker traffic, Delaware's only online poker provider, Delaware Poker, which is operated by 888, has a very small player pool. The six-month average for real-money ring-game players on the site is about 10, or about 0.0011 percent of the population (approx. 936,000). In Nevada, where the population of the state is approximately 2.84 million, WSOP.com NV has been operating with an average of approximately 125 real-money ring-game players over the last six months — or about 0.0044 percent of the state's population. When the agreement between the two states gets the green light, WSOP.com NV and Delaware Poker will begin sharing liquidity. While this is good, we have to be careful not to think the two states are all of a sudden going to see a huge boost.

Online poker hasn't exactly caught on in the state like it has in Nevada, but Nevada has a greater gaming culture and some Delaware residents could easily have relocated to New Jersey without having to make a massive leap away from their homes. WSOP.com NV is also the premier online poker site in Nevada backed by the World Series of Poker, which is arguably the biggest brand in poker. This lends itself to a greater exposure to the population.

While the small numbers may be worrisome and those in Nevada may think that the only benefit of such liquidity sharing would come to those in Delaware, the most important thing will be the increased attractiveness of this agreement once things are in motion. That itself should spark greater interest in online poker. Right now, the numbers in Delaware might be so small because those in the state may simply opt to not play online poker because the numbers being too small for their liking. But with the ability to play with the Nevada player pool in more games and a wider variety to choose from, there will be excitement. This excitement could then grow the amount of players playing from the State of Delaware, which then has an effect on the combined player pools.

Букмекеры прогнозируют сегодняшние победы «Барселоне» и «Ювентусу».
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«На победу «Манчестер Сити» коэффициент 3,4, на ничью 3,5, на победу «Барселоны» 2, то есть фаворит «Барселона». Коэффициент на победу «Ювентуса» 2, на ничью 3,2, на победу «Боруссии» 3,7. Фаворит «Ювентус».

Матчи «Манчестер Сити» – «Барселона» и «Ювентус» – «Боруссия» (Дортмунд) пройдут 24 февраля. Начало в 22:45 по московскому времени.

Информацию предоставила - букмекерская контора гол пас.