Poker Player Blog

Fred Berger wins in Louisiana: Fred Berger, who won a WSOP bracelet in heads up play against Chris “Jesus” Ferguson eight years ago, took home a WSOP ring this past Wednesday evening winning the Harrah Bayou Poker Challenge in New Orleans. He won against Mike Beasley, earning nearly $200,000 in winnings, the coveted WSOP ring and a seat in the WSOP main event that starts next Friday. That’s worth $10,000 and hopefully brings this decade long professional tournament player continued success.

Social networking and poker honcho matchup: Facebook signed a contract this past week with Zynga Game Network, the gaming software gurus, for a five year partnership that lets Zynga promote their games on Facebook. Facebook games will stick around such as the popular “Farmville” and the annoying “Mafia Wars” but a few more Zynga games will be added to the pot. The company’s poker game has a total of 28 million users to date and this commitment to work together to offer social networking gaming looks to benefit both FB and Zynga.

Poker Stars Main Event: The Poker Stars Asian Pacific Poker Tour came to a close with Victorino Torres coming out the victor. There were a total of 342 players from 40 different countries in the tournament that held its main event in Macau. Torres is an American and brought home over three million Hong Kong dollars for his trouble on this working vacation. That’s about $400,000 and a chance to defend the title next season.

Frank Gets Frank on Gambling Legislation: More discussion will take place on the proposed legalization (and thus taxing and regulation) of internet gambling in July. The congressman in charge of the discussion will be Barney Frank , head of the House Ways and Means Commission.  There are 69 co-sponsors for the bill and the Poker Player’s Alliance is heading up the lobbying campaign. The hope is the poker world will get some say on what goes into the final bill and that poker will not be unfairly targeted by the reform.

On a lighter note…

This year’s WSOP main event will hand out a total of 57 coveted bracelets to the winners of their games. The difference this season is that the bracelet will be personalized for each winner. The designer of the bracelet is Steven Soffa, a well known jewelry artist, who will be at the poker tournament to engrave the pieces and add details from the game each player wins. This is a first for WSOP and may be the beginning of a new bracelet tradition.