PartyPoker.com Blog

I have been enjoying playing the AussieMillions qualifiers at PartyPoker.com. The bounty on my head makes for an interesting dyamanic and I have enjoyed the challenge of trying to win my own bounty tournaments.

On Sunday 22nd there is a 250 buy in satellite with one package guaranteed to the Aussie Millions this also has a bounty which is a $640 ticket into the December 13 five package GTD tournamanent.

The guys at PartyPoker are offering two separate routes into the Aussie Millions, one for Australian and New Zealand players and one for the rest of the world.

This is purely so you won’t find yourself playing at 3 in the morning for the PartyPoker Aussie Millions package.

My next live event is the APPT Sydney which has some really juicy events including the $2700 six handed and also the $1650 PLO with second chance and the main event being a $6300 buy in with estimated prize pool in excess
of a million.

Hope to see you at the online qualifiers at PartyPoker.com and then inturn in Melbourne in January for the Aussie Millions

Good luck on the felt

Stewart Scott

Stewart Scott Aussie Millions Stewart Scott

As many of you are aware PartyGaming has been in takeover discussions with the WPTE for a few months now, well today we can announce that the deal is now official.

We are really excited to be cementing our long standing relationship with the WPT, after all it was thanks our sponsorship of WPT shows that partypoker.com was catapulted to the heady heights of no.1 poker site in the world.

Presented by PartyPoker ambassador Mike Sexton and Vince Van Patten the World Poker Tour helped to detonate poker’s explosion in popularity.  The show pioneered innovations like the revolutionary ‘hole cam’ – allowing viewers to see player’s cards, turning televised poker into a pulse-raising sport. Revolutionary visual graphics meant fans could follow from a barstool, further cementing poker as a national pastime.

Today the WPT is also home to a hugely successful subscription based poker site www.clubwpt.com alongside www.worldpokertour.com which hosts over 150 hours of poker videos featuring some of the most momentous tournaments in poker history.  The WPT TV shows made stars of the likes of Gus Hansen, Daniel Negraneau and Dave ‘Devilfish’ Ulliott and more recently Yevgeniy Timoshenko, the 21 year old American who won $2,149,960 at this year’s WPT World Championship.

The partnership offers many exciting opportunities for PartyGaming and the WPT that may even see www.partypoker.com back in the US in some form in the near future.  We will share more news with you on the blog as soon as the details are confirmed.

The acquisition of WPTE arrives on the back of our recent acquisition of Cashcade, parent company of www.foxybingo.com and www.getminted.com.

These are exciting times at partypoker.com so why not join the action?  Sign up for the Aussie Millions satellite tournaments and maybe you could be poker’s next TV superstar.

Thomas Baker WPT WPT

We all know that Phil Ivey is a remarkable poker player, after all this is a man that has total tournament poker earnings of over $8.5m and add on top of that the mind boggling sums he will have made in cash games you then begin to understand that we are talking about one of the all-time greats of this glorious game.

Come November 7th and Ivey will face his greatest challenge to date, the battle to become the WSOP Main Event Champion.  When all is said and done its WSOP bracelets that really matter to poker players.  Listen to them talk at the table or in an interview and they will brush off the millions in prize money as a by product, it’s the glory and acclaim from their peers that these guys really crave.

Just getting to the final table is an astonishing achievement, not just for Phil Ivey but also his eight fellow members of the ‘November Nine’, all the more impressive when you consider that 6,494 paid the $10,000 buy-in.

Such a large field can prove very difficult for the bookies to judge.  Who exactly are the favourites out of 6,494?  Obviously the world renowned pros will be fancied but in a game where luck or the ‘Poker Gods’ as some would have it plays a significant part the bookies must factor this in when calculating each player’s odds of winning the WSOP main event.

That is why Phil Ivey started out at 175/1 at our sister site PartyBets.com, even then that was considered quite a short price, it could easily have been double that but because this is Phil Ivey we are talking about the odds had to be shortened.  Indeed, this proved to be a wise choice because Ivey is now down to 5/1 to take that elusive Main Event bracelet.  Any of you who were wise enough to take him at 175/1 will be rubbing your hands with glee if he does succeed.

But Ivey is up against it, he’s one of the short stacks plus he faces some very stiff competition from the likes of Brit James Akenhead, Card Player Exec Jeff Shulman and France’s Antoine Saout.  And let’s not forget chip leader Darvin Moon, the logger from Maryland, USA who won his seat from a $130 satellite tournament.  If Moon were to win his story would surely surpass 2003 champion Chris Moneymaker’s rise to poker fame.

WSOP Main Event Chip Counts

Darvin Moon              58,930,000
Eric Buchman            34,800,000
Steven Begleiter       29,885,000
Jeff Shulman             19,580,000
Joseph Cada             13,215,000
Kevin Schaffel           12,390,000
Phil Ivey                     9,765,000
Antoine Saout            9,500,000
James Akenhead        6,800,000

Thomas Baker World Series of Poker James Akenhead, phil ivey

I left the days of endless sun and golden beaches at home to arrive in Auckland on a cold wet rainy day. There was a good turnout at Skycity for the APPT event including notables such a Lee final table Nelson, Raj Ramakritsin (who finished an unlucky 4th to me in the Aussie millions) and Tony Hachem.

The main event had starting stacks of 20k with a good structure. I hit the ground running chipping up to 30 k within the first 30 minutes then went card dead for a long period. My stack took a big hit when I made a call to a re raise shove with 88,the board counterfeited my pair and was beaten by A 10

I managed to double my way back to 30k by the 500/1k level when the action folded to me in last position I looked down at K 10 suited and made it 2300 to go, it folded to the guy on the button who had been running really well playing aggressive and had accumulated around 110k or so he made it 5100 and the size of the re raise and the dynamics I figured it was a good time for him to raise me light so I shoved and he snap calls with AA no help from the board and so it was GG Auckland and back home for me.

Good Luck on the felt

Stewart Scott

Stewart Scott PartyPoker Ambassadors Stewart Scott