Some interesting nuggets from a high-stakes report over at pokernewsdaily.com. First, Cole South, who has been killing it Full Tilt’s tables early in 2010, took a big hit in one session, losing about a million. Don’t worry, he’s still up more than $2 million for the year. Also, more scuttlebutt about the possibility that Isildur1 and DrPill share accounts at FTP. Here’s some chat between South and Tom Dwan:
durrrr: hav u played pill?
Cole South: nope
durrrr: i dont think they share accnts much
Cole South: never seen him at plo
durrrr: but all the nl guys seem to think they do
Cole South: and havent been playin too muc hnl
Cole South: yea silly for them to make accusations in public on a hunch though
durrrr: well not rly in this case
durrrr: b/c isil for sure did that w/ a diff accnt
Cole South: ah dont know the story there

Poker news show “Poker2Nite” premiered on its new channel, the VS. network. Video of the first segment here, or head over to pokerati.com for the whole thing:

PartyGaming released its financials for 2009, and net revenues were down. Most shocking, however, is that the poker operation saw a decline of about 28% from 2008 to 2009.

The Latin American Poker Tour event scheduled for Chile was canceled because of the recent earthquake in the South American country. The Vina del Mar stop was supposed to take place later this month. PokerStars said that everyone would be refunded their buy-ins, and out of pocket expenses.

The European Poker Tour stop in Berlin is underway, and pokernews.com caught up with tennis star Boris Becker at the event:

And if you want to see a man in a dress after losing a bet, here ya go:

The World Poker Tour’s celebrity invitational is over, and the winner was a qualifier from ClubWPT.com. You can read more on the WPT Web site. Boxer Leron Washington took down the first prize of $100,000. Reality star turned sponsored poker player Trishelle Cannatella took third.

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Tom “durrrr” Dwan had a pretty good 24 hours of poker — he won more than a million dollars in that time frame. According to reports, he took about half of his profit from Brian Townsend. Dwan was also spotted playing Isildur1 today. We’ll have a report out of that when there’s some final results to report.

Ashton “TheASHMAN103″ Griffin won the $25K buy-in event at the North American Poker Tour event at the Venetian in Las Vegas, banking more than half a million dollars. He outlasted the likes of Hoyt Corkins and Peter Eastgate at the final table of the shootout event. It’s actually the second time he’s won a $25K buy-in event — he won last year’s heads-up championship at Full Tilt Poker.

The $10,000 main event for the L.A. Poker Classic, and apparently Daniel Negreanu is a fan of the structure of the tourney. From his blog: “I’m about to board a plane to LA and had to take a look at the structure and almost got a … never mind, not appropriate.” You can read the blog entry here, and you can see the structure here. And here’s some video from the run-up, including a fantasy draft of players featuring Jason Mercier, et al.

The Poker Players Alliance is giving its thoughts on all of the intrastate poker legislation that is being considered throughout the United States right now. The goal is obviously federal legalization and regulation, but according to PPA Executive Director John Pappas: “The idea is not something that the PPA opposes. However, we are very concerned what intrastate poker means for the online poker player and the online poker market today.” Video with Pappas below:

Interesting (but long) blog post from Bill Rini here, on a recent move by Full Tilt affecting affiliates and rakeback. Full Tilt recently put a 3% cap on the margins that affiliates can make, and Rini goes into why Full Tilt is justified in doing so. He talks about the machinations of the world of online poker, it’s worth a read if you have the time.

Interesting story that we’re surprised hasn’t gotten more pub. According to this story, the International Mind Sports Association is planning to add the International Federation of Poker as a member. In turn, the International Olympic Committee will list poker as a skill game, which should help court cases in which poker is debated to be a game of chance of skill.

No matter what’s going on behind the scenes, you can still get rakeback at Full Tilt Poker. Sign up today.

Contrary to recent reports, Full Tilt pros are apparently will be able to play in the North American Poker Tour stop at the Venetian in Las Vegas. Earlier this week, ESPN.com reported that Full Tilt might be telling its pros to stay away from the PokerStars-branded event. Now, pokernewsdaily.com is reporting that’s not the case. An unnamed source told them: “Any Full Tilt pro, Red or member of Team Full Tilt, can play in any competitor’s open event.” Whether this is backtracking or simply the reality of things, we don’t know. But for now, FTP pros are free to play anywhere they want.

The 40 billionth hand in PokerStars history was dealt just a few hours ago. Read about how it went down here. Amazingly, three players folded their hands and missed out on thousands of dollars for participating in the hand.

The PartyPoker Premier League is over, and even though we’re still confused by the format, David Benyamine has won, beating down the evil forces of Luke “Full_Flush” Schwartz in heads-up play. Benyamine pocketed nearly half a million for his efforts. Interviews with Benyamine, Schwartz below:

While there’s been a lot of buzz about the return of Isildur1 to the high-stakes tables at Full Tilt, Tom “durrrr” Dwan was busy taking a beating of late. Story here talks about how he lost a million in short order recently.

The ratings for the World Series of Poker Europe on ESPN2 have been down 25% from last year. Story here says it is mostly due to material airing at the same time, such as the Winter Olympics.

Interesting blog post from Doyle Brunson, with what he’s been up to and some mini-rants about the state of poker today. A few lines here: “Anyway, I’ve never pretended to be a bonafide online poker player so I might not know or understand some of the more complex problems. When I hear people talking about tracking devices, statkeeping software, etc. I just think WTF.”

The latest state to think about legalizing table games? Maryland, which feels the need to keep up with other mid-Atlantic states that are legalizing table games, including poker.

No matter where you live, you can play online at Full Tilt Poker. Start a new account today to get rakeback.

Well, perhaps. Nevertheless, the new season of the Game Show Network’s poker show is set to premiere tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern. Fans are anxious for its return, as it’s been nine months since the last new episode aired. In is Scott, now a Party Poker pro, who replaces A.J. Benza as the show’s co-host alongside Gabe Kaplan. And the lineup of players is one of the best assembled in the show’s history, with amateurs out of the mix. The table will be filled exclusively with big name pros who are not shy about mixing it up on the felt.

Antonio Esfandiari, one of the players this season, had this to say about the show in an article in the Las Vegas Sun:

“It’s the one show that every poker player dreams of being on. It’s the one so many of my friends have tried so hard to be on. It’s a hard profile to fit. You either have to be a sick demon gambler, super-good or a super fish with personality.”

While players aren’t able to reveal specific details about the show or hands played, Esfandiari has already leaked that one hand between Tom “durrrr” Dwan and Phil Ivey will have the poker world abuzz.

The minimum buy-in is for the table is $200,000; blinds will be $300-$600 with a $100 ante throughout.

Here’s the full lineup of players you can expect to see this season:

Patrik Antonius
David Benyamine
Doyle Brunson
Tom Dwan
Eli Elezra
Antonio Esfandiari
Barry Greenstein
Phil Hellmuth
Andreas Hoivold
Phil Ivey
Mike Matusow
Daniel Negreanu
Dennis Phillips
Lex Veldhuis

Leading up to the premiere, there will be an “I Love Poker” HSP marathon starting at noon Eastern, featuring the top eight shows from the first five seasons, as picked by producers of the show.

FTOPS XV is officially under way, and if the first event is any indication, it’s going to a big tournament series for Full Tilt. More than 5,600 players turned out for event No. 1, a $1M guaranteed, $216 buy-in tourney.

Doyle Brunson apparently is doing ok after some serious dental surgery that lasted hours. Brunson has said he’s going to take it easy on his live poker play leading up to the World Series of Poker, but he’s already back at the tables online, playing at doylesroom.com.

PokerStars announced the latest pro added to its team: England’s Julian Thew. He has $2.5 million in live winnings and is most famous for this 2007 European Poker Tour victory.

If you follow “High Stakes Poker,” some recaps of the most memorable hands in show history here and here. The No. 1 hand? A swet bluff by Tom “durrrr” Dwan.

Interview with one of Dwan’s playing partners at Full Tilt’s high-stakes tables, Patrik Antonius here and here.

And more on both Dwan and Antonius here, in a story that wonders if it’s even possible for Dwan to lose his “durrrr Challenge” now that he has amassed a seemingly insurmountable $1.4 million lead. Since there’s a lot of money on the line, the story speculates that Dwan will become defensive to hold on to his lead. Doesn’t sound like Dwan, to us, but he’s also smart and likes money. So we’ll see.

We’ll call this poker-related, since it appeared on wickedchopspoker.com, who points out that it is about the Phil Ivey of golf. It’s a pretty great parody of the Google Super Bowl ad.

We still don’t know why the host of this poker show at cardplayer.com has a big pile of chips in front of him. Did he win a tournament of potential hosts for the tournament, and thus the chips? But there is an interview with Lauren ’supermodl’ Kling, which redeems him. But negative points because it’s only a phone interview:

We reported on California’s efforts to legalize intrastate poker yesterday. Here’s an editorial saying why it’s a bad idea, at least for the state budget.

Interesting read about PokerStars over at Forbes.com. Rarely do we see stories that look at all past the facade of the online poker giant, and this is at least a glimpse at it.

It’s not too late to play in this edition of FTOPS. Make sure to sign up with a new Full Tilt account, if you don’t have one already, to get rakeback today.

If you like keeping up with the turtle-like place of the durrrr Challenge, here’s an interesting recap/lookahead of the battle between Tom Dwan and Patrik Antonius. We recently reported that Dwan is now leading the challenge by more than a million dollars. The article estimates that the challenge will be over in August at its current pace, which would mean it took more than a year and a half to complete.

And more on Dwan, this time playing with Phil Ivey (and Antonius) in a live cash game. Dwan took a pot of $1.1 million from Ivey in a televised game (on Europe’s SkyTV), the largest pot in televised poker history. And video of the hand below:

In some more high-stakes news, Brian Townsend, who recently served a suspension at Full Tilt Poker regarding hand histories being shared before Brian Hastings took millions from Isildur1, lost a big chunk of change. He dropped nearly $600K in a session playing 7-game.

PartyPoker is cracking down on…play money? It’s true, you can read about it here. Some players have built up millions of chips over the years, but Party has now limited the maximum number of play money chips to 250,000 for a single account. The move was made in part to deal with sites where play money chips could be purchased on third-party sites. And we suppose the move is also to make the play money games a little more entertaining/like real poker. And more on Party here, with an ESPN story talking about the site trying to regain its spot atop the online poker universe. And more on “free play” poker over at pokerati, where they talk about a new xBox poker game.

Story here about how much money online poker sites have raised for relief efforts in Haiti in the wake of the devastating earthquake. More than $2M was raised by Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars.

If you’ve been keeping up to date on legal news in United States poker, you probably already know that New Jersey is considering the legalization of intrastate online poker and gambling. Here’s a story that looks into how this might affect the state’s players who play “out of state” poker, notably the U.S.-facing sites like Full Tilt, PokerStars, et al. The Interactive Media Entertainment and Gaming Association seems to think the proposed legislation doesn’t affect those sites at all. So play on, Garden Staters.

Good news if you’re a Canadian poker player — you’ll be seeing more of Lacey Jones. She just signed with the Canadian Poker Tour to be its new “face.” And quite a face it is.

Interview with the always entertaining “Elky” here, including how playing StarCraft translates into his poker game. We need to brush up on our StarCraft. It’s been a while.

We love some of the stories they come up with at pokernewsdaily.com, when there seems to be nothing else to write about. Here’s one where they recap interesting stuff that poker players tweeted about this week.

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It’s been a busy week for the two nosebleed pros, with a 1200 or so hand session during the week and a follow up session last night that saw several six figure pots.

The largest pot of the night – a $192,829.50 affair – saw Dwan get it in with a strong draw on the turn and make on the river to send Patrik’s two pair into the muck.

While the earlier session gave Patrik a bit of hope and momentum – he cut into Dwan’s lead by about 60k – this latest session has to be a bit frustrating for Antonius. Over the course of 892 hands, Dwan managed a $199,442 win that bumped his overall lead for the challenge to $1,077,932.50.

There’s still plenty of play left – after all, the two have only completed 31,912 of the 50,000 hands necessary to complete the challenge (which is coming up on its first anniversary), and while a million is a lot of money, the prevalence of six-figure pots means that it’s far from an insurmountable lead. To wit: If Patrik’s two pair had held, Dwan’s lead would only be about 600k.

It will be interesting to see if the dynamic of the game changes should Patrik find himself down by a similar amount with a smaller amount of hands left to play, or if the notion of a buy-out will come into play as the 50k mark draws nearer.

Graph of the play so far:

If you’re interested in watching the durrrr challenge, download Full Tilt and look for the special ‘durrrr challenge tables’ under the Omaha Hi tab in the main lobby. Read this before you download Full Tilt Poker.

If you’ve been watching “Rail Heaven” on Poker After Dark, you’ve seen some of the top cash game pros go at it. Here, Tom “durrrr” Dwan recounts a couple of hands from the show, including a big pot he lost to Phil Hellmuth.

We’ve been telling you about a CNBC piece on “illegal online gambling” in the United States that was scheduled to air. It aired last night, and you can read a recap of it here. It starts off tackling sports betting, but moves into the UIGEA and online poker. CNBC’s Web site has more on the story here.

Australia is considering forcing internet service providers to block certain types of sites in the country — and that would apparently include poker sites. Story from the Sydney Morning Herald here. The government wants to move ahead with the censorship, although there’s still some strong opposition and some problems with the filtering, which apparently catches a lot of content that has no reason to be censored.

Fox Sports Net’s Poker2Nite rolls into episode No. 5, watch the first segment below, or the whole thing at pokerati here.

A new twist in the case of Kentucky vs. online gambling and poker here. The Supreme Court of Kentucky has not yet issued a ruling in the case of Kentucky’s attempt to seize internet domains involved in online gaming. The new news: Kentucky is apparently also going after U.S. citizens who are linked to the 141 domains in question. No names named yet, an no sense yet on what course of action Kentucky’s lawyers will take moving forward. We’ll keep you updated as news warrants.

Check out a shaven-headed Barry Greenstein in the video below. Greenstein and a few other well-kown pros shaved their heads to support Thuy Doan, a young player who has cancer.

Brad “Yukon” Booth blasts Full Tilt Poker for (he says) backing out of a deal with him. Story at wickedchipspoker.com here. He has some choice words for Rich Bitar, who handles player sponsorships for FTP. Audio interview here.

Everest Poker was recently acquired by Mangas Gaming, a French online poker network — story here. Everest has been the official “felt” sponsor for the World Series of Poker, and will likely become the flagship of Mangas’ online poker efforts.

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There’s a pretty interesting “Poker After Dark” coming up this week. Patrik Antonius, Daniel Negreanu, Gus Hansen, Phil Ivey, Tom “durrrr” Dwan and Phil Hellmuth will play over the next two weeks of episodes. And, if you read earlier, Hellmuth stormed off the set at some point during taping of PAD. Sounds like must-see TV.

Full Tilt Poker Million VIII just wrapped up its live final table in London, and FTP pro James Akenhead took it down for $500,000. Not a bad year on top of his World Series of Poker and WSOP Europe main event final tables. The Brit outlasted 72 players in the event, surviving preliminary and semifinal shootouts to get to the final table. Luke “FullFlush” Schwartz had the chip lead heading into the final table, but ended up fourth. Read the whole story here.

Poker legal expert I. Nelson Rose sat down with pokernewsdaily.com for an interview regarding the delay of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act in the United States. Story here. On the possibility of legislation on the regulation of online poker passing: “I think that this is the start of the process. The Democrats won’t do what Bill Frist (R-TN) did and try to ram this through when no one is looking by attaching it to a must-pass bill. They’ll have hearings, but unfortunately for everyone who is interested in it, it’s still a very low priority.”

Yesterday we told you about the story about U.S. President Barack Obama, and comparing his presidency to his poker game. Now you can read the whole story over at pokerati. Check it out here.

And earlier we reported on European player Viktor Blom denying that he is actually high-stakes player “Isildur1.” Now, it turns out that it could possibly be still be him, according to this report. It appears that a different Blom may have been contacted in his “denial.” Some day we’ll know who you are, Isildur1. Some day.

Want to take on James Akenhead? You’ll have to sign up at Full Tilt Poker if you want to play him online. Make sure to get rakeback when you sign up.

The demise of “durrrr” isn’t here yet. After an awful month of November, in which he gave back more than $6 million, Tom “durrrrr” Dwan has a nice start to December. He’s played 10K hands and is up over a million dollars early in the month. And if you want to see some major variance, check out the graph here, detailing the rise and fall of Isildur1.

Even ESPN is getting in on the high-stakes action: column here. The article talks about how players like Phil “OMGClayAiken” Galfond, Di “urindanger” Dang, and Hac “trex313” Dang, have reined in their action since the arrival of Isildur1. Interesting read on the dynamics of the high-stakes world.

While a lot of legal news affecting poker has been centering on the Congress in the United States, there’s been some presidential talk about poker. First, a story about Barack Obama from the National Journal, which you can read about here. We can’t link the actual story, because you need to be a subscriber to the National Journal, which is a fairly wonky Washington insider publication. But the pokernewsdaily.com story gives us some insight into the piece, which compares Obama’s poker game to how he runs the country. A passage from the article: “Fellow politicians and card sharks have referred to his playing style as cautious, patient and, oddly enough, conservative. In other words, our President is a bit of a nit.” And the story speaks of poker in glowing terms, as a skill game that sharpens critical thinking. Anything showing poker in a positive light in the U.S. has to be viewed as a positive.

And Obama answers a question at a town hall meeting, where gambling is lumped in with drugs and prostitution. It’s not really an indicator of how he’ll respond to the legislation in Congress regarding the regulation of online poker, but interesting nonetheless:

And here is a story here in the Washington Times, usually considered a conservative newspaper, basically saying the United States’ Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act is silly. Summing up the UIGEA, the author writes: “In other words, figuring out which forms of online betting are illegal is so complex and uncertain a task that federal regulators did not even attempt it. Yet that is what they expect financial institutions to do.”

Some more mainstream poker coverage here — former World Series of Poker main event winner Joe Hachem penned a column for the Sydney Morning Herald, saying poker is still growing in Australia. Read it here.

This just in from President Obama: He issued a statement saying everyone should sign up at Full Tilt Poker. Not really. But you can get rakeback if you sign up today.