Poker News Roundup for February 13, 2012

by Dougie Goguen | Feb 13 2012

There's a new player of the year award, Churchill Downs makes a big poker purchase and the WSOPC hosts its first-ever heads-up event.

Las Vegas
Last week, PokerNews and Federated Sports + Gaming announced the launch of the GPI Player of the Year award, which will (obviously) be presented annually to the player who has the strongest recorded performance in live tournaments around the world during the calendar year. The Global Poker Index Player of the Year award will use the USA Today GPI Point System to track tournament results and this year's award will be awarded to the player with the most points accumulated between January 1, 2012 and December 31, 2012.

"We are thrilled to be able to apply the precision and quality of the USA Today GPI formula to a Player of the Year race," said Annie Duke, executive vice president of FS+G and commissioner of the Epic Poker League. "The 2012 GPI POY will showcase the single player at the apex of the game."

Louisville, KY
Churchill Downs announced this past Friday that they've acquired Bluff Media, an Atlanta-based multimedia poker content company. You might know them from Bluff Magazine and its online counterpart as well as The Poker DB, an online database that tracks and ranks the performance of players in tournaments (much like the Global Poker Index) and any number blogs and forums. In a statement, Churchill Downs, which is publicly traded on the NASDAQ National Market under the symbol CHDN, said it would build upon Bluff Media's current content and business model.

Tunica, MS
The World Series of Poker continues to innovate and the conclusion of Event #8, the first-ever Heads Up No-Limit Hold 'Em event in the Circuit's history, proved that it's going to continue to do so. The winner of the $555 buy-in event was Dalton Mills, a former bartender turned poker pro from Jacksonville, FL. A modest 132 players ponied up the buy-in, but nobody complained at the size of the profile pool: $64,020.

Determined by the size of the field, the Heads-Up Event at Harrah's Tunica consisted of seven rounds.  Each player started with $5,000 in chips and was allowed to receive an additional $5,000 in chips anytime during the first round. The winner of each match-up moved up to the next round with double the previous stack amount. Internet poker megastar Chris Moneymaker, the winner of 2003 World Series of Poker Main Event, made short work of his first round opponent, Nelson Herschberger, but was prevented from going any further after being eliminated by Michael Horchoff from River Ridge, LA.

The final matchup was between Cory Wood and Mills went on for almost two hours before Mills earned the top spot. Wood is a 26-year-old poker pro from Murfreesboro, TN. During the 2011 WSOP, he made a final table run in the $10,000 Pot-Limit-Omaha championship, where he finished in 7th place, worth $116,359. His runner-up finish in Event #8 at Harrah's Tunica added $11,077 to his total WSOP career earnings.

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