The Rundown: Poker News from the Week of March 18th
by Deke Marston | Mar 18 2011
San Jose, CA
The World Poker tour has been on a bit of a roll lately with some genuinely exciting big-money tournaments and the latest stop at the Shooting Star at Bay 101 is proving to continue this trend with famed poker announcer stepping out of his usual spot in the booth and making his way to his first-ever non-invitation final table. He'll be sitting down with Mike "The Mouth" Matusow and back-to-back WPT final tabler Vivek Rakumar among others to see if he's got what it takes.
There's been no real announcement from the event's organizers on how they're handling the whole "the guy that normally tells us what is going on is actually playing" thing, but with Vince Van Patten still behind the mic and an array of poker pros in town, it'll be easy to sort something out.
Philadelphia
The Parx Casino was the scene of something that we honestly thought had faded away in recent years: a genuine "card up the sleeve" trick. A 26-year old Plainsboro, NJ man got himself in the police blotter after he "introduced cards he kept from previous hands" into a game. He was confronted by the dealer and the victim and after he gave the loser their money back, he was ejected for a 24-hour period while Parx mulls over the final punishment for the cheat. Trooper Randy Testa stated that the victim don't want to go through the hassle of prosecuting and no charges were filed in the matter.
Las Vegas
The masters of Facebook gaming, Zynga, have had a very successful poker application that has been making the rounds over the last year or so. While it doesn't let you play for real money, the Zynga Poker app boasts 50 million players every day with around 215,000,000 playing every month. This sort of success means that they want to have a party to celebrate it and that's what's happening at the Palms Casino this weekend.
The Zynga Poker Con kicks off later this afternoon and is following in he footsteps of events like the World Series of Poker: there's glitz, glamor, celebrities and even a little poker. The main event of Zynga's $125 con is a $100,000 guaranteed freeroll tournament, but there's also a "chalk talk" being given by Annie Duke (who's taking time from kick-starting her own poker league,) appearances from Doyle Brunson, Scotty Nguyen, and Antonio Esfandiari among others.
