As we all know now, due to the Black Friday's events, all American players have been banned from the 4 major poker rooms, Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars, UltimateBet and AbsolutePoker.
This affected PS and FTP high stakes pros as well, many of them are American citizens. The online poker careers of Tom 'durrrr' Dwan, Phil Ivey, Daniel 'jungleman12' Cates, Howard Lederer, Barry Greenstein, Chris Moneymaker, Joe Cada, and Vanessa Selbst are uncertain.
This is why it's the European players came into the spotlight since Friday; the Danish Gus Hansen came to be the biggest winner of the weekend. He played around 5,000 hands at the $300/600 PLO tables with Patrik Antonius and harrington25; and managed to win over $700,000. With this win, he is back over 4 million this year. NoPasaran, sitting at the same table even had to crack a joke at the table:
NoPasaran: Hi!!! is it play money guys?
Gus Hansen: why would it be
NoPasaran: its joke Gus
Gus Hansen: ok
Seemingly Gus didn't like the joke that much.
Gus Hansen
The European high stakes play continued this week as well, this time Patrik Antonius fought Hansen at the same $300/600 PLO tables, Antonius left the tables after 491 hands with a handsome $351,000 profit.
Ilari 'Ziigmund' Sahamies, the Finnish pro made an unexpected statement: he announced that he will never again deposit to Full Tilt Poker or PokerStars. He added that he won't go to this year's WSOP, and plans to play at some European site in the future.
Meanwhile, Tom Dwan and Phil Galfond are so sure that their money is safe at the poker rooms, that they offered $1 million each to compensate the players if somehow the rooms won't pay:
Galfond wrote: “Everyone is panicking too much (tho I understand)," wrote Galfond over the weekend. "We are extremely likely to be paid our $. I’ll guarantee $1M in payouts from FTP/Stars. If they somehow don’t pay, I’ll figure out a fair way to disperse it, and send out all the gelt over Hanukah 2012."
"However I think we can’t expect to get paid right away, it’ll take a few months at least. Focus your worry/energy on planning around that."
The picture below exemplifies the weird (somewhat funny) consequences of the Black Friday at the tables; this is Barry Greenstein (who usually plays $25,000 HU MTTs) playing at the PokerStars play money tables to pass the time. Good times.
UPDATE:
Moneybookers and NETELLER have released short statements regarding the Black Friday; both payment processors ensured their users that they are unaffected by recent developments, and that any delays or errors are originated from the poker site operators. NETELLER also added that they have been assured by Pokerstars, Full Tilt Poker and AP/UB that these are process delays which will be resolved by them within the next few days.
Moneybookers and NETELLER have released short statements regarding the Black Friday; both payment processors ensured their users that they are unaffected by recent developments, and that any delays or errors are originated from the poker site operators. NETELLER also added that they have been assured by Pokerstars, Full Tilt Poker and AP/UB that these are process delays which will be resolved by them within the next few days.
0 comments