Slyde announced as the Official Watch Sponsor of
EPT Season 10

Slyde has today been revealed as the Official Watch Sponsor for the European Poker Tour Season 10. Winners of this season's Main Events and High Rollers, inclusive of the PCA 2014, will be lucky enough to strap on a specially-designed luxury Swiss watch of their own.

This is the second season that Slyde has sponsored the EPT, which is Europe's richest and most popular poker tour no less. Here's the breakdown of what you could win (alongside ?100,000's, of course):

EPT10 Main Event winners: a 'Black and Steel' design watch worth ?5,680.
EPT10 PokerStars.com and Monte-Carlo®Casino European Poker Tour Grand Final champion: a 'Black and Rose Gold' design watch worth ?9,000.
EPT10 High Roller winners: a new limited edition watch design worth ?5,470.

PCA 2014 Main Event winner: a 'Steel and Black' design watch worth ?5,550.
PCA 2014 High Roller winner: a 'Steel and Rose Gold' design watch worth ?12,800.
PCA 2014 Super High Roller champion: a 'Steel and Diamond' design watch worth ?15,600.

The Slyde 'Black and Steel' design

You can take a look at some other Slyde watches by clicking here.

"The EPT is delighted to be working with Slyde for the second season in a row. These watches truly are works of art and we are very pleased to be offering our winners these customised time-pieces as part of their prize," said EPT President Edgar Stuchly.

According to the a press release sent out earlier today, "Slyde watches are made according to the traditional standards of top-grade Swiss watchmaking and represent a revolution in watch-making by combining traditional horological craftsmanship with modern design and the latest technology. The innovative sapphire crystal display is equipped with an intuitive touch screen enabling the user to generate an infinite number of personalised interfaces for a customized indication of the time."

That sounds pretty special to us. Well, they sure do look pretty anyway. We caught up with the creator of Slyde, Jorg Hysek at EPT Barcelona at the beginning of last season to explain how the watches came about. Read that interview with Hysek here.

Jorg Hysek, Mr Slyde himself

"We are very pleased to be working with the EPT again for Season 10. Slyde is a company that values creativity, innovation and quality, and we are very pleased to be aligning ourselves with a brand like the EPT that has a similar focus. We are looking forward to presenting the winners with their watches and congratulating them on their success at the tables," said Hysek.

Further details about the EPT and how to qualify for the opening event of Season 10, EPT Barcelona (28 August - 7 September) can be found at the European Poker Tour site.

Rick Dacey is a staff writer for the PokerStars Blog.

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Behind the curtain at 100 Billion

At 8:24 PM here on the Isle of Man on Thursday, June 13th, 2013, PokerStars reached a mind-blowing milestone in our corporate history (and really in the history of poker) - we dealt our one hundred billionth hand of poker. Let me write that number out for you:

100,000,000,000

I won't try to draw any real world parallels, but suffice it to say few of us can wrap our heads around a number like that.

But I'm not here to talk about the size of the number; I want to talk about running the 100 billionth hand and how it's a proxy for how we got there in the first place.

Annnnd we're there.

I had the supreme honor of being the host for that hand. I got to tell the players what was happening, who won what, and so forth. But that was the easy part. Behind the scenes (where I was lucky enough to be), it was like Mission Control at an Apollo rocket launch.* My 30" monitor was covered with windows - three separate chat windows, my "script" for hosting the hand and, of course, the client itself.

*That's an exaggeration, obviously. But if all our people had been wearing white shirts, dark ties, and black-rimmed glasses, it might have looked somewhat similar.

One of those chat windows was a 20-way IM chat among many of the key staff members. The software developers, the CRM (Customer Relations Management) folks, the poker room management people, the tournaments people, customer support...

"250K+ RM"

A note from the head of the poker room saying that we have over 250,000 real money players on the site...

See, as far as our 407,000 customers on PokerStars at that moment were concerned, it was just another day at the playground. Well, not just another day; it's not every day that we deal our 100 billionth hand of poker and give away a million dollars in half an hour. But our customers expected that our games would run just as smoothly and continuously as they have for almost 12 years now.

We had to make sure that the tsunami of poker players didn't cause any glitches.

"OLTP-MAIN is creeping up in the monitor"

One of our servers is beginning to show a little strain under the record crowds. The database team wants to be sure that the number of transactions doesn't affect the march toward 100 billion and asks the poker room to take down the play money Zoom games.

"PM Zoom is killed - last hands being dealt now..."

The poker room takes down the play money Zoom games; as soon as the big hand is over, they'll be brought back up.

The customer support manager chats that he'll get the message to our support representatives so they can answer the emails ("Hey - where'd our Zoom games go?!?!?").

As the counter on the client spins up, the chat actually slows - things are going according to plan. At 8:24pm the counter in the software client lobby counts down those last few hundreds of thousands of hands and then the message flashes up on the client:

The Milestone hand #100,000,000,000 is being dealt at Euryalos XI

The Million Dollar Hand

The poker world and Twitter explode with the news while, in the meantime, there is "guarded optimism" in the IM chat.

"Home stretch..."
"Here we go"

At the PokerStars office, people crowd around monitors, the CEO whips out his phone to take a picture of the table...

And, just as planned, the table pauses. I go to the chat box at Euryalos XI and type (actually copy/paste from the script):

Hi all - Welcome all to the final step in the Road to 100 Billion.

And we're off. I don't watch the IM chat - I'm too busy chatting at the table - but they had paused dealing at the table, and everybody is watching as the observer count at the table climbs to 20,000; 30,000; 40,000... by the time we actually deal the hand, 67,000 observers are watching a single hand of poker. That is approaching the capacity of Manchester United's Old Trafford. Visualize Old Trafford almost full of poker fans breathlessly watching the turn of a river card.

The hand goes off exactly as planned. A low-stakes poker player called "microulis69" wins $103,800 (and a $31.55 pot).

Payouts based on our bonus are calculated, double-checked, and approved for me to report to the players.

microulis69: $103,800 (biggest prize)
Mayers666 $12,460

Isidora 'microulis69' Panagiotopoulou

In the meantime, mission control continues their behind-the-scenes chat...

"Stake share 1% credited..."

Within seconds, the software has automatically begun crediting the "stake share" (over $830,000) to all players who were at $.02/$.05 no-limit hold'em tables when the magic hand (a $.02/$.05 no-limit hold'em game) was dealt. One of the senior poker room management people is reporting the status of the automatic crediting.

I sign off from the table with this:

And to everybody who contributed even one hand to this amazing total: thank you for playing at PokerStars.

The software and poker room teams aren't watching me; they're watching messages like this...

"Stake share 18% credited..."

"How is the lobby handling the rapid drop in players?"

And fairly rapidly, things return to normal at PokerStars. They do find a bottle of champagne** in the office, and the number of players on the site drops to a far more typical 150,000.

**The champagne is warm - getting bubbly ready was not at the top of anybody's to-do list.

Less than 24 hours later, in a $.10/$.25 no-limit hold'em game at table Agematsu VIII, player "T oleee2" collects a pot of $6.54 in hand #100,036,094,779. The button moves, a server shuffles a virtual deck, and the beat goes on.

Which is really the point here.

We didn't just wake up one morning and decide to deal hand number 100 billion; it doesn't work that way. Here's how you get to hand 100 billion: you do the job right, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for a dozen years, starting with hand #1.

In 100 billion hands, we are not aware of ever pushing a pot wrong (poker-speak for awarding the pot to the wrong player); it's unlikely we could do it without it getting noticed.

During those 100 billion hands, we've sent over 31 million emails to our customers. On most days, 85% of the emails we get from our customers are answered within an hour.

In the early days we recognised the importance of keeping player funds and operating capital segregated. Now that is a standard in most licensed jurisdictions and was fundamental in allowing us to cash out $125 million in American player balances within three weeks of leaving the U.S. market.

Our blog team has written and published almost 18,000 articles, keeping our players and the poker community at large informed about every aspect of PokerStars.

We have established our PS Live events as a gold standard around the world which players use as a metric for how live poker events should be run.

In short, PokerStars has developed the reputation that makes players start playing poker with us and stay with us. They trust us to provide the best software, the most reliable servers, world-class customer support, and fiduciary responsibility that many commercial banks would do well to emulate.

And thanks to those players and their trust, the hands roll over one by one, a thousand by a thousand, and ten million by ten million. So when hand #100,000,000,000 was dealt, it was monumental and yet simultaneously routine. It's just what we've been doing since late 2001 - dealing a fair game of poker and taking incredibly good care of poker players.

The warm champagne has gone flat and we've tossed out the leftovers from the pizza they brought in to sustain people as 100 billion approached. It's another day of dealing 50 million poker hands and there are customer emails to be answered within an hour.

Lee Jones is the Head of Poker Communications at PokerStars; he first joined the company in 2003. He has been involved in the professional poker world since the mid 1980's.

Click here to read the build up to the 100 Billion Million Dollar Hand. Click here to read an interview with the winner, Isidora 'microulis69' Panagiotopoulou.

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dunner1624 like a dinner in 6/18/13 Super Tuesday

Winning poker tournaments can often involve crazy coolers, huge suckouts and a fair share of lady luck. Then there are the days where you keep your head down as it all just seems to fall into place. That was the case for dunner1624 in the weekly Super Tuesday. dunner1624 picked spots carefully, survived the early carnage of the final table and then accelerated beautifully short-handed to secure the win in efficiently ruthless fashion.

The $1,050 Super Tuesday brought out a healthy field of 478 entrants to create another juicy prize pool of $478,000.00. The top 54 place finishers would share in the spoils with first place slated to receive over $90,000.00.

With many of the big name professionals currently tied up at the World Series of Poker we couldn't spot too many Team PokerStars Pros in the field but Caio Pessagno and Toni Judet were representing the red spade in today's field. Unfortunately they both fell short of the money. A min-cash was worth $2,390 but that also eluded Austrian donvito1st who was the unlucky bubble in 55th place.

When SW GEORGIY lost a preflop race with pocket eights against the ace-king of CredeExperto, SW GEORGIY was out in 10th place as our Super Tuesday final table was set:

Final Table Line up
Seat 1: CredeExperto (853,395 in chips)
Seat 2: Pinguizetti (199,989 in chips)
Seat 3: Brad "BaZa88" Bower (102,236 in chips)
Seat 4: Ruben "rubenrtv" Visser (177,837 in chips)
Seat 5: quarltje (213,145 in chips)
Seat 6: puto59 (240,230 in chips)
Seat 7: NhFy (90,811 in chips)
Seat 8: dunner1624 (191,375 in chips)
Seat 9: kleopl (320,982 in chips)

The final table was deceptively strong with several players possessing strong online resumes, and reigning EPT London champion Ruben "rubenrtv" Visser headlining the line up. A few of them, such as NhFy and BaZa88 had some work to do as the short stacks, while CredeExperto held such a commanding lead, he was sitting out in the early stages of the final table.

BaZa88 was able to secure an early double with his [ad][qc] flopping two pair against the fast-talking quarltje's [ks][7d] in a button versus big blind battle, before dunner1624 was able to do likewise with pocket tens holding against NhFy's ace-king.

It would be BaZa88 first to go when he three-bet jammed [as][4s] into CredeExperto's [ah][qh]. The flop of [Kh][7h][Kd] took away one of BaZa88's outs but did bring some chop possibilities if the board double-paired. It wasn't to be on the [2c] turn or [6c] river to leave BaZa88 to pick up $7,934.80 for 9th place.

The players settled into a grove and it would be some time before quarltje would be next to fall. After opening from under the gun, quarltje called off what was left holding [jc][jh] after Pinguizetti shoved from the small blind with [as][kc]. The race was on but it wasn't until the river on the board of [3c][6c][3d][5s][Ah] that Pinguizetti took the lead to eliminate quarltje from the tournament in 8th place for $10,755 in prize money.

Those chips didn't last long with Pinguizetti as next hand dunner1624 doubled up with pocket kings against Pinguizetti's ace-jack as the chips started to fly around the table.

NhFy was able to secure one double up with pocket aces, but was brought unstuck in a battle of the blinds. NhFy raised from the small blind before dunner1624 moved all in from the big blind. NhFy called it off with [ac][3s] but it was another big pair for dunner1624 with [js][jc] which held on the board of [2s][Qd][Kd][6d][5h]. NhFy picked up $15, 535 for 7th place.

Just a few short hands later and puto59 was joining the rail. puto59 three-bet shoved from the big blind with [6c][6h] with CredeExperto making the call holding [ah][kh]. The flop was a bare [2d][9s][7c] but the [Ac] turn and [Kd] river sealed the deal to send puto59 home with $20,315 for a 6th place finish.

CredeExperto was well out in front, and that lead grew after a river raise was paid off by dunner1624 with CredeExperto tabling a full house on a coordinated board.

Meanwhile Ruben "rubenrtv" Visser struggled to get much going and eventually made a move from the small blind for around 14 big blinds with [jh][7c]. The steal attempt didn't get through as dunner1624 made a great call in the big blind with [qh][4h] which survived the [3c][As][Kh][4s][9s] board. Visser's 5th place netted a handy $26,768.

No victory this time around for EPT London champ Ruben "rubenrtv" Visser

kleopl caught a double up to stay alive, as did Pinguizetti with ace-nine holding against CredeExperto's ace-eight. However the domination didn't last as Pinguizetti was unlucky a short time later:

CredeExperto was still out in front but it was dunner1624 who gained the ascendency three-handed, winning the majority of pots. Eventually the three remaining players decided to look at a possible deal and ICM numbers were presented. dunner1624 and kleopl were happy enough, but the short-stacked CredeExperto wanted another $1,000 from the chip leader. dunner1624 compromised an extra $300 and the deal was etched in stone with $6,000 left in the middle to play for.

That was the cue for fireworks to erupt as CredeExperto and dunner1624 collided on the second hand back from the deal discussion:

CredeExperto had committed with ace-high but dunner1624 made a solid read with a lowly pair of ducks which survived the turn and river to remove CredeExperto in 3rd place for $62,092.47 in prize money.

Heads-up chip counts
Seat 8: dunner1624 (1,712,372 in chips)
Seat 9: kleopl (677,628 in chips)

dunner1624 held a near three-to-one chip lead and it took just four hands of heads-up play for our champion to be crowned.

The action was raised on the flop, dunner1624 fired a bet on the turn before moving all in on the river on the board of [8h][5h][2h][7c][4c]. kleopl made the call with [th][5s] for a pair of fives but that wasn't enough as dunner1624 showed [8c][6s] for the straight to secure an impressive victory. kleopl received $67,199.61 for 2nd place as dunner1624 delivered the win for $80,741.12 in prize money. Congratulations!

Super Tuesday Final Table Results
Entrants: 478
Prize pool: $478,000.00
Place paid: 54

1st dunner1624 - $80,741.12*
2nd kleopl - $67,199.61*
3rd CredeExperto (Russia) - $62,092.47*
4th Pinguizetti (Ireland) - $38,240.00
5th Ruben "rubenrtv" Visser (Netherlands) - $26,768.00
6th puto59 (Portugal) - $20,315.00
7th NhFy (Sweden) - $15,535.00
8th quarltje (Belgium) - $10,755.00
9th Brad "BaZa88" Bower (Australia) - $7,934.80

* denotes three-handed deal

Heath "TassieDevil" Chick is a Freelance Contributor for the PokerStars Blog.

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2013 SCOOP Tournament Leader Board correction

During SCOOP 2013, there were four separate tournament leader boards: Low, Medium, High and Overall. An error was identified in the initial calculation of points awarded from High stakes tournaments with small fields, which affected the results of the High and Overall leader boards.

The advertised rules required that leader board points should only have been awarded when a player cashed. However, that rule failed to be enforced during the initial calculation of leader board points, and thus some players who played in certain high buy-in events were mistakenly credited with points they were not eligible to receive. PokerStars regrets the error and has taken steps to solve this instance, and to prevent it reoccurring.

As a result of this error, 'GeorgeDanzer' received extra points, and was mistakenly ranked in first place on the Overall TLB. After correcting the calculations, the actual winner of the Overall TLB is 'AceQuad' of Mexico. PokerStars has now corrected the leader board and contacted the two affected players: 'GeorgeDanzer' and 'AceQuad'. The Overall leader board prizes of the SCOOP Trophy and the PokerStars and Monte-Carlo® Casino EPT10 Grand Final Package will be awarded to 'AceQuad'.

In addition, this error caused a re-ranking of some players who would have received prizes on the 2013 SCOOP High leader board. Specifically the following players have moved down from top 10 positions to non-prize awarded positions: 'blanconegro', 'ninototoroko', and 'ImDaNuts'. The following players have moved up into top 10 positions for the SCOOP High leader board and will now receive $1,050 WCOOP tickets for their efforts: 'ana marquez', 'AceQuad', and 'el_batong'.

Overall, ten events were affected by this calculation error. There were 51 players who were awarded points they did not earn according to the official posted rules. The leader board has been re-calculated with the corrected formula. The correction has only changed the prizes for the eight players listed above.

The ten affected events were the High versions of SCOOP 4, 6, 11, 12, 16, 27, 28, 30, 37, and 38. Because these events attract smaller fields, players were awarded points for highly ranked finishes, despite not cashing in the events. PokerStars has corrected the points calculation process to avoid this error repeating in the future. We apologise to the affected players for this error.

Players with any queries about this can email scoop@pokerstars.com

Michael Josem is the Head of Public Relations for PokerStars. He formerly served as a Senior Manager in the Security and Game Integrity teams for PokerStars.

Read The Full Article:
http://www.pokerstarsblog.com/corporate_blog/2013/2013-scoop-tournament-leader-bo
ard-corre-138889.html

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