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Last week PokerStars hosted a special charity poker event at the Amazon Room in Las Vegas featuring poker pros, online qualifiers as well as National Hockey League players. The event was called the PokerStars NHL Charity Shootout and it took place along with the annual NHL Awards celebration which took place at the Palms Casino Resort.

The players came together to compete in several rounds of qualifying heats to hopefully end up in the final round. Those who made the final round can be seen when the recorded footage airs at a later date. The Amazon Room made over the poker room to highlight the feature area table for the special tournament. The poker felt was replaced with a special on that looked like a NHL ice rink. The felt had red and blue lines, faceoff circles and miniature advertisement boards.

The NHL also brought along the Stanley Cup to visit the poker room during the charity tournament. The event raised $150,000 for the Ronald McDonald House of Las Vegas, the NHLPA Goals and Dreams Fund as well as other charities.

Vanessa Rousso, Chris Moneymaker and Dennis Phillips represented Team PokerStars while Mats Sundin, Jeremy Roenick, Mike Richards, Eddie Olczyk, Alex Ovechkin, Scott Hartnell and Glenn Anderson are just a few of the NHL players who competed in the tournament.

PokerStars has released the names of those who made the final table. Fans will be able to see the following players on ESPN, ESPN2, TSN and the NHL Network when the footage is aired.

Final Table Finalists:

Scott Hartnell

Roberto Luongo

Murray Ungurain (PokerStars.net qualifier)

Mats Sundin

Vanessa Rousso

Glenn Anderson

Kris Versteeg

Jeremy Roenick

Eddie Olczyk

The first ever PokerStars Italian Poker Tour event has come to an end after three days of poker action. The first event of the new poker tour was not won by a poker pro instead it was earned by an online player who qualified at the PokerStars Italy website. The PokerStars Italy website sponsored the event at the Casino Sanremo and it was Stefano Puccilli who can claim the first ever win of the Italian Poker Tour.

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The main event of the Italian Poker Tour San Remo event began on June 5th with two hundred and fifty five players posting the €2200 buy-in. the name of the game was No Limit Hold’em and many of the top poker players in Italy competed including: Salvatore Bonavena, Gregory Genovese, Fabrizio Ascari and Daniele Mazzia. Isabelle Mercier of Team PokerStars tried her hand as well at the tournament.

By the final day of play only twenty two players remained and it took almost ten hours of play to narrow the field down to the final table of eight. Play continued until it was down to the final two players: Stefano Puccilli and Vittorio Meraviglia. Both players had qualified online at PokerStars and both were very deserving of the win.

On the final hand Meriviglia went all in with A-3 and Puccilli called with pocket eights. The flop fell J-A-Q which gave Merviglia the advantage. A 9 on the turn gave Puccilli some hope and the 10 on the river saved him and gave his the €120,000 pay day. Meriviglia earned €75,000 for his finish and Roger Hairabedian earned €50,000 for third.

The next Italian Poker Tour stop will be in Venice on the 20th through the 26th of July. The tour will have a total of eight events with the Grand Final taking place in San Remo in 2010.

Next week the National Hockey League will be holding their awards celebration in Las Vegas. Because the league will be in Vegas they will be hosting a special charity poker tournament with the help of online poker room giant PokerStars. The charity poker tournament will feature top NHL players as well as top poker pros competing to raise money for a good cause.

The NHL Charity Shootout will begin on Wednesday June 17th and will be presented by PokerStars. Poker pros and NHL players will sit side by side to duke it out to raise money for each participants favorite charity. The tournament will also feature online players who qualified during satellites from PokerStars.

The event will also be recorded so hockey and poker fans can watch the tournament and see how their favorite player fairs against the other competitors. The tournament will air on television for a total of four hours on ESPN Classic and ESPN2 in the United States. TSN will air the footage in Canada and NHL Network will air the footage in North America.

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The tournament will be played in a shootout format where players will begin with a round of No Limit Texas Hold’em. Each table of competitors will get down to one player and then the players left will move on to compete each other for prizes that add up to over $150,000 for charity.

Each NHL player that participates in the tournament will be given $2,000 to give to the charity of their choice and proceeds will also go toward the Ronald McDonald House of Las Vegas and the NHLPA Goals & Dreams Fund.

It will be interesting to see which Poker pros and hockey pros will be competing in the tournament and how they will play against each other in the competition.

Online poker giant, PokerStars, is the host and creator of several popular live poker tournaments and tours. This is one reason they are the most popular poker room on the internet. The list is long of live poker tours the website hosts including the European Poker Tour, Russian Poker Tour and the Australia New Zealand Poker Tour. PokerStars recently announced a new poker tour to be added to the list, the Italian Poker Tour.

Poker Stars Donwload will kick off the new tournament on June 1st and it will continue for six days. The first round of play of the Italian Poker Tour will take place San Remo with additional events coming later in the year.

PokerStars created the Italian Poker Tour by working with their own poker pro, Luca Pagano, and Federpoker. The events have been well thought out and the final table of each Italian Poker Tour event will be aired on Italia 1 on PokerMania for fans to enjoy.

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PokerStars gave away a good deal of San Remo packages this past weekend so online players could enjoy a trip to San Remo to participate this week. The satellites were held for as little as €5 or 100 Frequent Player Points. This week PokerStars will be holding €250 buy-in live satellites in San Remo which will take place through Thursday. Each will begin at 9:00pm local time. Players can buy-in directly to the Italian Poker Tour for €2,200.

PokerStars distributed a press release online which featured comments from Fabio Angeli Bufalini the Italian Country Manager for Pokerstars. He stated: “PokerStars is really happy with the developments in live and online poker in Italy. The great success has been registered on the PokerStars. It website and the record breaking turnout for the San Remo leg of the PokerStars Season 5 EPT makes us hopeful that the PokerStars Italian Poker Tour will arouse huge interest in Italy and all over Europe.”