The tournament will be raising money for Speediatrics, which is the pediatric unit at the Halifax Health Medical Center, and will feature over 200 total players and a buy-in of $500. It is an invitation only event, and one that should have quite a few big names in it. Betty Jane France (NASCAR Foundation Chairwoman) and Rusty Wallace (NASCAR Foundation Board Member) will both be large parts of hosting the poker tournament. Annie Duke will of course be one of the key hosts as previously mentioned, and she was also be the tournament director of the event as well.

There will be 22 tables set up for the event, and each table will feature at least one big named celebrity (either a poker player or a NASCAR driver). A few of the names who have already been confirmed are former NBA player Brad Daugherty, and former NASCAR Winston Cup champ Dale Jarrett. The winner of this charity event won’t go home empty handed of course, as they will win a seat into the Epic Poker League’s $1,500 Pro/Am Tournament. For those players who are simply wondering why they won’t get a chance to play with some big names, you actually do have an opportunity! One player will get to play in the event for free if their name is drawn from a drawing which will be held by the MG, and in order to qualify for this you must go online and register at eventsatmgonthehalifax.com.

The great news for fans of this charity out there is that if we reach the max number of entries allowed, there would be over $100k raised on the buy-ins alone! Speediatrics was founded in 1999 and helps more than $2,000 children each year. On top of just the buy-ins though, there were also be many different auctions and ways for people to help out the cause as well.

I’m quite interested to see what type of names end up showing up for the invitation only event, but I definitely expect there to be quite a few big names from NASCAR as the event is fairly close to the Dayton 500! If you are a fan of NASCAR, you could always turn this into a full weeks trip and just head straight to the race after the tournament comes to an end!

An interesting point to note about this years Main Event final table, will no longer be called the “November Nine”, because the final nine players will actually play the final action in October instead. The reason for this is because of the US Presidential Election which occurs in November. The Main Event is going to feature three starting days instead of four, because there were additional tables added into the poker room. As far as that final table goes, you’ll see that the action will go down to the final two on Sunday the 28th of October, and the heads up match will be played on the 30th. Overall, they have decided to make the Main Event three days shorter.

Some new and exciting gold bracelet events have been created for our poker fans to keep an eye out for and they start on event number three with the $3k Heads Up No Limit Hold’em/Pot Limit Omaha event. After that the next new one is at event number six, which will feature a $5k buy-in and is a No Limit Hold’em Mixed Max event that will feature nine handed play, six handed play, and heads up play as well. There is a four handed No Limit Hold’em event for event number 28, and a $1,500 Ante ONLY No Limit Hold’em event for event 49. On top of that, many people have been talking about the $1,000,000 event called the “Big One for BIG DROP”, which gives 11.1 percent of each buy-in to the charity ONE DROP.

The World Series has also decided to go a different route by creating “exhibition” events as well, which will give players the chance to partake in huge tournaments with real money, but there simply won’t be bracelets awarded. The first of these will run on the 30th of June and is a $560 Doubles No Limit Hold’em event that features teams of two players. The other one will be on the 6th of July and is a $560 Bracelet Bounty NLH Event. Any player who plays in this event that has won a bracelet in the past has a bounty on them for all of their other players to aim for.

The promotion is one of the more straight forward online poker promotions that is going on, as players simply have to be playing at a real money cash game table in order to have a chance to win. Everyone gets the same shot at winning, which means that even if you are playing at a $0.01/$0.02 table, you are just as likely to pull in the big pay day as someone who is playing at a $100/$200 limit table. In order to win, you have to be dealt into a millionth hand, and there are a few different potential ways to take home a win. For starters anyone who gets into one of the millionth hands takes home $20 instantly plus another $60 which is multiplied by the number of Player Points which you have brought in during the last 50 hands at that specific table. So you can win quite a bit of money, and are essentially guaranteed $80 right off the bat. The player that actually takes down the hand that is being played will get their total winnings doubled, so it’s important not to fold your hand!

The hand that everyone will REALLY be hoping to hit though is the 75 billionth one, in which there are some HUGE payouts for being a part of this hand. If you are dealt into this hand you’ll receive $10k right off the bat, and you get $1000 added times the amount of frequent player points that you have. So if you have 30 frequent player points during that session on that table, you are going to earn an additional $30k on top of the $10k that you were given originally. More importantly though, if you win the hand, the prize is once again doubled, so you could be taking home a huge prize for winning the 75 billionth hand. If by some chance it ends up as a split pot, then any player who earned a part of the main pot will get a double in their prize.

It’s all about the cash games here, so if you see that they are getting close to the 75 billionth hand, be sure to jump onto a cash game table in order to have a chance to pull in some of the big time prizes!

No matter what type of card that you get, there will always be some sort of a prize given for each one. There is a max number of cards that players can earn each day of 50, but if you don’t hit that number, you can carry over your additional Party Points from the day to the following day to help you earn some more cards as well. Prizes are broken down into a few different things, such as Party Points, Cash, Freeroll Entries, and Card Rush Race Points. As far as the Party Points go, you can earn 10, 20, 50, 100, 150, 250, 750, 5,000, or 25,000 points. Cash prizes vary from $1, $2, $3, $5, $10, $50, $250, and all the way up to $5k! There are also seven different freerolls ranging from $2k, $3k, $5k, $7.5k, $10k, $15k, and $20k. Last but not least is the Card Rush Race Points which are either 1, 3, 5, 10, or 20.

What those “Card Rush Race Points” are, is a way for players to be able to collect points to go towards the Card Rush Race leader board. This gives players the opportunity to win additional money, as the player who wins the most points at the end of the month will take home a nice pay day of $9k simply for bringing home the most! All players who wind up in the top ten of this promotion though will take home over $1k, and a $100 prize is given to all players from 151st to 200th place on the leader board. Last but not least though is the “hot spots” that Party Poker has created, which means that for every player between 220th place to 2000th place, which lands on every 20th place will win $50 as well!

Freerolls will run from March 2nd through March 5th, and will include between one and two freerolls per day. So after you earn your freeroll cards just be sure to get prepared to jump into the action early in March. One thing to note about the freerolls is that you cannot win multiple entries into one freeroll no matter what the situation is.

While you can win 50 cards per day, there is a max number of 1.8 million prize cards that Party Poker.net will be giving away, so this means that there is an outside shot that the promotion could wind down a bit before the end of the month.

Li lost a pretty huge hand to Mohamad Kowassarie and fell back a bit in the standings. This was when Speidel began to step his game up and work his way to the top of the leader board. He knocked out the first player at the final table, and by the time the action was down to five handed he held a three million chip lead over his closest opponent. He never lost his momentum from that point, and went on to take down the title. It took two more hours for him to eliminate the final four other players, and he had a nice chip lead of over three to one when the action began heads up. It took 20 minutes for the heads up match to come to an end, and Speidel to knock off Kenneth Wong for first place. Wong still got a nice payday of $1 million for taking down second place though.

This event wasn’t the only one going on at the Aussie Millions though, as there were 16 players who took part in the $250k Super High Roller event. The top three players were paid out, and when we made it down to four, it was probably four of the biggest poker names in the world who were competing to make it into the money. Daniel Negreanu, Phil Ivey, Patrik Antonius, and Gus Hansen were left, but it was Negreanu who ended up being the bubble boy. Hansen was then sent home in third place, leaving Ivey and Antonius to play heads up. It took a full hour before they could determine a winner, but the final hand featured an all-in from Antonius and a call from Ivey. Antonius turned over K-3, and Ivey showed A-Q. Ivey hit his queen on the turn after a three came on the flop, and he sent Antonius home in second place, with a pay day of $1.2 million. Ivey got a nice $2 million pay day for winning the event.

Obviously many people are glad to see Phil Ivey back on the live poker tournament circuit, and based on how he played in this event, he could be in for a big year in 2012 if he keeps moving forward and playing well. Speidel definitely started off 2012 right as well, and he could be a name to watch as the year rolls on as well.

Apparently the deal that is in the works is being held up by Ferguson because of the money that he had put into the site after Black Friday hit on April 15th of 2011. The numbers that were reported about Ferguson came to a whopping $60 million that he had accepted from Full Tilt since back in 2007, and apparently it had all been going under different accounts under “Pocket Kings, Ltd”. It looks like he took about $45 million of the money out, but Ferguson is attempting to pick up the remaining money from that account, which is where the problem lies.

Ferguson allowed the remaining $14.3 million of the money that was left in that account to go back into the Full Tilt accounts so that they could take care of things after Black Friday hit the United States. By doing so, Ferguson felt that this would put him at the top of the list as a potential owner of Full Tilt Poker after it over went its many changes. The problem with all of this is, that’s not exactly how it all ended up going down. The reason for this is because the new potential deal that is in the works states that none of the current owners who are a part of Full Tilt Poker will be allowed to have any type of ownership at ALL with the new site. This is quite a problem and could push everything back a bit as players hope to see something happen in the next few months.

As you could assume, the online poker players and fans of poker are definitely not happy with what’s been going on in this situation. They feel that it’s incredibly greedy of Ferguson to do this, and also that everything with the deal should be almost completely finished. We are all hopeful that the deal with the Groupe Bernard Tapie ends up coming through in the end, but as time rolls on you can bet that people are getting more and more worried about the potential future of this deal between Full Tilt Poker and the Group.

Trickett’s performance through 2011 was nothing short of spectacular as he earned over $4.5 million throughout the year, and also took down some big time poker tournaments as well. At the 2011 Aussie Millions he won one of the largest events out there in the $100k High Roller event, and then finished in second at the Super High Roller Event, which is an incredible $250k buy-in. As far as other big tournament wins that he had, he also took down the Partouche Poker Tour Main Event later in the year. All of these deep runs and wins were enough to get him the win for Player of the Year. Cody on the other hand was incredibly impressive as well, as winning poker’s Triple Crown is one of the most impressive feats in all of Poker. He completed this during the World Series of Poker when he took down his first gold bracelet.

It wasn’t a trip for nothing for three of the other players who were in the talks for player of the year, as Grospellier, Heinz, and Pateychuk also won an award a piece as well. For Pateychuk, his award was the Rookie of the Year in poker, Heinz won Best Tournament Performance of the Year for his impressive win at the 2011 World Series of Poker Main Event, and Grospellier won the award for the Rob Gardner Memorial Poker Personality of the Year award. Another interesting award that was handed out was the award for Europe’s Best Female Poker Player, which was between two incredibly well known players in Liv Boeree and Victoria Coren, and also Natalya Nikitina, Barbara Martinez, Nesrine Kourdourli, and Cecilia Pescaglini. In the end, it was Nikitina who won this award in part because of her impressive win at the World Poker Tour Russia last year.

There were quite a few awards handed out throughout the night, but one award that definitely had some meaning behind it was the Lifetime Achievement Award that was given to poker announcer Jesse May. This was given to one player, and while he had no competition, many people feel that May shouldn’t have had competition for this one as he has been great for the game of poker with his incredible hosting skills over the years.

When we started the action with the final eight remaining, the chip stacks were scattered, with two players definitely sitting a good amount ahead of the others. It was probably the two biggest names, Gus Hansen (567k chips), and Joe Hachem (538,500 chips) who were at the top to start the day. Behind them was Dan Smith with 346,500 chips, Mikahil Smirnov with 265k chips, Sorel Mizzi with 228,500 chips, Tony G with 102k chips, Nam Le with 79,500 chips, and then Sam Trickett with 73k chips. Obviously the bottom few players here had quite a bit of work to do in order to make it into the cash (the top four).

Even with all of the big named players still in the action, it was actually two of the more unknown players who found themselves in the money with two of the well-known players. When the final four was set, it was Dan Smith, Mikahil Smirnov, Joe Hachem, and Tony G who were in, but there was still some work to be done. Hachem and Tony G were both never really able to get much going, and found themselves taking the first two spots home, and neither of them making it into the heads up match. This left the two underdogs to duke it out for the win in Smith and Smirnov. Smith had actually eliminated both Tony G and Hachem to set up heads up play, and then went to work on Smirnov. Smith simply couldn’t lose it seemed and pretty much won every race, as well as holding on in any hand that he was ahead in. Smith was the eventual winner in impressive fashion, and he took home $1,012,000 for his efforts. Smirnov still got a nice $616k payday for his run, which is definitely nothing to turn your nose up at!

While this was a huge win for Smith, he has actually won over $600k in live tournaments before this point as well. He could potentially be a name to keep an eye out for in 2012, as he has already won over $1 million in under 25 days of play on the live tournament circuit thanks to this huge win!

Hachem put out a comment about the deal which basically explained his new partnership and what made him choose this opportunity over any other that he was offered. Hachem stated that he has been playing around the world often, and he “made the decision that my next venture would keep me closer to home”. Hachem is currently living in Melbourne with his family, so he will be able to spend more time with them and it seems like this could be a good fit for both sides. He will be a part of the company in multiple different ways, one of which is as the ambassador of the Asian Poker Tour to help it grow in the upcoming years.

The well-known poker pros time with the poker site PokerStars came to an end after six years, and it originally began after he won the WSOP Main Event back in 2005. It ended this past month when Hachem said that he was looking to “pursue other career opportunities and have some time with family”. It seems that he has gotten the best of both worlds in this situation, as he’ll remain fairly close to home and will also be a huge part of the Asian Logic Group. Hachem’s win back in 2005 was his biggest of his career, as he took home $7.5 million, but it was only a year later that he almost took down another gold bracelet when he finished second in a short handed event. Hachem has had some huge career scores overall, and that also includes the $15k World Poker Tour Doyle Brunson North American Poker Classic, in which he won over $2.2 million for that impressive run.

Hachem went on to state that he was looking into a few other offers from other companies, but decided to go with the Asian Logic Group because it gave him an “active role and the ability to participate as the businesses evolve. The Asia Pacific Poker definitely has some potential to be big, and the addition of Hachem could be exactly what they need to help take it to the next level. It will be interesting to see exactly what type of role that he takes as time rolls on with this company, and also how he helps the growth of everything as well.

Hansen has been incredibly impressive throughout this tournament, and now he finds himself sitting atop the leader board when Day 2 kicks off. Hansen has a total of 567k chips, but isn’t far ahead of another pro in Joe Hachem. Hachem currently has 538,500 chips, but there is a drop after of close to 200k in chips. The hand that sent Ivey packing featured Hansen flopping two pair with his 7-6, and it held up against the pocket eights of Ivey. This is the first time that many players had seen Ivey, as he hadn’t played since Black Friday, except for a tournament at Macau a month or two back. While Ivey missed the final table by one spot, he also missed the money as well unfortunately.

While many people aren’t surprised with Hansen and Hachem making it to the final table, our other six players are pretty well-known as well. Sitting in 3rd place currently is Dan Smith with 346,500 chips, 4th place is Mikhail Smirnov with 265k chips, 5th place is Sorel Mizzi with 228,500 chips, 6th is Tony G with 102k chips, 7th place is Nam Le with 79,500 chips, and last but not least is Sam Trickett in 8th with 73k chips.

If this list doesn’t feature enough big names for you, it’s also worth nothing that Erik Seidel was sent home in 11th place, and Jason Mercier was sent home in 10th place. The structure was set up to make the event move quickly, and there were a total of 22 players who bought into the event. Six players were sent home before they hit the dinner break, and five other players were sent home soon after it as well. Just to note, the 22 players for this years event were quite a few less than last years total entrants of 38 players.

While we are down to our final eight players, only the top four will make it into the cash. The good news though, is that the buy-in was so expensive that the payout for players will be very nice. The min cash for this event pays out $242k, third place pays out $330k, second place pays out $616k, and the first place winner will take home a pay day of over $1 million, with a $1,012,000 first place prize. We’ll keep you updated on this star-studded final table to see not only who makes it into the cash, but also which player takes down the championship and the impressive first place prize.